9 ms·

Uber Hasn't Had an Effect on Drunken-Driving Deaths, Study Finds

36 points by mdagostino 10y ago

shanacarp 10y ago
I'm wondering if their thesis if off: is this due to where uber is rather than cost Ie - suburban to exburban uber is just expensive and rare, (low coverage), and therefore people are more likely to drunk drive. I mean, how many taxis to start with are there in small suburban towns?
seibelj 10y ago
I live in Boston. Until uber, the minimum taxi fair was $6, they always had broken credit card machines, and there was never enough cabs when you needed them. I remember s New Year's Eve where we had to promise the dispatcher we would pay a $100 tip to get anyone to pick us up. The "reducing drunk driving" theory was a happy side effect but ultimately not important. Über destroyed a a BS industry full of idiots and made it professional and reliable.
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, did you end up tipping $100? I feel like a taxi driver's job is to pick up people at a set rate and they forced you into promising the $100 because you knew otherwise they wouldn't do that job. Curious on your view.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  I lived in Cambridge for eight years (moved last summer) and never experienced anything remotely like this. I lived on Prospect Street right near Central Sq, and frequently took taxis around the area. I called ahead to have taxis pick me up for early morning rides to the airport, and they were always early and helped me with my bags. I took taxis over to the Boston College area when I was taking music lessons at a studio there. I took taxis home from sports events and concerts near Fenway. Even when coming out of a crowded show at House of Blues, it was a short wait for taxis. I never once experienced a broken credit card machine. I once did ask a driver if they accepted credit cards, he said no, and I waited about 30 seconds for the next taxi to come by -- on a side street on the Somerville side of Porter Sq, so not even close to usual taxi spots. Getting taxis in Boston is cheap, safe, and reliable, with pretty short wait times, easy to deal with dispatchers, drivers who show up on time, cars that are clean and 99.999% of the time have functioning credit card machines. I honestly don't know what on earth you're talking about. None of this is an argument against Uber anyway, because people use Uber for features that even good taxis don't have, including price reduction, better real-time tracking, an app interface, and other things. And Uber drivers certainly can do things worse than taxis -- such as simply fail to show up, treat you rudely during the ride, or try to make you exit the car in an inconvenient/unsafe spot of the street at your destination. Uber is not intrinsically better about this kind of thing than taxis. But some things you absolutely cannot say, at least about taxis in the Boston area, are that they are anything but clean, safe, reliable, punctual, and able to take your credit card.
  - unixhero 10y ago
    Taxis suck, globally.
    - p4wnc6 10y ago
      Except they really don't and are a great service in tons of places.
      - product50 10y ago
        Have you ever been in a taxi in US or India or Australia or even Canada? The entire experience sucks - from finding them, to convincing them to take you to your destination, to them rudely talking to you when you are explaining them your destination cross streets, to have them talking on the phone while driving, to have their taxi filthy dirty, to have them take you around to your destination in a non optimal way, to have them driving in a really rough manner, to have them ask for tip blatantly, to have their credit card reader not working, to them charging you a large amount for that 3 mile trip, to have them rudely tell you to get off on the other side of the road. It is such a miserable experience and I am glad the entire industry is getting killed. Speak for yourself when defending the taxi industry. You know nothing and I can prove that with experience and facts. It is so infuriating when fools like you come in and make a statement which has no firm basis and sense of truth.
        Bahamut 10y ago
        Some of the terribleness of the taxi industry is on full display in Las Vegas at McCarran Airport - the taxi lines are long, and despite the posters mentioning the cost to various casinos on the strip, taxis will often try to convince you to take the interstate to rack up an additional $25 from you for such a short trip. It used to be even worse before the introduction to Uber/Lyft in the city. I'm glad the corrupt taxi industry is forced to change, their shenanigans have bled a lot of money from consumers.
        kuschku 10y ago
