First analysis of how Uber and Lyft have affected roadway congestion in SF
sfcta.org
sfcta.org
That said, public transport is often a last mile problem. How do you get to and from the node, with a baby, in bad weather etc. Public transport is far from ideal and TNCs fill the gap willingly.
TNCs fill the gap so easily by piggybacking off the Auto Lobby. If we had more, denser public transport coupled with reliable safe bike lanes (heck sometimes the whole sidewalk is missing...) public would be much more attractive.
Though reaching “profitability” is not really a focus for them until automated vehicles are ready to replace the humans on the road.
Is this location based? I'm in the UK and my recent trips with Uber have cost around the same as a standard taxi and nowhere near as cheap as a bus would have cost.
My experience is that they're about 10-20% more expensive on short local trips, but about 20-30% cheaper on medium distance trips, where Uber drivers have the benefit of not having to return to the area where their company operates from.
In other words as you make transport more desirable, available, and affordable - congestion will increase. The natural retort against this is public transport, but route/time restrictions as well as other passengers will always pose a limit on both the desirability and availability of public transport, though it certainly tends to nail the third criteria at least.
I wonder how many people who can’t afford a vehicle but don’t want to deal with public transit would leave SF if ride sharing was banned outright.
How I wish that were true. Certainly it can be depending on whether it is Prime Time and some other variables, but generally taking a shared Lyft or even a private one, MUNI is more like 1/2 to 1/4 the cost.
Now the thing working against a shared Lyft is if a trip on the bus to my destination will take 30 minutes, a shared ride will be about 20 or 25, so for my use case I’m almost always calling a private car except when time isn’t a factor but overall comfort is.
That is to say, it isn’t cheap, but it is competitive if you’re willing to pay a tiny bit extra for a much more comfortable ride. That said I still try to stick to public transit when possible, except when time is a factor and I can’t rely on the bus.
If you can't deal with "the SF public", then you have no place living in SF.
Also, there are other things which have improved too. Such as less drunk driving, improved safety especially when traveling at nights, predictability vs. taxis etc.
I'm amazed that Uber is considered an affordable commute device. Is that a SV phenomenon ?
At this point, you have no argument but probably are just pissed that families are co-habiting your preferred non-family only city space.
Get a life and do something with it.
Here's a super ball park monthly cost breakdown:
- Car payment: $250
- Parking: $200
- Insurance: $85 (~$500 every 6 months)
- Gas: $50
- Registration: $40 (~$500+ a year)
- Saving for maintenance: $50 (assuming $600 a year, which is probably low)
That's super super napkin math, but that's almost $700 a month for a car, which is basically the same as $30 each work day for a month. On top of that, you don't have to deal with the hassle of parking in a city, which has to be worth something.
My comment was basically in support of using Uber for regular transportation as it costs about the same as owning a car. At the end I even mentioned that Uber only might be easier because you don't have to worry about parking.
If I'm reading your comment correctly, you are also in favor of an Uber only lifestyle because it allows you more time with your kids, saves you time, and you don't have to deal with parking (which I also mentioned).
If that's the case, I think we're on the same side.
I live in the rust belt, which is probably the worst environment for vehicles. I buy new, keep cars for 6 years or so, and I spend very little on maintenance. New vehicles simply don't require much to keep running well.
Also, $40 a month for registration? Most places are $50-$100 a year. Is California that much more?
If both rides are around $15 on average, than you get an afvantage.
In which case owning the car is a no brainier because of the personal freedom and massive amount of inconvenience it affords. If you want to go on a road trip or eat taco bell at 1AM you can do that for just the price of gas (though you probably shouldn't do the latter because odds are if you want Taco bell at 1AM you're also stoned out of your mind and unfit to drive).
Even in Toronto, which has some of the highest daycare costs in Canada, it was only $1,500/month. Aftercare at the school is $800/month. I'm very fortunate to make a good living so I can afford such things but even I balk at the idea of taking a daily Uber to drop my kid off.
You should really read your post from the perspective of the working poor and think about what you're saying from a position of privilege.
And this is hacker news. I am reasonably sure that we aren't representing working poor here but mostly well paid and skilled professionals.
You're out of your mind if you think most people with children are paying $3k a month for child care. $3k a month is the entire income for a minimum wage couple with a child isn't it? I don't think your experience is typical.
Just the cost of registering a car in CA buys you a lot of Uber rides. Then there's parking and maintenance (the HN demographic is taking their cars to the dealer, not down the street to the neighbor who fixes cars as a side gig) and the fact most people rich enough to afford to use Uber every day are comparing to the payments on a Tesla, not a one time purchase of an old Civic.
It's an upper-class phenomenon that's exacerbated by some SV and CA specific economic circumstances.
The fact that child restraints are not required on public transport (which is itself mysterious) makes it preferable to car transit, for our family.
Why would they use such a terrible data source. I had always assumed the cars in the Uber map are indicative anyway, not the actual location. Uber gives trip data to cities why not get real data
So if I can’t get there by walking, busing, train, or biking in wide open spaces, I’m just not going because damn, people in cars sure do act entitled to the spaces where I’m supposed to be and think nothing of swinging that two ton block of deadly metal around in ways that may smear their paint but could injure or kill me with little effort.
In New York (well, Manhattan), London and Paris it would work even better because you have a subway.
That would also solve the air quality problems of those cities in one fell swoop.
* Gas scooters - particularly two-stroke - are a relic from the past and need to be banned.
