Changes in car ownership due to life events: Insights from the UK Longitudinal Household Survey

Abstract

Proper positioning of ride-sourcing drivers may improve vacant travel times, waiting times, and matching opportunities. Herein, we evaluate the potential repositioning response of drivers when provided a guidance based on estimates of their earnings in a system offering ride-hailing (solo) and ridesplitting (shared) rides. We develop a strategy that enumerates the best regional repositioning destination based on the expected number of requests. A mixed continuous-discrete time Markov Chain (MDCTMC) is developed to predict drivers activities and the revenues associated with them. Our main findings indicate that the proposed approach is likely to retain drivers confidence by improving their earnings compared to other drivers. We also show that it manages to decrease the number of unserved requests compared to several state-of-art benchmarks and decreased the deadheading.