Traditional taxi, e-hailing or ride-hailing? A GSEM approach to exploring service adoption patterns

The provision of on-demand door-to-door trips within the hailing sector has experienced significant disruptions in the last years due to the advent of ride-hailing services. The evolution of the sector is ongoing and one of the latest novelties is the introduction of e-hailing, which allows the booking of conventional regulated taxis through digital applications. The regulatory and technological dimensions of taxi and ride-hailing seem to play a key role when trying to explain users’ choices of hailing services. For this reason, providing travelers with an option that combines traditional regulated services with the advantages of digital applications promises significant changes in users’ preferences. This paper aims to understand the preferences of hailing users taking Spain as case study because of the controversy after the advent of competition in the hailing market. To that end, a Generalized Structural Equation Model (GSEM) has been built to simultaneously study the influence of socioeconomic characteristics, latent psychological constructs, and mobility habits on individuals’ frequency of use of hailing services and their probability to belong to a specific hailing user profile. The results show that the adoption of ride-hailing and e-hailing is mainly influenced by psychological constructs. Individuals who wish to enjoy a high quality of service, but are not so liberal from the economic perspective, are more likely to have used e-hailing. Furthermore, the frequency of use of hailing services is affected by psychological constructs as much as by socio-economic variables and mobility habits. Finally, the effect of the openness to competition in the hailing market is discussed.