The Morning Commute Problem with Ridesharing When Meet Stochastic Bottleneck

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, please find my comments in the attached document.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

I have already revised my paper according to your Comments and Suggestions.

For some comments

I've rearranged the references and the section of introduction especially the first and second paragraph.

For comments of

 The long sentences(not limited to line 96,97,98,100,123,132,133,134,144,145,150,151,302,304,301,302-304,306,308,,314,316,319,320) have been fixed.

For comment about “The paper does not contain a description of strengths and weaknesses”

  I've rearranged a new section of 4.2 to explain the limitations,strengths and weaknesses of the proposed model

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper suffers from many presentation  problem (please refer to my comments (i-1) through (i-12)), technical  problem (please refer to my comments (ii-1) through (ii-6)) as well as organization problem.  
The assumptions of this paper are largely based on the works of Arnott et al.
However, base on the my comments (ii-1) through (ii-6), they indicate that the model is improper in capturing the characteristics of a typical ridesharing scenario.
From my point of view, the model used in this paper does not capture the basic information in ridesharing system, such as the capacity/seats/locations of vehicles, the exact pick-up/drop-off locations and the itineraries of drivers/passengers.
In summary, this paper is impractical due to unrealistic assumptions regarding ridesharing scenarios.
The contribution of this work is weak. Please refer to my comments below.

(i)For the presenation  problems in this paper, I list some of the problems as follow. 
Note that this is by no means a complete list. 
There are many other problems that are not included in the following list.

(i-1)Line 96: "three group of commute"

(i-2)Line 97-98: "Section 3"  -->  "In section 3"

(i-3)Line 98-100: "the dynamic single-peak and double-peak queue traffic patterns of user equilibrium with mixed
 travelers in different pickup-work time interval situation are discussed, the evolution of the dynamic
 queue over time is also shown by analytic solution."  --> There should be an "and" between two sentences.

(i-4)Line 123: "to analysis the random bottleneck for two scenarios"  --> incorrect

(i-5)Line 132-133: "The matching time and pickup delay will be ignored in this
paper, Traffic departure and arrival take place over the interval..."
---> two sentences

(i-6)Line 134: "ts, te is also the earliest and the last time for commute entering the bottleneck, respectively" -->  "is"???

(i-7)Line 150-151: "beta, gamma is the unit schedule delay penalty separately for early arrival
151 and the late arrival"  -->  "is" ???

(i-8)Line 302-304: "The analysis and results apply to not only pickup-work trips but also to ridesharing trip with two workers that carpool when the bottleneck is unpredictable."  -->  poor English.
(i-9)Line 304-306: "We consider that the congested road bottleneck is uncertained and
separated to two pattern: pre-pickup congestion(Pre-PC) and post-pickup congestion(Post-PC), which is quite common in reality."  -->  grammar errors 
(i-10)Line 306-308: "Ridesharing drivers and solo drivers need choose departure times to make a trade-off between the queuing cost and the schedule delay cost under individually optimal and achieve system equilibrium coordination between schedule gap and number ratio. " -->  errors.
(i-11)Line 314-316: "a multi-modal transportation system can be incorporated so that solo drivers can either share ride through driving or take public transport, where public transport service is responsive to traffic conditions." --> errors.
(i-12)Line 319-321: "Future research will take this into account, as well as more general user heterogeneity among different groups of travelers (in either group of ridesharing participants or individuals)2. Materials and Methods" --> errors

(ii)For technical  problem and organization problem in this paper, there are many errors and problems in this paper. 
This includes improper simplification of the situation in ridesharing problem and unrealistic assumption in this paper.
I list some of them as follows:

(ii-1)Line 132-133: The authors say "The simplified network is schematically
depicted in Fig.1(b)." --> There is an obvious technical issue: It is impractical to simplify Figure 1(a) as Figure 1(b). 

(ii-2)Line 132-133: The authors say "The matching time and pickup delay will be ignored in this
paper"  --> In most ridesharing literature, pickup delay is not ignored. This assumption is not realistic.

(ii-3)Line 152: In Line 151, an assumption is made based on a citation "(Small,1982)". However, there is no paper whose author name is "Small" in the reference.

(ii-4)Line 162-164: The authors say that "Denoting the free-flow time as zero and neglecting the pickup delay, we can see that the departure time of the ridesharing driver is equal to the pickup time (departure time)for ridesharing passengers."
However, in the real world, the departure time of the ridesharing driver is usually not equal to the pickup time for ridesharing passengers.
(ii-5)Line 172-173: The authors say that "As far as we know, the formation of traffic congestion has nothing
to do with passengers" --> This is contrary to the situation in the real world. In the real world, parking due to picking up and dropping off passengers may have negative impact on traffic.
The above statement in 172-173 is not consistent with the real world scenarios.   
(ii-6)Line 144-154: In Section 2.3, the authors referred  to classical morning commute ADL model (Arnott et al.,1990,1994) and made assumption based on the work (Small,1982).
The assumptions of this paper are largely based on the works of Arnott et al.
However, base on the my comments (ii-1) through (ii-5), this indicates that the model is improper in capturing the characteristics of a typical ridesharing scenario.
From my point of view, the model used in this paper does not capture the basic information in ridesharing system, such as the capacity/seats/locations of vehicles, the exact pick-up/drop-off locations and the itineraries of drivers/passengers.

