Emerging transportation services are quickly changing the way individuals travel by expanding the set of transportation alternatives available for a trip, allowing for more flexibility in travel schedules and providing access to transportation without incurring the costs of auto ownership. One of the most rapidly growing shared-mobility services are ridehailing services. In this dissertation, the relationships among the adoption and frequency of use of on-demand ride services and other components of travel behavior are analyzed. This dissertation utilizes the California Millennials Dataset collected in Fall 2015.
To investigate the factors that affect the adoption of ridehailing, the researcher estimates several models that help assess the role of individual characteristics and residential location in affecting these choices. Further, he expands his analyses of the factors affecting the adoption of ridehailing through the estimation of a latent-class adoption model that captures the heterogeneity in individuals’ tastes and preferences. Finally, he conducted a number of exploratory analyses to investigate the factors that limit or encourage the use of single-user ridehailing services and the potential impacts that these services have on other modes of travel.
The findings from this dissertation provide a starting point for efforts to forecast the adoption and frequency of use of ridehailing services, improve the understanding of how ridehailing as the spearhead of other emerging trends in transportation (e.g., automation and electrification) will transform future transportation and help inform policy decisions designed to increase transportation sustainability.