These things look pretty amazing. https://www.gogoro.com
That said the regulation does sounds a bit overbearing
The problem is simple. People need access to the roadways in a fashion that grows linearly to low exponentially. But the capacity of the roadway capacity stays constant with an occasional constant bump. Even if you suddenly toss every single driver on a scooter, it's just one of those constant time bumps. You'll eventually bump into the exact same problem of a constant road capacity against an increasing roadway access demand.
You need a way of linearly, and indefinitely, increasing traffic capacity, not one-off constant value work-arounds.
Recently Supervisor Peskin apparently reached a deal to impose a "net fares" tax on the TNC's. I wonder if they will consider differentiating it by neighborhood: imposing larger charges downtown. Peskin has also lobbied for downtown congestion pricing although that is harder to implement, politically and technologically, than such a tax.
Politically, sure. The idea has been floating around for at least a decade that I know of, and probably longer.
Technologically? License plate readers on every intersection, let's say, for the sake of argument, every intersection along Van Ness and South Van Ness going east, and every intersection along Folsom going Northwest. Maybe put the northern boundary at about Washington Street and also have readers at off-ramps. Maybe give people driving along the Embarcadero a free pass though and set the Eastern boundary there. Every car that enters this section of the City has their plate read, and you either pay with FasTrack or get a bill in the mail at the end of the month. If you live in this part of the City, you can apply for a waiver, oh and since we're reading plates and doing a DMV lookup for the address, the City could even charge extra if the vehicle is commuting in from outside the City. Actually, taking that into consideration, you wouldn't even need to apply for a waiver, any vehicle registered to an address within this zone simply wouldn't be charged.
In fact, to make this more interesting, if someone calls a Lyft or Uber to an address within that zone, you could have them collect a surcharge which will be paid directly to the City.
The technical challenge isn't very hard, actually kind of boring, I think the bureaucratic challenge is a bit harder once you get through the political challenge, which is the real hurdle. That is a potentially large source of revenue for the SFMTA though, between the tolls, the surcharges, and the additional monthly passes sold.
With respect to congestion, there is definitely a problem that so many rides leave the driver somewhere other than where they'd want to be. Taking rides to and from dinner is one thing, because those trips balance out pretty well. Using a TNC as a commute alternative is quite another thing, because everyone wants to go one way in the morning and the other way in the afternoon, leaving every car occupied only half the time. Even worse, the effect is most concentrated in exactly the places people least want to drive themselves because of the pre-existing congestion. Every bad place gets worse.
I don't know of any solution that others aren't already likely to mention, but it's definitely a problem looking for a better solution.
Would people instead have purchased cars and driven them around instead? Would we actually have had higher congestion?
Publishing reports like these without controlling for the economy/jobs/popularity of these cities seems to me to be an unfair attack on Uber/Lyft, where the real culprit might just be a strong economy.
I think these estimates pass the sniff test at least. Downtown SF has very little parking relative to demand, so Uber / Lyft are practically the only way to get there in a car.
Why do you need to get there in a car?
I use Muni and Caltrain.
So, wait... Your argument is that there is a natural disincentive to go downtown with a car, unless one uses Uber or Lyft... But you also somehow doubt that the car traffic that is downtown has been caused by Uber and/or Lyft?
So is everyone an idiot because they just drive around downtown, give up, and go home? Or they aren't in on this Uber/Lyft secret that nobody has heard about?
Or... And I'm just spit-balling here... Maybe you just argued against yourself very effectively.
My friends/coworkers who got jobs in the city directly after college all don't have cars. Think 2013-2018 graduates. The only ones with cars, either grew up in the bay, or have worked outside the city at some point. Mind you these are all people who have a license in their prior state/country.
The study very likely threw some more statistical tests, controls And models at it, but that's the gist.
Not an unexpected rresult either: personal vehicle use means the car is on the road twice per day, uber twice per passenger and the distance between passengers.
Your question is answered on page 15 (How Do We Determine the Causes of Changes in Congestion?) of the report you are happy to debunk so eagerly.
Link (PDF): https://www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/content/Planning/T...
I think real issue here is that road usage is mispriced. Singapore does it well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Road_Pricing.
A tax on just ride hailing is mad. They are cheaper than owning your own vehicle, in part, due to real efficiencies in terms of maintenance and depreciation. Why on earth would anyone want to incentivise individual car ownership?
The problem is not that roads are too cheap but that the alternatives are too expensive in terms of time, money and quality. Making what is the most effective (all things considered) transit option for a huge chunk of the population more expensive just hurts everyone. It's like raising prices on bandwidth in order to reduce network congestion. The solution is more capacity. That capacity doesn't need to be for cars but you need to add capacity.
I don't in principle have a problem with bandwidth being priced according to congestion. What we have instead is rationing.
You could make road pricing approximately revenue neutral by reducing fuel and vehicle excise duty.
Road traffic is a particularly good case for variable pricing because there is a discontinuity in traffic jam likelihood versus cars on the road - essentially, roads get full at a certain point, so the marginal cost of extra cars increases rapidly as it approaches that level.
This would encourage traffic to spread across more of the network, deliveries to happen at off-peak times, the 9-5 work cycle to be relaxed, pollution to be spread out more evenly across the day (to times when people aren't walking around).
So, for clarity: I'm saying make it cheaper to use the roads sometimes, and more expensive at other times.
I agree. That is why this report is so good. The section "How Do We Determine the Causes of Changes in Congestion?" covers this question.
" this time to systematically estimate the individual contributions to changes in roadway congestion of the factors of transportation network supply change, population change, employment change, and TNCs."
I agree that they have done a good job and that the conclusion that Uber/Lyft contributes to congestion increase is very valid and should be considered to take actions in the city.