Assessment of how Ride-Hailing services affect individual’s travel mode choice in urban transportation

BACKGROUN AND OBJECTIVES: Ride-hailing is a term to describe booking rides and paying for car services through a smartphone app with a Transportation Network Company. As an innovation in the ridehailing investigation in Iran, this paper is sought to analyze the influence of individual’s demographic characteristics on their travel mode choice between ride-hailing, traditional taxi and private car. For this purpose, questionnaires in six different statuses have been designed, and 414 questionnaires have been completed in 22 districts of Tehran metropolitan region. METHODS: To check the utility of choosing private car and traditional taxi compared to ridehailing, on short, medium, and, long travel distances with commuting and noncommuting purposes in the peak hours of morning and evening, the six multinomial logit models have been done by considering the ridehailing option as reference alternative, and the private car and traditional taxi options as the first and second ` FINDING:Initially, six logit models were generated, which fitted models are all appropriate. All of the variables used in these models in choosing private car or traditional taxis compared to ridehailing in different models were statistically significance. But, gender, household dimension, and individuals’ educational level didn’t affect the individual’s choice. CONCLUSION: The results showed that ridehailing is more acceptable to younger people, and highincome people attract more to it. Therefore, ridehailing services can be considered as a wealthy phenomenon and for the young generation. In addition, given the 67% response of individuals incline to use ridehailing services in a shared way, because of the interest of individuals to use this mode of travel due to its lower cost in some situations, which can be considered as a separate mode of transportation.