Improving Urban Public Transportation System Efficiency: A Case of Thai Taxis

Abstract

Taxi is one of the most popular urban public transportation systems. Many people rely on taxi service on a daily basis. However, the Bangkok taxi system may not be operating at its full potentials. Obviously, there are plenty of vacant taxis on the road searching for passengers while the passengers have to spend a lot of time waiting for taxis. This inefficiency wastes valuable resources such as time and fuel energy. Nonetheless, to our knowledge, the efficiency of the Bangkok taxi system has not been measured quantitatively. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the performance of the Bangkok taxi system based on the big data collected from real taxi traces. Both the system-level efficiency and the agent-level efficiency are investigated.