Suggested Citation:
Zhang, Yunwan (2020)

Impact of Ridesharing Services on New York City Taxis and Insights into Spatial Inequality

. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis, Dissertation UCD-ITS-RR-20-115

Abstract:

The advent of ridesharing services has been reported to be a disruption for the traditional taxi market. In this thesis, both the taxi and ridesharing services were analyzed using New York City as a case study. This research introduces a comparative analysis to understand: (1) the potential impacts of ridesharing services on traditional taxis; (2) the spatial inequality of taxis and ridesharing services and its correlation between underlying causes, especially land use types.

The impact of ridesharing services on travel time distribution of taxi trips was first examined using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Second, the travel time reliability of taxi trips before and after ridesharing services’ introduction was compared by calculating the buffer index and planning time index. Third, the spatial inequality of both taxi and ridesharing services was measured by the degree of services and the Theil index. Furthermore, correlation analysis and the stepwise VIF selection were performed to investigate whether there is a correlation between inequality and land use type. Finally, the correlations between the degree of services and land uses were explored by performing OLS regression models, and the influence of land uses on spatial inequality was investigated.

The results indicate that ridesharing services appear to have affected the demand for taxis and significantly influenced the travel time distribution of taxi trips. Moreover, the overall traffic conditions in NYC seemed to become worse after the introduction of ridesharing services, although more data are needed to figure out whether this is solely caused by ridesharing services or other factors such as increases in overall travel demand over the study period. A positive impact of the ridesharing services that we found is that they cut down the spatial inequality between Manhattan and the outer boroughs which were underserved by taxis.