        > Taxis suck, globally. You tried to defend this statement. Yet I live in northern Germany, Taxis are less than 10% more expensive than a comparable uber, have better service, are faster, and cleaner. I can order taxis via phone or a neat app (actually, there’s a bunch of them), basically anyone with a drivers license can start their own taxi company (so there is already a free market), and yet uber refused to comply with the market regulations (they need insurance for the cars). Your route is shown in the app when planning, you can pay via the app before the trip with taxi, and they often even offer to carry your bag up to your room at your destination. "Taxis suck, globally." is objectively false.
stuaxo 10y ago
Maybe all that's happened is people that used to take traditional taxis moved onto Uber.
nickgrosvenor 10y ago
Commonsense says this study is flawed in someway. Uber has giving millions and millions of car rides with drunk people, and how many of those wouldn't ride with a sober friend or take the time to call a cab?
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  Or perhaps the study says that common sense is flawed in some way? If the study holds up to scrutiny (not saying it will) then updating to have new common sense is the whole point.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
philip1209 10y ago
It sounds like the null hypothesis is that Uber has not affected drunken driving deaths. Didn't the study just fail to disprove the null hypothesis, meaning that its result is meaningless and inconclusive?
mc32 10y ago
So responsible people are trading Yellow taxis for Über and irresponsible people are still driving while intoxicated. Or, alternatively, the amount of drunk drivers is so huge that whatever number taxis and Uber take off the streets is negligible in relative numbers. But ride services want to promulgate the idea to cities they bring safety in order to counterbalance the annoyed voices of the yellow cabs decrying the conditions the ride service drivers must endure...
- officemonkey 10y ago
  Or perhaps, drunk driving happens in areas where Taxis, Mass Transit, and Uber are not available or economical.
  - mc32 10y ago
    "Researchers... looked at the 100 most populated metropolitan areas, analyzing data from before and after the introduction of Uber and its competitors" Fair inquiry, but no. They studied the top 100 metro areas, not the Podunks. Now, it does not say whether the rate has remained steady despite, perhaps, an increase in people who now feel comfortable getting drunk cuz they can get a cab fairly easily with the intro of ride services. However, they have not decreased the totals, as they have claimed, according to the findings.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - officemonkey 10y ago
      Uber doesn't launch in areas where there isn't a market. If there is no need for extensive taxi and mass transit services, Uber won't be there either. I maintain that Uber is just another option in the top 100 metro areas. If Uber did work everywhere, then I am sure you would see reductions in places that do not have competing services.
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    No. As someone who has gotten a DWI in one of the largest cities, I drove my car because I wanted to an was an irresponsible idiot, not because I had no options.
gojomo 10y ago
I'm suspicious. It seems the study may only be regressing on 'availability' of Uber – the single bit flag of whether it has launched in a city. If adoption is gradual, as the habits of drinkers/drivers change over months (or years), beneficial effects might not be seen by such a study, or remain hidden by all the other controls applied. The best analysis would likely need to use ride volume data; there's no hint in this study's abstract they've done that, and the paper is paywalled.
- officemonkey 10y ago
  Uber doesn't launch in areas where there isn't a market. If there is no need for extensive taxi and mass transit services, Uber won't be there either. In places where Uber has launched, they're probably just picking up riders that would normally take a cab or a train if Uber wasn't there.
  - gojomo 10y ago
    Of course they only enter markets where there's demand. But it takes a while for people to understand and adopt something new as their preferred transit. Some initially view Uber/etc as weird, before later becoming big fans. In San Francisco, it appears Uber/Lyft have massively increased the total number of paid-rides taken. They're not just shifting trips from taxis or public transit, but also from private car usage – and creating new trips where people would've just stayed in or walked. That points out another stat a 'gold standard' study should try to identify: fatalities per trips (or ride-miles) taken, rather than just absolute number of fatalities. If cities with Uber have the same number of fatalities, but spread over twice as much travel, that's giant safety and welfare win, too.
sandworm101 10y ago
