It's no secret that carpooling can help reduce traffic. But what if everyone in New York turned on the carpool option in ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft? Researchers at MIT found that just 3,000 four-person cars could serve 98 percent of the demand currently being met by almost 14,000 taxis.
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) fed data from 3 million New York City taxi rides into an algorithm that imagined those rides as carpool requests via a ride-hailing app. The computer model routed and re-routed all those rides and found it would only take 3,000 cars to meet most of New York's demand.
What's more, this boost in ride efficiency comes at a minimal cost to convenience. In the MIT researchers' models, no more than 5 minutes would be added to your trip in order to wait for a car along your desired route and pick up and drop off other passengers.
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