A new study says services like Uber and Lyft are causing urban traffic woes
axios.com
axios.com
That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But I’m surprised the study gets so much press because some guy published something on his personal website.
I bet city officials in most places don't like ride-hailing companies, too, so they would gladly link to something like this, for the same reason.
Maybe every other reader would look at it and say: "Hey, this has no data, and the author's position produces an obvious conflict of interests". But the headlines, without this notice, would already be in many places, and look like a more or less established fact. All publicity is good publicity, you know.
Why do you think limited-supply medallion systems existed in the first place? Come on this is just classic "I forgot why these regulations existed and now a 100 year old problem is being recreated"
A form of limited licensing for ride-hailing companies can exist without any of the inputs from the taxicab lobby and work out really well.
Because there is an ideological (i.e. irrational) component to some objections. It's true.
>Why do you think limited-supply medallion systems existed in the first place
Taxi lobby pressuring municipal governments? I cannot imagine you using the past system as an example of a well-run program. There was never a good reason to limit the number of taxicabs on the streets. There were good reasons for some regulations, such as driver registration, transparent pricing, vehicle standards, but not regulations around limiting number of vehicles.
>"I forgot why these regulations existed and now a 100 year old problem is being recreated"
There is no new problem recreated. Your argument went away when EVERYONE could afford a car and clogged the streets anyway. In the present day, any transportation option that incentivizes people not to own a car is good.
Are companies offering to pay you to drive people around, with little barrier to entry, in a tough economy where it's getting increasingly difficult to afford living in urban centers, not also an incentive to own a car?
More so, since the problem isn't so much about car ownership, but rather about the number of cars actually on the road at any given time: are these companies not also creating additional incentive for many existing car owners to drive their cars more in the hopes of earning extra cash? Because even when they're not actively giving rides, many of these drivers are still going to be driving around waiting for their next client. Then we have to take into account the fact that the shifts these drivers can potentially work are much longer than the amount of time an average driver would normally stay on the road for.
Incentives in a complex system are not an easy clear-cut thing to figure out, so it shouldn't be surprising that the incentives in one direction might actually outweigh and completely counteract the intended incentives of a plan in the opposite direction. Not saying that's actually the case here, but it's far from an impossibility, and it wouldn't require any malevolent bias to happen.
You'd think so, but Uber drivers aren't exactly rolling in money. In fact, if they aren't smart about it (i.e. if they don't know how to pick their routes, their customers, and opportune times where 'surge pricing' is in effect), they'll lose money from fuel costs + wear and tear. Seriously, if you think it's easy to make money driving Uber, try it.
My buddy is a truck mechanic and he sees it all the time. Lots of truckers now are independent contractors who own the truck. Some of those guys will spend as little as possible on a truck, get a couple gigs make some "decent" money. Inevitably they'll go in for maintenance and repairs and get hit with a $15,000 repair bill (or more, there is no upper bound) and watch all their profits evaporate.
>More so, since the problem isn't so much about car ownership, but rather about the number of cars actually on the road at any given time
That's a problem today in major urban centers. Do you know what people do? They take mass transit. I make that decision all the time, and sometimes it's just not worth to grab a cab or an uber because I know it's going to get stuck in traffic and a trip that should take 10 minutes, will take 50 minutes - even when work is willing to pay for my transit.
In a world with unlimited taxi/ride-sharing licenses, an equilibrium will be established, and price will fall. There is no downside. The current medallion system is there to protect capital investment of medallion owners and (to a lesser extent) the income of operators (thought, if they are contractors they make no money anyway).
New York implemented a medallion system because Manhattan is a long, narrow island with high travel demand. Commuters, shoppers etc. do own cars and clog streets during the peak hours, but commuters and shoppers also park their cars while they're off doing their jobs and errands; taxis are constantly driving for fares.
Were medallion prices high? Sure. But that doesn't mean a race to the bottom to provide a cornucopia of taxi services doesn't have negative externalities.
I'm sure it was well intentioned ... initially. And then it became a boondoggle that protected the invested capital of medallion owners.
>Commuters, shoppers etc. do own cars and clog streets during the peak hours, but commuters and shoppers also park their cars while they're off doing their jobs and errands; taxis are constantly driving for fares.
OK. But they aren't just driving around. They are moving people meaning there is a public good being served. I have no doubt there will be traffic LIKE THERE IS TODAY and customers will price that in. If traffic gets too terrible, more people will move to mass public transit LIKE THEY DO TODAY. When I'm in New York or Hong Kong, I'd love to be able to cab or uber it everywhere but I don't because many times a 10 minute trip will take an hour - so I opt for subway in many cases. An equilibrium which balances price, convenience, time, etc. will be established - so don't fight it, let it establish itself.
I didn't even talk about costs. Low density transit options like Taxis/Ubers are pricey compared to high density transit options liks buses and subways - people will opt for those just for price alone. You see that with the daily commute to work where even affluent people will take the subway instead of cabbing it. I did that because Uber is great for going to a bar on a Friday night, but it sucks to pay $30/day on a round-trip to work ... and subways are faster during rush hour.
>Were medallion prices high? Sure.
Talk about an understatement.
An equilibrium for local passenger travel might be established. Which does a whole lotta nothing for the emergency vehicles, the delivery vehicles, the commuter and local and intercity buses, etc., all of which have to share the same roads.
In fact, average bus speeds citywide in New York have declined due to increased traffic, which drives more people to Ubers instead of buses, which increases traffic. Unpriced traffic is a classic tragedy of the commons.
The second only covers state highways, of which most of the roads in New York City, especially Manhattan, are not.
The third is a flat fee; to get the most value out of it, it actually incentivizes driving more.
None of this is an actual price on traffic; you pay the same rate whether or not you do all your traveling on lightly trafficked country roads, or bumper to bumper city streets. In DC, for example, they started charging tolls to maintain a constant speed of 55MPH, and it turns out the market clearing price could go as high as $40. https://ggwash.org/view/65796/the-new-i-66-tolls-offer-great...
