Improving green urban mobility: A study on shared electric vehicles versus taxis

Future cities prioritize green development to combat climate change, focusing on reducing energy consumption, exhaust emissions, and traffic congestion. Shared electric vehicles offer eco-friendly transportation, improving vehicle utilization, reducing resource waste, and mitigating environmental pollution through sharing. Despite these benefits, range anxiety and inconvenience hinder widespread adoption, with many still opting for taxis. Currently, most taxis worldwide rely on traditional fuel, leading to high fuel consumption and unnecessary carbon emissions and waste as drivers frequently search for customers on the roads. Different from Shared Charging Electric Vehicles (SCEVs) in the current market, this paper proposes Shared Battery-swapping Electric Vehicles (SBEVs), integrating battery-swapping technology into shared electric vehicles. This innovation aims to enhance convenience, attracting users to eco-friendly transportation and reducing reliance on traditional fuel taxis. Hence by constructing two business models of the current competitive market (Model 1) and the future competitive market (Model 2), this paper analyzes consumer preferences for taxis and SCEVs in Model 1, as well as explores the conditions for encouraging more consumers to choose SBEVs over taxis by improving the convenience of SBEVs in Model 2. The optimal operational decisions of supply chain participants in both markets are obtained, including the car-sharing operator determining the optimal SCEV usage price in Model 1, and the optimal SBEV usage price and the optimal efforts to enhance the convenience degree of SBEVs by installing battery swapping infrastructure in Model 2. This study provides valuable insights for driving green practices and operational improvements in the shared electric vehicle sector.