Investigating objective and subjective factors influencing the adoption, frequency, and characteristics of ride-hailing trips

Even as ride-hailing has become ubiquitous in most urban areas, its impacts on individual travel are still unclear. This includes limited knowledge of demand characteristics (especially for pooled rides), travel modes being substituted, types of activities being accessed, as well as possible trip induction effects. The current study contributes to this knowledge gap by investigating ride-hailing experience, frequency, and trip characteristics through two multi-dimensional models estimated using data from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area. Ride-hailing adoption and usage are modeled as functions of unobserved lifestyle stochastic latent constructs, observed transportation-related choices, and sociodemographic variables. The results point to low residential location density and people's privacy concerns as the main deterrents to pooled ride-hailing adoption, with non-Hispanic Whites being more privacy sensitive than individuals of other ethnicities. Further, our results suggest a need for policies that discourage the substitution of short-distance walkable trips by ride-hailing, and a need for low cost and well-integrated multi-modal systems to avoid substitution of transit trips by this mode.