Tag Archives: ride hailing

An article in last week’s New York Times joins others in asking us to sympathize with the beleaguered transit industry, whose ridership has dropped every year since Uber and Lyft arrived on the scene. The article notes that Uber and Lyft subsidized the 5.6 billion rides they carried last year to the tune of $2.7 billion, or almost 50 cents a ride.

“The risks of [transit] privatization are grave,” the Times article warns. Uber and Lyft are taking “a privileged subset of passengers away from public transit systems” which “undermines support for public transportation.”

What the article doesn’t say is that, in order to carry 9.6 billion riders last year, public transit demanded more than $50 billion in subsidies from taxpayers, or more than $5 per ride. In other words, transit subsidies per rider are more than ten times greater than Uber and Lyft subsidies. Continue reading →

Ride-hailing services are not the principle cause of transit ridership decline, according to a new report from TransitCenter, a New York-based transit cheerleading group. This is based on a survey of 1,700 people in seven different urban areas.

Comparing the results with a similar survey from three years before, the group found a large increase in automobile ownership and that people who increased the number of trips they took by auto decreased the number of trips they took by transit. However, people surveyed who increased their use of ride-hailing services actually increased transit ridership, so TransitCenter concluded that increased auto ownership, not ride hailing, is the cause of transit’s problems.

A major problem with the study is that the people surveyed were not randomly selected — if they were, most of them wouldn’t have been transit riders. The amount of self-selection in the survey biases the results and says little about why the people who weren’t selected for the survey don’t ride transit — and their reasons may be completely different from those who were selected. Continue reading →

Lyft and Uber are increasing traffic by 180 percent, claims an arithmetically challenged study of ride hailing. As a result, reports NPR, ride hailing is adding to congestion. Moreover, says the study itself, ride hailing is inequitable and less sustainable than transit.

The study does have some useful numbers, but it was written by Bruce Schaller, a long-time transit advocate who obviously has a bone to pick about ride hailing. In reality, the study offers no real evidence that ride hailing is increasing congestion or that it is otherwise a serious problem for anyone but taxi companies and transit agencies. For them, it is a serious problem.

Schaller calculates that ride hailing grew from 1.90 billion trips in 2016 to 2.61 billion in 2017, for a net growth of 710 million rides. In those same years, transit ridership declined by 255 million rides. So, if only 36 percent of ride-hailing users would otherwise have taken transit, then ride hailing is responsible for 100 percent of the decline in transit ridership. Continue reading →

As the Washington Metro system remains in poor shape despite months of trains delayed for maintenance in 2017, the Washington Post is attempting to demonize ride-sharing companies for increasing congestion. DC ride hailing has quadrupled in the last three year, which is “probably” increasing vehicle trips and, by implication, traffic congestion. Note that the paper offers no real evidence that this is true.

What is true is that taxi ridership is down by 31 percent and Metro ridership is down 11 percent since 2015. Does that necessarily translate into more congestion? Certainly, substituting an Uber vehicle for a taxi adds nothing to congestion. And substituting a Lyft vehicle for a transit ride adds to congestion only if the trip takes place during congested periods of the day.

The frequent claims that ride hailing is increasing congestion come from a Boston study that found that 40 percent of ride hailers might otherwise have taken transit. The study also found that most ride hailing takes place after 7 pm, but that 40 percent of weekday ride hailing takes place during rush hours. Forty percent of 40 percent is 16 percent, which means that ride hailing does add some vehicles to the road during rush hour, but not as many as suggested by various media reports. Continue reading →

A new study from Boston has been heralded as “proof” that ride-hailing systems such as Uber and Lyft are making congestion worse. Indeed, the survey of 944 people using these services found that “over 15 percent of ride-hailing trips are adding cars to the region’s roadways during the morning or afternoon rush hours.” However, the study doesn’t estimate exactly how many cars are added, and it might be fairly small compared to the total that are already there.

In fact, the study’s other conclusions are far more interesting, some of them unintentionally. About 42 percent of the 944 people surveyed said that, if ride-hailing were not available, they would have taken transit. Since a previous survey in California found that only a third of ride-hailers would have taken transit, this latest survey suggests that ride hailing is having an even bigger impact on transit that previously thought.

The study also found that only 12 percent out of that 42 percent of people who otherwise would have taken transit were traveling during rush hours. Thus, more than two-thirds of ride-hailing takes place during non-rush hours and isn’t contributing to congestion. Continue reading →

Amtrak has agreed with Lyft to cooperate to allow the railroad’s passengers to order a Lyft ride from Amtrak’s own app. Dallas transit riders can call Uber to get them from a transit station to their final destination. A town in New Jersey is offering the same service to New Jersey Transit riders.

Transit agencies have long known that their transit vehicles usually can’t reach the final destinations for every rider, something known as the last-mile problem. Now, some of them see Uber and Lyft as the solution to that problem.

This is going to bite them in the end. A century and a half ago, river boat companies thought that railroads would solve their last mile problem. It never occurred to them that the railroads would soon be competing against them by building along the rivers. Within a few decades, the river boats were out of business. Continue reading →