Academic literature on the topic 'Taxicab drivers'

In many developing countries and in some small cities in many developed countries, we find taxicabs without meters. These taxicab drivers sometimes form a cartel to avoid competition among themselves. They stand in a queue serially one by one. Only the first driver in the queue can pick up a passenger. The second driver will wait until the first driver leaves the queue. That is, these taxicab operators offer their services serially one by one. They are free to quote any price for a trip they want and can wait as long as they want to get an acceptable passenger. But if they wait, they incur a waiting cost. If a driver quotes a price and the passenger does not accept it and leaves the market or waits for the next cab, then the driver has to wait to get another passenger and as a result, his waiting cost increases. Such a cartel can be best described as a Serial Cartel. A serial cartel can be of two types on the basis of its continuity: (1) Discontinuous Serial Cartel, and (2) Continuous Serial Cartel. Discontinuous serial cartels are formed where demand is temporary. On the other hand, continuous serial cartels are formed where demand is permanent. These serial cartels have many features which are not present in other forms of cartels available in the existing literature. This paper presents two models of serial cartels of taxicab services market ⎯ one is a Discontinuous Serial Cartel Model, and the other one is a Continuous Serial Cartel Model. The two models are based on some plausible assumptions and two hypotheses about the willingness of passengers to pay for taxicab services. The models use differentiable negative exponential probability distribution functions to measure the willingness of the passengers. It is found that the equilibrium price, supply function, optimal size of a serial cartel, entry decision of a driver, and welfare effects of these serial cartels are totally different from the basic features of the centralized and market sharing cartels

A popular phenomenon in the street-hailing taxi system is the imbalanced mobility services between city central and outside downtown areas, which leads to unmet demand outside downtown areas and competitions in city central areas. Understanding taxi drivers’ customer-searching behaviors is crucial to addressing the phenomenon and redistributing the taxi supply. However, the current literature ignores or simply models the taxi drivers’ behaviors, in particular, lacks the in-depth discussions on individuals’ heterogeneity. This study introduces the latent class model to identify the internal and external factors influencing the taxi drivers’ destination choice after the last drop-offs. Beyond the influencing factors, the modeling structure captures the heterogeneity in vacant taxicab drivers through introducing latent classes. The proposed model outperforms other discrete choice models, for instance, multinomial logit, nested logit, and mixed logit, based on the two study cases developed from the New York City yellow taxicab system. The empirical results first statistically indicate the existence of latent classes, which further empirically prove the heterogeneity in the choices by vacant taxicab drivers while searching customers. Moreover, we obtain a set of internal and external factors influencing the customer searching behaviors. For example, the taxicab drivers are sensitive to the demand at the search destination areas and the distance from the last drop-off location to the search destination areas and behave identically in particular under the conditions of high demand and short search distance. On the other hand, the external variables have different impacts on customer searching behaviors across the different groups of drivers in the both study cases, including peak hours, weekday, holiday, earned fare from last occupied trip, raining hours, and flight arrivals at airports. In final, the proposed modeling structure and findings are useful as a sub-model of taxi system modeling while developing strategies, as well as as a regional planning tool for taxi supply estimations.

Traffic congestion is a significant problem in many major cities. Getting stuck in traffic, the mileage per unit time that a taxicab travels will decline significantly. Congestion premium (or so-called low-speed fare) has become an increasingly important income source for taxi drivers. However, the impact of congestion premium on the taxicab market is not widely understood yet. In particular, modeling and analyzing of the taxi fare structure with congestion premium are extremely limited. In this paper, we developed a taxi price equilibrium model, in which the adjustment mechanism of congestion premium on optimizing the taxi driver’s income, balancing the supply and demand, and eventually improving the level of service in the whole taxicab market was investigated. In the final part, we provided a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model. The results indicated that the current taxi fare scheme in Beijing is suboptimal, since the gain from the raise of congestion premium cannot compensate for the loss from the demand reduction. Conversely, the optimal fare scheme suggested by our model can effectively reduce the excessive demand and reach the supply-demand equilibrium, while keeping the stability of the driver’s income to the maximum extent.

