Investigating ride-pooling use through a mixed methods approach

Ride-pooling is one of many new on-demand mobility services that have become increasingly popular in recent years. The role these novel services will play in the future is still uncertain. As of today, their share in the modal split is still low. However, in the context of traffic and environmental policy goals, these services could gain significant importance in the next years. Currently, it is often unclear who uses these services and for what purposes. Traditional household surveys are not particularly well-suited for investigating the use of these novel services and their users: the subsample size of users is small, and the number of reported trips is very low. Consequently, the results obtained are not reliable. Using the example of ride-pooling, this paper describes a mixed method study design composed of an online survey with a stated choice experiment and semi-structured interviews to understand ride-pooling use and its users. Special attention is given to the design of the stated choice experiment, which specifically targeted shared on-demand mobility services. A selection of the various results is presented to demonstrate the advantages of combining different methods when investigating new mobility services.