IMO gas tax is the best we can do. There not that many teslas, at least not yet.
It scales proportionally with miles driven. It’s roughly proportional to vehicle size. It even scales with traffic intensity, cars consume more fuel per mile in cities. It’s inexpensive to manage. Best of all, unlike direct traffic tax, gas tax is anonymous, no need to track who went where, all people will eventually go to a gas pump, except people living near a state border but that’s IMO acceptable losses.
I think that’s one of the reasons why fuel costs 2-3 times more here in Europe compared to US, and on average we have better public transportation.
For this reason US states have started experimenting with taxing VMT. You don't actually need to track mileage; just measure the odometer at the end of the month.
As far as tracking concerns, Manhattan is an island connected via bridges and tunnels; all you need to do traffic pricing is to toll the crossings.
Without some kind of limit/pricing on the public good that is city streets, what in particular is to stop Cab Company X from saturating the roads with cabs in a brute force attempt to capture a higher proportion of the ridership (and incidentally ballooning road wear & travel times to the detriment of everyone else)?
Same kind of problem as people anticipate with driverless cars (e.g. while I go in to shop at this store, my car circles the block for the next hour waiting for me). City streets are a "common good" that is largely unpriced.
It's a brute force solution with obvious shortcomings, to be sure.
They can, but so what? The sheer number of cabs it would take to 'saturate the roads' means enormous amount of upfront capital. But that also means cheap prices (essentially 0 profitability) - and isn't that what we want?
Leaving that aside, if the roads get clogged to the extent that service is compromised, people will do what they do today, and that is, rely on mass public transit (LIKE THEY DO TODAY). If I'm in New York or Hong Kong, sometimes I'd rather take the subway than have my taxi or uber fight traffic.
There are no issues here.
>while I go in to shop at this store, my car circles the block for the next hour waiting for me)
I heard that argued before, and I say this: never going to happen. That's a pipe dream of driverless car aficionados.
Your car is never going to be able to compete with a fleet because the base operating cost of a driverless taxi is going to be fuel cost + maintenance and fleets will always be able to underprice you due to economies of scale. In essence, if you rent out your car, you will lose money because you will, at the very least, have to contend with the wear and tear.
But even if you just want the car to 'wait' by circling the block (instead of 'working' while it waits for you) ... it's not cheap to have the car circle the block for an hour. 1 hour of driving is going to cost you in fuel. It's going to put wear and tear on your car. You'll risk collision and traffic tickets. It may not be worth it to do that all the time. HAVING SAID THAT, once in a while, maybe you want to take that hit, and isn't it nice to have the option to do that? Maybe you're running late for your flight, and you want to quickly run in to the store to pick something up - take the hit and the risk.
There is no free lunch but options are good.
I'm not sure I agree. If I drive a car to work, it sits in a parking garage all the rest of the day. If I take a Lyft, it continues to roam the streets waiting for the next fare. Any rideshare (or taxi, for that matter) that is not actively hired is a car that would not otherwise have been out on the road. I don't think they're currently numerous enough to make a huge difference, at least where I live (outside L.A.), but the difference definitely isn't on the side of less traffic.
I'm all for transportation options (and don't forget housing options!) that incentivize people not to own cars, but replacing my car with another car that has to drive a bit farther doesn't get cars off the road.
I argued this in another post, but this is a pipe dream of driverless car aficionados. Your car is never going to be able to compete with fleets. The base operating cost of a driverless car is fuel+maintenance and fleets will always be able to underprice you due to economies of scale. In essence, you will lose money every time you rent out your car. This is also a limiting factor for fleets as well. Too many cars will impact fleet revenues too because if they can't make up fuel and maintenance costs they will also have a operating loss.
Even in the world where this somehow doesn't happen, what's wrong with deploying your capital? If the streets get clogged (like they are today in major municipal centers), people will opt to for mass public transit until some sort of equilibrium is reached (like it does today). When I'm in Hong Kong or New York, sometimes I opt for subways instead of taxis or uber because it may take uber forever to fight through traffic to my destination.
Why do you think Uber and Lyft exist in the first place?
now they cause a different inefficiency.
but without reinventing the wheel, medallions can probably be reimplemented in a better way. instead of turning the drivers into debt serfs, Uber and Lyft can buy all the medallions until the municipality stops issuing them.
it is an anti-spam prevention, anti congestion in this case. it'll also likely force the ride hailing companies to likely be even more discerning about their drivers
the negative? well yes the egalitarian side job that "anybody" can do is probably going away now. fares may also go up. this was inevitable.
But I still think their origin can be traced to numerous problems with taxi services, definitely including the false economy of medallions. But taxi companies in the US have been ridiculously poor providers of service. Prior to Uber/Lyft, I had numerous problems with taxis, e.g. even scheduling them 24 hours ahead, they would show up late, resulting in being late to work or (nearly) missed flights; the dispatchers would lie about drivers accepting credit cards; etc. etc..
> fares may also go up. this was inevitable.
Right now Uber/Lyft are subsidising fares. Once they've achieved market dominance, they will surely raise rates.
https://steps.ucdavis.edu/new-research-ride-hailing-impacts-...
"Net vehicle miles traveled (VMT) changes are unknown."
"While this data provides initial insights into the travel behavior changes associated with ridehailing, it is still limited in that it does not provide a complete picture of individual travelers’ trip generating activities, the modes they used before ride-hailing services, and the potentially new patterns of behavior that have since emerged."
Meanwhile, here is coverage of this study: "Lyft, Uber increase traffic 180 percent in major cities, says report" https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/27/17622178/uber-lyft-cause-tra...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46212892_On-street_...
Sure, more rigor is nice but it's not necessary to get people to start looking at a problem.
