Ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft initially touted themselves as a remedy for traffic congestion.
Getting drivers out of their individual private cars would, they believed, lighten up traffic in urban areas.
But a story in the Wall Street Journal reports that the results are quite the opposite (“The Ride-Hail Utopia That Got Stuck in Traffic“).
According to the WSJ:
A study published last year by San Francisco County officials and University of Kentucky researchers in the journal Science Advances found that over 60% of the slowdown of traffic speeds in San Francisco between 2010 and 2016 was due to the introduction of the ride-hail companies.
In Chicago, the companies have been “creating exponential growth in congestion in the downtown,” said Dan Lurie, policy director in the mayor’s office. Last month, the city started charging a new fee on every ride-hailing trip to mitigate traffic.
The reversal of ride-hailing from would-be traffic hero to congestion villain is the sort of unintended consequence that has become a recurring feature of Silicon Valley disruption. Companies seeking rapid growth by reinventing the way we do things are delivering solutions that sometimes create their own problems.
See also: “Uber and Lyft may be making San Francisco’s traffic worse,” ScienceMag.org, May 8, 2019.
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Yeah but how does that translate to here on Oahu? The drivers I’ve come across in the Bay Area and Seattle mostly seem to be recent immigrants from Middle East or Africa where a critical mass of immigrants are going to go for a flexible, relatively easy and decent paying gig where language is mostly not a factor and being your own boss, so to speak, is important.
Over here, it’s locals and military/mil family doing a side job to supplement income for the most part so there aren’t huge numbers of vehicles roaming around clogging the roads at all hours.
I think the ride hailing businesses offer a huge service to the community in fighting drinking & driving or going into Waikiki/Chinatown/etc. to shop/dine without having to worry about parking. I for one always use Lyft or Uber when I know I’m going to town for a night out from Central Oahu.
The problem might be the difference between “ride sharing” and “ride hailing”, as Chaz’s comment above implies.
Originally, Uber and Lyft were used as ride-SHARING services. If someone was heading in to work, they could make some money by bringing someone else along. Sharing a ride meant less cars on the road, and that helped everyone. Also, it was celebrated as a great way to meet new people, the way Facebook was originally used to find old friends.
Today, Uber and Lyft are really typical taxi services that utilize a ride-HAILING app. The drivers are not fellow commuters, but often professional drivers who literally never leave their cars (they sleep in them). Taxis drop their customers off on the curb, so now an entire lane of traffic is dedicated to that, with the same results one finds at the airport with all the other lanes slowing down.
What Uber and Lyft might accomplish (along with less drunk driving) is rendering parking obsolete. All that parking space can now be converted to offices and residences.
The biggest problem is not ride hailing, but cars. Cities are really best dedicated to mass transit. Cars are for the suburbs.
I think a $5.00 surcharge should be added to UBER rides to be applied to lowering Bus and Train fares.
I’d generally agree that fees should be imposed on Uber and Lyft when they are in congested places at congested times.
However, the problem might not be Uber or Lyft themselves, but cars — especially cars in the city. And big trucks and SUVs in the city. And especially these gigantic vehicles driving through the city at peak traffic hours without a passenger.
So perhaps in a perfect world, there would be fees imposed for:
1. greater vehicle size
2. lack of passengers
3. high density location
4. peak traffic hours
Technically, this might be possible. Does the political will exist to push for such fees?
There are places moving in the right direction.
https://www.citylab.com/environment/2020/02/paris-election-anne-hidalgo-city-planning-walks-stores-parks/606325/