Understanding the imbalance of the taxi market: From the high-quality customer’s perspective

Abstract

Abstract With the rapid development of the urban economy and transportation, the taxi market has presented a series of problems regarding unreasonable resource allocation, demand–supply imbalance, and driver income imbalance. Since the distribution of high-quality customers (hereafter HQC) affects drivers’ incomes and resource allocation in the taxi market, it is of great significance to study the HQC distribution to address these imbalance problems and understand the imbalance of the taxi market. In this paper, we calculate the profit margin of each order and construct a high-quality customer evaluation model from taxi GPS trajectory data. In analyzing the spatial–temporal distribution of HQC, our results indicate that HQC present a regional aggregation phenomenon in the spatial dimension, and HQC are mainly distributed in the main urban areas. The distribution of HQC is imbalanced in various administrative districts and functional zones. The daily change of orders in each administrative district is the same, but the temporal distribution of HQC is imbalanced. The temporal distribution of HQC in each functional zone is imbalanced, showing different daily change trend. According to these results, we suggest that the pricing of taxis and online ride-hailing services be coordinated based on the spatial–temporal distribution characteristics of HQC and that resources be rationally allocated to promote the sustainable and healthy development of urban transportation.