Ride hailing

Ride hailing is an activity that allows an individual the ability to summon a vehicle to pick them up from a location and take them where they want to go

Ride hailing is an activity that allows an individual to summon a vehicle to pick them up from a specific location and take them to their destination. For a long time, this action involved calling a taxi or limo service, requesting a pickup, and telling the dispatcher your ultimate destination.

If you lived in a city, you might simply stand on the curb and wave down (or hail) a passing taxi. Today, as an alternative to taxis, people around the world in both urban and suburban settings use popular rail hailing services such as Lyft or Uber to hail a ride via their mobile device. While ride hailing services function much like taxis, drivers use their own personal vehicles to get you where you need to be.

One might think services like these help reduce the number of cars on the road. If one can just summon a car to take them where they need to go in a matter of minutes, the need to own a car becomes a minor concern. Our Head of Innovation at Cintra, Lorena Cuadrado, points out how trends like ride hailing create new challenges for both drivers and users.

One challenge is that when people have a convenient and affordable option such as ride hailing, they avoid taking public transportation or simply walking to their destination. As a result, there is an increase in the number of vehicles on the road, which causes higher traffic levels and severe stress on the transportation infrastructure.

According to data published by the  Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, half of all trips made with ride hailing services in North America could have been made by walking, biking, using public transit, or could have even been avoided altogether.

To fix the issue of congestion, we are looking at high-tech solutions to improve existing concepts such as managed lanes and dynamic tolling to better manage traffic flow on busy urban roads all around the world.