Study finds ride-sharing intensifies urban road congestion
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
Why is Uber called ride sharing? It never was. Okay, maybe in the beginning there were actual people taking extra passengers now and then, but considering drivers are treated like employees now (which means they spend significant time ferrying passengers back and forth), it's just a smarter taxi service.
Ride sharing would be when a group of people with the same destination share one car instead of taking one car per person. Which is not Uber, not Lyft.
Real ride sharing would indeed reduce traffic. Taxis... why would they? At best they reduce parking lot congestion.
You must be an outlier, everyone I know including me just uses it like a taxi where you don't have to explain on the phone where you want to be picked up from and where you want to go (and where you know how much you'll pay when ordering).
The fact that they don't want to label themselves as taxis doesn't make them any less taxis.
In my experience in Ukraine and Poland over the years there's been only a few times when it was a company offering transportation. For the most part it's a private person travelling anyway and picking up people to cover the fuel cost.
In my eyes it's the 21st century hitchhiking, as you get the safety of knowing passengers ahead of time (and some degree of screening by the app itself), but still just go wherever you were going.
That said, the cows are already out of the barn and have been for years now. We probably can't get this new understanding of the term out of the vernacular anymore, so I guess we'll have to make do with an important conversation topic now being permanently confusing.
The same in Berlin, Oslo and Barcelona, at least that has been my experience with Uber since 2017 in numerous cities around here.
Since anyone is free to run a taxi business in anywhere Sweden as long as they fulfill the base requirements the whole "ride-sharing" angle to get around medallion systems and what not does not apply here. For now Bolt has completely eaten Ubers cake and is the largest taxi app in Sweden.
News about the conclusion of it in Swedish: https://www.breakit.se/artikel/15246/skattesmall-for-uber-i-...
Edit: Flaunting -> Flouting.
I think you meant "flouting".
We did a study for a major university after it found a huge increase in traffic volumes within its main entry “plaza”, and an associated logjam that radiated from there. A large proportion of that traffic was due to ride-sharing drivers circulating in and around the plaza waiting for passengers.
The university built a dedicated ride-sharing area nearby and prohibited ride-sharing services from the plaza. This largely solved the problems (although enforcement is an ongoing issue).
Ride-sharing absolutely can cause local increases in congestion if nothing is done to accommodate it. However, it’s a modern reality, so planners who don’t accommodate it aren’t doing their jobs.
Ride-sharing is when I'm intending to drive somewhere, have spare capacity in my vehicle, and offer that space (at a price, potentially) to other people. A high degree of ride-sharing would almost certainly decrease congestion by making more efficient use of vehicle capacity.
Uber and Lyft are essentially app-enabled taxi services. It's not surprising that putting a huge number of extra taxis on the road can increase congestion as drivers congregate in the areas with most potential fares.
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[0] - As you say, Uber and Lyft, and their predecessors and successors, are just that - a different flavor of taxi services. Slightly leaner, at the cost of worse guarantees for certain service types where old-school taxis were bound by regulations, but otherwise pretty much the same thing.
If I take my own car to work, the car is only on the road between my house and my office. If I take a taxi, at the very least you'll have to add the distance the taxi drove to pick me up, as well as the distance driven to pick the next customer up. There is no way around that, and any argument that taxi services (whether with actual taxis, or by the driver's personal cars) somehow reduce traffic is complete nonsense.
That's not even mentioning the fact that a number of people are now going to take a taxi instead of public transport, further increasing the number of cars.
I'm a not a traffic planner, so I'm not certain if things play out this way in reality - but it sounds plausible.
A different topic is that taxis unfortunately compete with mass transit too much these days. For example, in my hometown of Kraków - known in Poland for having a very good public transit system - the situation in recent years[0] evolved to a point in which, for 2+ people traveling further than a bus or tram will go in 20 minutes, it's cheaper[1] to travel in one of these VC-subsidized app-taxis! Given the economics of mass transit, I worry this is not the kind of competition that will lead to improvements of service - instead, it'll lead to further degradation of the bus and tram networks, in a positive feedback loop.
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[0] - I noticed it around 2019, so it's not a COVID-related phenomenon, though the pandemic did a lot of work to cement it, as well as reversing the ongoing efforts to remove car traffic from the city center.
