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From Lyft's report: > We surveyed 30,000 passengers and 37,000 drivers in 52 major cities. I suspect they may have done some generous extrapolation here...(e
by awwstn 9y ago
From Lyft's report:
> We surveyed 30,000 passengers
and 37,000 drivers in 52 major cities.
I suspect they may have done some generous extrapolation here...(e.g. "0.1% of the 30,000 Lyft passengers we surveyed got rid of their cars for ridesharing, so 0.1% of the U.S. population must have ditched cars for ridesharing")
- clairity 9y agoyou've thrown suspicion on the study without any reasoning behind it. unless your population size is small, all studies extrapolate results. why do you think it's incorrect? for example, maybe the 52 cities they surveyed aren't representative of the whole population (this can be true if they chose the 52 largest cities rather than a random sampling of cities). give your comment some meat to chew on.
- hueving 9y agoAre you serious? Sampling Lyft riders for an life choice that makes them a Lyft rider absolutely would not extrapolate to the US population. It's like sampling people in an airport to get stats on how often everyone flies.
- luhn 9y agoThey aren't extrapolating to the US population, they're extrapolating to the Lyft userbase.
- clairity 9y agoyes. note that the article doesn't extrapolate anything to the US population, that's something that @awwstn added in. lyft, in the article, says 250K people on its platform have dropped car ownership according to its survey. they extrapolate that total number from a survey of a sample of it riders and drivers in 52 cities.
- hueving 9y agoOk, then the error is much less egregious but there is still a sampling error I can see (at least based on my own usage pattern of Lyft). As a user of Lyft who owns a car the odds of me being sampled by this survey were significantly lower than the people that depend on Lyft daily. It's the same problem with surveying people in an airport to determine how often flyers fly. Heavy users are more likely to be oversampled because they are in the airports more frequently. So for Lyft to overcome this they would have needed to survey people in population adjusted parts from each usage tier. Otherwise the 1% or whatever that ride everyday are going to throw off the whole survey. Especially since the most likely to answer surveys are frequent users.
- clairity 9y agothat's definitely a possible sampling error but lyft doesn't seem to tell you enough to know if they made that error. for example, if they only solicited survey takers after a ride, your assertion would be true.