Managing travelers’ mode choices in the era of shared mobility through traditional traffic regulation policies

The rapid expansion of ride-hailing service has imposed a huge amount of additional traffic on urban transportation systems. To reduce congestion, different regulatory policies have been announced to control the number of ride-hailing vehicles in metropolitan areas around the world. However, these measurements, shooting at ride-hailing vehicles only, deprive non-car owners of their private-car mobility rights (endowed by ride-hailing services), therefore are debatable in themselves. Instead of imposing specialized restrictions on ride-hailing vehicles, we propose to cure the deteriorating traffic conditions with classic traffic regulation policies implemented on all road space users. In this study, in a simple one corridor scenario with two different types of ride-hailing services, i.e., ride-sourcing and ride-sharing, we model travelers’ mode choices at user equilibrium under no policy intervention to reveal the negative impacts of ride-hailing on urban transportation efficiency, and compare the different system optimum states with and without ride-hailing to demonstrate the great potential of ride-hailing in mitigating congestion. Based on the model, we then examine the impacts of three traffic regulation policies, i.e., road space rationing, congestion pricing and tradable credit schemes, and investigate the existence of traffic regulation policies that can achieve system optimum in the presence of ride-hailing.