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A New Study Says Services Like UberPool Are Making Traffic Worse (washingtonpost.com)
The explosive growth of Uber and Lyft has created a new traffic problem for major U.S. cities and ride-sharing options such as UberPool and Lyft Line are exacerbating the issue by appealing directly to customers who would otherwise have taken transit, walked, biked or not used a ride-hail service at all, according to a new study. From a report: The report by Bruce Schaller, author of the influential study, "Unsustainable?", which found ride-hail services were making traffic congestion in New York City worse, constructs a detailed profile of the typical ride-hail user and issues a stark warning to cities: make efforts to counter the growth of ride-hail services, or surrender city streets to fleets of private cars, creating a more hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists and ultimately make urban cores less desirable places to live. Schaller concludes that where private ride options such as UberX and Lyft have failed on promises to cut down on personal driving and car ownership -- both of which are trending up -- pooled ride services have lured a different market that directly competes with subway and bus systems, while failing to achieve significantly better efficiency than their solo alternatives. The result: more driving overall. Ride sharing has added 5.7 billion vehicle miles to nine major urban areas over six years, the report says, and the trend is "likely to intensify" as the popularity of the services surges.
As the transit system collapses from maintenance issues, and walk/ride options become more dangerous due to crime, that people are turning to alternatives?
make efforts to counter the growth of ride-hail services, or surrender city streets to fleets of private cars
That is the most close the barn door the horse has bolted of comments since horses started bolting from open barn doors.
UberPool/Lyft Line is often close in price to a subway trip and you go door to door. Even with the shared ride (which anecdotally seems to happen 40 to 50% of the time), it is also competitive with the time it takes once you factor in the walk, wait time and actual travel time. My mapping app shows the Lyft and Uber fares as well as travel times for public transit so it's easy to pick the cheapest or fastest depending on what I want.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
...perhaps if city planners paid more attention to mass transit this wouldn't be an issue. In most cities I've visited, mass transit charges quite the time premium if you want to get anywhere.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
No, I would not have "taken transit", when the nearest bus line is half a mile from my house, and only runs once every 30 minutes.
No, I would not have walked two miles in bad weather, especially carrying heavy or fragile items.
No, I would not have ridden a bike in an area without dedicated bike lanes, or dealt with the hassle of locking it up and hoping it wouldn't be stolen.
Yes, I absolutely would use a ride-hail service when the more expensive alternative is to drive and park my own car.
What is it with the proponents of mass transit who can't stand the idea of people making their own decisions about transportation? So if you can't make mass transit affordable and desirable, the only alternative is to outlaw the competition?
"Modern" mass transit can't die quickly enough.
For the most part in my city it seems drivers from uber/lyft/whatever just park wherever the hell they want to to pick up/drop off riders, even if they're blocking whole lanes of traffic. That or they'll drive around really slowly and block traffic and/or run into other cars or pedestrians because they don't know what the hell they're doing. Trying to do anything downtown in the evening/night is a nightmare with all of them.
It may have promised to cut down on car ownership, but that's simply because of a more efficient allocation of cars to rides. The number of rides, on the other hand, was never promised to go down, and in fact easy availability has only made it go up. I'm not quite sure why nobody was expecting that, it seems a basic economic principle...
The problem with the idea of "city planning" is that most cities aren't planned. They're grown. There have been planned communities, and they have tended to work OK. But public transit systems have mostly been grafted onto existing towns, rather than planned in, because the town wasn't planned.
The other problem with the idea of city planning for public transport is that the auto companies attacked public transport, and it never recovered. The ideal system would involve elevated PRT in cities, and ordinary rail between them. The good news is that once we pry people out of their cars, PRT will actually be realistic. It isn't now because people would rather drive, and you need ridership to make a system of any kind viable.
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I know I'll get voted down for this, but to achieve this, you need the town to run the public transport. As long as it's private owned, profit is all they care about, why would they care about congested roads?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
you went a different direction. when you said "...you need the town to run the public transport." i thought you meant that if the government ran lyft/uber, they'd suck as much as the public agency transport (almost all bus/train passenger moving in the US is government run, and it is crazy expensive per person/mile, and usually sucks for the user).
uber/lyft are private companies that have to fight to provide a service people will pay for.
It's a constant source of stress and problems. I don't own a car for fun. I own it because I need it to get to work, and nobody will hire me if I can't get to work.
I didn't ask for my cities and transportation network to be built around cars. These decisions were made in the 30s, 40 and 50s before I was even born. Now that they've been made changing over to a system of public transportation is virtually impossible. A situation that was not lost on the car manufacturers and oil and gas producers.
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> Yep $400 million for a light rail on a bridge that has no other light rail on either side to connect to.
People complained about the lone blue line on the Portland MAX light rail.
Then they continued adding and several years later it's excellent and goes plenty of places. It takes me from a short walk from my front door to the airport on the other side of town. You have to start somewhere. Getting the difficult bridge bit out of the way first is not a bad plan.
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The limited resource which is addressed by Uber is not traffic congestion, it's parking. Cities have used limited parking as a stick to make driving unbearable in cities. The market found a way around the bad planning.
The whole "rail line" talk is just so he could troll about karupt gubermint.
For one - it won't cost a billion dollars, OP made that shit up. The cost will be $750 million.
For two - there won't be a light rail line.
The Florida Department of Transportation announced a new plan Monday for the Howard Frankland Bridge.
Starting in 2020, the state will build an 8-lane bridge that will include toll lanes and a bike and pedestrian path.
The toll lanes could accomodate buses, driverless vehicles or even a light rail system.
There will be eight lanes, plus a bike lane and a pedestrian lane.
Four of those lanes will be toll lanes - with AN OPTION of later converting two toll lanes to light rail.
On top of it all, original bridge replacement plan was supposed to just replace a 4-lane bridge with a new 4-lane bridge... and then later add ANOTHER bridge.
So instead of two existing bridges, there'd be three bridges, at a combined price of $1.2 billion.
Basically, everything OP said is bullshit.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You'd have a point if people aren't already heavily taxed. A rough estimate shows people in the SF Bay Area pay $1 billion in gas taxes to the state every year, yet we still have pot-holed roads everywhere and no usable public transportation except in a few small areas. Where did the money go?
If you only look at the function of getting people moving, then yes. But towns have goals beyond a simple focus on a single service, they factor in the entailing costs and benefits. More people going by bus/subway means that you have to build and maintain fewer roads. It also means fewer accidents and fewer places necessary for parking space. It also means lower pollution and a higher quality of life. Not to mention that the town can, by extending subways to so far unattractive corners of the town, make those places much more interesting for investors, and for people more willing to move there, taking pressure from the rent in inner city areas.
Towns have vastly different interests than simple private businesses. They have to factor in a lot more effects their services have, and they can use those services to benefit the town in more ways than just getting people from A to B while making a profit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.