Taxicabs for Improved Urban Mobility: Are We Missing an Opportunity?

Taxi services are critical aspects of urban transportation systems. Taxicabs serve the public in a variety of ways, from metered fares to informal jitneys, and provide critical mobility for people of all income levels. Despite the ubiquity of taxi service in cities, there is limited scholarly research that explores how people use taxi service to support transit-oriented lifestyles and enhance mobility, and there is scant research exploring the complementary aspects of taxi service for conventional transit. In this paper the authors argue that taxi service is a critical aspect of a transit system, and taxi usage exhibits complementary characteristics to conventional transit. Specifically, taxi usage is asymmetrical where origins and destinations have very different spatial distributions. This suggests that taxi riders have multi-modal travel journeys. In many cases taxi trips are part of journeys that began with transit trips, yet planning and expanding taxi service as an extension of transit networks is rarely undertaken in practice. The authors use regulatory and Geographic Positioning System (GPS) data from New York City as a case to demonstrate the asymmetrical nature of taxi usage and innovative regulatory approaches that foster high rates of taxi usage that complement transit ridership.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP060 Paratransit
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • King, David A
  • Peters, Jonathan R
  • Daus, Matthew W
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2012-1-22 to 2012-1-26
• Date: 2012

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 19p
• Monograph Title: TRB 91st Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Market assessment; Modal split; Multimodal transportation; Taxicabs; Travel behavior; Travel demand; Urban transportation
• Geographic Terms: New York (New York)
• Subject Areas: Passenger Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01372670
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 12-2097
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Jun 15 2012 4:03PM