I don't think someone needs to be an authority to raise legitimate concerns. That shouldn't be a requirement because otherwise we run into "appeal to authority" types of fallacies.
It does make an interesting argument that ride sharing makes transportation by car available to a wider audience (walking, bike, public transportation) and that is why it is causing congestion. Those people would have just suffered through it or not moved to a city that required them to do those things in the first place before ride sharing.
I found this statement funny though:
> There’s no way that ride hailing could move people around as efficiently as mass transit.
Efficiency is subjective to the actual metric. Clearly the metrics people actually care about (time and convenience most likely) are not being addressed; otherwise, they would be using public transportation more.
I personally drive to work despite being walking distance to Caltrain on both ends because it takes me 25 minutes door to door. If I take public transportation it is 60-90 minutes. Plus my time options are extremely limited. No train options past 7:30 AM. Plus it's more expensive than the gas, wear, and tear.
The Embarcadero in SF was turned into a surface road after the Loma Prieta earthquake permanently damaged it: http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/FreewaysEmbarcadero.html
Chonggyecheon, Seoul was restored as a stream after the highway capping it was demolished: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2017/09/14/braess-paradox...
We have to get off of cars and empty seats. Apps pushing cars and pushing ride sharing are pushing laziness and congestion.
Why kid ourselves into thinking that Uber and Lyft are fixing the car traffic problem and climate change?
Imagine for a second all these cars as chairs. Imagine sitting in your chair with a wheel attached then getting onto a freeway and propelling forward. All these people in chairs with empty chairs in their walled off metal combustion tank. We need to stop all this empty chair insanity and use more efficient ways to move people sitting down going from place to place.
Want to combat obesity? Fight climate change? Prevent accidents? Motor deaths? Depression and isolation? Do away with cars.
We should be encouraging ride sharing and working to eliminate parking; parking requirements make cities unwalkable thus making public transit ineffective.
Anecdotally, yes.
In the time that I drove for Uber, I met a number of people who gave up their cars because Ubering was cheaper than having a car.
To me, that makes sense because every time I move from a small city to a large city, the first thing I do is sell my cars. Then when I move from a big city to a small town, I end up buying new cars again.
Though I haven't lived in a large city since Uber became widespread, my family managed just fine with public transit, Zipcars, and taxis.
Ride sharing makes congestion worse because people are less likely to use mass transit for the route.
I think it's time to give up on this dream.
In a sprawled out city like Los Angeles, the suburbs that people live in, are too far away from the job centers. It's even too far away from a supermarket, or the shopping mall.
Mass transit is a failure when it takes 2 hours to get to your destination, when it is just 15 miles away. Where you may have to walk to a bus stop to catch your bus, and then transfer to a light rail line. And then, the light rail drops you off, 4 miles away from where you need to be.
It's easier to just sit in your car, stuck in traffic. At least you have air conditioning in the hot sun. You can listen to your own music. And you won't be in danger of being violently attacked, robbed, or physically assaulted.
But I think there can be a few solutions to the last mile problem.
1. Dockless bicycles. I don't think this can work in America, the way it worked in China. The bicycles are too massive, and can get crammed up on the sidewalk, at some destination point.
2. Dockless electric scooters. I think this can actually work in America. They are small enough, that several units take the same amount of space as a single bicycle.
3. Uber to drive you the last few miles. A taxi service won't pick you up. And it might not even be profitable for an Uber driver to pick you up. But at least this is an option.
4. Fully electric and autonomous robotic vehicles that will drive you from point to point. This has to be the ultimate dream, and can actually be the real solution to the mass transit problem.
In LA the biggest difficulty facing new dense/affordable construction is the number car spaces required per apartment. http://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2014/parking-requiremen...
We don't even need public tax dollars to pay for them. There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities.
Hell, Google (and other tech companies) will happily pay for its own buses to reduce VMT, but taking away street parking to add bus stops is political suicide in San Francisco right now.
Chicago has these. And it's available as an app, too. I assume other cities have this, as well. It just needs to be more widespread.
And somehow you have to let people who don't take the bus know that it exists.
If your city still lacks this, maybe you should let your municipal representative, or your bus company, know that you want it.
I've never once felt unsafe.
Mildly annoyed maybe, but never remotely unsafe.
Whereas I've felt unsafe driving through certain areas by myself at night. I've also felt unsafe driving when other cars were performing dangerous maneuvers around me.
>But I've experienced far too many train cars smelling like urine and experienced a homeless person with extreme odors come into a car basically necessitating it being vacated. Even a 1 in 100 chance is enough for me to opt for another mode of transport, if available.
All you have to do is get out of one subway car and move to the next one at the next station. Avoiding public transport because you (allegedly) have to do this 1 time in 100 makes no sense.
If public transit didn't result in worse experiences, then I wouldn't opt to use Uber/Lyft.
2) do you also avoid leaving your house entirely?? because you are likely to run across homeless people in other public places than the subway. The worst smelling homeless person I've ever encountered was at a grocery store.
I'd like to see what happens if all the buses became free, with reasonable counter-actions taken (i.e. increased funding from city budget to offset loss of ticket costs, more buses to handle increased ridership, etc).
Of note though: Apparently making it free was too expensive, so now only a "great reduction in price" is considered [2] (June 2018).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/14/german-cities-... [2] https://global.handelsblatt.com/politics/german-cities-slash...
That's the opposite direction of where the SF Bay Area is going. The San Francisco District Attorney, for e.g., has been at loggerheads withe police department because the former has been eager to let even violent criminals go scott free.
Of course, you add the rampant social justice warriors in the area and you get accused of racism for arresting 11-time felons (e.g https://stopcrimesf.com/blog/2018/8/10/second-chances-how-ab... vs https://48hills.org/2018/08/judge-soft-on-crime/)
Kind of hard to fine someone that doesn't have the money to pay for it. Kind of hard to put a person in jail when the jail is already full of kids with marijuana sentences.