From talking to Brits, I'm starting to think that the greater availability of alternatives to driving one's self home seems to increase drinking. The need to get home, to get one's car home, is a good reason not to drink. During university I rode a motorcycle to school/work and can say it kept me away from many an afternoon at a beer garden. London's nightlife, the serious drinking, can only exist because nobody has to drive themselves home. So dropping Uber into a city, giving them another option for getting home, might increase the overall level of drinking. This would muddy the drink-driving numbers. For every drunk driven safely home by Uber there may be some other person out there pressured into having a drink that otherwise wouldn't. And some of them might drive.
- laurencerowe 10y ago
  Drinking is definitely more socially acceptable in Britain than the US, but that has more to do with differing history (no prohibition) than options for getting home. Drink driving became socially unacceptable in Britain only in the last 20-30 years but alcohol consumption hasn't really changed. The anti drink driving ads on TV every Christmas were really quite hard hitting. I've seen nothing similar in the US.
  - smt88 10y ago
    The US has extensive ads fighting drinking and driving. I imagine there isn't much difference there.
    - DanBC 10y ago
      The UK has had drink driving ads on mainstream TV for 50 years, since 1964. This BBC page shows some of the ads, and discusses others. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29894885 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29894885
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
xupybd 10y ago
Totally off topic, but totally bugging me. Why is it (in this case) Effect not affect?
- bumblebeard 10y ago
  Effect is usually a noun and affect is usually a verb.
  - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
    That's not an explanation. Effect and affect are just different things with different meanings both as nouns and verbs.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  Because the noun affect means something entirely different.
- unclenoriega 10y ago
  It seems like it should be clear if you read the definitions. Perhaps if you explain why you think it should be 'affect', you can get a better explanation.
austinl 10y ago
It's worth reading the other report [1] the article cites — it's a lot more comprehensive than the author makes it out to be. The study didn't find a relationship between Uber and alcohol-involved accidents/fatalities (which the NPR article is about), but did find a statistically significant relationship between Uber, traffic fatalities, and DUIs. They also found that introducing Uber increases auto-theft. Using a differences-in-differences specification, we find that fatal accident rates generally decline after the introduction of Uber. Specifically, in the unweighted regressions, we find that entry is associated with a 6 percent decline in the fatal accident rate. Fatal night-time crashes experience a slightly larger decline of 18 percent. In both the weighted and unweighted estimations, we also discover a continued decline in the overall fatal crash rate and the rate of vehicular fatalities for the months following the introduction of Uber. For each additional year of operation, Uber’s continued presence is associated with a 16.6 percent decline in vehicular fatalities. ... Again employing a differences-in-differences specification, typically with county specific trends, we find a large and robust decline in the arrest rate for DUIs. Depending upon specification, DUIs are 15 to 62 percent lower after the entry of Uber. The average annual rate of decline after the introduction of Uber is 51.3 percent per year for DUIs. [1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2783797 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2783797
- scythe 10y ago
  Classic case of proving the null hypothesis. The p-value hit the threshold for DUIs and deaths, but not for alcohol-involved accidents. If you're wondering why, here's a hint: the mean rate for alcohol-involved accidents was less than 1 in 100,000. The headline, then: "Uber hasn't had an effect".
Overtonwindow 10y ago
Why does it seem the media is so intent on tearing Uber down. There have been a lot of articles on HN about Uber is fucked, Uber is going down, Uber is doomed... Uber is really great. No, they don't pay their drivers enough. No, they don't do everything they can to ensure their drivers are responsible, and vetted. Yet they provide an invaluable service against a corrupt, entrenched industry that has needed a serious kick in the pants for as long as any of us have been alive. Uber has a lot of improvements to make, but I would rather have the option of choosing them over the corrupt taxi industry than not.
silveira 10y ago
Maybe the group of people who drink and are responsible enough to call a Uber does not significantly overlaps with the group who drinks and are irresponsible enough to drive.

