  Taxi services are a vital part of urban transportation, and a considerable
contributor to traffic congestion and air pollution causing substantial adverse
effects on human health. Sharing taxi trips is a possible way of reducing the
negative impact of taxi services on cities, but this comes at the expense of
passenger discomfort quantifiable in terms of a longer travel time. Due to
computational challenges, taxi sharing has traditionally been approached on
small scales, such as within airport perimeters, or with dynamical ad-hoc
heuristics. However, a mathematical framework for the systematic understanding
of the tradeoff between collective benefits of sharing and individual passenger
discomfort is lacking. Here we introduce the notion of shareability network
which allows us to model the collective benefits of sharing as a function of
passenger inconvenience, and to efficiently compute optimal sharing strategies
on massive datasets. We apply this framework to a dataset of millions of taxi
trips taken in New York City, showing that with increasing but still relatively
low passenger discomfort, cumulative trip length can be cut by 40% or more.
This benefit comes with reductions in service cost, emissions, and with split
fares, hinting towards a wide passenger acceptance of such a shared service.
Simulation of a realistic online system demonstrates the feasibility of a
shareable taxi service in New York City. Shareability as a function of trip
density saturates fast, suggesting effectiveness of the taxi sharing system
also in cities with much sparser taxi fleets or when willingness to share is
low.
