A New Study Says Services Like UberPool Are Making Traffic Worse (washingtonpost.com) 239
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.
Or is it the other way around? (Score:4, Interesting)
As the transit system collapses from maintenance issues, and walk/ride options become more dangerous due to crime, that people are turning to alternatives?
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
Due to crime? You know that US violent crime numbers are way way down, right? Violent crime per 100K people has been between 360 and 400 since 2010. In the 2000 it was 510. In 1990 it was 730 Crime is currently very close to historic lows, the last time it was this low was the 1970s.
No, what's happening is that private cars (or even semi-private) are nicer than buses and subways, and if the price comes close to the same people prefer them.
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Interesting)
Another suggestion: Urban planning is crap in a lot of locations.
People turn to the easiest alternative. Cars have the best convenience since you're free to go at your own schedule, no waiting 30 min for a bus or train. Uber fills that gap for a lot of folks who would rather wait 5 minutes and get *exactly* where they are going than wait in a cattle car to get *close* to where they want to be.
I live in a city with no real mass transit *AND* all the roads suck. Millions of people stuck on two-lane roads with speed limits between 40 and 45 mph. Rush hour is miserable - if there's a wreck (and there is at least one on every road i take weekly) then can easily add an hour to your commute. I'd love to be able to bike to work, but I'm not brave enough to share a lane with drivers that don't pay attention on a good day flying by at 50+ mph (what speed limit?) 3 feet from me.
Re: Or is it the other way around? (Score:2)
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Not the people in places with good transit. In those places, people vote on the taxes, earmark them for transit, and businesses support it.
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Would they be as convenient without laws that force developers to build more parking than the market wants [strongtowns.org]?
And would they be as convenient if the roads paid for themselves 100% from gas taxes and other user fees instead of less than half [uspirg.org]?
When was the last time you bought groceries without carrying any form of government ID? This used to be common.
It's tragic how we willingly give up our freedoms and enlarge our governments just for a little convenience. "Those who would give u
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Yesterday?
Re:Or is it the other way around? (Score:5, Insightful)
National crime statistics are meaningless on the ground. Local crime statistics vary rather a lot from th national average. Crime on e.g. the BART in Oakland really is a problem, and it's disingenuous to pretend that there's not a problem with crime on public transport because of some national number.
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"Really a problem" means what? ~500 violent crimes occurring in ~130 million BART rides in 2017. That is an incident rate of 1 in ~260,000. Of course that is ALL violent crimes, where the number of deaths and serious injuries still being very few.
If you have a long commute, your odds of dying on the road going to and from your perfectly safe suburban home and perfectly safe office park are in the same ballpark (1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles).
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!
And increasingly being the centers of their own universe, being annoyed is now a "violent crime" and in this day of no
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Doesn't matter. What's changed is that people have new ways to deal with crime. 20 years ago you didn't have Uber so you worked with what you did have. In 2018, Uber is an option.
The only thing about the crime rate that matters, is that people percieve it as significantly higher than 0, such that they want to react to it somehow. And if they associate walk/ride or public transit with crime, that's enough to get some people Ubering
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As the transit system collapses from maintenance issues, and walk/ride options become more dangerous due to crime, that people are turning to alternatives?
The results of this study don’t surprise me at all. I live in a very walk friendly urban environment and I have seen people order an Uber or Lyft to go 2 blocks because it’s hot outside and only costs $2 so why not? I’ve even had a friend order an uber for a place that was literally around the corner. None of us knew it was around the corner when she ordered it, but someone would have looked at the walking distance had uber not been an option. That was less than 200 feet.
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As the transit system collapses from maintenance issues, and walk/ride options become more dangerous due to crime, that people are turning to alternatives?
By almost all statistical measures, violent crime in the US has been decreasing for the last 30 years and is close to an all time low. It seems that suburbanites have recently gotten spooked about crime in urban areas, based on nothing more than fear mongering.
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My take away from this is that no matter what you do, someone else is always going to concoct some excuse why you shouldn't do it. It's a wonder anything ever got accomplished in the past approximately 100,000 years of Human existence.
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Err...isn't that precisely what city streets (and streets in general) were built for in the first place???
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Re: Or is it the other way around? (Score:3)
Lol. The funny thing is, given what we see in virtual space: more and more applications are jumping onto the internet, giving up their isolated and independent infrastructure.
