Abstract:
Past literature has explored the degree to which ride-hailing complements or competes with public transit. The evidence suggests that while individual trips sometimes do connect to transit or occur in areas or not well served by transit, ride-hailing trips are most concentrated in the densest parts of urban areas where transit service is good. The result is a shift from transit to ride-hailing, adding congestion to the roads that are most congested already. This talk presents two studies exploring how we might counteract that effect through pricing.
The first evaluates Chicago's Ground Transportation Tax (GTT) update of January 6, 2020, which increased fees on solo rides and all downtown ride-hailing between 6am and 10pm. Using a novel policy-sensitive direct ridership model estimated on open data before and after the GTT update, we measure the effect of the pricing change on ride-hailing volume, mode choice, and ride-sharing behavior across Chicago census tracts.
The second study proposes and evaluates a revenue pricing scheme in which per-trip taxes on transit-competitive rides are used to subsidize rides that serve areas or times with limited transit access. Applied over a full day, the scheme would diminish transit competition, reduced vehicle miles traveled, andreduces passenger cost — providing the potential to shift ride-hailing from transit competitor to complement.
Bio:
Greg Erhardt is a Raymond-Blythe Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Kentucky, a Hans Fischer Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, and a Senior Advisor to Bay Area Metro. He earned an MS in Civil Engineering from Northwestern in 2002. The first study was co-authored with Richard Alexander Mucci at the University of Kentucky, and the second with Zhihua Jin, Rolf Moeckel and Allister Loder at Technical University of Munich.
Andrea Cehaic
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