Sharing taxi rides in New York City could reduce the number of trips by 40%

Steve Strogatz is a coauthor of a paper studying the benefits of taxi sharing that was recently published in the�Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. The authors utilized a newly available data set compiled by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. The 2011 database contained information about each of the 172 million taxi rides taken in New York City that year. They found that if riders were willing to arrive up to 5 minutes later, almost 95% of the rides could have been shared, reducing the total number of taxi rides by 40%.

The paper, “Quantifying the benefits of vehicle pooling with shareability networks”, was written by Paolo Santi, Giovanni Resta, Michael Szell, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Steven Strogatz, and Carlo Ratti. (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/08/27/1403657111)

For more information see:

The New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/science/sharing-taxis-nyc-mathematics.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C{%222%22%3A%22RI%3A14%22}&_r=0
The Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-strogatz/taking-rides-with-strange_b_5754520.html
WNYC interview with Steve Strogatz and Carlo Ratti: http://www.wnyc.org/story/should-we-start-sharing-taxis/
The Cornell Chronicle - http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/09/math-reveals-benefits-taxi-sharing