Taxi-Sharing Boosts Energy Efficiency, But Will Riders Get on Board?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) set out to answer that question, analyzing a year’s worth of New York taxi trips. They concluded that the total amount of time that taxis spent traveling could have been reduced 32 percent by shared cabs, with passengers riding no more than an extra five minutes. That reduction in travel time would result in less pollution and traffic, the researchers said, though they did not specify how much. Their work was published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab and one of the paper’s authors, said the research is meant to quantify the benefits of taxi-sharing. “We were ourselves very surprised with the results, which are quite striking, of how much more efficiently we could use the mobility infrastructure in cities,” he said.

The researchers also looked at whether such increased efficiency would be possible in other cities that have a lower density of taxis than New York. “You still find that there’s a huge potential for sharing,” Ratti said.

City Mobility Evolving

Ride services such as Uber and Lyft have given urban dwellers more options than ever to get around. Instead of hailing a cab, residents of cities around the world now can summon a ride via smartphone from a black SUV driven by a professional, or from a moonlighting civilian driver with a personal car out for hire. For longer trips, drivers can rent from a proliferating fleet of by-the-hour cars offered by services such as Zipcar and car2go, or from car owners who put their vehicles on sharing services. (See related: “U.S. Teenagers Are Driving Much Less: Four Theories About Why” and “Car Sharing Widens Lanes of Access for City Drivers.”)

“We’ve seen with Airbnb that people are ready to share even intimate spaces, in their homes, now that we have systems online that allow you to know better who you’re sharing with,” Ratti said. Airbnb lets travelers book a stay in all or part of someone’s home.

The researchers analyzed 172 million trips made by more than 13,000 taxis in New York City in 2011. On the Senseable City Lab’s HubCabwebsite, an interactive map plots all of those trips and helps illustrate the potential for sharing. Let’s say you’re heading from LaGuardia Airport to the corner of Park Avenue and 57th Street. Including all passenger drop-offs within a quarter-mile radius, according to the map, that same trip occurred about 6,000 times.

If even 2,000 of those trips were prevented as a result of sharing, at an average distance of nine miles from LaGuardia, and with the average vehicle emitting 368 grams of carbon per mile, nearly 7,000 kilograms of carbon emissions would be saved. That amount is roughly equivalent to the emissions from consuming 788 gallons of gas.

Will Riders Want to Share?

The researchers acknowledge, though, that there are “psychological limitations of taxi-sharing” that need to be assessed. Passengers need a clear and straightforward way to split costs, among other factors. As the researchers noted, the potential delay that sharing introduces is an important consideration. When National Geographic informally asked people on social networks whether they would share a cab with a stranger if it meant saving money, answers ranged from “Sure, why not?” to “Depends” to “Nope. I might even pay extra to not have to.”

Collected: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/

Posted by admin on Sep 4 2014. Filed under News at Now. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry