Will a random infected passenger spread a virus across a large number of travellers using ride-pooling services? or will it be encapsulated and thus confined to a distinct community? How many other travellers will get infected and how will the epidemiological process evolve? Finally, can we mitigate it by effective control and design measures and thus introduce it to policymakers as a safe alternative?

See our open-access work published in Scientific Reports with Rafał Kucharski and Julian Sienkiewicz.

We combine epidemiological and behavioural shareability models to examine spreading among ride-pooling travellers, with an application for Amsterdam. 

Findings are at first sight devastating, with only few initially infected travellers needed to spread the virus to hundreds of ride-pooling users. Notwithstanding, we identify an effective control measure allowing to halt the spreading before the outbreaks without sacrificing the efficiency achieved by pooling.