Ride-hailing vs. public transport: Comparing travel time perceptions using revealed preference data from Washington DC

Abstract

Ride-hailing has become an important part of the urban mobility landscape. The main contribution of this study is to estimate how travellers perceive time when using ride-hailing compared to using conventional public transport, to better understand ride-hailing mode choice. We combine two unique datasets containing actual, individual passenger behaviour for the Washington DC area from October 2018: a large set of almost 250,000 individual ride-hailing trips made using Uber, and more than 326,000 public transport trips obtained from automated ticketing data. Contrary to previous studies our model estimations rely on over half a million directly observed passenger choices between ride-hailing and public transport, based on which we estimate a discrete choice model to infer travel time perceptions for both modes using a binomial logit model. Our results show that on average ride-hailing in-vehicle time is perceived 35% less negative than public transport in-vehicle time. We also found that waiting time for ride-hailing is valued 1.3 times more negative than ride-hailing in-vehicle time, which is about 20% less negative than the ratio between waiting and in-vehicle time found for public transport. Our study enables a more accurate modelling of ride-hailing by using mode-specific travel time coefficients derived from large-scale empirical data, which can improve the accuracy of modelling outputs and thus improve decision-making processes.