In the past, radio, TV, police communications, telephony, and even telegram/telegraph has their own infrastructure. This was radio bands, dedicated hardware, and dedicated lines traversing the country. The internet makes better use of that infrastructure by allowing all applications to leverage all mediums and all hardware. Want radio?
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Except that we don't use the same device for all uses. There are cell phones, laptops, desktop computers, servers, all connected to the Internet.
I suspect that we'll (at the very least) end up with "skates" of different configurations. I wouldn't want to be trapped in a sitting-only pod for four hours, without even ability to piss or stretch my legs. Long-distance skates would be closer to today's high-speed trains, short-distance might be seated-only pods.
And they won't drag your car with them -- that's
errrr.... (Score:3)
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.
Quite the opposite... (Score:2)
That is the most close the barn door the horse has bolted of comments since horses started bolting from open barn doors.
No point of taxing taxis before there are taxis to tax.
Slap a tax on it and watch the invisible hand solve the problem. Magically.
While filling the city's coffers.
Two birds - one stone.
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There are only two problems, not three.
And they are essentially the same problem - too many fake taxi cars are creating traffic congestion while adding pollution and waste by "adding 5.7 billion vehicle miles to nine major urban areas over six years".
I.e. About a billion vehicle miles per year more than before.
As for the public transportation problem - there isn't one. It's still there.
It's just that people are coaxed into giving money to corporations who shift all the expenses and risk onto other people -
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No public transportation is not still there for the majority of U.S. citizens. Where I live, which is not New York Chicago or the West Coast, there is effectively no public transportation. What there is consists of buses which share the roads with cars, from about 6 am until 8 pm, on very limited routes.
And it only goes local, when most people live outside of the local city where they work.
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Slap a tax on it and watch the invisible hand solve the problem. Magically. While filling the city's coffers. Two birds - one stone.
This is the answer. If you make something available to all those poor people they will use it instead of their designated public options. Taxis and ride sharing should be reserved for those in the upper 25% or so.
Makes sense (Score:3, Informative)
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If people prefer an UberPool ride in congested traffic over a subway trip, then it means that the subway trip sucks even more. Why isn't the title "UberPool reduces subway pain"? Someone is pushing an agenda.
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How much do you pay for a subway ticket in your town?
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In many places it can often be a Bus->Subway->Bus which can easily be over $10 for people who need to get across town. If you UberPool esepcially if you buy a monthly pass you can get Uber to under $10 a ride.
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In DC (where I am) no such thing exactly exist. You can get monthly cards that cost you the cost of 18 (36 one way trips) of your selected distance, its a seriously weird system.
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Wow. 10 bucks is more than a 24-hour ticket costs in most places I know.
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How much do you pay for a subway ticket in your town?
Depends where I am. Some cities have mileage based and prime time rates that can easily reach $10. Even an off peak short trip runs at least $2 for a very short trip; and in a sometimes 20 minute wit for the next train and the extra 2 to 3 $ for UberPool is worth it.
Re: Makes sense (Score:2)
It would probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars to get a subway ticket in my town.
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Mu.
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UberPool/Lyft Line is often close in price to a subway trip and you go door to door.
Heck, the TFA has the wrong end of the problem to begin with. The problem isn't traffic, the problem is people being forced into transport that's not door-to-door. If more people are benefiting from more convenient transport, it's a win. Trying to force people into public transport to reduce traffic is exactly backwards - serve the people, not some personal ideal of how people should move.
Re: Makes sense (Score:2)
If rich people at VC firms want to pick up the tab for my ride, who am I to argue?
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Re: Makes sense (Score:2)
It's not competition. It's not even close. The choice is to use Uber or use nothing, because there's no fucking way I'm going to make a phone call to wait an hour and fifteen minutes for a taxi in a downtown area, only to be told by the driver at the end of the ride that he only accepts cash, not credit, ever though the MasterCard logo is printed on the window.
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Taxi fare in NYC is $2.50 per mile + $2.50 initial, so yes, you can get a taxi ride for about 19 miles (outside of heavy traffic) for $50.
As far as the crime thing -- stop being a paranoid coward, maybe?
