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The Impact of SNCF Strike on Ridesharing: A Novel Approach of Consumer Surplus Estimation Using BlaBlaCar.com Data

We estimate the impact of the strike of the French railway monopoly (SNCF) on ridesharing usage and user welfare. From April to June 2018, railway workers went on strike every two out of five days. We collect daily trip level data from the public API of BlaBlaCar, the largest inter-city ridesharing platform in France. Our data covers the entire strike period and one month afterwards of 78 representative routes in France. Our results show that on an average strike day, demand increases by 29 percent while supply increases by 7 percent. We then use a novel method to estimate the price elasticity of the demand and consumer surplus of each route per day. Different from traditional methods that rely on equilibrium analysis, we exploit the transaction-level data to construct the market supply curve and the observed transaction curve, from which a true market demand curve and a consumer surplus are conservatively estimated. We further use propensity score matching to impute the consumer surplus estimate of an additional 318 routes that have not been included in the initial data collection to give a more comprehensive evaluation for the whole of France. On an average non-strike day, BlaBlaCar generates 79,413€ of consumer surplus, while an average strike day generates 97,166€, an increase of 17,753€. Our work suggests that inter-city ridesharing contributes substantially to the social welfare, serves as a flexible substitute for the railway service and ridesharing should be integrated into the design and management of the transportation network.