A multi-criteria fairness framework for equitable transport resource allocation

Mobility service providers (MSPs) commonly allocate mobility resources unevenly across traveler groups and urban zones to maximize profits. While such strategies may improve operational efficiency, they can also generate disparities in the treatment of travelers, raising concerns about transport fairness. Despite growing policy attention to these issues, policymakers lack a systematic framework to evaluate how different fairness objectives interact with MSPs’ operational decisions and overall system performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified framework that characterizes transport fairness along three distinct dimensions: (i) resource per capita, (ii) service utilization, and (iii) average traveler surplus. We embed these fairness metrics as regulatory constraints into a profit-maximizing resource allocation model and examine their impacts on MSP’s profit, traveler surplus, and social welfare through analytical derivations and numerical experiments. The results show that fairness improvements always entail trade-offs with MSP’s profit, while regulations targeting different fairness metrics can lead to markedly different outcomes for traveler surplus and social welfare. Moreover, in less polarized or already balanced cities, imposing additional fairness regulations may result in substantial efficiency losses relative to the limited fairness gains achieved under the proposed fairness constraints. These findings highlight the importance of adopting context-specific and metric-sensitive fairness regulations, rather than uniform policy interventions, when governing mobility service operations.