I don't think this "Singapore Solution" would work in the USA.
Free for who?
Imagine the tax income down the line if every citizen that wanted a high-training-required career could get that career. Imagine the burden reduction on welfare.
You seem to just assume if we give people free stuff they will all go get PHD's. That's just simply a fantasy.
I didn't say "mandatory higher education," I said "free." It already is free for twelve years so it seems silly to think slapping on another 2-6 would be some massive burden against the expected returns.
For those that don't want it or can't test into it because they literally are too stupid (this is after fixing inequal access to early education), there's no associated cost. They just to to work, same as it was before.
I think you will find the IQ benefits of education itself is not really that large. I could be wrong but it seems like scientists are looking more into diet these days as bigger influencers than quality education.
Which is to say, of course there is contrast between a child who never goes to school and is just left to leisure around the house until they are adults to one that goes to a quality school that are beyond simply a diet but that in western countries, diets could be a bigger reason for poorer socio-economic populations scoring lower on IQ tests.
I think though that you would have to rebalance the culture when it comes to higher education before making it free because in countries like the USA, you already have too many people going to university and then going into non-skilled jobs despite the insane prices.
Lowering the price to free is only going to increase that when many kids see college as an experience more than a critical education for a high end role.
and
>Imagine the tax income down the line...
are contradictory.
A better argument would be: "Increased education and welfare spending leads to more productivity and the added cost is offset by the increase in taxes due to the productivity gain". Or more simply: "Education and welfare are good investments".
Now we can have a serious conversation about the economic impacts of this kind of investment. But to market it as free is irresponsible. It it not free. At best we get more out than we put in, but by definition we must put in something.
That was the point of my original comment. Everything has a cost. Even an investment with a nearly guaranteed return comes at a cost and has a certain amount of risk associated with it.
Imagine slashing DoD funding in half. I don't think taxes would have to go up a penny to provide free education then.
Other than that, yes, I agree with you in using investment terminology.
Another assumption that you make is that the problem with the US education system is a lack of funding. I don't think this is the case.
I think we can have that while also auditing and cleaning up whatever ineffective messes money is being spent on by the doe now.
I’m certain most people would not want Singaporean-style justice in the US.
E.g., the most famous case, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, was caught sharing 1700 songs. The RIAA asked for $5000.
She refused, so they sued. They sued over 24 of the songs. Why not sue over all 1700? Probably a couple reasons. First, if they sued over 1700 and won, the minimum damages they would receive would be $1 275 000 (statutory damages of $750 [1] per infringed work x 1700 works). Only suing over 24 cuts the minimum to $18 000. They were willing to settle for $5 000, but having to go to trial adds some expenses and so $18 000 is pretty reasonable.
Second, for each song they do have to file some paperwork proving that they have standing to sue on behalf of the copyright owner. Every bit of paperwork they have to file is time and money, and every bit of paperwork offers the defense something to challenge to further take their time and increase their cost.
Any non-moron looking at the above math would beg to accept that $5 000 settlement as soon as they found out that they were in fact being sued. But not Thomas-Rasset. Worse for her, she was a very unsympathetic defendant. She tried to pin the blame on her kids, she tried to destroy evidence, and she lied about that under oath and was caught at it. The jury gets to pick the damages and instead of going for the low end of statutory damages they went for something higher up, and she got hit with a large fine (around $200k).
And then what did the RIAA do? They offered again to settle for some reasonably low amount. She refused, got another trial, lost again (because of course nothing had changed) and that jury went high, going an order of magnitude higher than the first jury. The RIAA again offered to settle, although now they were asking $25.
Eventually she got an appeals court to lower the damages back down to around the first trial's amount. Again the RIAA offered a much lower settlement, if she would agree to make a video about copyright infringement. She refused.
If you are going to pirate, fine, but be an honest and honorable pirate. If you get caught and are offered a reasonable settlement (and 3x what it would have cost you to buy the works without pirating them is reasonable [2]) take it. Don't waste the court's time with going to a trial you have pretty much no change of winning and that when you lose the minimal damages will be more than the settlement offer.
[1] It can go down to something like $200 or $250 per work if the alleged infringer can prove they were an "innocent infringer", which means that they did not know the works were copyrighted and had no reason to know this. That would be very hard to prove.
[2] It has to be more than the retail cost because if the worst that happens to you when you are caught is that you pay what it would have cost to buy retail, there is no incentive not to pirate.
EDIT: I'm not dismissing the inherent risks of public transportation and interactions, I'm stating it is a risk that must be accepted as a condition of the living environment.
One either actively polices and maintains the commons, or it devolves into trash.
If transportation network consumers wish to use those services, they should be able to. And cities should tax those rides to offset additional congestion and improve public transportation. Everyone wins.
Would the revenue generated from those taxes result in successful public transit reform to address the issues that are pushing the public away? Not arguing that it doesn't, I'm genuinely curious because I don't know enough about the problem to say that insufficient funding is the root of the issue for most cities' transit systems. I'd agree that it's a net win if the additional funding would enable meaningful progress, but nobody wins if money isn't the root of the problem and that money is squandered or spent elsewhere.
> In the SF Bay Area, rides are $3.80 during off-peak hours, and are $5 during peak hours.
I have no idea what their operations or financials look like, but they have survived for at least a few years, so the business model must be at least somewhat viable.
Sharing a subway car with dancers isn't anywhere near as dangerous as sharing a road with other vehicles.
You're not going to logic humanity out of it.
It's not an education problem, either. People will still feel this way even once they're aware of the numbers, because we evolved in an environment that rewarded avoiding aggressive strangers and also in which automobiles did not exist.
The feelings that you mention are far from universal and significantly educable. I find subway dancers mildly irritating. They've never caused me to fear for my safety.
