Are Uber and Lyft responsible for reducing DUIs?
washingtonpost.com
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In Seattle when I was in my early 20s, it was nearly impossible to call or catch a cab when the bars closed, so often we just walked home. And on New Year's Eve? Forget about it...
Incidentally, walking in a city while drunk is also dangerous. For about a third of U.S. pedestrian deaths, the pedestrian was drunk, according to one study. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/drunk-walking-leads-pedestria...
If I were Uber facing regulation, I'd drive hard after these studies. Let governments explain why they favor more risks, higher costs, and worse service.
Nothing strange about this implication. Many laws have similar effects. If you regulate a drug, you balance the amount of people who die because of drug toxicity vs. number of people who die because the drug wasn't available when it could fix them. If you as much as even touch employment laws, you're gambling with people's lives, changing the number of those who will die in poverty.
Hell, the laws that even allow mass population to drive cars are themselves responsible for hundreds of milions of deaths to date.
http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/en/
(I couldn't find a source for a total deaths from car accidents estimate and I need to go to sleep now; any link welcome)
You're seeing individual trees but not the forest. It has everything to do with Uber and Lyft specifically because they're the first in (ever? my lifetime.) to break into this and in doing so, provide more cabs. Nobody is claiming that it is a specific chocolate chip cookie that Lyft gives out that is preventing DUIs. Put another way, the entire reason you're leaving a comment on this thread about the possible reduction in DUIs from alternative cab companies is because of the alternative cab companies. Give credit where credit is due—they changed the game.
Hypothesis: Too few cabs mean more DUIs
Experiment: Add more "cabs"
Expected Result: More cabs will lead to fewer DUIs
Uber/Lyft is the Experiment. The argument about other Experiments is irrelevant. Sure, less regulation could mean more cabs. But that wasn't the Experiment.
That counter argument is logically equivalent to saying "Drones, Blimps, Automated Cars all could have been cabs. There's nothing special about Uber/Lyft". There the difference is between a hypothetical and an actual result.
I'd also add that Uber offers far more than just "More cabs". It offers more safety, convenience, and trust. The driver is known, the car arrives when you are ready, and you don't have to haggle about not using cash.
The most chilling near-miss I've ever seen was when a very drunk pedestrian stumbled across a boulevard at about 3AM and a car driven by a drunk passed within a foot of him at about 50 mph. (I know the driver was drunk because he had been at the same bar I had.) Neither drunk noticed that anything had happened.
Well, there was a third drunk person present, but I was riding my bicycle at the edge of the street.
The problem is that I can't count on the voice-operated cab system. I have to call, and then wait outside at the pickup point, with a 50% chance of the cab actually getting there, at which point you call and get another 50% chance of the cab getting there within 30 minutes, at which point you repeat.
I have no idea if it's going to be 5 minutes or 120 minutes. I have to stay outside, too, because they won't call me when it's there.
If a cab took an hour but I could set it up on my phone while I was still in the bar, and it would alert me when it got there? That would be just fine with me.
Now, the local cab company could (and perhaps has, I have not checked lately) create an app that does just this; I don't really mind waiting half an hour if I had some assurance that the car would be there in half an hour.
But why would you, if you could get a car within minutes?
Obviously, given the choice between a good interface with slow service and a good interface with fast service, at similar price points, I'll pick the latter.
I was just saying that even if uber/lyft did not add more cabs to the road (decreasing my wait time) - and that's the part where some are suggesting they are engaging in "regulatory arbitrage"- just having a uber-like interface to a regular cab company would take the pre-existing cab system from "not good enough" to "good enough" for me to use on nights out. For me, at least, the interface (a lot of which is the ability to not need to watch for the cab) is more important than the speed.
(Of course, would existing cab companies bother to use a new system, when all their cabs are already full?)
I think this depends on the urban design more than anything inherently dangerous about walking while drunk. Walking and/or bicycling home while drunk is a weekly Copenhagen pasttime, and pedestrian/bike fatalities are extremely rare. Since almost all pedestrian deaths are caused by cars, two simple expedients almost entirely eliminate them: 1) don't have high-speed car traffic in the middle of a city; and 2) have a high standard of driver education, so drivers can reliably drive in a way that never hits pedestrians.
People drinking in remote areas are more likely to drive home drunk (since there is no other choice). These drunk drivers will come in potential contact with fewer cars, but generate a lot more miles for the statistic.