[1] - Unless you're a citizen/regular, and pay a monthly pass. I'm currently neither.
And yet, prior to Uber and Lyft, I would hesitate to call a taxi for my worst enemy due to all of them smelling like smoke, being old dumpy cars, and having questionable drivers. After Uber/Lyft, I can remotely order a car for my grandparents who don’t speak English and they can get to me in a nice clean car with no issues.
Taxis outside of urban cores in a few US cities were a terrible experience prior to Uber/Lyft, they clearly brought something to the table.
If I understand correctly, that's what taxi medallions are. Many respond with outrage about anything that limits ride-sharing, but they are taking my road space, which my tax dollars pay for.
The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion and charge regardless of vehicle type.
The last thing you want to do is charge ride sharers and not single commuters, which are much worse.
Agreed, the negative effects of air pollution, noise pollution and car dependency are mostly borne by the poor.
Increasingly inequality is of course something we should be mindful of when designing policy though.
If you want to charge for use of a resource, to discourage over-use, and only to raise enough to fund production of more of that resource, it's entirely irrelevant that it's "regressive" (which is a very loaded term), because it is not the main source of government revenue, and people benefit from the expenditure of the funds raised by the tax directly in proportion to how much they are taxed.
If the objective is to use the tax as a proxy to tax general utilization of public infrastructure and services, then yes, it would be inappropriate to choose a tax on an activity that is a poor proxy, e.g. an activity that the poor engage in out of proportion to their general use of public infrastructure and services.
> Poor people pay a larger proportion of their income and wealth on such tolls
And every other basic good. This doesn’t mean much.
> Also transport costs - or, more specifically, commute times - interact with house prices.
Yes, but as it stands the cheap road use is subsidizing mega commutes, which is broken.
> Poor people often have to travel longer and further for work, increasing the tax they have to pay even on an absolute basis.
And they often don’t too. We don’t need to be subsidizing mega commutes as a society. It shouldn’t make sense to travel for 90 minutes each way for a $20/hr job.
Making these jobs more expensive for the employer is a good thing. Either they will raise the wage because they lost all employees or they will just hire locals instead which is better for the environment.
Car commuters into the central business districts are a much smaller, wealthier group. Free roads act more as a subsidy for this group, while the masses, including almost all poor people, cram onto insufficient public transport. A bus carrying 240 people being stuck behind a line of wealthy car commuters alone in their vehicles is not a picture of equity.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/10/24/de-blasios-wrong-poor...
Paying cash isn’t even an option anymore.
There’s also some interoperability- my Texas TollTag works in Oklahoma and one or two other states so it’s all consolidated with the lower rate. Those with TollTag accounts pay a lower rate on toll roads as it acts more like a gift card than a bill, it just autoreloads each time your balance gets low.
Another cool thing is that some parking garages can read your TollTag if you let them to open the gate for you. It doesn’t bill you, it just acts as an access card if you have a standing agreement with the garage owner (you can see this at UT Austin for permit holders).
"True" progressives here would prefer to ban cars in the inner cites completely (or at least the non-electric ones), but most of the moderately progressive and liberal are content to put a high tax on roads and petrol (and new cars too).
Cars fueled by fossils are seen as symbols of anti-environmentalism, pro americanized consumerism and an unnecessary luxery (for the non-disabled), and particularily so in the cities. Car lovers are almost as bad as Trump supporters, in the eyes of progressives here.
Here is one of the most iconic progressives in the country posing with her electic cargo bicycle (with the kid inside), in a news story promoting massive increases in parking taxes in Oslo:
https://e24.no/privatoekonomi/i/X8w2zg/mdg-lan-og-oslobyraad...
People are expected to take the train/tram/subway/bus when they can, and if necessary, park at the train station after delivering the kids to school/daycare. (If they cannot use an electric bike, as in the story above).
In order to ensure there is no regressive aspect, disabled (including many elderly) are subsidised. Also, electric cars are not taxed, and 53% of new cars sold last year were electric. (Teslas are everywhere).
So if you want to show everyone you are a good progressive, you should support toll roads, and if you can, take the bus. :)
Right; road capacity is a scarce resource. There isn't an unlimited amount available.
> The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion
Sure, modern tech allows more flexible pricing than periodic capacity auctions. However, I wonder if it allows long-term investment, given that tomorrow your capacity could effectively disappear.
