Abstract
Adverse weathers are well-known to impact the operation of transportation systems, including taxis. This paper utilizes taxi GPS waypoint data to investigate the quantitative impact of rainfall on taxi hailing and taxi operations to help improve service quality on rainy days. Through statistical analysis, the study proves that it is more difficult to hail taxis on rainy days, especially during morning peak hours. By modelling the difference value of factors for rainfall and nonrainfall conditions in a multivariate regression model and attaining the significance and elasticity of each factor, passenger demand, taxi supply, search time and velocity are proved to be the significant factors that lower the taxis’ level of service on rainy days. Among them, the number of passengers and taxis are two factors that have the greatest impact. It is also shown that there is no significant difference in the total taxi supply and passenger demand between rainfall and nonrainfall conditions, but a dramatic change in the spatial distribution is discovered. The results suggest that instead of simply providing more taxis on rainy days, optimally dispatching taxicabs to high demand regions can be a more effective solution.
Highlights
Taxi services play a crucial role in transporting travelers in urban areas across the globe
We thoroughly study the taxi operation factors affected by rainfall and quantitatively analyse the variation of spatial supply-demand distributions between rainy and nonrainy days. ird, we develop a multivariate regression model to find significant factors and conduct an elasticity analysis to quantify the contribution of each factor, which can provide quantitative values for regulators to take into account in order to improve taxi service quality on rainy days
To test the di erence of each taxi level of service (TLOS) level between nonrainfall and rainfall conditions, an independent sample -test is performed and the results show that all levels have signi cant di erences between rainy and nonrainy days, except for TLOS A. is indicates that rainfall has a signi cant impact on regions of low TLOS on nonrainy days
Summary
Taxi services play a crucial role in transporting travelers in urban areas across the globe. In China, taxis carried about 35.17 billion passengers in 2018, which was 27.86% of the total urban passenger transport volume [2] Such a huge volume highlights the importance of taxis and draws wide academic attention, and studies into factors a ecting taxi operations have received considerable attention. The impact of adverse weather events, especially rainfall, can critically a ect taxi supply and travel demand, but receives little to no attention. It is common sense in cities of high dense populations (e.g., Asia-Paci c cities, New York, etc.) that to hail a taxi become much harder in rainy days. Most studies neglected the di erences in spatial distribution and did not consider the causes of those variations. e other few related studies are almost all descriptive analyses under some proposed assumptions, but it lacks quantitative analyses of the performance of taxi operations [11, 12]
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