While the quoted statistic is true at a literal level ("you are 8 times more likely to die per mile walked drunk than mile driven drunk"), the intuitive implication that you'd be safer using your car is not. And that, of course, is not even considering the safety of others.
I've never used Lyft, but I have used Uber and usually find them them be quick and very service oriented. From what I've heard Lyft is given them competition in both ways, so I look forward to trying them as well.
Far better than any cab I've ever taken.
Using the 2013 NYC Taxi data that was posted earlier, the amount of people who pay with cash vs. amount of people who pay with credit card is about 50:50.
Here's a quick spreadsheet of the distribution: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EaP9LJ7i1MPREuypejOr...
The strategy used in Chicago when a credit card machine isn't working is just to tell them you don't have cash and you're walking out if they won't accept a card ("for a 'broken machine'") Magically it starts working again. [The city of Chicago mandates that they must be able to accept credit cards]
Psychologically, trust and safety are huge multipliers. Most of the press I see on these companies is convenience-oriented. My experience, and with extensive self-defense training, is that the whole experience is just much safer.
Unlike other modes of transportation, there are few times I'm really at-risk. I'm not standing outside trying to hail a taxi or going on the subway or walking through a park. I'm not getting into an unknown vehicle. And I'm not having to pull out my wallet.
I've had cases where the cab driver told me upfront he wouldn't drive me if I paid with credit card, going so far as driving me to an ATM so I can get him cash as though I OWED them a tip.
Uber/lyft disrupted an industry infected with laziness and bad attitudes.
I lived in Marin, and a cabbie required me to tip him 100% of the ride cost coming from SFO otherwise he wouldn't take me. Frequently getting back to Marin, from SF is a pain with cabs, they often won't take you.
Yeah, so screw'em... they can work for uber/lyft, I tip them generously with cash in addition to the fare, much better that way.
What does this mean?
I welcome the death of the SF cab companies. Long Live Uber/Lyft/Sidecar.
> Again, caveats are in order. We've simply plotted arrests on a timeline here; we haven't adjusted for changes in the city's population, or bar scene, or the economy. Any number of other things may have changed in the city over the last few years affecting DUI arrests. It's possible police have changed how they conduct DUI stops and arrests, or that public pressure on them to crack down on DUIs has ebbed with time. Other changes in public transit service may have impacted alternative routes that bar-hoppers take home.
It's also striking that San Francisco and Philadelphia show a steep and parallel rise in DUIs long before these services ever came to town; on both charts, it looks as if DUI numbers may be returning to an older normal as much as they've been falling. Perhaps these services have arrived on the market just in time to ride the benefits of an improving economy? (More theories on this welcome below as well).
It's sad that traffic-desperate news sites have forgotten how to write a assertive, non-question headline...something like "Measuring ride-sharing's impact on DUIs requires more data" would do just fine.
Nothing to see here.
* There's already a downward trend well before Uber and Lyft come into play.
* Even if the downward trend is stronger more recently, Waze also came into existence a few years ago. Maybe people were, e.g., downloading Waze and using it to find police cars beforehand.
* The graph measures arrests, not incidents. So it could be that, for instance, police are getting laxer about DUI enforcement, rather than that people are driving drunk less.
In short, there's too many confounding factors here to conclude that Lyft and Uber should get credit.
This may be true somewhere, but not anywhere that federal anti-DUI funds are tied to purchase of new vehicles and equipment. In those places, i.e. most of the nation, there is no laxity, even though there certainly should be.
I do like the idea of not driving, and think the DUI rate will rapidly decrease once things like self driving cars better enable us to give up personal vehicles.
Crediting uber is a startup echo-chamber delusion.
I doubt they're having much impact, personally, unless in cities where there isn't much of a developed cab infrastructure already, and people drive for a night out. This probably doesn't describe anywhere outside the US.
But, both Uber and Lyft are completely going around the taxi unions in many cities in the US by not paying regulatory fees and it's a-ok.
Those debates don't have anything in common which is why you'll probably receive downvotes. For example, voucher money goes directly from the government to a school. 85% of private schools are religious organizations. Etc. They just aren't the same animals. It is akin to saying a lightbulb is a transistor because they both use electricity. Though true, that misses a lot of detail.
There is no such thing as "the opinion of HN". The community is divided on most issues. Different constituencies upvote and downvote different things.
There's a bias on some issues, like NSA/Snowden (albeit with a substantial dissenting minority). But on typical left vs. right issues, my sense is that the community is about evenly split, and so are the complaints of bias.