Understanding the Dynamics of the Pick-Up and Drop-Off Locations of Taxicabs in the Context of a Subsidy War among E-Hailing Apps

Rongxiang Su, Zhixiang Fang, Ningxin Luo and Jingwei Zhu
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Rongxiang Su: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University, Luoyu Road 129, Wuhan 430079, China
Zhixiang Fang: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University, Luoyu Road 129, Wuhan 430079, China
Ningxin Luo: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University, Luoyu Road 129, Wuhan 430079, China
Jingwei Zhu: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University, Luoyu Road 129, Wuhan 430079, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 4, 1-24

Abstract: The locations where taxicabs pick up and drop off passengers are crucial to understanding the dynamics of taxi trip demand. Investigating their spatial distribution and derived dynamic features is still a key task in the fields of urban geography and transportation. Such investigations are urgently needed, considering the competition created by new communication technology services, specifically e-hailing apps such as Uber, Didi and Kuaidi. For example, a subsidy war between two e-hailing apps occurred in China in 2014. However, how the pick-up and drop-off locations of taxicabs change during subsidy wars is still an open question. This paper introduces a methodological framework that can be used to derive the pick-up and drop-off dynamics of taxicabs. It also proposes three indexes that can be used to assess the dynamics of the pick-up and drop-off locations at the city and sub-district scales, namely the numbers of daily pick ups and drop offs per taxi, average transfer distance per unit area of weighted mean centers of pick-up and drop-off locations, and degree of dispersion in the spatial distribution of pick-up and drop-off locations. This paper employs data from taxicabs in the city of Shenzhen to uncover the dynamics of their pick-up and drop-off locations. The results show that the methodological framework and the indexes introduced are powerful tools for uncovering the dynamics of the pick-up and drop-off locations of taxicabs in urban environments.

Keywords: taxi trajectory mining; human dynamics; spatial pattern; subsidy war; e-hailing service (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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