Can Ridesharing Improve the Reserve Capacity of Transportation Network?

Ride-sharing is one of the effective method to reduce car ownership, thus it may have a profound impact on the reserve capacity of road network. However, it’s unclear the relationships among users’ ridesharing behaviors, travel demand pattern and the reserve capacity of road network. To this end, this paper builds a ridesharing trip-assignment model which considers users’ ridesharing choice, destination choice and path choice, and further proposes a bi-level programming for reserve capacity of road network with ride-sharing. The bi-level programming is then converted into an equivalent single-layer optimization problem by a conventional relaxation scheme. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to provide valuable insights and examine the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that subsidizing ridesharing drivers can improve almost as much reserve capacity of road network as expanding link capacity without ridesharing. However, retrofitting High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lane has limited impact on improving reserve capacity of road network.