As a consequence of neoliberalism, employment has become increasingly precarious and informal, sitting outside of traditional organizational contexts. There is a need to better understand how these structures emerge and, importantly, how workers can also adapt to challenge these shifts. This article is a study of a labour dispute between Philadelphia taxicab drivers and the governmental regulatory body. The dispute was centred around the implementation of surveillance technologies to regulate and control the industry and the drivers’ working practices which they considered to be de-professionalizing and an infringement of their liberty. The drivers resisted through traditional organizing, legal challenges and creating unconventional alliances. We argue that this labour dispute should be seen in the wider context of how a neoliberal political economy emerges and is maintained – in this case not by capital, but by the state. The article is a longitudinal case study covering the period from 2004 to 2011. As such, it is a prologue to later technologically driven transformations in the taxicab industry (such as ride-hailing apps) that have further exacerbated precarity among the workforce.

Our research focuses on developing matching policies that match drivers and riders for ride-pooling services. We aim to develop policies that balance efficiency and various forms of fairness. We did this through two methods: new matching algorithms that include a fairness term in the objective function, and income redistribution methods based on the Shapley value of a driver. I tested these methods on New York City Taxicab data to evaluate their performance and found that they succeed in reducing certain forms of fairness.

Questions are answered as to whether taxicab partitions between drivers and passengers reduce assaults. Assaults on Baltimore, Maryland, taxi drivers decreased 56 percent the year following a citywide mandate requiring partitions between taxi drivers and passengers. Data also show that between 1991, when only 5 percent of cabs had shields, and 1998, when all taxis had shields, assaults decreased 90 percent. Confounding factors such as annual changes in city population, crime rate, robberies, unemployment, and drug arrests are addressed by comparing the 1991 assault rate for the shielded cabs of one taxi association with a similar association without shielded cabs. This analysis shows that in 1991 an unshielded Baltimore taxi driver was five times more likely to be assaulted. Using linear regression to account for the time variation in factors from 1991 to 1998, the results indicate that reduced driver assaults correlated the most with population changes, improved policing, decreases in robberies, and the percentage of shielded taxis. A related economic analysis yielded a 17-to-1 benefit-to-cost ratio of estimated savings from reduced injuries versus the costs of citywide shield installation. The results support the Baltimore shield mandate and argue for shields in other cities.

The purpose of this thesis is to focus on some of the different decisions taken by taxi drivers. The three main areas considered are when a taxi driver chooses to work, where they choose to work and having chosen when and where, the strategy employed by the taxi driver. The chapter examining the decision on when a taxi driver chooses to work considers whether drivers are consistent with the neoclassical model of labour supply. Existing literature on taxi drivers has suggested taxi drivers behave in different ways. This thesis finds that taxi drivers respond to earning opportunities and are more likely to work when the earning opportunities are better than usual. The decision on where a taxi driver chooses to look for fares uses an experimental approach, putting subjects in the position of drivers choosing locations in a square grid. The location choice is a two dimensional extension of Hotelling’s model. In this particular experiment, Nash equilibrium is not obtained through minimum nor maximum differentiation and the learning of subjects and subsequent performance improvement is slow. Simulation through agent-based computational economics is used to investigate the different strategies taxi drivers can use. The simulations show that drivers can increase their own earnings and reduce the waiting time of potential customers by adopting a strategy which makes use of all the available information. The simulations also show that the effectiveness of a strategy is dependent on the choices of other drivers. This thesis suggests a different approach to the analysis of the labour supply decisions of taxi drivers and makes some recommendations regarding regulation of taxi services. The experimental and simulation chapters contribute to the literature through making use of these approaches in the context of looking at taxi drivers. The experiment and simulation could also be extended into other areas.