> and charge regardless of vehicle type
That ends up being regressive taxation. Public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. I absolutely oppose effectively restricting poor people from the roads in parts of the city - and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood? Can they pull out of their parking spot?
> bullshit
Well if you put it that way ...
“Regressive taxation” is a term for people paying what something costs. Carbon taxes are also a “regressive taxation” as well as sales tax, alcohol tax, etc.
Public resources are public goods, but they are rivalrous. If you don’t make people pay in a fair manner, you’ve just implemented government rations which incentivize all kinds of stupid shit (illegal taxi services for one).
> and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood?
If they can’t afford it then they don’t drive. It’s that simple.
The complexity only comes from trying to solve poverty (“oh, but that’s regressive”) at the same time as trying to solve a specific issue. Just give poor people cash stipends for transportation if transporting the poor is the problem you want to tackle. Then they can choose if they want to spend it on bus fares or use it towards ride shares, biking, whatever.
Prescriptive “there shall be 10 taxis for the people and they will enjoy them and no more” laws have basically never had good outcomes. Hedge funds paying millions of dollars to analysts with mountains of data have difficulty predicting market demand trends, there isn’t a chance in hell some bureaucrat is going to correctly balance a market.
The reason why politics doesn't work is that people aren't interested in solving the problem, they just want some kickbacks. The end result is a "fair" but dysfunctional society.
There are two separate problems. One is insufficient road capacity at time X for Y number of vehicles of size Z. You can adjust X, Y, or Z, all with the use of variable tolling.
Platitudes such as “public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay” will not solve congestion.
A second problem might be there are too many people in society too poor to be able to make use of a fair amount of limited resources, such as road capacity. This is a separate problem, and can be solved by giving poorer people money so they can pay to use the roads at peak times.
Calling it a platitude doesn't address that critical issue; it does suggest you don't know how else to address it?
Paved roads are required when there is a lot of traffic, but all the uses you named are a fraction of road uses.
> I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free
That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.
Also, you do use the roads all the time even if you don't drive yourself. Your hair stylist uses them to get to work, your groceries get to the store, your customers come to your store, etc. etc. Imagine your situation if there were no roads.
> (semi-)public transportation
It's a private, for-profit company.
This isn't quite true. If Uber charged more to increase profit, they would lose more customers to competitors who didn't increase their prices.
Taxes can increase costs for (some of) those competitors as well. In that scenario, prices could rise to absorb the tax and there would be less relative change between competitors.
This is important for incentivising 'societal values', e.g. reducing pollution, increasing public health, etc.; either directly by discouraging people from choosing single-occupier taxis like Uber in favour of e.g. trains and buses; or indirectly by causing companies to compete on reducing their harm (and thereby avoiding the tax).
I don't have specific examples to hand, but I recall some companies advocating for such taxes (e.g. a carbon tax), since they want to make bigger improvements, but doing so individually would make them uncompetitive.
It absolutely is in the long run. Reduced margin means fewer competitors and subsequently higher sustained costs for riders. There is little barrier to entry in the “rideshare” market so as long as high margins exist competitors will keep entering with cheaper prices to eat at the margin.
There is no scenario in a competitive market where an input cost is not reflected in the output cost of a good/service.
A natural law of wealth accumulation dictates that as trade continues the players with more wealth already, are increasingly more likely to get even more wealth at the cost of those with less. At time of hardship you would expect the less wealthy players to loose the business which eventually concentrates the industry to 2-5 players through acquisition or bankruptcy. Taxation is actually a way to counter this phenomena by means of redistribution.
EDIT: To clarify the above is only true if industries are competing for customers against each other. While a market is growing the growth of one player does not necessarily come at the cost of another. However at some point the market will be saturated and businesses new customers are exponentially more likely to come from a competitor rather then new to the market. At this point the premise holds true.
I am forced to pay taxes for the roads since you can't possibly fund all of the rodes solely by taxing ride-sharing companies.
> Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true.
Eh. Economics is not an exact science so there is no way for me to prove it to you. If you don't believe in that (and have another reason why iPhones are more expensive in higher taxed countries) then let's leave that.
> That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.
Then why not subsidize cars, or better yet, offer a free car per citizen? In fact, "we" decided that we should tax cars and maybe we should also tax car usage (gas, roads, pollution, ...).
