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Comment by nickles | Hacker News Reader

> It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars

>> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043

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I don't think the effect has been definitively proven one way or the other. While there are studies showing a decrease in congestion, there are also several showing a notable increase too[0][1].

I can say, anecdotally, in SF there are lots of Uber/Lyft drivers who drive in from outside of the city (and even Bay Area) because they can make more driving in the city. If they disappeared, would they be replaced by an equal or greater number of private cars? Given the parking situation in SF, I doubt it, but who can say.

[0]https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/study-half-of-sfs-increase-i... [1]http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf

A quick google gave me this: https://uber.asu.edu/ . I would be more confident if the paper was issued by an entity with no economic ties with Uber.

It appears the paper was published two years before the partnership began. There's also no disclosure in the paper that Uber provided any funding (for whatever that's worth).

[0] https://asunow.asu.edu/20181031-asu-news-uber-and-asu-partne...

The report came out in August of 2016, so the data must be from before then. The next question would be, what has happened to Uber ridership levels over that same timeframe?

According to this article [1], combined Uber and Lyft ridership in NYC was about 200,000/day in July 2016 (the most recent possible date for the original data). By July 2018, daily ridership was almost 600,000.

Is possible that Uber/Lyft lower congestion when first introduced, but worsen it over the long-run?

[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-rid...

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