[sustran] Is Uber Helping or Hurting Mass Transit?

Vinay Baindur yanivbin at gmail.com
Fri Nov 3 19:58:28 JST 2017


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/upshot/is-uber-helping-or-hurting-mass-transit.html


Is Uber Helping or Hurting Mass Transit?
<https://www.nytimes.com/by/emily-badger>

Emily Badger  <https://www.nytimes.com/by/emily-badger>@emilymbadger
<https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=emilymbadger> OCT. 16, 2017
C
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/upshot/is-uber-helping-or-hurting-mass-transit.html#story-continues-1>

For all the tensions that Uber and Lyft have had with taxicabs
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/nyregion/uber-taxis-new-york-city.html>,
the bigger questions about ride-hailing companies have to do with their
effects on all the other ways you might get around.

Have they siphoned riders from public transit, or have they made transit
feasible for more riders?

Have they enabled people to ditch their cars, or only encouraged people to
use cars (driven by *other* people) even more?

The answers will determine how chaotic our streets become. And they could
tell us something about how people will behave in a more far-off future of
self-driving cars, when ubiquitous ride-hailing will have no one at the
wheel.

The answers are still up for debate because these services remain
relatively new, because the companies that offer them guard their data, and
because even they don’t track the counterfactuals. There’s no button in the
Uber app that asks, “If Uber weren’t an option, how would you get where
you’re going?”

In new survey data, though, there are some provocative patterns.
Researchers at the U.C. Davis Institute of Transportation Studies
<https://its.ucdavis.edu/> surveyed 2,000 people about their travel
behavior in seven major metro areas, including New York, Chicago and Los
Angeles, and including people who live in their suburbs and those who don’t
use these services.
Photo
Survey data suggests that ride-hailing services like Uber encourage people
to take trips they wouldn’t otherwise, and draw people away from public
transit. CreditAdam Berry/Getty Images Europe

The results
<https://itspubs.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/themes/ucdavis/pubs/download_pdf.php?id=2752>
suggest
that ride-hailing draws people away from public transit. And the authors,
Regina Clewlow and Gouri Shankar Mishra, estimate that 49 percent to 61
percent of ride-hailing trips either wouldn’t have been made at all if
these apps didn’t exist, or would have been made by foot, biking or
transit. All of those trips, in other words, added cars to the road that
otherwise wouldn’t have been there.
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RECENT COMMENTS
Ivana Begley October 26, 2017

I don't take Uber or Lyft, but I do use car sharing (Car2Go, ReachNow) and
bicycle sharing (Limebike, Spin, ofo, and others). In my...
BA October 23, 2017

I am a professional transportation planner with more than 35 years of
professional experience who lived in New York City for 50 years until...
carl October 22, 2017

The Upshot needs to do better interpreting statistical findings. The
original UC Davis study said the following: "On the whole, the majority...

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<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/upshot/is-uber-helping-or-hurting-mass-transit.html#story-continues-3>

That picture implies that Uber and the like could make traffic worse. And
let’s further assume that many of those trips additionally require drivers
to cruise around waiting for rides, and to “deadhead” occasionally after
the rides are over (to return to, say, the airport with an empty back seat).

Among people who use these apps, 3 percent said they rode heavy rail like
subway systems more since starting to ride-hail. That’s consistent with the
idea that apps could help you travel the “last mile” home from the train if
you don’t live near a stop, or that they could help you cobble together
transportation options once you ditch your own car. But 6 percent said they
rode the bus less, and 3 percent said the same of light rail.
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Among the most common reasons people gave for turning away from transit:
Service was too slow or unreliable. It potentially does not bode well for
public transit, then, that just as these apps are growing more dominant,
transit systems in cities like New York
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/nyregion/subway-delays-lost-work-time-cost-new-york.html?_r=0>
, Washington
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/local/metro-history-failures/> and San
Francisco
<https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/the-muni-death-spiral/Content?oid=2176739>are
facing deep problems. In New York, where other data
<http://schallerconsult.com/rideservices/unsustainable.htm> has also
suggested that ride-hailing lures riders away from public transit,
officials have speculated about Uber’s role
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/nyregion/new-york-city-subway-ridership.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0>
in
recent declining subway ridership.

Austin, Tex., offers another intriguing case study. In May 2016, Uber and
Lyft temporarily pulled out of the city
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/technology/uber-and-lyft-stop-rides-in-austin-to-protest-fingerprint-background-checks.html>
over
a new law that required the companies to submit drivers to fingerprint
background checks. Their departure created a natural experiment, and
afterward researchers at the University of Michigan, Texas A&M and Columbia
University surveyed Austin residents
<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2977969> about how the
change affected their travel behavior.

Asked about the last trip riders took with Uber and Lyft, 3 percent said
they took similar trips afterward by public transit instead (Austin has
much lower transit usage in general than New York). That also implies some
substitution. Further complicating this picture, 9 percent said they bought
a personal car as a result of the change.

The bulk of the evidence so far shows that these services don’t inherently
make transportation more efficient at the level of an entire city, even if
they have the potential to. They may make *your* travel more efficient,
because you don’t have to hunt for a parking spot or wait for the bus. But
when you aggregate the behavior of many people, transportation becomes less
efficient when transit riders switch to cars, when new car services entice
people onto trips they wouldn’t otherwise have taken, or when people who
give up their cars wind up traveling even more in someone else’s.
183COMMENTS

It’s equally not preordained that these apps will make traffic worse, or
that they must come at the expense of public transit. If more people left
their solo cars for car-pooled ride-hailing, rather than leaving public
buses for solo Uber rides, that would reduce the number of cars on the road
and the miles they travel. If transit agencies partnered with these
companies, as some have <http://www.dart.org/news/news.asp?ID=1179> begun
to try
<http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/uber-and-lyft-partner-with-boston-transit-agency-to-provide-on-demand-rides-to-disabled-residents/>
doing,
ride-hailing could fill niches that trains and buses don’t handle well,
like late-night journeys, transit for riders with disabilities, and
suburban service.

“There’s this potential opportunity for policy makers, city planners and
these firms themselves to find solutions where we’re steering toward that
future,” Ms. Clewlow said. It’s unlikely we’ll get there by chance, though.


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