How to disseminate reliable waiting time in app-based transportation services considering attractiveness and credibility

Many app-based transportation services provide waiting time information to users before they book the services. Travel time is an important component of waiting time, and positive skew with a long upper tail is a basic characteristic of travel time variability. Waiting time information provision is expected to be reliable and easy to understand. However, the existing information provision forms involving travel time variability are either too optimistic in terms of having a high risk of delay or not easily understood by the users. This paper develops a conservative expected travel time approach with multiple cut points (MCET) for reporting reliable waiting time information to users in app-based transportation services. The MCET is modelled as the expected value of a discretized travel time distribution according to cut points. The numbers and locations of cut points are optimised by seeking a tradeoff between the attractiveness and credibility of the service platform.