Studying recurrent mobility perturbations, such as traffic congestions, is a major concern of engineers, planners, and authorities as they not only bring about delay and inconvenience but also have consequent negative impacts like greenhouse gas emission, increase in fuel consumption, or safety issues. In this dissertation, we proposed using the resilience concept, which has been commonly used for assessing the impact of extreme events and disturbances on the transportation system, for high-probability low impact (HPLI) events to (a) provide a performance assessment framework for transportation systems' response to traffic congestions, (b) investigate the role of transit modes in the resilience of urban roadways to congestion, and (c) study the impact of network topology on the resilience of roadways functionality performance. We proposed a multi-dimensional approach to characterize the resilience of urban transportation roadways for recurrent congestions. The resilience concept could provide an effective benchmark for comparative performance and identifying the behavior of the system in the discharging process in congestion. To this end, we used a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to integrate multiple resilience-oriented attributes to estimate the efficiency (resilience) of the frontier in roadways. Our results from an empirical study on California highways through the PeMS data have shown the potential of the multi-dimensional approach in increasing information gain and differentiating between the severity of congestion across a transportation network. Leveraging this resilience-based characterization of recurrent disruptions, in the second study, we investigated the role of multi-modal resourcefulness of urban transportation systems, in terms of diversity and equity, on the resilience of roadways to daily-based congestions. We looked at the physical infrastructure availability and distribution (i.e. diversity) and accessibility and coverage to capture socio-economic factors (i.e. equity) to more comprehensively understand the role of resourcefulness in resilience. We conducted this investigation by using a GPS dataset of taxi trips in the Washington DC metropolitan area in 2017. Our results demonstrated the strong correlation of trips' resilience with transportation equity and to a lesser extent with transportation diversity. Furthermore, we learned the impact of equity and diversity can mostly be seen at the recovery stage of resilience. In the third study, we looked at another aspect of transportation supply in urban areas, spatial configuration, and topology. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of network topology and configuration on resilience to congestion. We used OSMnx, a toolkit for street network analysis based on the data from OpenStreetMap, to model and analyze the urban roadways network configurations. We further employed a multidimensional visualization strategy using radar charts to compare the topology of street networks on a single graphic. Leveraging the geometric descriptors of radar charts, we used the compactness and Jaccard Index to quantitatively compare the topology profiles. We use the same taxi trips dataset used in the second study to characterize resilience and identify the correlation with network topology. The results indicated a strong correlation between resilience and betweenness centrality, diameter, and Page Rank among other features of a transportation network. We further looked at the capacity of roadways as a common cause for the strong correlation between network features and resilience. We found that the strong correlation of link-related features such as diameter could be due to their role in capacity and have a common cause with resilience.
Doctor of Philosophy
Transportation infrastructure systems are among the most fundamental facilities and systems in urban areas due to the role they play in mobility, economy, and environmental sustainability. Due to this importance, it is crucial to ensure their resilience to regular disruptions such as traffic congestions as a priority for engineers and policymakers. The resilience of transportation systems has often been studied when disasters or extreme events occur. However, minor disturbances such as everyday operational traffic situations can also play an important part in reducing the efficiency of transportation systems and should be considered in the overall resilience of the systems. Current literature does not consider traffic performance from the lens of resilience despite its importance in evaluating the overall performance of roads. This research addresses this gap by proposing to leverage the concept of resilience for evaluation of roadways performance and identifying the role of urban characteristics in the enhancement of resilience. We first characterized resilience considering the performance of the roadways over time, ranging from the occurrence of disruptions to the time point when the system performance returns to a stable state. Through a case study on some of the major highways in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and by leveraging the data from the Performance Measurement System (PeMS), we have investigated how accounting for a proposed multi-dimensional approach for quantification of resilience could add value to the process of road network performance assessment and the corresponding decision-making. In the second and third parts of this dissertation, we looked at the urban infrastructure elements and how they affect resilience to regular disruptive congestion events. Specifically, in the second study, we focused on alternative transit modes such as bus, metro, or bike presence in the urban areas. We utilized diversity and equity concepts for assessing the opportunities they provide for people as alternative mobility modes. The proposed metrics not only capture the physical attributes of the multi-modal transportation systems (i.e. availability and distribution of transit modes in urban areas) but also consider the socio-economic factors (i.e. the number of people that could potentially use the transit mode). In the third study, we investigated how urban road networks' form and topology (i.e., the structure of roadway networks) could affect its resilience to recurrent congestions. We presented our findings as a case study in the Washington DC area. Results indicated a strong correlation between resilience and resourcefulness as well as topology features. The findings allow decision-makers to make more informed design and operational decisions and better incorporate the urban characteristics during the priority setting process.