> Your hair stylist uses them to get to work [...] Imagine your situation if there were no roads.
There should be roads. And private drivers shouldn't get out of paying for them.
> It's a private, for-profit company.
Taxis are private and for profit, yet they are considered public transportation.
> Then why not subsidize cars, or better yet, offer a free car per citizen? In fact, "we" decided that we should tax cars and maybe we should also tax car usage (gas, roads, pollution, ...).
OK, why or why not? Are you proposing something?
> There should be roads. And private drivers shouldn't get out of paying for them.
They do pay, via their taxes, which is the generally appropriate way to fund public goods.
Because we live in a society.
I disagree, not necessarily, and probably not in the case of unnecessary personal transportation (which is most of it). Everyone in society profits from fire fighters or hospitals, even when they don't need either just this instance. That's not the same for some luxury that some/most people enjoy and want everyone to fund.
> Arguing that people should not have personal transportation is arguing that "we" have the right to dictate people's lifestyles to them.
And we do, and we don't consider that an issue. People shouldn't have personal nuclear bombs, even though some would like to. Also, few people are arguing that personal transportation shouldn't exist, just that the required infrastructure should be funded differently.
I agree that there is a lot of work to be done to rebalance the equations on how we spend money on roads, public transit, and various forms of energy subsidies. But all else being equal, getting that balance "right" is not going to make personal transit just go away. Some will shift to public transit, but you will always have a case of "your tax money" going to pay for roads used by private transit.
The only thing ride sharing reduces is parking requirements, unless the ride sharing is truly carpooling.
Are they? They only drive in one direction park and then drive the same route back. No need to go from customer to customer, no need to "circulate" waiting for a customer. The only miles a commuter drives is the miles he has to drive, not a single mile more. I always thought the "your car is idle 99% of the time" statistics are meaningless, yes it's idle, it's idle exactly where and when I want it, there is zero waste.
Of course there are problems with cars, but they also apply to "ridesharing" as well.
People in the US absolutely loathe the idea of being taxed based on license plate scanners. The combination of automation, surveillance, and taxation is basically toxic across the political spectrum.
I’ve seen cop cars outfitted on all corners with license plate scanners driving around. I even saw parking enforcement cars outfitted with them to track which cars were spending too much time parked in spots with time limits.
People are used to surveillance in law enforcement to some extent. Once you tell them it's a tax agency, they lose their minds. I have participated in large-scale, state-funded studies that have shown this.
Has as little chance as dynamic tolling because there's a loud swing vote who wants their road trips and commutes paid from the public coffers.
No, it's not. Maybe at 8/gal. But cars still expand to fill all available road space, parking on the sidewalks, and generally demanding that their needs are accounted for first.
why is that bullshit, it might create artificial scarcity of taxi services but it helps prevent the kind of congestion that this article discusses.
Being a car owner really warps the mind in a bizarre way in terms of the entitlement most people seem to feel about their own use of public space and how they justify deserving to use it more than others.
If it was set up as an yearly auction, that would work okay.
Free Market Capitalism actually designs markets for optimal allocation. Can be recognized by operating anti-monopoly yearly or so auctions.
When people complain about today's capitalism, they actually complain about feudalism. Yet the aristocratic rentiers they actually hate hide behind the productive capitalists, which leaves people confused. The real parasite successfully conceals its presence.
It doesn't help that most transit agencies are run by people who drive and so they won't use their limited budget to make something as good as possible.
No idea why you are getting downvoted!
As long as you use a taxi from a well known established company you can expect a high level of service. On the whole taxis are plentiful and cheap.
This is obviously a terrible idea, and everybody can see why there is no city that operates roads this way. But it demonstrates that there exists problems which the free market is ill equipped to solve. Road congestion is one of them. A better solution has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread: Congestion taxes + public transportation.
The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.
And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).
And what's the alternative, assuming N people still need to make trips to a particular location? A traffic jam of people driving around in circles searching for half an hour for parking spaces to snatch?
Public transport? Works really well in a lot of cities.
However, constraining productive economic activity as a plan for dealing with inadequate infrastructure development is a fundamentally stupid idea that would impact the prosperity of everybody in the area, whether their business or employment is directly related to transport or not.
