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When mobility on demand meets vehicle electrification: a longitudinal study on evolution of city-scale ridesharing

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Abstract

With the rapid development of ubiquitous computing, our society is witnessing a rapid expansion of mobility-on-demand services, in which ridesharing (e.g., Uber, Lyft, and DiDi) has become one of the most successful applications and has percolated into people’s daily life. Even though a large number of research studies have been conducted to understand the demand and supply patterns or improve the operation efficiency of ridesharing services, little is known at a comprehensive level on their evolution, especially during the widely-initiative vehicle electrification process that electric vehicles start to take over conventional gas vehicles gradually. Different from conventional gas vehicles, electric vehicles have some unique characteristics, e.g., long charging time compared to the refueling process of gas vehicles, which potentially makes a difference in providing ridesharing services. In this paper, we seek to shed light on the evolution of city-scale ridesharing services with the penetration of large-scale electric vehicles. In particular, our study is based on a ridesharing operation dataset from the Chinese city Shenzhen in 2019, including all orders served by over 50,000 unique ridesharing drivers. We perform a set of observations on the differences between gas vehicle and electric vehicle drivers for ridesharing services from different dimensions, e.g., spatial, temporal, and income, etc. Our study shows that understanding the evolution of city-scale ridesharing with the penetration of electric vehicles has strong implications for ridesharing drivers, passengers, operators, and city governments. On the one hand, our findings paint a promising picture of electric vehicles for ridesharing services, showing its prosperity in the Chinese city Shenzhen. On the other hand, our study also has the potential to provide some meaningful guidelines for other cities that plan to replace their vehicles for ridesharing services with electric vehicles based on the obtained insights, e.g., possible drawbacks for long trips and charging infrastructure deployment.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This work is partially supported by NSF 1849238, NSF 1932223, NSF 1951890, NSF 1952096, and NSF 2003874.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, 1017 Academic Way, Tallahassee, FL, 32304, USA

    Guang Wang

  2. SIAT, CAS & Shenzhen Beidou Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

    Fan Zhang

  3. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, 110 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

    Desheng Zhang

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  1. Guang Wang
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Correspondence to Guang Wang.

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Wang, G., Zhang, F. & Zhang, D. When mobility on demand meets vehicle electrification: a longitudinal study on evolution of city-scale ridesharing. CCF Trans. Pervasive Comp. Interact. 5, 226–240 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-023-00125-w

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