Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

planetizen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 458 posts

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#161

Post by abalone »

samstave wrote: post #141
abalone wrote: post #107

tl;dr People use ridesharing mostly to go out to eat and drink (62% of trips). Riders are actually more likely to own cars. They don't want to drive when they're going out because they don't want to deal with parking or drive drunk. They don't ride the bus because it's too slow, unreliable or unavailable. If ridesharing didn't exist, two fifths of the time they'd walk, bike or use public transit instead, and a fifth…

It may increase the "total miles traveled" but doesn't it also increase occupancy density in the cars, thus reducing the fuel/pollution consumption? I'm tired of shitty data coming out of Uber and Lyft: I want to know about fuel consumption and the impact on auto insurance rates/accident frequency. Given the known population of drivers, what is their average insurance rate, fuel consumption etc vs the general pop who…

> It may increase the "total miles traveled" but doesn't it also increase occupancy density in the cars

If it did then it wouldn't increase total VMT. Again there are "deadhead" miles in those cars without any passengers at all, a fifth of those trips wouldn't have happened in the first place, and two fifths would have used alternatives that don't contribute to VMT. (According to the study.)

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#162

Post by ibejoeb »

ctoth wrote: post #150

I cannot drive. I take Uber to and from work every day using a Uber pass. If my alternative were public transit, a bus to a train to another bus or train depending, it would take me 1.5 hours per trip, for a total of 3 hours a day. I would not work in the corporate world if this were the case. Does this study capture these positive externalities? For blind people, these often-derided services are the difference betwe…

Do you regularly get offered the Uber Pass? I've gotten it once, and I used the hell out of it, so now I'm pretty convinced that I'll never be offered again.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#163

Post by majidazimi »

hyperbovine wrote: post #104
yardie wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass transit is already subsidized and yet they are unable to make it work. Only one is subsidizing to gain ridership. As I’ve told friends and family it’s still cheaper than owning a car. If that equation changes I’ll re-evaluate our habits.

Mass transit works amazingly well in Europe, particularly in the north.

I'm a foreign student in Germany, living in a small city with 200K population. Public transportation is just fascinating compared to size/population of the city. More than ten tram lines. Countless number of buses.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#164

Post by ProAm »

harigov wrote: post #157
ProAm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the subsidies end, will people be willing to pay $10 +1 for the exact same ride vs public transit?

Subsidies are here to accomplish economies of scale. And when they have that scale, the cost of ride will also decrease dramatically (run buses instead of cars, electric cars/buses?), so my bet is that there will be an increase in price but it won't be order of magnitude more than current price.

Subsidies here are not for economies of scale, but for market share. Your bet is a risky one vs proven methodology.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#165

Post by jdavis703 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #146
jdavis703 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people die in automobile crashes than from train crashes and crimes in public transit systems.

The statistics don’t really tell that story. Getting mugged in a station doesn’t typically kill you, and you’re not travelling, so those stats won’t be counted. If there was an “incidents per mile travelled”, metric for my trip during daylight hours that would be one thing. But there isn’t any such statistic. It’s almost certainly cheaper, safer, more time efficient and dramatically more convenient to take a car. In…

> The statistics don’t really tell that story.

> In my personal, typical case

They may not tell that story in this particular case, but unless something is wrong with the way with the statistics are gathered, it does present a better top-level picture than personal anecdotes. (While personal anecdotes can also be useful in understanding how to design around edge cases, but are not useful when figuring out the best way to design a system).

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#166

Post by Nursie »

smsm42 wrote: post #153
jdavis703 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal convenience isn't the only definition of what makes transportation better. There's all kinds of negative externalities automobiles generate, from traffic backups, to gaseous emissions, to taking up space that could be used by transportation modes with lighter footprints such as bikes. Not increasing VMT is very important to making cities perform more efficiently, with a lighter footprint.

> Personal convenience isn't the only definition of what makes transportation better. But this is the only one that would be taken into account by a person when deciding which transportation mode to use. If you don't take it into account, you're making the stats better, but the lives of people worse.