There's an essential reason: Businesses are not human beings. They don't have rights and we generally don't provide them with public goods. If a person loses everything and is on the street, that's a tragedy and we try to help them; if they are ill, they are guaranteed medical care (depending on some factors); if they die, it's a serious matter involving grief, sometimes crime, etc. If a business loses everything or is ailing or 'dies', it's just part of the creative destruction of capitalism. I can kill your business and be congratulated. People own the roads and the city - they democratically decide what happens with them - and businesses don't.
It's not so simplistic, of course, but people need access to roads and we generally believe that freedom involves the ability to move around the public areas as one pleases, regardless of wealth or other factors.
But not if they’re conducting business?
I hate it when you realize the ride-sharing area is in some offsite parking lot when there's a pick-up area right at the door.
Driver should only enter the plaza with a confirmed pick-up (go wait in the designated area), not lazily relocating every ride-share.
(well, pre-covid)
Even though most of the kids walked, many were not allowed to walk and there were logjams of cars down the block and through the parking lot with plenty of idiocy.
The study also found a corresponding 9% drop in public transport ridership.
And of course with Uber Pool and Lyft Line, there may be only a slight detour for pickups.
This situation seems better than taxis, which drive an empty car around when they're NOT EVEN on their way to pick someone up. They'll just drive around and around waiting for someone to stick their arm out.
"due to the substantial deadheading miles (miles travelled without a passenger), which account for at least 40.8% of TNC miles"
However, I can see how many people may take several " to work it out.
Also, in many jurisdictions, capacity for taxis is limited; that's what the medallions are for. Ride-sharing capacity is not limited.
I haven't seen data on whether taxis or ride-sharing have more spare capacity in terms of miles, but I have seen data that ride-sharing vehicles significantly increase traffic.
This is true, but mainly for dense cities prior to Uber/Lyft, and even then cabs driving looking for fares would be in the central part of the city. Here in NYC back in the day I’d rarely find a cab just driving around in Brooklyn, you’d typically find them on main roads driving back to Manhattan after dropping off their last fare if you did.
Now there are just a lot more for hire vehicles driving around the city in general. There was an artificial shortage of medallions, with about 14000 of them back before the apps, plus a bunch of for hire car services (and dollar vans on Flatbush). Now there’s about 100,000 cars for hire in NYC.
None of those things are very problematic on very small scales...an inconvenience at most. But just a tad more than that, and it can create absolute chaos.
Uber could optimize this by predicting where demand will be and telling a subset of drivers to move there. Right now drivers predict and move to hotspots in herds.
Maybe for S-bahns far out it's a mile, but bikeshare should cover that.
Why not? Buses are cheap and can operate on existing infrastructure. Sure there are places like Seattle where the buses are congested and more expensive rail infrastructure is needed, but that is not true in majority of American cities. Quite often the bus lines are even already there, but run so infrequently that they are unusable for the majority of people (think El Paso).
For most of Americans the problem could literally be solved over night.
Though if cities actually did put for that investment, in a few years there would be enough riders as to pay off the investment. I'm not hopeful though: most cities have transit executives who don't care about transit, and so if given a ton of money will instead invest in transit art - things that look good but don't improve transit.
Also we can do it much faster if we accept we need to make driving worse. See https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-train... cars and trains are fundamentally opposed, so every time build American-style light rail and yet continue widening highways we shoot ourselves in both feet.
Accepting the reality that we need carets and sticks to radically reform our material culture, demolish highways, shred zoning laws, crank up the gas tax, and then suddenly find your trains full, bikes all in use, people clamoring for more, the private sector helping with the easy stuff, and more growth in general.
Suburbia on the other hand makes us all worse off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...
Getting rid of cars would solve that problem regardless of density.
> large public parks
Denser everything else frees up more space for parks. (I sometimes think of a "fractal density" which is high on average but has tons of variation to keep things beautiful.)
You are saying at best make them less bad, but used just as often? Forget other universe, what about the other countries that successfully do what I speak of?
If your lifestyle is inherently non sustainable or non scalable, then you only get to live it because you're at the top of a pyramid scheme.
But we're already running over budget on the resources we do have, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/past-earth-overshoot-d....
Unless we want to accept some kind of extreme depopulation events (either by choice or by systemic failure) then we have to learn to live a lot more efficiently than we do now. And the long term costs of running suburbs are not fully internalized to the people choosing to live like that.
