Topology dependence of on-demand ride-sharing

Abstract

Traffic is a challenge in rural and urban areas alike with negative effects ranging from congestion to air pollution. Ride-sharing poses an appealing alternative to personal cars, combining the traffic-reducing ride bundling of public transport with much of the flexibility and comfort of personal cars. Here we study the effects of the underlying street network topology on the viability of ride bundling analytically and in simulations. Using numerical and analytical approaches we find that system performance can be measured in the number of scheduled stops per vehicle. Its scaling with the request rate is approximately linear and the slope, that depends on the network topology, is a measure of the ease of ridesharing in that topology. This dependence is caused by the different growth of the route volume, which we compute analytically for the simplest networks served by a single vehicle.