Mobility on-demand: What about the weekend?

Abstract

Mobility on-demand services like ride-hailing, ride-sharing, and car-sharing are changing the way we travel, offering us more options and flexibility. They can be best understood and planned for by using detailed computer simulations. However, these simulations often forget about the weekends. They focus mostly on the average working day when travel is high and fairly predictable. But the way we travel has changed. Unlike the weekdays with rush hours, people tend to travel throughout the day on weekends, especially on Saturdays. In fact, these new types of transport services are used most heavily during the weekends. Even the way we share rides changes - we are more likely to share a ride with others at the weekend than during the week. This difference in our habits could have big impacts on these new travel services and even on the future of transport itself. Our study looks at this overlooked area. We include weekend travel data to get a full picture of how we could use these services. We compare travel patterns during the week and at the weekend for Zurich, Switzerland, as a case study. Our goal is to understand the unique aspects of weekend travel and what they mean for these on-demand services.