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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.
Maybe if cities did a better job of keeping mass transit free of ... and I know this sounds bad, and I feel bad saying it.... but bums, people wouldn't be so reluctant to use it. I mean real bums, like a dude who's got 3 coats on but you can someone still smell the vomit and feces. I know that's horrible, I'm not proud to say that, and maybe I have an over-sensitive nose, but it is what it is. Until then, I'll keep taking an Uber when I'm unable to take my own vehicle for whatever reason.
There are two kinds of congestion in cities - cars just going somewhere, and cars looking to park/parked.
Uber/Lyft reduce the second kind, which means traffic flows more smoothly even with more cars. A car just dropping people off does not impact traffic the way cars circling a block looking for parking will, and also will not fill up valuable parking spots that might have otherwise been filled.
Also congestion pricing itself naturally means there will be fewer uber/lyft drivers around at peak normal traffic times. The majority of uber/lyft drivers come out during surge pricing, which is when other forms of transport come less frequently or are not available - one person I know who commutes to downtown usually takes a bus, but if he's going in later will sometimes take an Uber if he misses the bus because it will be 30 minutes before the next one.
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Seriously, provide cheap personal taxi service and of course it increases congestion. There are suddenly more ride-sharing cars on the road! Mass transit helps reduce congestion by removing cars from the road although it isn't as comfortable as a personal ride and cycling / running / walking also removes cars from the road. The real question is what happens if congestion gets so bad that Ride Sharing services get stuck in traffic as well. After all I've seen situations where walking is faster than dealing with a traffic jam.
Mass transit is of limited use. It is a pain when you have to do a transfer or your destination is a long ways from a stop. I can easily see Uber which offers door to door service pulling people off from a mass transit system that doesn't really go where they need it to.
Boston also has a special problem of the north commuter rail system not being connected to the south one. So if you have to cross this boundary it forces a transfer onto the subway. Subway and commuter rail are separate systems and require two fares. When you add this up, an Uber Pool is definitely price competitive.
These companies aren't actually "sharing" rides, they are taxiing people about.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I think buses congest traffic more than regular cars. They stop practically every 10 feet.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Yes it will create more congestion absolutely. It will make driving a manual car completely unworkable. But I can guarantee you even if I don't do it, thousands of other people will. Also because having the automatic car parked at my work doesn't help my stay at home wife during the day either.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
According to the article, studies are showing that people who take Lyft and Uber are people who don't have cars. So it's not keeping cars off the road, it's pulling people who normally would have taken public transportation, walked, or biked, or not made the trip at all, out of their houses and into privately-owned automobiles.
Of course, these studies are being done in cities which already had some public transportation infrastructure. So this is happening where people already could comfortably live lifestyles free of car ownership. Young people with smartphones are finding that Lyft Line and Uber Pool offer these advantages over public transportation:
- vehicle will take them door-to-door without having to walk blocks out of the way to locate specific pickup locations
- vehicle will arrive for pick up "pretty soon" rather than "sometime in the next 45 minutes or perhaps not at all if there is some event or mechanical breakdown"
- vehicle will stop fewer times between pickup and destination
- no need to transfer from one line to another
- vehicle guarantees a seat
- vehicle may be more clean
All of this for perhaps double or triple the cost of a bus ride — in San Francisco, $2.25 or $2.75 versus, say, $7.25.
Note that I can't find anything in the article which mentions how ride-hailing services are clogging the roads by bringing thousands of cars into the inner city from the suburbs. I know from personal experience and from reading articles that many, many, many of the Uber and Lyft drivers on the roads of San Francisco come from dozens or hundreds of miles away. That is absolutely not getting cars off the road.
At night, Uber and Lyft drivers patrol neighborhoods, driving slowly, looking at their phones, waiting for the next pickup. They sit at stop signs and don't move when it is their turn, waving on other traffic to go instead. During the day, there have been many times I have seen an entire line of cars waiting to turn or waiting for a light to turn green, where every car in the lane is an Uber or Lyft.
It's amusing how what people thought was the second coming of transit just makes it worse.
The root problem is that ride-sharing gives poor people options that they didn't have before. They need to know their place. They should go back to walking or taking the bus so it easier for me to drive.
No, because this is the whole reason for regulating number of taxi medallions and fares. There are only ever the number of taxis on the road that the city wants to allow on the road, and they are priced at a point where taking a bus is a better option.
Let's also remember here that Uber rides are priced artificially low. After taxis are out of business they will move to charging rates that will make them money. It would be interesting to know what level that rate would be at today. Significantly more expensive than they are now, probably similar to a taxi.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The title implies, actual congestion — the number of traffic jams and the average amount of time we spent waiting them — has gone up.
But the actual study finds only that people use Uber to get places because it is more convenient than the alternatives:
In other words, Uber/Lyft are guilty of offering a good and convenient service.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you look at Manhattan one of the main reasons the medallion system was setup was to reduce congestion from an excessive number of taxis on the street. During the great depression people who had cars but no job just became independent taxi companies. At most times of the day there were more cabs parked or driving then potential passengers grinding traffic to a halt and eliminating street parking for most who were taxi drivers. There were some safety, pricing, and quality issues baked into the medallion design as well but the overall point was to provide as safe and consistent travel experience as possible while not over-congesting streets and parking. The medallion system was far from perfect mainly because modifications to the system and responses to changes in consumption move at a glacial pace but the historical precedent is there.
