Shared-Cab Matching for Airport and Railway Station Departures: A Survey-Based Simulation Study of Holding Windows and Passenger Tolerances in Pune, India

Passengers leaving an airport or railway station often travel to nearby places but book separate cabs and pay full fares. A shared-cab service could reduce the fare, but it must decide how long to hold passengers and whom to group, and passengers will refuse matches that go against their own limits on saving, waiting, detour, group size and safety. This paper studies that problem using an anonymous online survey of 30 travellers and a computer simulation of passengers leaving a hub in Pune. The survey answers were used to give simulated passengers realistic limits. Five matching policies were compared in 30 paired simulation runs. Under the survey limits, matching that respects every passenger’s limits matched 35.6% of passengers and gave an estimated fare saving of 15.5%, compared with 52.3% when limits were assumed instead of measured. The main reason is that 13 of 30 respondents asked for a saving of at least 50%, which a shared cab can rarely provide. Holding passengers for no more than 2 minutes kept everyone within their own waiting limit; at 5 minutes, 21.7% waited longer than they wanted. A same-gender option lowered the saving by 2.7 to 4.1 percentage points. The survey is small and not representative, and fares and demand are simulated, so the results are first estimates and not measured outcomes.