>we evolved in an environment that rewarded avoiding aggressive strangers and also in which automobiles did not exist.
People from remote tribes who've never seen an automobile are practically scared to death when they first set foot in a city. Not being scared by cars isn't in any way the default attitude for a human to have -- quite the opposite. But we get used to cars. You can also get used to people dancing on the subway.
Also, subway dancers aren't "aggressive", in my experience at least.
We shouldn't conflate the experience of seeing a big, loud automobile for the first time with the experience of driving or riding in one, which is designed to be so comfortable as to eliminate all sense of danger.
Similarly, once you’ve seen dancers on the subway a few times, you won’t be scared of them — if you ever were in the first place.
There is nothing inherently scary about dancers as compared to cars. Indeed, there are all sorts of good evolutionary reasons to be less scared of dancing humans than of large, heavy, fast-moving objects.
...what did the dancers ever do to you?
Navigating in Penn Station with 20/200 vision is fun.
https://nypost.com/2017/02/23/dancers-attack-straphanger-who...
http://thesource.com/2016/01/13/one-of-the-infamous-showtime...
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20171006/midtown/nypd-polic...
At least in Southern California we have the extra lanes that could be dedicated that.
While busses and bus routes used to be very difficult to parse, compared to the tube map, apps like Citymapper have made them accessible to all. I take the bus often, it's often faster than the tube, and always a more pleasant way to get around.
Citymapper is now launching its own 'smart' bus and Uber-like services, using the mountains of data they have on the door-to-door journies Londerners make to plan smart routes - some that change throughout the day to meet demand. I've used both the busses and the cars and they're both fantastic (the cars take you to your door for a fraction of the price of an Uber, if you're in the right place to catch one).
London has embraced Citymapper and vice-versa and they're doing some really interesting things without disrupting existing services.
Call an Uber and it arrives wherever you are within ten minutes. A bus will arrive within 30-60 minutes — IF you're anywhere close to a bus stop AND it's not after the busses stop (usually some working-class-insultingly early hour like 10pm).
I once nearly got caught in a goddamned tornado because I was stranded in Texas after municipal bus hours. This was in the pre-Uber days; I did try calling a couple taxi services, they said "yes on its way" and didn't arrive after a 90 minute wait.
I know this is kind of an edge case, but as long as busses and municipal light rail don't run 24-hours and cover, well, everywhere, ride share has a place. Even the best bus systems kind of suck and need a lot of work to be an acceptable alternative for most folks.
Buses are a good tool, especially when they're full of commuters, but they can't replace all the benefits of a ride-hailing fleet. Nor will they - many people, myself included, simply prefer to pay more for a taxi/lyft/uber.
Yes, and no.
The less dense an area is, the less effective buses are.
If everyone lived in a dense, urban environment, buses would be great. But they're not useful for large portions of the population, in America at least.
I wish park-and-rides were more common. I'd use that, if it was an option. But for now, I'm not going to walk four miles to take a bus the remaining 15 miles to work.
In most cases, the inverse of this statement is closer to the truth: most 'micro transit' companies have been propped up by government subsidies but have nevertheless constantly lost money on each ride. Here's some good background reading on that point: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-tr...
The people on the buses were horrible.
People blasting loud music without headphones was an almost daily occurrence on my commute. Despite there being signs on the bus explicitly forbidding it. If I was lucky, I'd be sitting close enough to the bus driver that I could discreetly ask the driver to ask the person blasting the music to turn it down. One time, this backfired horribly, because the driver was a racist. He pointed at the first black person he saw and told him to turn off his music. Actually, the guy blasting his music was the white dude two rows behind him, but for the next 10-15 minutes I had to hear the falsely-accused black guy loudly rant about how the driver was a racist POS (and he was right to be pissed... but that didn't help the noise much).
And then there was the time I was riding the express bus down the Tollway while the guy in front of me was violently mentally ill and off his meds. And by "violently", I mean that I tried making small talk to him about the traffic (which was especially bad that day) and he spent the rest of the ride, which ended up being a half hour, loudly threatening to beat the shit out of me, occasionally pausing to demand that someone tell him where his meds are.
Or when I rode to work one day and got to listen to the driver and the passenger sitting next to him talk loudly about how they both love to beat their kids (IIRC, this was the same racist driver from before). I wish I had the sense to use my phone to record their voices. Instead, I just took a picture of them and planned to use it against them later but forgot.
I have a few more stories of people being horrible on the bus, but I think you get the drift.
And then if not for the people, there's the fact that the buses themselves just suck.
I live in Texas. Waiting for ages in the sweltering heat was not an uncommon occurrence. You know what's even worse than that? Waiting for ages in the sweltering heat while on my way to a job interview. I'm sure there were a few jobs I failed to get solely on account of me having half-melted on the way to the interview.
Speaking of job interviews, there's the fact that the bus schedules are so awful that I'd often have a choice of getting to the interview 45 minutes early or getting there 15 minutes late. Since being late to an interview is unacceptable in any circumstance, I'd have to get there 45 minutes early. And these weren't short, breezy trips, either. No, it'd take me a good 1.5 to 2 hours between walking out my front door and getting to the office. A good chunk of that time was waiting for connecting buses. 20 minutes in the sweltering Texas heat on a street corner waiting for Bus 2 or Bus 3 to pick me up. In hindsight, I'm lucky I didn't get those jobs, because my commute would've made me suicidal. The only reasons I accepted those interviews in the first place instead of backing out was because I was unemployed and desperate (2010 and 2011 were objectively the worst years of my life).