I don’t think dense living energy usage is only marginally less due to the extra distance all the mass has to travel. And with current technology, the energy used is basically a proxy for pollution.
The more mass you move (water, sewage, gas, waste, supplies, people) longer distances, the more you pollute. I.e. the more space you use, the more you pollute. Just like using most other material resources.
It's not marginal at all, but a huge difference. Rich inner suburbs ("Democrat suburbs" you might say) are the worst polluters per capita, and urban and some truly rural areas the best, but the truly rural case absolutely doesn't scale.
I'm sorry, but your boats-the-shed fantasyland is slowly killing us all.
Expecting perpetual economic growth without densification is equally absurd.
A good example is ST3 in the Seattle area. Seattleites and their neighbors overwhelmingly supported the expensive and radical expansion of the rapid transit system in the area and were more then willing to pay the increased taxes for it... Opposition came mostly from the eastern parts of the state even though the taxes are only to be collected in the proximate areas to the expansion.
In fact I can’t recall any examples of people calling for the cancellation of existing public transit. The backlash is usually against planed expansions from distant areas.
I’ve seen a few places on the East coast where voters resonate with political candidates that decry the subsidies to public transit, and call for increases in fares or decrease in frequency of bus/train service.
There's nothing inherently bad about rainy, slushy or snowy weather. It's just water. Getting wet is not going to melt you.
It's miserable trying to bicycle in slush, or in near freezing temperatures. Bicycling any length of time in the rain also is miserable. Strong wind makes things worse, and there's only so much you can do to compensate. Let alone what happens when you get sick from a chill, or you work at a job that has lots of physical labor or standing time, or bike in high heat with no showers available at your job.
I used to do so a lot as a young man, and it really does limit you. Sometimes you just give up the bike and walk, because the weather is that bad.
It was unbelievably terrible. I was actually okay with the biking in 90+ degree heat, but it required more careful planning on water consumption. And, I have a pretty high tolerance for general wet misery. I once spent a weekend lying in puddles in the rain, and it was fine.
But the winter biking, holy hell. The cold and road slush are the real killers for winter biking. The cold can make it physically painful, and the slush makes it both dangerous, and consumes a huge amount of time on maintenance - especially when it's a salt-brine slush. That stuff disintegrates your bike (or at least my bike).
A car sidesteps it with a big set of convenience.
While convenience is king for the end consumer that's what will happen for most people.
In one elderly couple I know, they sustain permanent or serious injuries when they fall just walking, and they don't heal so fast or well. One slipped in the bathroom and broke their collarbone. The other slipped on the sidewalk and has permanently lost significant function in their left (dominant) hand. An injury that requires prolonged immobility, such as a broken hip, not uncommonly leads to death.
No way are they riding a bike. Not only would they hit cement at bicycle speeds, they lack coordination, strength, and mental acuity. I have been in many situations on bikes that they simply couldn't handle. As one simple example, what happens if there is no curbcut or some other obstacle. I can simply lift by bicycle over any obstacle; they cannot always do that, and especially with the added weight of a battery, and then consider that a tricycle is the only feasible option for their balance.
That can easily be a confusion of cause and effect. I have multiple 80+ neighbours and relative who ride a bike daily - which is what makes them fitter for events like falling in the first place. It's well researched that physical fitness both prevents accidents and reduces recovery times for the elderly.
You've made an assumption that most cities have a period of un-rideable weather every year and that's just not the case.
I didn't say the majority have good weather either, I just disagree with the premise that "most" have unrideable seasons. Maybe "most" have an unrideable day or week but there are days you can't drive too and we don't pull funding from road infrastructure because of it.
In addition to different high temperatures, SF also has surprisingly cold summers.
Having lived in CA for most of my life (and having visited AU once), I'd say the temperatures are more similar in Sacramento or Los Angeles, and to a lesser degree Palo Alto.
1: https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/Australia/SA/A...
2: https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/CA/San-Fra...
https://www.sustainable-bus.com/news/yutong-begins-the-deliv...
This is why transit-only lanes are important. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis
Though it might be time to vote for someone else. If your council member doesn't care what you think, then vote for someone else. SF is big, but it is still small enough for votes to matter. You have already rejected grass roots, but that is the real answer. And it need not be you doing much, just make sure the ones who are doing something get noticed by your peers.
