Transit Planning Optimization Under Ride-Hailing Competition and Traffic Congestion

Keji Wei (), Vikrant Vaze () and Alexandre Jacquillat ()
Additional contact information
Keji Wei: Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
Vikrant Vaze: Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
Alexandre Jacquillat: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142

Transportation Science, 2022, vol. 56, issue 3, 725-749

Abstract: With the soaring popularity of ride-hailing, the interdependence between transit ridership, ride-hailing ridership, and urban congestion motivates the following question: can public transit and ride-hailing coexist and thrive in a way that enhances the urban transportation ecosystem as a whole? To answer this question, we develop a mathematical and computational framework that optimizes transit schedules while explicitly accounting for their impacts on road congestion and passengers’ mode choice between transit and ride-hailing. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear program and solved using a bilevel decomposition algorithm. Based on computational case study experiments in New York City, our optimized transit schedules consistently lead to 0.4%–3% system-wide cost reduction. This amounts to rush-hour savings of millions of dollars per day while simultaneously reducing the costs to passengers and transportation service providers. These benefits are driven by a better alignment of available transportation options with passengers’ preferences—by redistributing public transit resources to where they provide the strongest societal benefits. These results are robust to underlying assumptions about passenger demand, transit level of service, the dynamics of ride-hailing operations, and transit fare structures. Ultimately, by explicitly accounting for ride-hailing competition, passenger preferences, and traffic congestion, transit agencies can develop schedules that lower costs for passengers, operators, and the system as a whole: a rare win–win–win outcome.

Keywords: mixed integer nonlinear optimization; public transit planning; ride-hailing; traffic congestion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2021.1068 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ortrsc:v:56:y:2022:i:3:p:725-749

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().