Studies Are Increasingly Clear: Uber, Lyft Congest Cities (apnews.com)

One promise of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft was fewer cars clogging city streets. But studies suggest the opposite: that ride-hailing companies are pulling riders off buses, subways, bicycles and their own feet and putting them in cars instead . From a report: And in what could be a new wrinkle, a service by Uber called Express Pool now is seen as directly competing with mass transit. Uber and Lyft argue that in Boston, for instance, they complement public transit by connecting riders to hubs like Logan Airport and South Station. But they have not released their own specific data about rides, leaving studies up to outside researchers. And the impact of all those cars is becoming clear, said Christo Wilson, a professor of computer science at Boston's Northeastern University, who has looked at Uber's practice of surge pricing during heavy volume. "The emerging consensus is that ride-sharing (is) increasing congestion," Wilson said. One study included surveys of 944 ride-hailing users over four weeks in late 2017 in the Boston area. Nearly six in 10 said they would have used public transportation, walked, biked or skipped the trip if the ride-hailing apps weren't available. The report also found many riders aren't using hailed rides to connect to a subway or bus line, but instead as a separate mode of transit, said Alison Felix, one of the report's authors.

Comments

Re:So you'd rather have drunk people on mass trans

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not my experience with public transportation. It may happen at some point, but it is far from a regular occurrence and changing seats or standing somewhere else has never been a problem.

Toughen up... you sound like a 6 year old. Misrepresenting the truth and afraid of your fellow human beings.

Re:self driving cars will do the same in fleet mod

[judoguy]

Public transport is designed by the city to be a sustainable solution for a city.

If you define "sustainable" as "tax consumer" and "federal matching funds" harvesting.

In the Minneapolis area, public transportation, particularly light rail, is a boondoggle. Light rail is the darling of the progressive government here. It averages around 100 million a mile to install and tickets provide about 1/3 of the operating costs meaning that three people pay for a ticket so that one person can ride.

Years ago when the first leg was being put in, I knew a member of the planning commission. He freely admitted that their studies showed no lessening of street traffic and that it would consume tax revenue, but that it was still "the right thing to do" in order to subsidize a small segment of the low income population. .