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Public transit is great, if you live in a place that has it properly. Last night two straight busses on the FIRST route I have to take on my 1.5 hour journey home failed to even turn up. after 45 minutes of waiting by the road, faced with an unknown wait, and the liklihood of not getting the second leg of my journey in any reasonable time, I got a Lyft. I hate spending 10 times as much (and I had my bus pass for the day) but this is a fairly regular occurance where I live. THere are no trains. There is no s
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Well, then you enjoy that in the 4-5 major US cities where that is even a remotely viable option.
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I wouldn't say that, I love living here.
I like to visit other parts of the world, but I'm ALWAYS glad to come back home.
I've heard the old saying "The US sucks, but it sucks a whole lot less than the rest of the world....".
I"m happy to call it home.
I like my way of life.
I enjoy all the people around me...neighbors, friends, family.....my town is friendly and there's always something fun going on down here.
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Dunno where you are, but in Vancouver, both TransLink and the driver's union are doing big campaigns to get people to come in and do the driving course. Heck, they pay you to do the course. The system is really hurting for new drivers, both the operator (CMB) and the union recognize this.
Maybe if mass transit weren't an afterthought... (Score:4, Insightful)
...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.
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Re:Maybe if mass transit weren't an afterthought.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: Maybe if mass transit weren't an afterthought. (Score:2)
And the reason we don't plan cities is because it's often a waste of resources. There's no way to accurately predict the future use of the city. The best you can do is be continuously planning for various contingencies, but that becomes complex and expensive.
Re:Maybe if mass transit weren't an afterthought.. (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
You're talkin to the wind. OP is full of shit. (Score:3)
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. [tampabaynext.com]
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. [tampabay.com]
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
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I think the fact that you have a train station right outside your door might color your attitude on how useful the train system is. Not everyone is so lucky. In many countries, they price real estate on how near it is to the train station and living as close as you do is a real high dollar accommodation.
Yup. I've lived near a station in two places and far from a station in one other house.
Living near a station certainly increases the utility because you don't need a car to get to it.
However it is still worthwhile driving to a nearby station and getting on the train to the airport - which is on the other side of town. Parking at the station is free compared to $50 a day at the airport.
The proximity to the train station was a factor in purchasing the house we currently live in.
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If your government is corrupt, why don't you elect a different one?
Gerrymandering plus presidents being selected and not elected means that we have an oligarchy, not a democracy.
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We have never been a democracy (mob rule). We have always been a republic.
We do not ever want to be an actual democracy. We have checks and balances in place that would be totally destroyed if we went from a republic to a democracy.
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No. Mass Transit simply sucks. There is no getting around it. Private transport sucks far less. One is trying to be a generic one size-fits-all solution and the other is tailored to a particular person. There is simply no way that one can compete with the other if you care about the quality of the experience.
You can have an ideal set of circumstances for mass transit and the private option will always be better. The only advantage mass transit has is cost. If your population isn't dirt poor and struggling j
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No. Mass Transit simply sucks. There is no getting around it. Private transport sucks far less.
True in the abstract, but commute times can change the equation. Anything that gives people the choice of a reasonable commute time and door-to-door transport is obviously a net win.
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I have seen a couple of large cities. Oddly, it seems the only places that ever get it right were in Europe. Especially Germany and Austria, they know how to run public transport. It's fast, efficient, clean, on time (ok, the local public transport inside the towns are, forget trains between towns, they come and go whenever, like everywhere else) and most of all they're fairly inexpensive.
Maybe that's a reason Uber can't gain traction in those areas.
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Not uber, its lazy people. (Score:2)
Free market will fill provide the goods and services demanded by the consumers.
Blame the lazy people not Uber.
Solution: use the same free market principles. The cities are selling access to the public roads at throwaway prices. For free, almost. Introduce surge pricing for road access. 90% of the capacity or a road or an intersection will be sold for free, paid by general tax on fu
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Then watch how suburbs that implemented those lovely 4-way-stops to deter through traffic will suddenly become ersatz-highways. Yes, you stop every 50 feet ("sqeeeak - wrooooooom" for the whole neighborhood every other second), but at least it's cheaper.
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And you thought the ghost flights from heathrow was bad. Wait until you get ghost ubers.
Trying to outlaw the competition (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Then be prepared to spend more time on congested roads.
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Your elected overlords have already proscribed a public-transit solution to satisfy your transportation needs. That solution is predicated on some ridership statistic, and it implodes if the revenue numbers aren't met. How dare you choose an alternative?!?
