Are users ready to accept fully flexible walking in on-demand mobility?

Abstract

On-demand ride pooling benefits from updating its routing decisions in real-time as new information becomes available, as well as from optimising the pickup and drop off (PUDO) points to avoid long detours. Both features indicate that it could be plausible to implement flexible walking, i.e., deciding the PUDO points dynamically, as opposed to informing users upfront. However, this could reduce the reliability of ride pooling thereby influencing the user experience. In this paper, we analyse data extracted from a labelled discrete choice experiment, consisting of three distinct ride pooling alternatives: door-to-door, fixed walking where walking time is informed upfront, and flexible walking where walking time is expressed as a time interval. Each alternative is further described by the following battery of attributes: price, in vehicle and waiting times, and emission savings compared to conventional petrol vehicles. The empirical analysis is performed via the density de-compositional version of the non parametric random effects Logit Mixed Logit model. Our main findings are as follows: i) There is a discontinuous zero-walk effect: passengers strongly prefer door-to-door services to walking even a minimal distance; ii) Users prefer to know their walking direction, as the willingness to pay to reduce walking time is significantly higher when the PUDO point is not fixed in advance; iii) The so-called reliability ratio, which compares the value of reliability to the value of time, is approximately 0.68 for walking time — significantly greater than previous values obtained for either waiting or in-vehicle time indicating that reliability is relatively more important for walking. All of this implies that flexible walking would be desirable only if the operational benefits are very large. On the other hand, those three findings reflect the average, but we do identify a percentage of the population willing to embrace flexible walking, suggesting that offering both fixed and flexible times to the users can be the best option.