The battle for kerbside space: An evaluation of the competition between car-hailing and bus services

Tianli Tang, Ronghui Liu, Greg Marsden, Ziyuan Gu and Xiao Fu

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2025, vol. 192, issue C

Abstract: The kerbside of today is a complex environment with a huge diversity of uses and highly dynamic patterns of use, including for parking, (un)loading, EV charging, and bus stops. The competition for kerbside space is to become more fierce with the rising of car-hailing services (CHS) and soon the connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The kerbside is an often overlooked yet critical urban infrastructure which requires better understanding of its varies uses and functions. In this paper, we examine the competition between CHSs and traditional buses on the use of kerbside lanes. More specifically, we investigate the relationship between the mode share of car-hailing and bus services, network congestion and the performance of bus priority strategies along a real-life bus corridor and quantify their effects through simulation modelling of a set of future scenarios. The results show that the increasing penetration of car-hailing services will negatively impact network performance due to the growing number of kerbside stops, while increasing the share of public transport can help mitigate this loss and improve network resilience. Additionally, bus improvement policies, such as bus lanes and faster boarding techniques, can effectively prevent the adverse effects of car-hailing on network speed. These findings demonstrate the importance of managing kerbside space in a range of scenarios and offer valuable insights to authorities and researchers for policy-making and modelling.

Keywords: Kerbside; Car-hailing; Bus service; Microsimulation; Network performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856425000205
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transa:v:192:y:2025:i:c:s0965856425000205

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2025.104392

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice is currently edited by John (J.M.) Rose

More articles in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().