Car-sharing, ride-sharing, and on-demand ride-hailing services

By Jeff Lee 2019-11-24

With high urbanization and dense population, Taiwan is the ideal location to realize mobility services. In accordance with the development process of self-driving technologies, in my opinion, the time frame for the transportation model described in this paper is likely to occur in Taiwan between the years 2030 and 2035. Should this era-defining technology begin to materialize in its ideal scenario, changes in the concept of car use would overwhelm the automotive industry and reshape the urban landscape.

The three mobility service models in the title are referred to as Car sharing (CS), Ridesharing (RS), and Ride-hailing (RH), respectively. The common ground of these service models is that they eliminate the need to acquire vehicles for personal use and instead utilize mobile phone apps to satisfy all transportation needs that can be accomplished with their vehicles. Once these models are combined with fully autonomous vehicles, the future of personal transportation for the general public will look like this...

- When commuters leave home in the morning, they could use their cell phones to check if there are any CS cars nearby; if they have to wait too long for a CS, they could take an RH ( or so-called Robo-Taxi) instead, but at a higher cost.

- When students leave home in the morning to go to school, as their destination is the same as that of their neighboring students, they can choose to take a RS and have several stops along the way, thus making it inexpensive and convenient.

- For elderly people heading for a hospital in the morning, they can choose CS or RS.

- For those on business trips or working outside the office and required to visit many locations within a short period, adopting CS with long-term rental would be preferable because of the time pressure. RH is not a preferred option due to its higher cost.

- In situations where there is much demand for cars in a small area at any one time (e.g., at the end of the day at an office building or factory, at the end of the school day, or the end of a concert or ball game), RS-based autonomous vehicle route planning is most efficient at this time, as it quickly filters riders to adjacent destinations and constructs a one-car route to take them to their destinations in the best sequence. By reducing the number of RS autonomous vehicles to 1/2 or even 1/3 of the original number, the urgent need for transportation can still be relieved in a short period, while traffic congestion can be alleviated by reducing the number of vehicles.

- CS offers the most suitable option for family holiday trips and theme park transportation.

These models are not novelties but already exist in today's life. On top of that, with autonomous driving, Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is no longer just a concept but a core thought of revolutionizing the future of transportation.