Uber and Lyft - metrics of congestion

[whole diary]

[grahame]

Are Uber and Lyft abstracting passengers from mass (public) transport and adding to congestion?

From The Chicago Tribune

One promise of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft was fewer cars clogging city streets. But studies suggest the opposite: that ride-hailing companies are pulling riders off buses, subways, bicycles and their own feet and putting them in cars instead.

And in what could be a new wrinkle, a service by Uber called Express Pool now is seen as directly competing with mass transit.

Uber and Lyft argue that in Boston, for instance, they complement public transit by connecting riders to hubs like Logan Airport and South Station. But they have not released their own specific data about rides, leaving studies up to outside researchers.

And the impact of all those cars is becoming clear, said Christo Wilson, a professor of computer science at Boston's Northeastern University, who has looked at Uber's practice of surge pricing during heavy volume.

"The emerging consensus is that ride-sharing (is) increasing congestion," Wilson said.

[CyclingSid]

TfL^» (Transport for London - about) have produced figures showing that Private Hire Vehicles (taxis etc.) and small delivery vehicles are the biggest source of growth in London traffic.

[ChrisB]

And TfL^» (Transport for London - about) are suffering a big drop in passenger numbers, leading to budget problems! So in London, defintely

[Lee]

It's clear that these new services are a particular threat to public transport networks that are based on having to change to reach one's end destination, as those networks in many big cities around the world are.

It reminds me of the culture change that was seen in the mid-1980's with bus deregulation in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom). A good example was Tyne & Wear, where pre-deregulation saw bus routes end at a Metro station, with a change to the Metro required to reach the city centre - One of the first things the new bus companies did was extend those bus routes into the city centre, directly competing against a Metro it had previously integrated with, while offering the passenger a more direct journey solution without the hassle of changing modes.

[didcotdean]

Today also sees the public announcement of autonomous cars being tested between Didcot Parkway and Milton Park (Oxford Mail story here). What will happen to the bus service ...

Led by First Group, who are presumably bringing their experience of vehicles without drivers to the consortium.

[ChrisB]

first accident will be the end of those....

[Bmblbzzz]

The most obvious mode of transport which Uber and Lyft take passengers from has to be conventional taxis, in which case they never increase nor decrease congestion. As to other modes, it obviously depends on people's behaviour and so is going to vary from place to place (and to an extent from time to time); what happens in Chicago and Boston won't necessarily be the case in Cologne or Bath. It's also possible that they will generate some new journeys, simply by making them easier, cheaper or more desirable. I think this happens to some extent with most new transport possibilities.

[Red Squirrel]

first accident will be the end of those....

It wasn't.

I may not live to see electric trains at Temple Meads, but I'm pretty confident I'll see level 5 autonomous vehicles outside...