Andrea Pellegrini, Andrés Fielbaum
Abstract
On-demand ridepooling benefits from updating its routing decisions in real-time as new information becomes available, as well as from optimising the pickup and dropoff (PUDO) points to avoid long detours. Both features indicate that it could be plausible to implement flexible walking, i.e., deciding the PUDO points dynamically, as opposed to informing users upfront. However, this could reduce the reliability of ridepooling thereby influencing the user experience. In this paper, we analyse data extracted from a labelled discrete choice experiment, consisting of three distinct ridepooling alternatives: door-to-door, fixed walking where walking time is informed upfront, and flexible walking where walking time is expressed as a time interval. Each alternative is further described by the following battery of attributes: price, in-vehicle and waiting times, and emission savings compared to conventional petrol vehicles. The empirical analysis is performed via the density decompositional version of the non-parametric random effects Logit Mixed Logit model.Our main findings are as follows: (i) There is a discontinuous zero-walk effect: passengers strongly prefer door-to-door services to walking even a minimal distance; (ii) Users prefer to know their walking direction, as the willingness to pay to reduce walking time is significantly higher when the PUDO point is not fixed in advance; (iii) The so-called reliability ratio, which compares the value of reliability to the value of time, is approximately 0.59 for walking time — significantly greater than previous values obtained for either waiting or in-vehicle time — indicating that reliability is relatively more important for walking. All of this implies that flexible walking would be desirable only if the operational benefits are very large. On the other hand, those three findings reflect the average, but we do identify a proportion of the sample willing to embrace flexible walking, suggesting that offering both fixed and flexible times to the users can be the best option.
