Ride-hailing vs. Taxi Services: a Survey-based Comparison

Abstract

As being an important player of sharing economy, ride sourcing services provide benefits for socio-economic and environmental issues of countries and make positive contributions for sustainability. To indicate socioeconomic and environmental influences of these services, this paper aims to make comparison between some alternative Transportation Network Companies, namely, Taxify, Uber and Liftago and standard taxi services regarding their drivers’, vehicles’ and trips’ characteristics. In line with this objective, this research investigates 84 drivers of ride sourcing services and standard taxi industry from two various cities of the Czech Republic, namely, Prague and Ostrava. The data of this paper was collected by using a self-administered questionnaire and the researchers applied multiple correspondence analysis in R-software to make the analyses of this research. The results of these analyses show that different from standard taxi services, most of the drivers of Taxify in Prague are not Czech fluent. Moreover, in Prague, drivers of Uber Technology Network company work at the weekends and they drive Uber cars as a part time work. When it comes to transportation activities in Ostrava, standard taxi services were driven for higher kilometres and at the weekends, while total kilometres that were driven by Liftago’s cars are less than standard taxi services and these trips were mostly taken in workdays. These results show that services of standard taxi industry and ride sourcing services differ regarding characteristics of drivers, trips, vehicles, passengers and cities. Some policy implementations are also provided by this paper to hinder disruptive transportation actions.