36 points by mdagostino 10y ago

I'm wondering if their thesis if off: is this due to where uber is rather than cost Ie - suburban to exburban uber is just expensive and rare, (low coverage), and therefore people are more likely to drunk drive. I mean, how many taxis to start with are there in small suburban towns?

seibelj 10y ago

I live in Boston. Until uber, the minimum taxi fair was $6, they always had broken credit card machines, and there was never enough cabs when you needed them. I remember s New Year's Eve where we had to promise the dispatcher we would pay a $100 tip to get anyone to pick us up. The "reducing drunk driving" theory was a happy side effect but ultimately not important. Über destroyed a a BS industry full of idiots and made it professional and reliable.

chipperyman573 10y ago
Out of curiosity, did you end up tipping $100? I feel like a taxi driver's job is to pick up people at a set rate and they forced you into promising the $100 because you knew otherwise they wouldn't do that job. Curious on your view.
p4wnc6 10y ago
I lived in Cambridge for eight years (moved last summer) and never experienced anything remotely like this. I lived on Prospect Street right near Central Sq, and frequently took taxis around the area. I called ahead to have taxis pick me up for early morning rides to the airport, and they were always early and helped me with my bags. I took taxis over to the Boston College area when I was taking music lessons at a studio there. I took taxis home from sports events and concerts near Fenway. Even when coming out of a crowded show at House of Blues, it was a short wait for taxis. I never once experienced a broken credit card machine. I once did ask a driver if they accepted credit cards, he said no, and I waited about 30 seconds for the next taxi to come by -- on a side street on the Somerville side of Porter Sq, so not even close to usual taxi spots. Getting taxis in Boston is cheap, safe, and reliable, with pretty short wait times, easy to deal with dispatchers, drivers who show up on time, cars that are clean and 99.999% of the time have functioning credit card machines. I honestly don't know what on earth you're talking about. None of this is an argument against Uber anyway, because people use Uber for features that even good taxis don't have, including price reduction, better real-time tracking, an app interface, and other things. And Uber drivers certainly can do things worse than taxis -- such as simply fail to show up, treat you rudely during the ride, or try to make you exit the car in an inconvenient/unsafe spot of the street at your destination. Uber is not intrinsically better about this kind of thing than taxis. But some things you absolutely cannot say, at least about taxis in the Boston area, are that they are anything but clean, safe, reliable, punctual, and able to take your credit card.
- unixhero 10y ago
  Taxis suck, globally.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    Except they really don't and are a great service in tons of places.
    - product50 10y ago
      Have you ever been in a taxi in US or India or Australia or even Canada? The entire experience sucks - from finding them, to convincing them to take you to your destination, to them rudely talking to you when you are explaining them your destination cross streets, to have them talking on the phone while driving, to have their taxi filthy dirty, to have them take you around to your destination in a non optimal way, to have them driving in a really rough manner, to have them ask for tip blatantly, to have their credit card reader not working, to them charging you a large amount for that 3 mile trip, to have them rudely tell you to get off on the other side of the road. It is such a miserable experience and I am glad the entire industry is getting killed. Speak for yourself when defending the taxi industry. You know nothing and I can prove that with experience and facts. It is so infuriating when fools like you come in and make a statement which has no firm basis and sense of truth.
      - Bahamut 10y ago
        Some of the terribleness of the taxi industry is on full display in Las Vegas at McCarran Airport - the taxi lines are long, and despite the posters mentioning the cost to various casinos on the strip, taxis will often try to convince you to take the interstate to rack up an additional $25 from you for such a short trip. It used to be even worse before the introduction to Uber/Lyft in the city. I'm glad the corrupt taxi industry is forced to change, their shenanigans have bled a lot of money from consumers.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        > Taxis suck, globally. You tried to defend this statement. Yet I live in northern Germany, Taxis are less than 10% more expensive than a comparable uber, have better service, are faster, and cleaner. I can order taxis via phone or a neat app (actually, there’s a bunch of them), basically anyone with a drivers license can start their own taxi company (so there is already a free market), and yet uber refused to comply with the market regulations (they need insurance for the cars). Your route is shown in the app when planning, you can pay via the app before the trip with taxi, and they often even offer to carry your bag up to your room at your destination. "Taxis suck, globally." is objectively false.

