Taxi Driver’s Operation Behavior and Passengers’ Demand Analysis Based on GPS Data

Abstract

The existing research outputs paid less attention to the relationship between land use and passenger demand, while the taxi drivers’ searching behavior for different lengths of observation period has not been explored. This paper is based on taxi GPS trajectories data from Shenzhen to explore taxi driver’s operation behavior and passengers’ demand. The taxi GPS trajectories data covers 204 hours in Shenzhen, China, which includes the taxi license number, time, longitude, latitude, speed, and whether passengers are in the taxi vehicle, to track the passenger’s pick-up and drop-off information. This paper focuses on these important topics: exploring the taxi driver operation behavior by the measurements of activity space and the connection between different activity spaces for different time duration; mainly focusing on eight traffic analysis zones (TAZs) of Shenzhen and exploring the customer’s real-time origin and destination demands on a spatial-temporal distribution on weekdays and weekends; taxi station optimization based on the passenger demand and expected customer waiting time distribution. This research can be helpful for taxi drivers to search for a new passenger and passengers to more easily find a taxi’s location.