> It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars
>> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy.
Read the actual paper. They seem to have used two methods to make the alternative ("counterfactual") scenario more realistic than just "remove Uber cars":
- They compare increase in congestion and Uber/Lyft activity for short road segments, and show that these two changes correlate
- They compare reality to a model that does not include ride sharing, but does model increased population etc. This (generally well-regarded model) shows lower increases in congestion in a world without ride sharing.
Those passengers would be in a car anyway. They don't stop going places. Like I said, ridesharing either reduces cars on the road or decreases the amount of parked cars for the same amount of people.
The biggest study was in SF and was inherently flawed by looking at traffic over years. It's obvious that an increasing population will generate more traffic, and Uber has allowed more people to travel than before. Serving more people isn't a bad thing, it's a natural situation that cities should plan for instead of being constantly surprised by.
Worth noting this is on top of creating more traffic [1] and arguably decreasing usage of public transit. Ridesharing has a lot of benefits, but it's also got quite a few negative externalities that should maybe be priced into rides somehow. In theory fuel taxes would take care of this naturally, but in the US they really don't.
> Ride-sharing is not an area that can be monopolized
It is very close. There are massive network effects and it will be hard to unseat an incumbent.
The more riders there are, the more revenue is available for the service provider (eg drivers). More riders means average waiting time is lower because more vehicles will be around. More riders means less downtime between riders since the next rider will be closer. More time in revenue service lets you spread fixed costs over more riders, reducing the fixed costs per ride (economies of scale).
This all means an incumbent will provide better service especially as reduced waiting times, and will be able to provide that service more cheaply due to greater utilisation. Their drivers/owners will also make more money due to greater utilisation. Newcomers will end up providing worse service (longer waiting times etc) and cost more!
The availability of ridesharing lessens the need for car ownership, which is a huge win for cities because it reduces the need to devote space for the storage of automobiles.
The article ignores this benefit entirely, then makes the contradictory points that a) ridesharing apps actually increase traffic, and b) ridesharing apps siphon riders from public traffic.
All in all it’s written from the perspective of someone who hasn’t had to drive much in a high density urban area, where parking is nearly as much of a headache to figure out as traffic.
I don't think the study is "faulting" anyone. Clearly ridesharing is a very popular and convenient alternative to driving and public transit which are both rife with problems. It is however contributing to traffic and emissions. Those are important facts to establish because previously it was thought that maybe ridesharing is helping with those too, like a dream come true.
It concludes, "substantial policy action may be required to ensure that ride-hailing can effectively be woven into the transportation network while reducing congestion and the emissions of transportation services. Absent of these efforts, congestion and emissions appear likely to grow."[1]
The problem described in the article is a short term problem. The reason for the increase in congestion is that the new services, Uber and Lyft, have added vehicles, not displaced them. The taxis and buses that were there before are still there, plus now there are ride sharing vehicles.
But that situation won't last. If usage of taxis and buses decreases, fewer of them will be needed, so the number of them on the city streets will gradually decrease. That hasn't happened yet because those services are propped up by fees and taxes, so the fact that they are being out-competed can be hidden--for a while. Sooner or later that will cease to be feasible.
The real question is whether, after all this has shaken out, congestion on city streets will be better than it was before ride sharing services came along. It seems like it ought to be, since ride sharing seems like a more efficient way to allocate vehicle space. But we won't know for sure until the experiment is done.
Network effects for ridesharing are overstated. Its a commodity that'll race to the bottom. It already occurs in markets where both Uber and Lyft are present.
But intuitively it's not surprising. Imagine a world without rideshare, but where the taxi companies just got way better, dropping prices and improving service. Use would go up. People who were driving before were either going to keep driving or user rideshare. Some transit trips would switch. A bunch of new trips would happen because the bar is lower. More trips means more traffic, and the areas where rideshare is most popular were not exactly known for low traffic before.
"We find a consistent negative effect of ridesharing on traffic fatalities, with impacts concentrated during nights and weekends. Our results imply that ridesharing has decreased U.S. traffic fatalities by 5.2% in areas where it operates. The annual life-saving benefits are $6.8 billion."
> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing".
Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple customers at once.
But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was an entire network of FSD vehicles.
I'm unsure if anyone is seriously making arguments that dropping in Uber/Lyft into a city like Phoenix, AZ would be much more efficient. Rather, it would hopefully help as an intermediate transportation mode for cities that have a somewhat useful transit system. For those cities, mass transit is the highly available mode.
To state the obvious, people can want all the availability in the world, but they don't often get that because of the costs associated with it. Cars are expensive[1], and so is parking[2]. The costs of congestion are also typically only paid for by drivers with time (although many cities are toying with congestion pricing). Of course, the cost calculation for residents changes for different cities; the costs in Manhattan vs in Atlanta are very different.
So while you in particular may be able to afford the private cost burdens of car ownership, I believe the convenience of owning a car is a woefully inadequate metric to make policy decisions on. This is all mostly moot anyway as at least according to the original post, ridesharing does not positively impact car ownership.
One thing about this article: their argument that it doesn't save time or money is taken from a very specific use case in which it doesn't save time or money: traveling from LAX to the author's house in Venice. As noted elsewhere in the thread, this is true because of specific usage and pricing restrictions at LAX, which are not true in most other cases.
Calling a cab to pick you up at your home and take you somewhere else in the city would be a more common use case to compare to, but likely would not support the author's claims, which is probably why they don't mention it.
The pollution claim may be more valid: I have no thoughts on that other than the speculation that, if rideshare vehicles are spending 40% of their time driving without passengers, I bet they're returning to places where they're expecting to get more lucrative calls. This seems like something Uber and Lyft could somewhat mitigate with their pricing or compensation structure, if they wanted to. So, a problem for sure, but not one that's inherent to ridesharing.
I also wonder why taxis wouldn't have the same problems. I recall reading that buses drive without passengers about 25% of the time, so it's not like this phenomenon is unique to rideshare. Based on common sense and observation, I would assume taxis are deadheading about as much as Lyft and Uber, but can find no citation for it.
Lastly, the fact that this article has links to supporting resources, but those links are disguised to look like unstyled body text, is really frustrating.
For ridesharing apps, at least, it seems clear that the gig economy has grown the total market and hence the number of workers needed to serve this market. Before Uber entered New York there were ~500k cab trips per day: now, yellow cabs only serve 250k trips but 700k trips are performed by ridesharers [1]. The negative effect on employment is about 3x smaller than the positive one.
Within the city, it's not like people who already own cars instead use rideshare apps; it's that for anyone in the city who might have used public transportation, a portion have opted for the rideshare apps. And that leads to the effects parent et al are talking about: increased congestion and all its side effects.
Bike use and bike sharing, while decreasing public transit use, have similar positive benefits to public transit use such as reduced congestion, reduced pollution, etc.
>> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
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