Hey, at one job I had two connecting buses with a fairly tight gap between them. I'd get off one bus at a station and hop right on the next one. Awesome, right? No more waiting 20 minutes before my connecting bus, right? Well, that all goes away if my first bus is late. Which happened weekly. First bus being late means I miss the connecting bus, which means I'm standing around the station for an hour before the next bus going my way comes. Which means I need to either tell my boss I'll be late for work or beg one of my coworkers to come pick me up. Great way to make an impression at a new job! To be honest, if I'd been standing around at the bus stop in front of my house long enough, I eventually learned it'd be better to go back in and tell my boss I'll be working from home that day. And, you know, that was an hour commute even when the buses were on time, but it would have been 15 minutes by car. Even in this dream scenario where I don't have to wait for the connecting bus, the bus was still 3-4x slower than going there by car. The rule of thumb is that if it takes me an hour to get to a place without having to wait for a connecting bus, it would only take me 15-20 minutes by car.
Need to go to LabCorp to get my blood taken for an upcoming doctor's appointment? Well, the bus ride there isn't that bad... fairly lengthy, but hey at least it's a single air-conditioned bus from my house to the lab, and I don't have to leave my house until the bus is almost here. The ride back? Well, after I get out of the lab, I open up the bus schedule on my phone, and... it's a 45 minute wait. In the sweltering Texas heat. There's no place around to kill time. It's a medical district. There's no shopping and no places to get food. Just me and the heat and a sidewalk for 45 minutes.
Never again.
Meanwhile, I am already paying one of the highest state and local taxes in the nation. But I'm not complaining about the taxes -- rather, I'm complaining that these dollars don't go very far -- it cost 3.5 BILLION per mile of track(B) because of graft and poor city management.
For those in parts of Brooklyn, looks like the L train will take 15 months to fix. Would anyone take a $100 bet that it finishes on schedule (at 1:1 odds)?
The last time I was in a cab, the driver yelled at me for using an iPhone, accusing me of using Chinese children to assemble them. Somewhat confusingly, he also yelled at me for being Chinese and taking away jobs. I looked up how to report this and it involves showing up in person at a hearing during work hours.
Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway. Even if the ride takes just as long, at least it's quiet and air-conditioned, and I can read or nap. Rather, Uber's major fault seems to be not greasing the politicans' hands like the medallion industry is. The parent article references the book "The Power Broker" when citing traffic. Funny, because it sure seems that Tammany Hall is still around.
(A) The metro card fare is $2.75, but the machine prevents you from putting in exact change -- only $5 increments -- so anyone who visits town usually wastes some fare.
(B) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
There's no doubt there are issues with public transit, but letting the rideshare services run rampant, while being effectively subsidized by the taxpayers roads, etc is no solution either.
>> U.S. ridership is surging, he said — up 37% last year, to 2.6 billion passengers, from 2016.
>> It found that, in U.S. cities, 49% to 61% of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all — or by walking, biking, or public transit.
Given these two notes from the article, Thats alot of extra demand added to road infrastructure. A medallion system makes the ride-share services contribute their share for the increase in wear & tear on infrastructure. Its not perfect, but letting them run wild isnt working either.
Medallion revenue doesn't go to infrastructure though; Gas Tax does though and is an existing way to tax on use. And to counter your point, it's rarely the rider oriented cars, suvs, and minivans that actually wear and tear the streets; it's more likely that they are subsidizing the roads for delivery trucks.
https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
It's important to note that public transit agencies don't pay gas tax, and a large portion of the federal highway fund is diverted to public transit agencies.
Far, far more than $1,500 over the lifetime of a car. The cost of the externalities are more than the cost of gas itself.
https://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2005-09-0...
$0.25/gallon is peanuts. New York (State) consumed ~135 million barrels of gas last year. That's 1.35 billion dollars of gas taxes. (Less in reality, because some commercial uses are exempt from these taxes, or can deduct them as expenses.)
The NY DOT's maintenance budget, alone is ~$4.5 billion USD. Not to mention another $7 billion earmarked for new construction.
Increase the gas taxes to $2.5/gallon, and then I'll agree that road users, in aggregate, are paying their way, instead of freeriding.
> The FY 2018 Executive Budget recommends nearly $11.6 billion for the Department, an increase of $749.1 million over the FY 2017 budget. This year-to-year change primarily reflects new capital investments in transportation infrastructure.
> Preventive Maintenance - Capital Projects Funds - Other $4,428 (million)
[1] https://www.budget.ny.gov/pubs/archive/fy18archive/exec/agen...
(I don't know, so I'm asking. E.g. MTA is known for the opposite.)
They are reasonably efficient stewards of tax dollars. Most of their spending is at least partially federally funded, so they are subject to many layers of audit.
Its inefficiency would actually be a point in favor of shifting costs to direct users of infrastructure - it would incentivise a reduction in use (Of a service provided by an inefficient department.)
[1] Yes, I know, gas taxes are regressive. This issue is a bit more complicated then I let on - but if we were to take a purely market economics approach, I feel that my points stand well.
Ride hailing drivers pay income tax.
If some groceries (Which had to be trucked hundreds of miles to reach my table) became more expensive then other groceries (Which had to be trucked tens of miles to reach my table), I'd be able to discriminate between them, based on their cost, and, through my purchasing decisions, encourage more efficient use of public resources.
Heres what I did find, https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/alb... a per-ride fee. but doenst have a .25/gallon fee
Uber driver pays taxes including whatever is in the gasoline and vehicle insurance and whatnot.
The proper "get off my lawn" way to complain about non-payers of road taxes is to focus on cyclists.
Road wear is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power. Gas tax is proportional to total weight to the first power.
In collisions, the more massive vehicle sustains proportionally less damage. A large truck could completely pulverize an economy car while barely even denting its own grill. Clearly, collision liability insurance should be proportional to a vehicle's mass and its top speed, while own-vehicle insurance should be proportional to speed and inversely proportional to mass.
