Ride-sharing study findings are scalable to different cities

A still image taken from a video available at hubcab.com showing a map of Manhattan (upper left), with the yellow lines indicating taxi trips. Where lines intersect indicates sharing opportunities. Three years ago, Steven Strogatz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, helped a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology identify the 'shareability' of cab service in New York City. The group found that, indeed, the vast majority of the city's 150 million taxi trips per year were shareable, and even by sharing a fraction of those rides, pollution and congestion would be significantly lessened. So the obvious follow-up question was: Will that result generalize? In other words, could a result in a city as densely populated as New York be replicated in different kinds of cities - say, in Vienna? Strogatz and his MIT colleagues asked that very question in their most recent study, and the results could perhaps point city planners toward a 'greener' future. Strogatz - author of four books on mathematics, including 'The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, From One to Infinity' - was a key contributor to - Scaling Law of Urban Ride Sharing ,' which was published online March 6 in Scientific Reports. Lead author Remi Tachet and principal investigator Carlo Ratti are both at MIT's Senseable City Lab, which conducted the study.