The South African taxi industry is a fast-growing industry and greatly contributes to the GDP growth of the country. While it also contributes to the decrease of unemployment problem in the country, it does very little to compensate its employees, the taxi drivers. A large body of research has been done on the taxi industry regarding its growth and future development such as recapitalization, and SANTACOs initiatives at introducing a much affordable Airline. However, little research has been done concerning the financial challenges facing taxi drivers in South Africa, especially in Umbumbulu, South of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. This is the gap this dissertation is attempting to fill in. The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance understanding of how taxi drivers fare in this fast growing informal economy, namely, the taxi industry, by investigating their financial management practices. Through the utilization of, questionnaires, indepth interviews and ethnographic approach, a model will be developed to describe, firstly, how financial management practices are carried out to facilitate the fulfillment of specific life goals of these taxi drivers and secondly, discuss how these practices translate to financial management. For the purpose of this study a questionnaire was used to investigate the financial management practices of taxi drivers in Umbumbulu. 27 owners and drivers were interviewed during their loading intervals when they were not busy. The study revealed that the Umbumbulu Taxi Rank drivers face huge financial difficulties which are due to different reasons. The challenges have been found to not only affect them but also their families. The conclusion drawn from the results was that even though taxi drivers face these problems they are able to deal with them through different strategies, such as, saving money through Stokvel and savings accounts.
Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

Thesis (M.A. (Organisational Psychology))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Human and Community Development
Abstract The following research report aimed to determine how the South African print media socially constructs minibus taxi drivers. In order to achieve this aim, a media survey of South African newspaper articles reporting on minibus taxi drivers in the year 2014 was conducted. The collected articles revealed the print media’s social constructions of minibus taxi drivers. The media is a very powerful entity which has the ability to create and shift the perceptions of those who read their reports. It is through this ability, that the media portray the current social relations existing in post-Apartheid South Africa. The researcher was able to determine these different social constructions through the use of a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology. This methodology allowed the reader to look beyond the words the journalists used, and rather to focus on the implications of these words as well as what had not been explicitly mentioned. This research found that the minibus taxi driver was socially constructed using three discourses: ‘The Bad Citizen’, ‘The Victim’ and ‘The Good Citizen’. This research provides the platform for future research into the perceptions of the minibus taxi and the minibus taxi industry. Understanding these perceptions is vital in transforming the transportation industry of South Africa. Key words: Minibus taxi drivers; Minibus taxi industry; Social constructions, South African print media; Newspaper articles, 2014.
GR2016

