A stochastic prediction of minibus taxi driver behaviour in South Africa

For many emerging and developing countries, urbanization and demographic changes require a remodelling of transportation systems and networks. Paratransit, with its demand responsive characteristics of being fully flexible, often represents the backbone of the transport sector while being an informal and, therefore, fairly unorganised system with little knowledge about working routines of its workers. As an example, this paper analyses the minibus taxi industry in South Africa based on data from Rustenburg, a mid-sized city, to gain valuable insights into the working behaviour of minibus taxi drivers by taking an evidence-based and data-based approach. Therefore, the principle of reference-dependent preferences is applied to the data to investigate the labour supply choice of taxi drivers, since sheer profit maximization has proven inadequate for the analysis here. Results indicate, that working hours for South African minibus taxi drivers are likely to be in the 10–12 h bracket with a revenue-dependent additional hour accounting for the revenue performance of that day. As a main finding however, South African minibus taxi drivers cannot clearly be attributed to either reference dependence or profit-maximization behaviour.

Jan Schlüter, Manuel Frewer, Leif Sörensen, Justin Coetzee