stuaxo 10y ago

Maybe all that's happened is people that used to take traditional taxis moved onto Uber.

nickgrosvenor 10y ago

Commonsense says this study is flawed in someway. Uber has giving millions and millions of car rides with drunk people, and how many of those wouldn't ride with a sober friend or take the time to call a cab?

p4wnc6 10y ago
Or perhaps the study says that common sense is flawed in some way? If the study holds up to scrutiny (not saying it will) then updating to have new common sense is the whole point.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

philip1209 10y ago

It sounds like the null hypothesis is that Uber has not affected drunken driving deaths. Didn't the study just fail to disprove the null hypothesis, meaning that its result is meaningless and inconclusive?

mc32 10y ago

So responsible people are trading Yellow taxis for Über and irresponsible people are still driving while intoxicated. Or, alternatively, the amount of drunk drivers is so huge that whatever number taxis and Uber take off the streets is negligible in relative numbers. But ride services want to promulgate the idea to cities they bring safety in order to counterbalance the annoyed voices of the yellow cabs decrying the conditions the ride service drivers must endure...

officemonkey 10y ago
Or perhaps, drunk driving happens in areas where Taxis, Mass Transit, and Uber are not available or economical.
- mc32 10y ago
  "Researchers... looked at the 100 most populated metropolitan areas, analyzing data from before and after the introduction of Uber and its competitors" Fair inquiry, but no. They studied the top 100 metro areas, not the Podunks. Now, it does not say whether the rate has remained steady despite, perhaps, an increase in people who now feel comfortable getting drunk cuz they can get a cab fairly easily with the intro of ride services. However, they have not decreased the totals, as they have claimed, according to the findings.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - officemonkey 10y ago
    Uber doesn't launch in areas where there isn't a market. If there is no need for extensive taxi and mass transit services, Uber won't be there either. I maintain that Uber is just another option in the top 100 metro areas. If Uber did work everywhere, then I am sure you would see reductions in places that do not have competing services.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  No. As someone who has gotten a DWI in one of the largest cities, I drove my car because I wanted to an was an irresponsible idiot, not because I had no options.

gojomo 10y ago

I'm suspicious. It seems the study may only be regressing on 'availability' of Uber – the single bit flag of whether it has launched in a city. If adoption is gradual, as the habits of drinkers/drivers change over months (or years), beneficial effects might not be seen by such a study, or remain hidden by all the other controls applied. The best analysis would likely need to use ride volume data; there's no hint in this study's abstract they've done that, and the paper is paywalled.

officemonkey 10y ago
Uber doesn't launch in areas where there isn't a market. If there is no need for extensive taxi and mass transit services, Uber won't be there either. In places where Uber has launched, they're probably just picking up riders that would normally take a cab or a train if Uber wasn't there.
- gojomo 10y ago
  Of course they only enter markets where there's demand. But it takes a while for people to understand and adopt something new as their preferred transit. Some initially view Uber/etc as weird, before later becoming big fans. In San Francisco, it appears Uber/Lyft have massively increased the total number of paid-rides taken. They're not just shifting trips from taxis or public transit, but also from private car usage – and creating new trips where people would've just stayed in or walked. That points out another stat a 'gold standard' study should try to identify: fatalities per trips (or ride-miles) taken, rather than just absolute number of fatalities. If cities with Uber have the same number of fatalities, but spread over twice as much travel, that's giant safety and welfare win, too.