This dissertation uses the taxicab as a vehicle to tell the story of the Pakistani Muslim community from the 1970s onwards. The research includes an in-depth ethnography (2013-2014) on Muslim cab drivers that live and work in West Yorkshire, northern England, but who vary in age as well as place of birth. Most have their heritage in and around the villages of Mirpur, Azad Kashmir/Pakistan, as do the vast majority of the Pakistani diaspora in Britain. One driver's personal narrative organizes my thesis: a former rude boy turn revert (practicing Muslim), whose trajectory is situated in the 1980s and 1990s specifically. Exploring themes of family, community, religious identities, and violence, ‘Cab Driving in the Spirit of Islam’ refers to the richness of Islamic religious traditions as well as the specter which continues to haunt the liberal imaginary, both of which help shape the world of Muslim cab driving. Cab driving is a hyper-individualistic pursuit, the first steps towards integration into mainstream society and corollary normative acceptability. Yet paradoxically, for these South Asian Muslims, cab driving has stabilized into a communal infrastructure, a way of life for over three decades now, and as integral to them as the two Islamic traditions in their lives, Barelwi and Tablighi respectively. In the world of Muslim cab driving, critical knowledge is shared and passed on as religious community is continuously produced. The circulating cab driver occupies a pivotal mediating role, full of potential and promise, but also a position fraught with risk. As a figure of access and “plain person” in Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, he is an integral religious authority in this sociality, readily available to dispense and enjoin the Islamic good. It requires virtue and skill to live according to the sunna, the model of ethicality based on the Prophet’s example, the Prophet motive, rather than being dictated by the profit motive. In doing so, the expert driver turns a possible vulnerability into a potentiality. The study has five parts. In ‘Formations of the Rude Boy,’ I introduce the “boys,” figures of resistance and rebellion analogous to Paul Willis’ working-class “lads.” Via the critical medium of the car, the boy becomes the sovereign-beast. He takes possession of his fate, the ineluctable predicament of degraded cab driver, position occupied by his father and "uncles." However, the significant difference from my findings and Willis’ research is that the world of cab driving mediates Islamic religious traditions to produce the Islamic counterpublic (Charles Hirschkind), thereby unsettling the normative regime where school complements workplace. The sphere of pious cab driving is tantamount to an education in the Islamic virtues, described in Part II, ‘Righteous Turn.’ The overlay of revivalist discourse and practice onto the cabbing infrastructure, especially the spiritual exchanges in the taxi base, enables the rude boy’s ‘reversion,’ an un-becoming Sovereign and a life-altering trajectory shared by a significant constituency in this Islamic revival. In his pious turn, the former “boy” sees the other side to the tradition, one of care and concern, rather than the policing which he aspired to rebel against. Part III, ‘Riding with the Enemy,’ examines the specter of “Islam” in liberalism. Drivers work all over England, including the country proper, villages and market towns whose residents are predominantly non-Muslim whites. The driver is thus at the core of liberalism, both materially and psychologically. The Muslim driver is a marked target, a convenient opportunity and point of access, resulting in a concentration of violence in the cab. In the possibility that the ride turns into a sexual encounter, the Muslim driver is the “intimate enemy.” I investigate the gendered dimension in this mode of everyday violence, tying together the performance of expected gender roles to a resurgent nationalist sentiment that necessitates the need to disavow the Muslim/the migrant within. I trace the emergence of this nationalist subjectivity in the decline of the white working-class while attending to the spatial transformations and movements taking place in these landscapes. In Part IV, ‘Care Drivers,’ I consider the driver’s response in this vulnerable predicament as the putatively lacking migrant. The pious driver learns to depend and trust in God. He draws upon the significance of the social position of ‘lack’ and ‘beginning’ in Islamic tradition, most notably the Prophet’s companion, Bilal, the exemplar par excellence of embodying piety and practicing sabr, the virtue of endurance, in the face of degradation, inferiority and violence. While Muslim cab driving has formed a way of life, it is far from stagnant. In Part V, ‘Revaluation of the Saints,’ I explore the shifts and transformations that result in the transnational circulation of goods and people, as the returning émigré-driver is endowed with a saint-like authority, produced out of the two dominant South Asian Muslim traditions, ‘Sufi’ Barelwi and ‘Deobandi’ Tablighi, mediated by cab driving and the migration process. I analyze changes in the religious authority and practices of these Muslims, a matter of ‘knowing the men,’ their good deeds and actions, as they strive to ‘live Medina’ in modern England.

Lo Chi-yan.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 42-51).
Abstract in English and Chinese; questionnaires in Chinese.
Abstract --- p.i
Acknowledgments --- p.iv
Table of Contents --- p.v
Chapter CHAPTER 1 --- Introduction --- p.1
Why is empirical research on driver sleepiness important? --- p.2
Prevalence of driver sleepiness --- p.2
Driver sleepiness as a risk factor for traffic accidents --- p.3
Why should taxi driver sleepiness be studied? --- p.6
Variations in sleepiness and vigilance and driving performance within a shift and comparison between daytime and nighttime drivers --- p.8
"The impact of circadian typology on sleep, sleepiness, vigilance and driving performance" --- p.11
Bright light exposure --- p.14
Overview of the present study --- p.18
Chapter CHAPTER 2 --- Main study --- p.20
Recruitment and Characteristics of Participants --- p.20
Procedure --- p.20
Instruments --- p.23
Chapter CHAPTER 3 --- Results --- p.28
Chapter CHAPTER 4 --- Discussion --- p.36
References --- p.42
Figures --- p.52
Tables --- p.55
Appendices --- p.62

