SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt comments on a recent study that examines the possible benefits of New York taxi passengers sharing rides along common routes.
The PNAS paper featured in the article examines current data on New York taxi rides, and computes how many trips could be saved if passengers traveling identical routes at the same time were to share a cab.
Despite the impressive 40 percent reduction in number of taxi trips, Bettencourt cautions against the unintended consequences of implementing such a system without further analysis. One such consequence of a taxi-sharing program could be diverting passengers from public transit, he says, which might actually worsen pollution.
“This is not to say that it should not be done...but one would have to think these through some more and try them out in practice, I think,” Bettencourt says in the article.
Read the article in the New York Times (September 1, 2014)
Read the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (subscription required- to be released)