sandworm101 10y ago

From talking to Brits, I'm starting to think that the greater availability of alternatives to driving one's self home seems to increase drinking. The need to get home, to get one's car home, is a good reason not to drink. During university I rode a motorcycle to school/work and can say it kept me away from many an afternoon at a beer garden. London's nightlife, the serious drinking, can only exist because nobody has to drive themselves home. So dropping Uber into a city, giving them another option for getting home, might increase the overall level of drinking. This would muddy the drink-driving numbers. For every drunk driven safely home by Uber there may be some other person out there pressured into having a drink that otherwise wouldn't. And some of them might drive.

laurencerowe 10y ago
Drinking is definitely more socially acceptable in Britain than the US, but that has more to do with differing history (no prohibition) than options for getting home. Drink driving became socially unacceptable in Britain only in the last 20-30 years but alcohol consumption hasn't really changed. The anti drink driving ads on TV every Christmas were really quite hard hitting. I've seen nothing similar in the US.
- smt88 10y ago
  The US has extensive ads fighting drinking and driving. I imagine there isn't much difference there.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    The UK has had drink driving ads on mainstream TV for 50 years, since 1964. This BBC page shows some of the ads, and discusses others. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29894885 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29894885
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

xupybd 10y ago

Totally off topic, but totally bugging me. Why is it (in this case) Effect not affect?

bumblebeard 10y ago
Effect is usually a noun and affect is usually a verb.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  That's not an explanation. Effect and affect are just different things with different meanings both as nouns and verbs.
the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
Because the noun affect means something entirely different.
unclenoriega 10y ago
It seems like it should be clear if you read the definitions. Perhaps if you explain why you think it should be 'affect', you can get a better explanation.

austinl 10y ago

It's worth reading the other report [1] the article cites — it's a lot more comprehensive than the author makes it out to be. The study didn't find a relationship between Uber and alcohol-involved accidents/fatalities (which the NPR article is about), but did find a statistically significant relationship between Uber, traffic fatalities, and DUIs. They also found that introducing Uber increases auto-theft. Using a differences-in-differences specification, we find that fatal accident rates generally decline after the introduction of Uber. Specifically, in the unweighted regressions, we find that entry is associated with a 6 percent decline in the fatal accident rate. Fatal night-time crashes experience a slightly larger decline of 18 percent. In both the weighted and unweighted estimations, we also discover a continued decline in the overall fatal crash rate and the rate of vehicular fatalities for the months following the introduction of Uber. For each additional year of operation, Uber’s continued presence is associated with a 16.6 percent decline in vehicular fatalities. ... Again employing a differences-in-differences specification, typically with county specific trends, we find a large and robust decline in the arrest rate for DUIs. Depending upon specification, DUIs are 15 to 62 percent lower after the entry of Uber. The average annual rate of decline after the introduction of Uber is 51.3 percent per year for DUIs. [1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2783797 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2783797

scythe 10y ago
Classic case of proving the null hypothesis. The p-value hit the threshold for DUIs and deaths, but not for alcohol-involved accidents. If you're wondering why, here's a hint: the mean rate for alcohol-involved accidents was less than 1 in 100,000. The headline, then: "Uber hasn't had an effect".

Overtonwindow 10y ago

Why does it seem the media is so intent on tearing Uber down. There have been a lot of articles on HN about Uber is fucked, Uber is going down, Uber is doomed... Uber is really great. No, they don't pay their drivers enough. No, they don't do everything they can to ensure their drivers are responsible, and vetted. Yet they provide an invaluable service against a corrupt, entrenched industry that has needed a serious kick in the pants for as long as any of us have been alive. Uber has a lot of improvements to make, but I would rather have the option of choosing them over the corrupt taxi industry than not.

silveira 10y ago

Maybe the group of people who drink and are responsible enough to call a Uber does not significantly overlaps with the group who drinks and are irresponsible enough to drive.