Not the only one, surely? Cost factors in, and some folks make choices based on what they think might be best for longer than "right now"

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#167

Post by bluedino »

abalone wrote: post #107

tl;dr People use ridesharing mostly to go out to eat and drink (62% of trips). Riders are actually more likely to own cars. They don't want to drive when they're going out because they don't want to deal with parking or drive drunk. They don't ride the bus because it's too slow, unreliable or unavailable. If ridesharing didn't exist, two fifths of the time they'd walk, bike or use public transit instead, and a fifth…

>> because they don't want to deal with parking or drive drunk.

That's what my friends use it for.

It's a shame, because in the smaller midwestern towns, we don't really have Uber yet so it can't be used. Drunk driving here isn't even given a second thought.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#168

Post by abalone »

ibejoeb wrote: post #155
abalone wrote: post #107

tl;dr People use ridesharing mostly to go out to eat and drink (62% of trips). Riders are actually more likely to own cars. They don't want to drive when they're going out because they don't want to deal with parking or drive drunk. They don't ride the bus because it's too slow, unreliable or unavailable. If ridesharing didn't exist, two fifths of the time they'd walk, bike or use public transit instead, and a fifth…

That all seems like a net positive to me, especially in major urban areas that a very car dependent like Los Angles, Atlanta, Houston... In LA, driving drunk was just the way of life, and it was a real problem. Now, I don't know anyone who prefers driving over ridesharing given the option. Uber Pool makes getting from the east side to the west side faster that public transit for about $10-15, which is less than 1 dri…

I don't think the study is "faulting" anyone. Clearly ridesharing is a very popular and convenient alternative to driving and public transit which are both rife with problems. It is however contributing to traffic and emissions. Those are important facts to establish because previously it was thought that maybe ridesharing is helping with those too, like a dream come true.

It concludes, "substantial policy action may be required to ensure that ride-hailing can effectively be woven into the transportation network while reducing congestion and the emissions of transportation services. Absent of these efforts, congestion and emissions appear likely to grow."[1]

[1] https://itspubs.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/themes/ucdavis/pubs/d...

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#169

Post by smsm42 »

untog wrote: post #114
smsm42 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though Uber has been saying that they are improving urban transportation Note here that there are other dimensions of improving, not expressed in VMT. Such as convenience, availability, time to get to certain point, ability to perform certain tasks (e.g. compare traveling with two huge suitcases to/from an airport in public transport with two transfers and in a ride service car), etc. So when talking about imp…

Those are all important aspects, but it's also important to factor in accessibility (in the monetary sense, not physical - although that as well!), because that's one of the main reasons for public transit to exist. Yes, Uber and Lyft will provide better opportunities for transporting two large suitcases across town. But at what cost to the person who needs an affordable journey to work? Neither can come close to rep…

> And if they're contributing towards traffic that is actively harming performance of public transit, it's worth discussing.

It's worth discussing, but not in terms of "evil rideshares are up to their evil evils again" but in terms of "why public transit fails to satisfy the needs of the people that choose to use rideshares instead, and how it can be improved so that it starts to satisfy more people". The goal should be making people's lives better, not achieving reduction in some abstract statistical metric.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#170

Post by objclxt »

pmichaud wrote: post #110
ng12 wrote: post #6

Gee, it's almost like people only use public transportation when it's reliable, cost-effective, and efficient.

I stopped using the BART recently because it's dangerous. Several people I know personally have been held up at gunpoint on the BART, or in the station. That's not counting the various news reports, like one [1]. I'll go back when it's safe, but not before then. [1]: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-50...

> I'll go back when it's safe, but not before then.

BART is already exceedingly safe. Even with robberies rising 45% this year the overall robbery rate is projected to be 1.7 per million trips[1].

To put it another way, if every time you rode the BART you also bought a CA lottery scratch-card you'd be about as likely to get robbed as you would to win the jackpot (normalized odds for a $2 scratch card: 0.00000167[2], normalized odds for robbery 0.0000017).

Do I think BART is a great system? Absolutely not. Do I prefer taking a Lyft to the airport rather than the BART? Yes. But I've worked in cities with unsafe public transit systems, and the BART simply doesn't compare.

[1]: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Crime-stats-show-where-s... [2]: http://www.calottery.com/LotteryHome/play/scratchers-games/$...

Post reply on HN