Ride hailing was the primary cause of transit ridership declines in the years before the pandemic, according to a paper recently published by the National Academy of Sciences. Nationwide ridership had fallen by 14 to 15 percent between 2012 and 2018, and the report blamed about half of this decline on ride hailing, with 4 percent due to lower gas prices, 0 to 4 percent due to increased transit fares, and 2 percent due to higher incomes and increased auto ownership.
I’m not entirely convinced. The estimates are based on a statistical model, not on actual rider surveys or other on-the-ground information. The estimates don’t agree with other transit data I’ve seen.
Ride hailing is expensive compared with transit fares. Yet in the years 2012 to 2018, the number of workers earning less than $25,000 a year who commuted by transit fell by 475,000, a 16 percent decline. Meanwhile, the number earning more than $75,000 grew by 738,000 (a 55 percent increase) while the number earning $25,000 to $75,000 grew by 298,000 (an 11 percent increase).
This suggests that transit declines happened mainly among low-income workers, and I doubt they switched from transit to taking Uber to work every day. Instead, they responded to lower fuel prices by buying cars and driving to work. Meanwhile, far from abandoning transit, the people who could most easily afford ride hailing significantly increased their use of transit.
Of course, these numbers are for commuting, and the National Academy report says that most of the decline in ridership happened in off-peak periods, but still I don’t see ride hailing to be as big a factor as low gas prices. For one thing, ridership recovered slightly in 2019, but ride hailing also grew in that year.
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But that’s not their mission. Instead, it is to relieve congestion in dense inner cities (which was the original reason Congress began funding transit in 1964), provide mobility to low-income people, and reduce the environmental costs of transportation. If ridership among low-income people is rapidly falling, then transit has lost one-third of its mission. If the solution is to expand service so that buses and trains are emptier than ever before, then transit is increasing, not reducing, the environmental costs of transportation. That leaves relieving congestion, but transit really only does that in New York City and perhaps six other downtown areas.
As the National Academy report notes, even that mission may no longer be important in the future. After the pandemic, the report predicts, more people (particularly downtown office workers) will work at home and population and job densities will decline. This means rush hours will not be as congested as they were before the pandemic.
If the goal of transit is to perpetuate itself and the main threat to transit is new forms of competition such as ride hailing and scooter sharing, then the appropriate response is for transit to make itself more attractive by increasing service and reducing fares. But if transit’s goals are congestion relief, social equity, and environmental quality, and the main threat to transit is that people who once depended on it no longer do so, then the solution is something very different.
Compared with 50 to 60 years ago, when transit began getting heavy taxpayer subsidies, nearly everyone with a job now has access to automobiles, those autos are far cleaner and more energy efficient than they once were, and most downtowns have declined in importance and so congestion is no longer a major issue (at least not in a way that can be addressed by transit). So perhaps the real solution is to declare victory and eliminate most transit subsidies as no longer being necessary to the missions of equitable mobility, environmental quality, and congestion relief.
Hygiene wise I guess people unwilling to ride someone elses car. Government succeeded in getting us to be afraid of another non-disaster. Germs.
There’s a lot of trade-offs when modeling. I’d be curious to see more on the model they used when assessing the impact of Lyft and Uber. Like Southwest airlines, a big chunk of their ridership isn’t just coming from taxis, but are trips that may not other wise occur.
I have a hard time understanding that people who were previously paying $3.50 to take the bus are paying $20 to take an Uber. For that to be the case, you’d have to have a huge high income cohort taking transit that was refusing to take taxis yet for some reason saw patchouli-scented 10 year old Corolla’s as a better option.
Doesn’t quite add up.
And then there’s the question of how many trips occur because of ride share that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.
I traveled to Miami without a car and took Lyfts. All the cars I took were under five years old. Most were 2018 or later. None smelled. It was extremely fast and efficient. Most of my rides were $10-16. It is much more expensive than public transit but delivered crushingly superior experiences.
Do you mean “4 percent” or “4 percentage points”? If it’s the former, there are some important unexplained sources of variation that are left out.
@AP: There was a notable decline in workers with less than $25k earnings. That explains some of the decline in # of workers with less than $25k earnings commuting by transit. The decline in low income workers was larger in NYC (lots of transit commuters) than nationwide. Was this true in other cities with higher than US average transit commute mode share?
And while transit ridership did decline from 2012-2018, the number of transit commuters increased according to your ACS links.
@prk
In NYC Yellow taxis have seen a decline in business while other for hire vehicles (e.g. Uber, Lyft etc…) have seen explosive growth. Combined market was way bigger in 2018 than 2012. Some of those new cab rides used to be on the subway.
There are a decent number of relatively high income single young tech workers in cities like NYC, Boston, Seattle, SF etc…that don’t own cars. They live near walkable downtown areas with access to bars and by a transit line that can take them to work. When they get a bit older and start a family a lot of them will buy cars, but while they’re young they can get by without one in some places even though they have money to buy one now (or use uber to get around). That’s who could switch from transit to cabs off peak.