Dr. Yafeng Ying - On the Empty Miles in Ride-hailing Systems

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Dr. Yafeng Yin to speak at the Spring 2020 Transportation Speaker series. He is a Professor at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He works in the area of transportation systems analysis and modeling, and has published more than 100 refereed papers in leading academic journals. Dr. Yin is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Department Editor of Service Science, and Associate Editor of Transportation Science. He also serves on the International Advisory Committee of the International Symposium of Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT). Dr. Yin received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2002, his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1996 and 1994 respectively. Prior to his current appointment at the University of Michigan, he was a faculty member at University of Florida between 2005 and 2016, a postdoctoral researcher and then assistant research engineer at University of California at Berkeley between 2002 and 2005. Between 1996 and 1999, he was a lecturer at Tsinghua University. Dr. Yin has received recognition from different institutions, including a Doctoral Mentoring Award from University of Florida, Outstanding Leadership Award by the Chinese Overseas Transportation Association (COTA), and the Stella Dafermos Best Paper Award and the Ryuichi Kitamura Paper Award from Transportation Research Board.

Title: On the Empty Miles in Ride-hailing Systems

Abstract:

Ride-hailing services provided by companies like Uber, Lyft and Didi Chuxing are playing an increasingly important role in meeting mobility needs in many metropolitan areas. Other than delivering passengers from their origin to destination, ride-hailing vehicles generate massive vacant or empty trips from the end of one passenger trip to the start of the next. These vacant trips represent unproductive use of labor supply. They also contribute additional traffic demand and may worsen the traffic conditions in urban networks. In this talk, we will discuss the causes of empty miles in the ride-hailing systems, and introduce the modeling of ride-hailing services to estimate empty miles and capture their impacts on traffic congestion, and then explore countermeasures to reduce empty miles in the systems.