Substitution or Complement? Uncovering the Interplay between Ride-hailing Services and Public Transit
For urban planners and transportation researchers, it provides updated evidence that ride-hailing increasingly complements public transit in saturated markets, challenging the dominant substitution narrative.
This study analyzes ride-hailing and public transit relationships in Shanghai, finding a 9.22% increase in complementary trips and a 9.06% decrease in substitutive trips compared to prior work, with nonlinear effects from factors like metro distance and bus stop density.
The literature on transportation network companies (TNCs), also known as ride-hailing services, has often characterized these service providers as predominantly substitutive to public transit (PT). However, as TNC markets expand and mature, the complementary and substitutive relationships with PT may shift. To explore whether such a transformation is occurring, this study collected travel data from 96,716 ride-hailing vehicles during September 2022 in Shanghai, a city characterized by an increasingly saturated TNC market. An enhanced data-driven framework is proposed to classify TNC-PT relationships into four types: first-mile complementary, last-mile complementary, substitutive, and independent. Our findings reveal a substantial increase in the complementary ratio (9.22%) and a relative decline in the substitutive ratio (9.06%) compared to previous studies. Furthermore, to examine the nonlinear impact of various influential factors on these ratios, a machine learning method integrating categorical boosting (CatBoost) and Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) is proposed. The results show significant nonlinear effects in some variables, including the distance to the nearest metro station and the density of bus stops.