Optimal Fare and Vacancy Rate for a Cruising Taxi Market
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Chu, Chun-Hsiao
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
Taxi is a paratransit in the urban public transit systems. Compared with conventional mass transit systems, because of its convenience, speediness, door-to-door attribute, privacy, comfort, long-time operation, as the private autos but without parking cost, taxi has become a popular mode in the urban areas. If the fare is reasonable and the service quality is high enough, taxi would be very attractive to private vehicle users and hence reduce the environmental pollution, enhance the efficiency and safety of transportation system and, furthermore decrease the external cost of using the private vehicles.
In this study, a generalized model with the welfare maximization objective, the budget constraint and the consideration of externalities has been developed and used to analyze for a cruising taxi market. The model has included the effects of externality issue and resolved the common restriction of the conventional log-linear demand function so that the price elasticity has no longer to be less than -1.
The numericial results show that the vacant mileage would produce the external cost which is valued as 1.2 NT dollars per vehicle-km while the occupant mileage would contribute the external benefit as 0.4 NT dollars per vehicle-km. If the price elasticity is -1.4, the optimal vacancy rate should be 18.07%. The first-best fare and subsititution rate is 20 NT dollars and 4.38 NT dollars per vehicle-km respectively while the second-best fare is 24.9 NT dollars per vehicle-km. It is also shown that the first-best fleet size of taxicabs in Taipei metropolitan area should be reduced by 1,335 while the second-best fleet size should be reduced by 20,337 under the assumption that the daily average operation hour of taxi drivers is 9 hours. Furthermore, under the second-best environment, it is shown that the taxi market of Taipei metropolitan area would be excessively supplied when the taxi drivers’ average daily operation length was over than 108.15km or the average daily hour was over than 5.87 hours.
Subjects
計程車
空車率
費率
外部性
最大願付價格
Taxi
Vacancy rate
Fare
Externality
Maximum willingness-to-pay
Type
thesis