Hong Kong, with a land area of only 1091 square kilometers of which about 15 per cent is built-up, has a population of more than six million people. We have a very convenient transportation network....[ Read more ]

Hong Kong, with a land area of only 1091 square kilometers of which about 15 per cent is built-up, has a population of more than six million people. We have a very convenient transportation network.

Everyday, around 10 million passenger journeys are made on the system which includes two high capacity railways, trams, buses, mini buses, taxis and ferries.

There are 266 licensed vehicles for every kilometer of road, and the topography is making it increasingly difficult to provide additional road capacity in the heavily built-up areas.

Everyday, 15250 urban taxis, 2838 New Territories taxis and 40 Lantau taxis carry 1.3 million passengers. The urban taxi operate throughout the territory, while, the others are fundamentally confined to the rural areas of the New Territories and Lantau Island.

The study presented in this paper is based on a taxi service situation found in the urban area of Hong Kong. We shall model the demand and supply equilibrium of taxi transportation in a city from a theoretical point of view. Number of taxis, taxi fare and disposable income are important determinants of travel behavior. They are used as exogenous variables in this model. Several equations can be obtained from demand-supply equilibrium between daily passenger taxi trips, passenger waiting time, taxi utilization, average taxi waiting time and taxi availability. These models can be used for policy sensitivity analysis. It can be used by the transport department to allocate the taxis efficiently to cover the entire city in order to attain a better level of service.

In this thesis, we will only consider urban taxis. The survey data used was 1986 to 1995 and was provided by the Hong Kong Transport Department and published in the Hong Kong Annual Digest.

For example, the model can predict the impacts of taxi fare increase on passenger demand. It can provide valuable recommendations for the government regarding the control of fares and the number of taxis in a given city.