How Travel Behaviors Of Ridehailing Users Differ From Those Of Non-users?

Abstract

Since its first introduction to San Francisco, the United States, in 2012, ridehailing (RH) has improved mobility while disrupting the urban transportation market. In response, scholars have estimated its effects on travel behaviors, which are inconsistent, in part because of a lack of clear conceptualization and rigorous methods. In this study, with the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, we examine the differences in travel behavior between RH users and equivalent non-users in the 50 largest Urban Areas in the United States. In so doing, we employ propensity score matching to identify and match the most comparable non-users to each user with various covariates. With these matched samples, we estimate parametric models on four travel outcomes, days with transit trips in the past 30 days, trips by walking and biking in the past seven days, household vehicle count, and personal miles driven in the past 12 months. We find that RH users presented more days with transit trips, more trips by active modes, and higher chances of owning zero vehicles, compared to equivalent non-users. We also uncover substantial heterogeneity in RH impacts by frequency and residential density. For instance, occasional and frequent RH users living in highly dense neighborhoods reported fewer days with transit trips than their matched non-users, suggesting that substitution dominates complementarity in these transit-rich neighborhoods. This study contributes to the literature by examining travel outcomes between two comparable groups, investigating key travel outcomes in comprehensive manners, and uncovering substantial heterogeneity in RH impacts by frequency and land use.