Abstract
Understanding taxicab operation behaviors under various management or market policies (i.e., subsidies) is critical to making informed operating decisions for e-hailing companies and for government surveillance. This paper investigates the change of taxicab operation zones in context of an e-hailing app subsidy war in China, which is an important perspective that reflects changes in taxicab behavior, such as how the operation zones of taxicabs under the e-hailing app subsidy war change and how this change affects their trip distance and cruising time. To investigate this issue, this paper utilizes three indexes to elucidate the change of taxicab operation zones, namely, the repetition ratio of operation zone pairs, the area, and the degree of dispersion in the spatial distribution. A case study using taxicab trajectories during all of the important periods of the e-hailing app subsidy war in Shenzhen, China, was conducted and produced several valuable findings; for example, with respect to taxicabs as a whole, the proportion of habitual operation zone pairs among operation zone pairs in neighboring periods is relatively stable under any subsidy policy, and changes in the operation zones have little effect on changes in the average daily trip distance and average daily cruising time. Four groups of taxicabs divided according to initial change patterns in the operation zones present different change patterns during the subsidy war. By comparing these changes before and after the subsidy war, this paper finds that the subsidy war influences the taxicabs in groups I and II, while it has little influence on the taxicabs in groups III and IV, although all groups were affected during the subsidy war. For the taxicab groups in the period with the highest subsidy, the average daily trip distance and average daily cruising time decreased, whereas, in other periods, they presented different patterns.
Highlights
Taxicabs perform an indispensable function in urban transportation systems
The distribution of the weighted repetition ratio is flatter than the distribution of the unweighted repetition ratio, which indicates that the proportions of repeated operation zone pairs are close among all taxicabs, the numbers of trips within the operation zone pairs vary from cab to cab
The repetition ratios slightly change in different periods regardless of whether the unweighted or weighted calculation methods are used, which indicates that the proportion of habitual operation zone pairs among all of the operation zone pairs in the neighboring periods is relatively stable under all subsidy policies in this subsidy war
Summary
Taxicabs perform an indispensable function in urban transportation systems. Cabdrivers’ mobility patterns and operating strategies have been widely studied since large-scale taxi GPS trajectories became obtainable due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT). Previous studies analyzed the distance and direction distributions of intraurban trips [1], urban cabdrivers’ activity distribution [2], spatial variations in urban taxi ridership [3], cabdrivers’ operation strategies with respect to revenue [4, 5], and alternative taxi services strategies [6]. With the e-hailing app subsidy war that occurred from January to August in 2014 in China, which had a dramatic effect on the taxi industry, it has become feasible to analyze how cabdrivers react to the external policy stimulus and what consequences these different reactions cause. From the perspective of taxicabs, the most direct reflection of the spatial effect of subsidy policy is the change of operation zones. Do the operation zones of taxicabs change under the stimulation of a subsidy war? Do the operation zones of taxicabs change under the stimulation of a subsidy war? If so, how does this change affect cabdrivers’
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