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Generalized Traffic Equilibrium with Ride-hailing and Customer Waiting
We develop a generalized traffic equilibrium model that considers ride-hailing services provided by Transportation Network Companies (TNCs, e.g., Uber and Lyft) and accounts for customer waiting. The generalized equilibrium model integrates three interacting sub-models, including TNCs' decision on dispatching ride-hailing vehicles, travelers' choice of which trip mode to use, and queueing dynamics that explicitly capture customers' waiting costs. The TNCs’ choices and customers’ choices together form a generalized noncooperative game, coupled with the queueing system of customer waiting. We provide the conditions under which the customers' waiting cost mapping needs to satisfy in order to exist an equilibrium solution. Most importantly, to provide a computationally tractable treatment of the complete equilibrium model, we propose a truncation of the classical queueing formulas for customer waiting. We validate the proposed equilibrium model using the Sioux-Fall network. Numerical experiments show that compared with our method, existing methods tend to underestimate the waiting cost of ride-hailing customers. As a result, they overestimate the mode share of ride-hailing travelers and the vehicle miles traveled in the system.
