“Not just a taxi”? For-profit ridesharing, driver strategies, and VMT
By D. N. Anderson. 2014
183 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The spread of GPS-based location services using smartphone applications has led to the rapid growth of new startups offering smartphone-enabled dispatch service for taxicabs, limousines, and ridesharing vehicles. This change in communicative technology has been accompanied by the creation of new categories of car service, particularly as drivers of limousines and private vehicles use the apps to provide on-demand service of a kind previously reserved for taxicabs. One of the most controversial new models of car service is for-profit ridesharing, which combines the for-profit model of taxi service with the overall traffic reduction goals of ridesharing. A preliminary attempt is here made at understanding how for-profit ridesharing compares to traditional taxicab and ridesharing models. Ethnographic interviews are drawn on to illustrate the range of motivations and strategies used by for-profit ridesharing drivers in San Francisco, California as they make use of the service. A range of driver strategies is identified, ranging from incidental, to part-time, to full-time driving. This makes possible a provisional account of the potential ecological impacts of the spread of this model of car service, based on the concept of taxicab efficiency, conceived as the ratio of shared versus unshared miles driven.
Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Marketing, Transportation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/149d90056ac75709d710785724f785a1ff5e5557
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Citations in the corpus
- Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers (2016, unknown): “or cooperative contexts (Anderson, 2014; Chan & Shaheen, 2012; Cohen & Kietzmann, 2014; Furuhata et al., 2013).”
- Ridesourcing systems: A framework and review (2019, background): “For example, Anderson (2014) argues that due to the relative lack of regulatory oversight of vehicle standards and quantity, ridesourcing could prove less ecologically desirable than conventional taxis: In San Francisco, for example, nearly 100% of the conventional taxi fleet is composed of…”
- How app-based ride-hailing services influence travel behavior: An empirical study from China (2020, background): “The development of technology has allowed smartphone users to access ride-hailing apps easily, and at the same time, has created a market for transport services based on sharing private cars (Anderson, 2014).”
- Uber, Public Transit, and Urban Transportation Equity: A Case Study in New York City (2019, background): “Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. abundant research and media coverage on the comparison between ridesourcing and taxis and how the emergence of ridesourcing changes urban mobility through transforming the taxi industry (Anderson 2014; Bialik et al. 2015; Gl€oss, McGregor, and Brown 2016).”
- Ridesourcing, the sharing economy, and the future of cities (2018, background): “Many scholars and the popular press made comparative studies on taxi and ridesourcing (Anderson, 2014; Bialik, Flowers, Fischer-Baum, et al., 2015; Glöss, McGregor, & Brown, 2016), all of which seemed to confirm this significant modal shift.”
- The Future of Work in the ‘Sharing Economy’. Market Efficiency and Equitable Opportunities or Unfair Precarisation? (2016, unknown): “(Anderson, 2014) Ride sharing drivers motivation and strategy Anthropology Qualitative study Ethnographic interviews Uber and Lyft”