Re: Trying to outlaw the competition (Score:2)
So we should tax people who use mass transit because they should be walking instead?
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Clueless Drivers (Score:3)
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.
Re: Clueless Drivers (Score:2)
Ummm... where are they supposed to park when there are no parking spot? The whole point of using Uber in the city is to avoid parking. Uber helps address the parking problem. Talk to your bus operators if you want to address congestion. Talk to your city council if you think it should be illegal to build a place that draws 1000 people but only has two public parking spots.
Ownership, not rides (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Cars are freedom (Score:2)
Personal driving and car ownership in the USA as its fun. People can buy their own car in the USA and enjoy it. No big gov to tax a new car like in the EU.
Re "desirable places"
Clean up the city streets. Stop the crime. Return to services that citizens want in a city.
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Or, in short "Don't tax me, just gimme".
I own a car and I hate it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Self-driving fleets are going to make this worse (Score:2)
I'm a big fan of the promise of self-driving vehicles... so much human time and effort is wasted on manual driving, and the death toll is horrific. Not to mention the incredible amount of labor and natural resources that are invested in vehicles that are parked most of the time, and all of the space we waste on parking lots. And self-driving vehicles promise of mobility to populations that don't currently have it, especially youth and the elderly. It's a good thing in so many ways.
But, I predict that com
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If you can pay 3X as much to have a quiet, private car that takes you right to your destination rather than a noisy, crowded subway train, or bus that doesn't... lots of people will do that. I think it's going to get very bad if cities don't do something.
Translation: people will have a higher standard of living. Government must stop that!
he solution seems obvious to me, though: Make surface transportation more expensive.
Translation: the solution is obvious: the government should just arbitrarily lower the standard of living of enough people, though imposed costs, to prevent the above-mentioned horror.
I am not a fan of your ideas, and do not wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Keep in mind that we're talking about public roads that are built and maintained by the city. Why should they not charge for them? A truly libertarian, small government solution would be to privatize all of the roads and let the new owners charge what the market will bear for their use. I'd be okay with that. How about you?
Also, I find it interesting that you think that more congestion equals a higher standard of living. I think the opposite. Yes, government could do nothing and then congestion would i
This is New York we're talking about right? (Score:2)
The idea that the likes of Uber are making New York more pedestrian hostile than it already is is just absurd.
Oh no! (Score:2)
Uber and Lyft are creating a beloved service that is continuing to grow in popularity for some reason! We must kill it!
Gee, you don't say (Score:2)
Who would have thought adding more taxis to city roads would increase traffic? It's almost as if adding more vehicles to a finite space has never been done before.
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Each Uber Pool car takes 2 replaces 2 or more cars, unless people switch from mass transit. Somehow it's bad that people then choose a higher standard of living and carpool rather than take government transport.
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People DO switch from mass transit, apparently--
Each subway train displaces hundreds of cars.
Each bus replaces dozens of cars.
Also, if the Ubers are driving empty some of the time, their load factor is probably still closer to 1 than 2.
Not that there's anything wrong with "government transport" either. I don't see "public" or "government" as dirty words, like many Americans do.
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Who would have thought adding more taxis to city roads would increase traffic?
Anyone who paid attention to cities like New York and Boston before taxi regulations and subways. It was horrible, but for some reason a lot of people want to go back to it.
This study ignores studies on car ownership (Score:2)
taxes (Score:2)
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A 2009 Texas study found that in order for the roads to pay for themselves, the gas tax would have to be raised to $2.22 per gallon [houstontomorrow.org]. That's $2.59 in today's dollars.
When you're paying $2.59 per gallon in gas taxes and the roads still aren't fixed, come back and ask again where the money went.
Uber's role in the city (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Behold, my brilliant solution (Score:2)
If we don't want rideshare to cannibalize public transit, expand rideshare apps to include transit in rideshare route alternatives. When booking an Uber (for example) in the usual manner, such an app would, besides offering you the Uber cost and timing, show any plausible variations of the route that include a transit ride. You would be able to choose between an all-Uber route and a cheaper but more complicated option of something like Uber-train-Uber. For single rides, few people will choose the transit-in
Re:People will use what works best (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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.
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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 tho
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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?
Oh yes, the capitalist anti-regulation zeitgeist of /. will totally mod you down for that.
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Right, they do care about congested roads, but in the wrong direction.