Abstract
The research team analyzed what ride-hail drivers do when out of service between paid trips. The paper utilizes a dataset of 5.3 million trips in San Francisco and partitions each out-of-service trip into cruising, repositioning, and parking segments. We find that repositioning accounts for nearly two-thirds (63%) of the time between trips, with cruising and parking accounting for 23% and 14% respectively (these figures exclude short trips). The regression models suggest that drivers tend to make reasonable choices between repositioning and parking, heading to high-demand locations based on the time of day. However, we also find suggestive evidence of racial bias, supporting previous studies of both taxis and ride-hailing that indicate that drivers tend to avoid neighborhoods with high proportions of residents of color.