How about more cars = more pollution? I am by no means a tree hugger but having a second taxi fleet that is also pulling people off public transit just seems wasteful towards the environment.
As a side note, its kind of funny to think that those crappy cab companies may have had some unintended benefit.
If I understand your comment correctly, the 'benefit' is not unintended at all. Why do you think they carefully plan and limit the number of medallions available and regulate the rates so that the whole thing is sustainable. We're only having this conversation because Uber and Lyft have refused to play along, and so are creating these problems.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Ironically, you're polluting the world more than they are, which we all have to live with.
There are as many as 10000 Uber/Lyft cars in SF on the weekends from out of towners coming as far away as Fresno who want to get some of that 'congested time' money. It's getting really bad. I will never use an Uber/Lyft in a major city again.
"In reverse."
This is a wake up call to Public Transportation. Public Transportation needs to improve its service. If given a choice people will choose the cheapest/easiest/most convenient option. So public transportation needs to provide better service if it wants to out compete Uber/Ride Sharing. When I visit a city, I usually usually use public transportation. Many times, I found it counter intuitive. There is little to no convenience. Last time I was in NY the subway credit card machines were broken and you had to purchase your fares with cash. You were only allowed to buy in certain denominations. The trains arrived on different platforms than marked, because it was after 10pm. Fix those issues, before there is any talk of banning Uber/Ride Sharing.
There is the non-trivial problem of how you and your ride identify each other in a tangle of 2000 pedestrians
That's what the AR is for - well, besides smiley faces.
Public transport is designed by the city to be a sustainable solution for a city. By extension taxi regulations are for the same purpose. If you use a service that you find is 'better' but is not beholden to some sort of overall city planning then you are likely contributing to something that is a bigger problem for someone in your city. Previous generations understood this and were willing to play along for the sake of everyone. Apparently millenials just want it cheap and clean and easy and don't care about the problems, so history is doomed to repeat itself.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This is literally physically impossible. At some point those cars in those 1000 lanes have to go to 1000 different places, and those places have to exist where the highway isn't. The issue is not large enough roads. If all we needed to do was move one 100,000 car parking lot from A to B, then you might have a point. But that's not what the challenge is. The issue is density, pure and simple, something you can achieve with trains and buses and not with cars.
And public transport isn't "the government". Good lord.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I primarily use Uber as a way to avoid parking. I imagine most heavy users - like me - live in congested areas with no parking.
They're not ripping you off. Uber is dumping the service on customers below cost. When you take an Uber, half your ride is being paid for by some billionaire venture capitalist.
Uber's business model only works without drivers.
Yeah, the results of these studies are not surprising at all. "Unregulated taxis cause same problems that forced taxi regulations 100 years ago." Gee, I'm totally shocked.
Germany tried the stupidity you are suggesting in the 1960ies. It sucked and resulted in quite the expenses to rebuild everything back for public transportation. The cities are for the people, not for their cars.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Now that sounds a lot like a bus.
A bus that is available at any time, takes you exactly where you want to go, will help you move cargo (like, say, a new refrigerator), is willing to do on-the-spot negotiations for special circumstances, such as groups traveling together, or odd destinations, and can be pre-scheduled.
... so nothing like a bus.
I'll choose an option where I don't have to worry about being cheated by the driver, and he won't have to worry about me robbing him.
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I'll choose an option where I can hop into the car and hop out with payment handled electronically instead of actual money or credit cards changing hands.
Taxis are required to take credit card where I live, there's a reader in the back seat of each car.
I'll choose an option where the vehicle will be clean and reasonably well maintained, and the driver reasonably courteous.
Usually not a problem with taxis either.
I'll choose an option where the names of both parties involved are known, and all details of the ride can be recovered in case something goes wrong.
Every taxi I've been in lately has video and audio surveillance and the taxi number and driver's license are posted in the back seat.
And most of all, I'll choose Uber because I know that if they ever start to go bad, another ride sharing company can compete with them, instead of them being protected as a government-regulated monopoly.
You think there's a taxi monopoly?! There's more than 20 companies operating in my city!
You've clearly drunk the "ride-sharing" Kool-Aid, but taxis are not nearly as awful as you make them out to be.
often late at night. Smelly Bums are fewer and farther between than that. People call Uber because the buses are massively underfunded. I used to sometimes ride my bike the 40 miles there/back because it was faster than waiting for the next bus (1 hour, 2 if you didn't want to wait at the bus for the 20 minute window that the bus might happen by during).
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And the other half by the driver who is accepting chump change and failing to factor in their vehicle costs.
Nobody who has worked out the depreciation and maintenance costs relative to what you'll get paid for driving Uber would be driving for Uber.
Uber's business model involves screwing over drivers, and somehow conning them into thinking they're not getting totally screwed in the deal.
The Utopian dream that we can build large scale cities around individual automobile transport was long ago realized to be just that -- a dream, not just a fantasy but a dangerous fantasy at that!
Except that's our reality, and it works out just fine. Sure, there's congestion, but congestion is still better than public transit.