In the early days of Uber and Lyft, when the illegal taxi companies were trying to get permission from the state to operate under a new definition called Transportation Network Companies, the companies argued that they were going to do a public service, and get people to give up their private cars.
Why own a car, and pay for maintenance, parking, gas, and fees, when you can just call a neighbor on an app and they will drive you where you want to go? That’s why they called it “ridesharing,” which was a lie: Sharing doesn’t involve fee for services.
The reality: When Uber went to Wall Street for an IPO that would make its founders really, really rich, the company told the truth: Its business model would only work if it could get people not out of their private cars, but out of trains and buses. In other words, Uber has, by definition, been attacking public transit. From the IPO documents:
We believe we can continue to grow the number of trips taken with our Ridesharing products and replace personal vehicle ownership and usage and public transportation one use case at a time, including through continued investment in our affordable Ridesharing options, such as Uber Bus and Express POOL.
Guess what? It’s working.
A new study from UC Davis researchers shows that more than half of the rides passengers took in Uber and Lyft vehicles “replaced more sustainable forms of transportation—such as walking, cycling, carpooling, and public transit—or created new vehicle miles.”
You can read the full study here. It’s pretty detailed and technical, and has a lot of complicated math, but the data is solid.
The study looked at the San Francisco Bay Area along with San Diego and Los Angeles-Orange County. The researchers used a detailed survey to track 9,600 people with an app to record their trips and the modalities they used.
Their overall conclusion:
We found that over 50 percent of ridehailing trips in our sample were replacing more sustainable modes (i.e., public transit, active modes, and carpooling) or were creating new vehicle miles, with a 5.8 percent rate of induced travel, with public transit being the most frequently substituted mode.
This is just going to get worse as Waymo and Cruise start offering more and more driverless car rides.
We already know that Uber and Lyft have created considerable new congestion in San Francisco, and their arrival has not been consistent with any decline in car ownership.
The study goes further:
Respondents without a household vehicle and who use pooled services were more likely to replace transit … A drop in transit ridership in favor of ridehailing will increase vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and decrease revenue for transit companies, which may lead to a cycle of decline in transit services.
Imagine what happens when anyone can easily summon a driverless vehicle (which may be electric, but still uses considerably more energy than a bus or a train) to go anywhere in the country. The threat to public transportation is very, very real.
Oh, and the study found that higher-income people were more likely to use Uber and Lyft—no surprise there—but if that leads to a collapse of cheaper public transit, the economic impacts on the less wealthy will be immense. They won’t be able to get around, to go to work or school, buy food, visit friends …
The study notes:
Together, these findings provide valuable insights for policy makers seeking to address the environmental and equity issues associated with ridehailing.
If only policy makers were paying attention and thinking about serious policy, instead of listening to the billionaire tech lords who fund their campaigns.
