Impact of service quality factors on ride sharing in urban areas

Ride sharing offers great potential to decrease the number of vehicles in the street and improve traffic congestion, if the customers are willing to share a ride and accept a certain deviation from their direct travel route. The demand for ride sharing will probably increase with higher user convenience. However, constraints on detour time, waiting time or even amount of time to board and disembark the vehicle, decrease the chances to find shared trips. This paper investigates this trade off by analyzing the impacts of service quality factors on the amount of trips which could be shared, a quantity called shareability. The service quality factors which are analyzed are the detour time, the time the customer is willing to wait to be picked up and the boarding time. A mathematical model that captures these impacts is developed and the model is tested by means of simulations. The results show a good correlation of the mathematical model with the simulated data for all the factors considered. Therefore, we create a relevant model, which could be used by operators to examine the shareability rate that can be reached when offering different quality of service to the customers.