This is a repeating pattern, let's reinvent X but call it something else to bask in the rays of disruption and mislead regulators/consumers long enough to succeed.
Uber hijacked the term and took it over to mean a commercial enterprise that is basically unlicensed taxis via smartapp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
How much value did that increase in congestion (and environmental impact) provide ride-sharing customers?
Well, the article indicates the increase was 1% in amount of congestion, and 4.5% in duration. So, I suppose that means people in traffic are in traffic longer?
That is why rush hour exists. In Des Monies it is more like 15 minutes, in Minneapolis it is several hours. The idea is the same though: the time when the most people are trying to get someplace at the same time.
There will be a few people who give up the car for taxis since without paying a driver taxis are cheaper, but those won't be near as popular as people think.
You mean the democratic choice of local citizens?
No, despite that hot trope, it's not true and doesn't survive much examination. I have never experienced a threat of violence from the state; that's certainly not why I do anything. In fact, even states run by totalitarian dictatorships require the support of the people. If they lose it, no matter how much violence they use, the state collapses. This isn't theoretical; it's government 101.
I'm not saying that violence isn't used, but my state survives because I support it and the rule of law, like almost everyone.
Because you decide not to partake in whatever would cause that. This might or might not be a decision you notice. You probably wouldn't kill someone else even if it was legal. Would you do drugs if it was legal (to pick on a current hot topic)? I generally support my state, but that doesn't mean that the state doesn't exist because it uses force on those who don't like it.
> In fact, even states run by totalitarian dictatorships require the support of the people.
Myanmar is a current counter example: the military just took over and few people have the ability to do anything about it, and those who are trying are doing at risk of their life.
I have not experienced !== it does not exist. That isn't theoretical; it's logic 101.
> but my state survives because I support it and the rule of law, like almost everyone.
You and "almost everyone" support the rules of this specific set of laws, there are others who have morals that do not line up with that set of laws very well who do indeed follow them due to thread of force. That's government 101.
Most people !== every person. That should be evident by us talking about Uber and Lyft circumventing these rules. The fact that this conversation is happening invalidates your thesis.
In that sense, Uber also added to sidewalk congestion as I’d previously have spent that time and money in a Cambridge or western suburban location. With convenient and reasonably priced transport, my life is more flexible and enjoyable. Whether that’s worth the trade-offs is a valid question to entertain, but it seems odd to focus only traffic rather than also looking at how much of that traffic is a result of people enjoying life more.
This juxtaposition sounded weaselly, so I went to the paper:
>TNCs had insignificant effect on vehicle ownership on average, but they reduced vehicle ownership by 1% in the top ten transit MSAs.
I.e. the effect on vehicle ownership was only significant when you look specifically at large cities.
So, what ends up happening, is even though there is a garage or pick up parking inside a building; the 2 lane road turns into 1 lane with parking (but with no signage)_or street parking turns into street double parking.
If we move away from being bound by available parking, would we not increase congestion but also throughput?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-28/uber-s-im...
In Beijing, cars are faster for many journeys, and public transportation doesn't quite reach everywhere you'd want to go, without a lot of changes. But the reach and density of public transportation (particularly the subway system) is growing fast. And the last mile is served by ubiquitous shared bikes.
In San Francisco, which has a fraction of the population (maybe 10% of London's, and <5% of Beijing's), almost all journeys seem to be faster by car, than they are by public transport. A small section of the city is served by BART but, even then, wait times are a significant proportion of total journey times for short journeys.
I prefer to walk, cycle or take public transport, than to drive. But I'll drive if it cuts the journey time in half, which it often does.
For example, my son's preschool is 10 mins' drive away. 2 return trips per day is 40 minutes. Switching to Muni (bus) would add an extra 90 minutes each day.
Perhaps it's the low population density, perhaps it's lack of funding, perhaps mismanagement. Or perhaps we're stuck in a suboptimal equilibrium in which people don't use public transport for $good_reasons, and the lack of ridership means that improvements cannot be justified.
IN THE US:
Public transit suffers from under funding and a general lack of civic planning (at least at macro-scales).
