Researchers tracked tens of thousands of taxis in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, and Vienna and found that over 90 percent of rides that are more than 5 minutes in duration could be fairly easily shared.
A newly published study co-authored by MIT researchers suggests that urban ride-sharing is feasible in a wide variety of cities around the globe - and indeed that the potential 'shareability' of autos in those places is more similar, from place to place, than previously expected. The work builds on a 2014 study showing that ride-sharing - in the form of, say, taxi trips shared with other passengers traveling along similar routes - could be highly effective in New York City. However, given New York's exceptional population density, an ongoing question is how many other urban settings offer the same potential for sharing vehicles. The new study examines data from San Francisco, Singapore, and Vienna, in addition to New York. It suggests the ride-sharing potential in those cities converges so closely that, as the study authors write, 'they all obey the same empirical law governing the potential for ride-sharing.' 'We found this kind of global law of ride-sharing,' says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's Senseable City Lab and a co-author of the new paper. The paper, 'Scaling Law of Urban Ride Sharing,' is being published today in Scientific Reports . Ratti's co-authors on the paper are Remi Tachet, a researcher at Senseable City Lab (who is the corresponding author); Oleguer Sagarra of Senseable City Lab; Paolo Santi, a research scientist at Senseable City Lab and a senior researcher at the Italian National Research Council CNR; Giovanni Resta of the Italian National Research Council CNR; Michael Szell, a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; and Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University.
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