An exploratory analysis of alternative travel behaviors of ride-hailing users

The emergence of ride-hailing, technology-enabled on-demand services such as Uber and Lyft, has arguably impacted the daily travel behavior of users. This study analyzes the travel behavior of ride-hailing users first from conventional person- and trip-based perspectives and then from an activity-based approach that uses tours and activity patterns as basic units of analysis. While tours by definition are more easily identified and classified, daily patterns theoretically better represent overall travel behavior but are simultaneously more difficult to explain. We thus consider basic descriptive analyses for tours and a more elaborate approach, Latent Class Analysis, to describe pattern behavior. The empirical results for tours using data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey show that 76% of ride-hailing tours can be represented by five dominant tour types with non-work tours being the most frequent. The Latent Class model suggests that the ride-hailing users can be divided into four distinct classes, each with a representative activity-travel pattern defining ride-hailing usage. Class 1 was composed of younger, employed people who used ride-hailing to commute to work. Single, older individuals comprised Class 2 and used ride-hailing for midday maintenance activities. Class 3 represented younger, employed individuals who used ride-hailing for discretionary purposes in the evening. Last, Class 4 members used ride-hailing for mode change purposes. Since each identified class has different activity-travel patterns, they will show different responses to policy directives. The results can assist ride-hailing operators in addressing evolving travel needs as users respond to various policy constraints.