Simulation of Mixtures of Legacy and Autonomous Mainline Rail Operations

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of walking and e-hailing on the scale economies of on-demand mobility services. A microeconomic model is developed to explicitly characterize the physical interactions between passengers and vehicles in the matching, pickup, and walking processes under different market conditions and matching mechanisms. We show that passenger competition plays a critical role in scale economies. When unmatched passengers do not compete for idle vehicles, both street-hailing and e-hailing exhibit increasing returns to scale, although such property in ehailing is less significant. In contrast, when there exists passenger competition, e-hailing service shows decreasing returns to scale. Street-hailing, however, is free of this detrimental effect thanks to its limited matching radius. While walking does not change the scale economies, it does benefit the system by reducing the total vehicle supply required to serve the same level of demand and improving the overall vehicle utilization rate.