Public transit and all other public _spaces_ also suffer from lack of social safety nets at a national level. Defacto, they are where the displaced and under-served end up, because they are unable to go anywhere else. Everyone else with options either doesn't need to travel, or uses personal transport when they do. This exacerbates the issue of lack of funding through lack of use.
In the United States there is, an accurate, perception that on public transport someone is more likely to be exposed to crime, unwanted scents from the unwashed or the uncouth in personal hygiene (too much Axe (which is any), etc), or particularly during the pandemic, unavoidable social mingling.
In urban cores this might be different given the lack of cars and denser service. However around them the only well serviced customer are business persons who commute down town early, and then back in the evening.
In the suburbs and outlying areas there's either service far too infrequent to be a reliable choice or none at all; and often that service cuts off too early in the evening.
Now imagine how it works in the next 50 largest US cities that have worse public transit than the Bay Area.
Then think about how it works in the thousands of small cities and towns where many bars and restaurants are a 20 minute driver and public transit barely exists.
Here in Japan public transport in unanimously preferred over Uber & Taxis
One of the great benefits of a train network is that you're not amongst the car traffic, so you don't suffer congestion.
Many brand new American train networks run at grade with car traffic, so even aboard the train you can't escape. For example, it takes 15 minutes aboard the expo line in Los Angeles to go between USC and downtown LA. The distance is 2 miles; you could out run the train if you ran directly on the track and didn't have to stop at red lights like the train does. Most new transit construction in the US seems to be this half measure LRT that has many at grade crossings with cars, and is rarely given signal priority (there should be no reason for an at grade train to stop at an intersection at all).
Not just for the strain on the stock and rails but thinking about it like a societal ethos, public transport should have right of way to individuals in their cars as public transport efficiently serves the commons. I still think atomic individual transport is important and will stick around, but surely it's important to not undermine the efficacy of a network that supports hundreds of people at a time.
Edit: I forgot, there's a light tram line in my city that stops at a handful of car intersections, but it's mostly above grade anyway and those stops are accompanied by a platform as well. So the tram technically stops at the platform first, then begins again once the road lights cycle.
There are a small minority who cannot walk that far, and so yes we should provide something for them. However that is a tiny minority.
A major problem with public transport in many cities is that this "last mile" segment is often several miles which would be hours of walking and therefore necessitates ridesharing/vehicle travel.
There is one exception: a park and ride lot can work in some cases. though then the last mile is solved. In general I don't like park and ride, but they have their place.
Your replies are nonsensical and add nothing to this discussion. It seems you're replying just to argue and I'm not interested.
Transfers should be normal. We need to make them quick and easy.
And I'm lucky enough to live relatively convenient to work. Many apartments I was looking at in my price range were still within 5-10 miles of work, but with bus commutes hovering around 2 hours one way thanks to transfers across the street grid and a lack of diagonal serving bus routes. For many people who might not be able to afford to be choosy about where they live, it can be difficult to land a practical apartment transit wise to your work, and it can be hard to land a job where there is even good transit opportunities to begin with. Suddenly a $2000 car that can turn your 2 hour bus commute into 18 minutes seems like the best investment money can buy, no matter what job you have, especially when you have a family who you want to see, or maybe even another job to get to across town. People in this city sooner give up a roof over their head than their car when money gets tight.
How is it an economic engine? Who benefits? The jobs don't apy well. AFAICT, the main economic beneficiary is the shareholders of the ride-sharing companies, but I genuinely wonder what the truth is.
In the suburbs/college towns/etc in the US, getting a taxi had to be done hours in advance if you wanted a guarantee they would even show up.
Otherwise you would call a dispatcher on the phone, tell them where you were and wanted to go, then they would say something like “someone should be there in 30-60 minutes”. Then it would be about a 30% chance they would actually show. That’s right, too much to drink at a bar around closing time and you will likely end up just walking home drunk in the dark. Really great industry.
This was my experience throughout all of the 00s in multiple large suburban cities and college towns. An absolutely dead industry kept alive by regulatory capture that deserved to get fucked.
Even in Vegas (a presumably ‘healthy’ cab market), you would get scammed by cab drivers from the strip hotels to the airport by them suggesting the interstate despite it not being faster because it would accumulate them more miles. Cabs had no reasonable negative feedback systems for shitty (but not illegal) behavior so it was a terrible experience.