Motivated by the imbalance between demand (i.e., passenger requests) and supply (i.e., available vehicles) in the ride-hailing market and severe traffic congestion faced by modern cities, this dissertation aims to improve the efficiency of the sharing economy by building an agent-based methodological framework for optimal decision-making of distributed agents (e.g., autonomous shared vehicles), including passenger-seeking and route choice. Furthermore, noticing that city planners can impact the behavior of agents via some operational measures such as congestion pricing and signal control, this dissertation investigates the overall bilevel problem that involves the decision-making process of both distributed agents (i.e., the lower level) and central city planners (i.e., the upper level). First of all, for the task of passenger-seeking, this dissertation proposes a model-based Markov decision process (MDP) approach to incorporate distinct features of e-hailing drivers. The modified MDP approach is found to outperform the baseline (i.e., the local hotspot strategy) in terms of both the rate of return and the utilization rate. Although the modified MDP approach is set up in the single-agent setting, we extend its applicability to multi-agent scenarios by a dynamic adjustment strategy of the order matching probability which is able to partially capture the competition among agents. Furthermore, noticing that the reward function is commonly assumed as some prior knowledge, this dissertation unveils the underlying reward function of the overall e-hailing driver population (i.e., 44,000 Didi drivers in Beijing) through an inverse reinforcement learning method, which paves the way for future research on discovering the underlying reward mechanism in a complex and dynamic ride-hailing market. To better incorporate the competition among agents, this dissertation develops a model-free mean-field multi-agent actor-critic algorithm for multi-driver passenger-seeking. A bilevel optimization model is then formulated with the upper level as a reward design mechanism and the lower level as a multi-agent system. We use the developed mean field multi-agent actor-critic algorithm to solve for the optimal passenger-seeking policies of distributed agents in the lower level and Bayesian optimization to solve for the optimal control of upper-level city planners. The bilevel optimization model is applied to a real-world large-scale multi-class taxi driver repositioning task with congestion pricing as the upper-level control. It is disclosed that the derived optimal toll charge can efficiently improve the objective of city planners. With agents knowingwhere to go (i.e., passenger-seeking), this dissertation then applies the bilevel optimization model to the research question of how to get there (i.e., route choice). Different from the task of passenger-seeking where the action space is always fixed-dimensional, the problem of variable action set emerges in the task of route choice. Therefore, a flow-dependent deep Q-learning algorithm is proposed to efficiently derive the optimal policies for multi-commodity multi-class agents. We demonstrate the effect of two countermeasures, namely tolling and signal control, on the behavior of travelers and show that the systematic objective of city planners can be optimized by a proper control.

This research was aimed at exploring how taxi violence could be policed effectively within Stanger area. To achieve the objectives of this study the researcher interrogated the strategies that the police use in dealing with taxi violence as well as the impact and the challenges that are faced by police officials regarding this phenomenon. The researcher adopted a qualitative research approach in order to increase her understanding of the knowledge, attitudes, perceptions and beliefs related to taxi violence within Stanger area. The non-probability purposive sample method was used to select the research participants and the focus was on the research participants’ experience and knowledge of the subject matter. The researcher also used semistructured interviews in order to resolve specific questions. The findings were that most of the taxi violence remained unresolved within Stanger area because witnesses were afraid to come forward with information regardless of the anonymous hotline that was created to encourage the reporting of this violence. Consequently, because of a shortage of manpower, resources, uncooperative witnesses and knowledge of matters concerning taxi permits the police and other law enforcement agencies in the area are mainly reactive in attending to taxi violence crimes. The lack of proactivity hampers the success of the initiatives that they (police) put in place to address taxi violence in Stanger.
Police Practice
M.Tech. (Policing)

The religious tourism management has been the subject of much attention in academic literature and has made a significant contribution in creating soft image in tourists' behavior. Pakistan has one of the best archaeological and religious historical sites in the world. Buddhist civilization at Taxila, Islamabad, Swat, and Takht Bai are of great interest for tourists from Japan, Korea, Thailand, and other countries. The aim of this chapter is to determine the promotion of religious tourism management for creating soft image in Pakistan. In this regard, initiatives of religious tourism by federal government are analyzed while incorporating input from easing immigration services, establishment of national tourism coordination board, infrastructure development, and pollution free environment, which leads to the soft image. An exploration of the nature of soft image requires examining the two key drivers: cognitive approach and the more recent cognitive-affective approach. Using quantitative method, various analysis techniques will be applied.