Uber is not a threat from a road maintenance perspective. It's a question of road capacity used per passenger trip distance. If you measure a road's capacity by vehicle throughput per unit time, a hailed ride can transport 0 to 5 passengers in one vehicle-plus-buffer 60m long. A bus is a longer vehicle, but it still needs a traffic buffer for safe stopping distance much longer than its own length. That bus can transport dozens of passengers with nearly the same road capacity utilization as the car.
What's needed to reduce congestion in car-heavy traffic is robovehicle-to-robovehicle communication, that can automatically negotiate multiple robocars into a train, to reduce the length of empty roadway needed ahead of each one for collision-free travel. The robocars have to agree to brake and accelerate at the same times, in the same amounts. Buses can already accomplish this easily, just by putting all the riders in the same box, and using one driver to control the speed of everyone in it. So the problem really is the ride-hailing driver. Their reflexes are too poor to drive at 60 mph with their front bumper touching the rear bumper of the car ahead.
What a nice reasonable start to a discussion.
>> Road wear is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power. Gas tax is proportional to total weight to the first power.
Great, I didnt argue for a gas tax. You are arguing about road capacity which my original point about 49%-61% more rides out there is in line with. and which is what the much-maligned medallion system aimed to work on (it has its own issues but thats due to not raising the limit with population/demand vs the idea being wrong).
The fairest use tax for roads would be to charge passenger vehicles and road tractors annually, proportional to ("wet weight"/ 2 )^4, and separately charge the semi-trailers attached to the road tractors for each trip, proportional to ( loaded weight / 4 )^4 * trip distance.
Anyone suggesting that bicycles cause any kind of burden to the roads themselves, rather than just to urban traffic patterns and traffic congestion, need a memorable explanation of the fourth-power rule. Which they can read with their remaining eye.~
Given that any additional taxes will be passed on to ride share users, why should taxpayers subsidize private car ownership but not use of the roads by ride share users?
A blanket congestion tax feels more fair to me.
We as a society have decided that it's best for all of us is we collectively eat the cost of letting people use certain resources as much as they want at low/no cost or at a cost not proportional to usage. Roads are one of these resources.
Increasing the cost of transportation basically increases the cost of physical distance. That's a needless drag on the economy in every way and at every level. It's better to just keep filling potholes and ignore the people who grumble about it than it is to enact any sort of pay-per-use system that actually results in the roads being approximately self sustaining. Transportation infrastructure is publicly funded/subsidized for a reason.
But we decided this based on the idea that those that use the roads for profit will pay extra as they are making income off a public resource
https://taxfoundation.org/state-road-funding-2017/
That means that Rideshare drivers are largely paying their fair share.
It also shows that 38% of CA's road funding comes from sources not tied to motor vehicle use (meaning sales taxes, income taxes, etc). The median US state (NH at 25 and ID at 26 derive only 48% of their road budget from road user fees. IMO, that means rideshare drivers are far from paying their fair share.
The biggest issue is that there is plenty of taxpayer money but it's not being used well at all, hence the strong demand for these other transport options. Ask why the local government cant manage some proper rail and bus lines instead.
Every time someone wants to argue against anything involving a road, they pull out this "roads are subsidized" canard. The state actually recovers most of the costs through gas taxes, registration fees, insurance requirements, and tolls, all of which rideshare drivers (and therefore riders) pay for -- and don't forget the income tax. If someone's activities are costing the state money (which I doubt) the correct response is to tax them -- not ban what they're doing or introduce artificial limitations on supply.
Sounds like you should take that up with Gov. Cuomo, who's completely washed his hands off of overseeing the MTA, as he's supposed to do.
The good news is that he's up for re-election on Thursday.
So, in a sense, ride-sharing never really went away.
...But, in a car-based society, this won't happen until your entire city is a single level surface of pavement. There is no way to get the required efficiency out of a system where one person usually takes up a full 6'-by-10' lot of street space, and where speed is limited by the inherent dangers of having multi-ton masses of steel and aluminum passing within feet of pedestrians. Self driving cars might up throughput by a factor of two; I'd estimate we need about a factor of a hundred before we can call the problem solved.
This doesn't seem correct to me. If I can ride my bike or walk somewhere, I will do that pretty much every time. The only time I ever consider an Uber or Lyft is if the distance is too far to bike, and I would rather not drive for whatever reason. I know this is just one anecdote, but that seems like quite a bold claim from the article, and a claim that doesn't match up at all with the reality of how I and others I know use the services.
If you chase this back to the working paper, they received 4,094 completed responses from 5 major urban/suburban areas.
Those are valid numbers.
But I'd say that most folks I work with have a reflex to get an Uber when they're going any distance at all.
Sometimes I need to go across the usual lines of the subway / bus traffic, and any reasonable route would have 2 transfers and be circuitous. Or maybe I'm carrying a couple of heavy bags from an airport. In cases like these I'd hail a car. Such cases are not frequent, but being able to hail a car at such moments is very convenient.
Going westbound on Golden Gate st around Fillmore is one of the weirdest thing I've ever seen. You can see entire lines of double parked cars with no drivers inside (sometimes on both sides of the road!)
Then you also have the way-too-small MUNI bus stops where the bus has to double park (e.g. along Fulton), the delivery vans and the random dudes waiting for a parking spot to hopefully free up somewhere in the block.
Even without considering Ubers, driving in SF is already a shitshow...
That one's probably because of the McDonalds.
Many analyses of traffic have shown that individual drivers can cause huge downstream traffic effects. When you see an Uber driver just stop at a corner at a major intersection, there can be 10-15 cars slowed by having to wait or go around.
Biking around SF has made me very wary of certain car models popular for Uber. If I see a Prius I assume it could stop anywhere at any time.
Even with all that ... These services may still be a net positive. I use them a lot on the weekends and would never be able to get around the city like I do without them.
If the Uber is getting back-to-back trips, they're probably driving more efficiently on average.
I have never taken a rideshare pool, and NYC is just about the last place I'd consider doing so.
