Macroscopic pricing schemes for the utilization of pool ride-hailing vehicles in bus lanes

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of ride-hailing services, new modes of transportation are having a significant impact on the overall performance of transportation networks. As a result, there is a need to ensure that both the various transportation alternatives and the spatial network resources are used efficiently. In this work, we analyze a network configuration where part of the urban transportation network is devoted to dedicated bus lanes. Apart from buses, we let pool ride-hailing trips use the dedicated bus lanes which, contingent upon the demand for the remaining modes, may result in faster trips for users opting for the pooling alternative. Under an aggregated modelling framework, we characterize the spatial configuration and the multi-modal demand split for which this strategy achieves a system optimum. For these specific scenarios, we compute the equilibrium when ride-hailing users can choose between solo and pool services, and we provide a pricing scheme for mitigating the gap between total user delays of the system optimum and user equilibrium solutions, when needed.