Managing ridesharing with incentives in a bottleneck model

Abstract

Ridesharing is recognized as an environmentally friendly alternative to daily transportation that can potentially reduce vehicular carbon emissions. Transportation Network Companies (TNC) have been providing ridesharing services. However, generalized costs need to be balanced between rideshare drivers and passengers via financial instruments to reach a sustainable equilibrium. In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Incentive-Based Travel Demand Management (IBTDM) strategies in managing morning commutes with ridesharing. Separate time-varying incentive schemes for both rideshare drivers and passengers are proposed to maintain the user equilibrium. Since IBTDM strategies are usually non-mandatory, it is found that the optimal incentives vary with respect to market penetration. Subsequently, we took the difficulty of scheme implementation, system cost reduction, and net utility as the criteria, and obtained the optimal incentive schemes under different criteria. Finally, we verified the effectiveness of the above incentive scheme in promoting ridesharing and reducing system costs by means of experimental economics.