The problem studied in paper [10] by Arnott et al. in the reference is different from ridesharing.
The abstract of [10] says that "In the morning rush hour, a
fixed number of identical individuals, one per car, must travel from home to work,
between which is a bottleneck of given capacity."
Note that the words "a fixed number of identical individuals, one per car" in the above description
indicate that there is no ridesharing in problem studied in paper [10].
Therefore, the way to compute cost in ridesharing systems will be different from the one proposed in [10].
In summary, this paper is impractical due to unrealistic assumptions regarding ridesharing scenarios.

(ii-7) In addition, what's the difference between this paper and the above papers/works?
Although some results are presented in Section 3 and Section 4, there is no comparison with other approaches.
The authors should demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method by comparing with other competitive approaches.
 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

I have already revised my paper according to your Comments and Suggestions.

For comments about the several typos, problem in spelling mistakes

 The long sentences and some problem (not limited to line 96, 97,98 , 100,123, 132, 133, 134,144,145,150,151,302,304,301,302-304,306,308,,314,316,319,320) have been fixed.

For comments of technical  problem

1."The simplified network is schematically depicted in Fig.1(b)." --> There is an obvious technical issue: It is impractical to simplify Figure 1(a) as Figure 1(b). 

I have already change it, and delete the simplify figure1b

2.The matching time and pickup delay will be ignored in this
paper"  --> In most ridesharing literature, pickup delay is not ignored. This assumption is not realistic.

This paper mainly discusses the congestion problem Caused by an excessive number of vehicles, and discuss the ridesharing drivers’ departure time selection, so the pickup delay can be ignored,

3.About what's the difference between this paper and the above papers/works( Arnott et al.)

Previous works just discuss the congestion problem under A single bottleneck of certainty, this paper discusses Non-deterministic bottleneck with pre-pickup and post-pickup

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments are attached to the MS Word which was converted from Pdf.

General:

• The title could be more specific regard the kind of ride-sharing; maybe instead of "modeling" you can use "the approach", while models need "calibration and validation" and maybe a case. The model is presented, but I didn't "see" any modeling.
• Usual "upgraded or new model" is somehow proved to be better than ... (no hypothesis, missing the approach and methodology, etc.). I found your article as an approach to "how to do it" and not "how you did it". I suggest explaining more exactly the research you did it. I am missing "What motivate you to prepare this paper/research?"

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

I have already revised my paper according to your Comments and Suggestions.

For comments about the several typos, problem in spelling mistakes

 The long sentences and some problem (not limited to line 96, 97,98 , 100,123, 132, 133, 134,144,145,150,151,302,304,301,302-304,306,308,,314,316,319,320) have been fixed.

For other comments

1.Please describe what kind of ridesharing are you talking about for modeling

We describe the ridesharing in lane 92-95

It’s worth noting that there are different types of ridesharing: private passenger vehicle (e.g. personal car): one owner/multi owners and users at the same time (Carpooling/Car-sharing) or, passenger vehicle as a part of the public service (e.g. car/van/minibus; like Taxi or Car-sharing rent a car), no distinction was made in our study

2. Meanwhile, some incentive public policies, High-occupancy vehicle/toll(HOV/ HOT) lanes, are being used in some metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada and China .

The Blue Word has been changed to all over the world

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comparing with the previous version of this paper, the authors did a good job in improving the quality of this revised paper. Obviously, the authors have made a lot of efforts. I only found a few minor errors that need to be corrected as follows. Please correct these errors. After correcting these errors, I think it can meet the quality of this journal and asseptable for publication.

Line 38: "On link , ride-sharing system is often regarded as an extension research of morning ..." --> either "a ride-sharing system is" or "ride-sharing systems are"  

Line 295: "In this section, we details all possible commuting patterns, now we examine the user’s travel
costs under double-peaked queuing case and single-peaked queuing case." --> "we details" is not correct.

Line 341: "Besed on the concept of mobility as a service, a
new multi-modal transportation system can be described that solo drivers can either share their ride
or take public transport."  -->  "Besed" should be "Based". 

Author Response

I have already revised all  problems of three spelling mistakes（line38,295,341）

Reviewer 3 Report

I am still missing the case as proof that such a kind of modelling approach could be used. How the model could be used? I am also missing the approach to the calibration and verification of the model. Generally, when we are talking about modelling, we are describing also that aproach. On the other hand please correct the title according to that.

Author Response

this paper discuss a morning commute problem，almost all articles use vickrey' bottleneck model to discuss the congestion case in this morning commute problem. Based on the fact that almost all papers[1-4] discuss one bottleneck of certainty  in morning commute problem of ridesharing case. This paper creatively analyzes the bottleneck problem of uncertainty with pre-pickup and post-pickup. This is closer to reality, which is also the innovation of this paper

 

[1] Wang J P , Ban X J , Huang H J . Dynamic ridesharing with variable-ratio charging-compensation scheme for morning commute[J]. Transportation Research Part B Methodological, 2019, 122:390-415.

[2]Yuanyuan, Liu, Yang. Pricing scheme design of ridesharing program in morning commute problem[J]. Transportation research, Part C. Emerging technologies, 2017.

[3]Yang, Liu, Yuanyuan, et al. Pricing scheme design of ridesharing program in morning commute problem[J]. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2017.

[4] Ma R , Zhang H M . The morning commute problem with ridesharing and dynamic parking charges[J]. Transportation Research Part B Methodological, 2017:S0191261516307202.