Your hypothesis is a good one imo.
If I ride the bus to meet someone for dinner and I get there everything will start fine. What eventually happens after dinner is that person will invite me to some other place and they'll want to get there as soon as possible. Responding with "oh, I'm trying only use public transit so I'll meet you in a bit" causes a bit of friction. It's normal to expect people to be somewhere in a certain amount of time now because of ride sharing. The convenience of it is almost like texting. "Why aren't you here yet? Can't you just Uber or Lyft?" / "Why haven't you responded to my text? Why don't you have your phone on you?"
I also wonder if people used to go out on dates and not drink in that scenario? Or would only one person drink? Double dates? Hrmmm.
It's highly plausible that people are choosing rideshares over public transit / walking / biking, leading to an overall increase. It's believable. But to truly assess it we need to deduct the old taxi system. With no mention of that and no link to the source study it's hard to tell if they did.
If only the trains weren't breaking down, signals weren't needing repair, there wasn't a mid 60 percent on-time rating at present. If only the train service wasn't cut so viciously weekends. If only subways themselves weren't filled with miscreants, behaving rudely by playing music on their phones, bringing bikes, etc. If the subway platforms weren't 100 degrees F during the summer, when the next train is 10 minutes away. If only the buses were an alternative, instead of being beset by slow traffic thanks to bicycle lanes, double parking that's not ticketed, construction vehicles, and parking on both sides of the street.
Then I'd be open to being concerned about the fact that I'm contributing to "traffic congestion" by taking Lyft and Uber (mostly Lyft) about 5x or more a week.
We're one of the most expensive cities in the country, and our public transit system is pretty decent. I commuted using it exclusively for over 10 years.
5 years ago it would be insane to hear a college student say they've never taken a train here. Maybe it's the combination of low Uber prices and high housing expenses? I feel like the local student population has been becoming wealthier (because they have to come from richer families to afford housing)... and Uber pool pricing is generally within $1-2 of a non-discounted trip on a train.
Via is an on-demand transit system that takes multiple
passengers heading in the same direction and books them
into a shared vehicle. Think of Via as a bus that’s smart
enough to come when you want it and where you want it...
and
Isn't this what last mile inevitably does? If a part of town is walkable, it doesn't decrease street traffic; If it's bikeable - or scooterable, it doesn't decrease those vehicles.
Yes, this is induced demand; which is why this information shouldn't be used to make more highways or lanes. Indeed; a large part of the negative traffic impact from rideshare is probably lack of suitable drop off curb space.
As a driver who's lived in SF for a long time I've seen first hand the terrible impact these services have had to the city. They clog streets and disregard any and all traffic laws. Just yesterday an Uber driver made a left turn from the middle lane on Hyde street. He backed up traffic as he refused to move until someone let him make his illegal turn. He was the recipient of a lot of honks.
His response? Gave everyone the finger after he finally made his left hand turn. Lovely. He should lose his license, period. In the days before these services existed cab drivers were petrified of getting in trouble. Many Uber/Lyft drivers are modern day lawless pirates.
A modern medallion system driven by traffic/ridership data with as little chance for corruption as possible would be the best answer to these problems. Uber/Lyft as they exist today cannot be allowed to continue if we value quality of life/safety.
The situation is exactly the opposite. The taxi licensed taxi cartel have no fear of blocking traffic, speeding, making illegal turns, parking in bus stops or anything else because they are a licensed taxi. They refuse to take any rides that don't suit their plans because there is more demand than taxi licensed so if you need a taxi from downtown to suburban neighborhoods you might wait 2-3 hours until you get a willing driver or just end up taking the bus.
Uber/Lyft drivers on the other hand are very respectfully following the rules of the road because if they cause undue attention someone will report them and they'll be fined, and they don't have the money of the taxi cartel behind them to pay the fine for them.
There's no regulatory body preventing me from getting into the car I purchased. It makes no sense whatsoever to suggest that suddenly we need regulation simply because I rented the car in a particular way instead of driving it myself.
The regulations that matter with respect to taxi services are those that protect consumers -- there is no basis for using regulation to limit a consumer's access to the service.
The 1st question my wife and I ask with regards to Uber is generally, "Will we be able to park?"
In Cincinnati, the public transit system is terrible. The buses don't run on schedule, our light rail route is incredibly short. I use ride sharing services here a lot more as a result.
Even if we do move traffic into public transit systems, that isn't going to magically shrink the costs of DOT departments around the nation. We'll just be subsidizing something else.
As the price of a service decreases, consumption increases. So, we should expect that more people are taking taxi rides that would otherwise commute in different ways (e.g. walking or taking the bus). If we extrapolate to self-driving cars where the cost comes down by about 2/3, it is easy to see a tragedy of the commons situation where roads in major cities are saturated with vehicles.
This is where government intervention is required. This can be done either through limiting vehicle permits (which NYC introduced) or other forms of taxes (e.g. congestion taxes).
Many people 'aren't even from the bay area' and drive in; hell they even take up space in the bay area to store their car when it's not in use!
All employers within San Francisco pay a large amount of taxes to the city for each employee. Those taxes more than pay for the cost of road use of their employees.
Thank you.
There are solutions which would better fit the problem: congestion pricing for peak hours or non-residents, pollution surcharge for non-EV ride share vehicles, surcharge for non-pool/line rides.
The status quo is to publicize the congestion and pollution and risk and privatize the profits.
make public transit
The only thing it seems likely to reduce is the amount of parking spaces and idle vehicles in storage, less vehicle ownership.
But now everyone, even those without cars or even driver's licenses, are just a smartphone app away from having a car shuttle them around for even the most trivial of distances. When you make something more convenient and accessible, it gets utilized more.
A funny thing about the prospect of self-driving cars: what about the people who used to be in the driver's seats? I suppose some percentage of those will instead be passengers in the future - oops, even more cars on the road!