15 ms·

A new study says services like Uber and Lyft are causing urban traffic woes

125 points by aaronbrethorst 8y ago

rossdavidh 8y ago
I live in Austin, which for a period of time had basically driven out Uber and Lyft with regulation. Then, the Texas state government overruled the city, and Uber and Lyft came back. I can say from personal experience, our traffic did not get the slightest bit better when Uber and Lyft were gone. However, our drunk driving rates did apparently go up.
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  In my admittedly limited experience in Austin, the problem is more parking than traffic a lot of the time (at least downtown). I rented a car the last couple of times I visited but walked or changed plans to avoid moving it. Could I have used Uber at the time, I wouldn't have rented a car in the first place: I would've effectively shared one with others, kept another parking spot open the whole time, and would've been more flexible and saved a lot of time.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  I live in Austin too. The reason you didn't notice much change is that several new services swooped in to fill the gap left by Uber and Lyft. There was even a very popular Facebook group where people (illegally) solicited ride-sharing services. So, in a sense, ride-sharing never really went away.
  - shard972 8y ago
    I don't have a FB account but i use uber so that's just not a solution that everybody would easily be able to jump over to.
- dagoat 8y ago
  In that time they were gone, didn't about 6-12 other companies offering the same service spin up/get popular? Which are probably not doing as great now Lyft and Uber are back.
  - rossdavidh 8y ago
    You are correct, but from my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, none of them became as commonly used as Uber/Lyft were, before or after. This maybe would have changed eventually, had the situation persisted longer.
dokein 8y ago
A week ago, at the stop nearest me, the E train uptown was re-routed. The C train had an 18 minute wait (the next one after that -- 19 minutes). The station was somewhere north of 100 degrees F and packed. As the trains were one floor below the turnstiles, these issues were only visible AFTER swiping $3(A) to get into the station. The escalator was broken too, which is fine for me but bad for many others. Meanwhile, I am already paying one of the highest state and local taxes in the nation. But I'm not complaining about the taxes -- rather, I'm complaining that these dollars don't go very far -- it cost 3.5 BILLION per mile of track(B) because of graft and poor city management. For those in parts of Brooklyn, looks like the L train will take 15 months to fix. Would anyone take a $100 bet that it finishes on schedule (at 1:1 odds)? The last time I was in a cab, the driver yelled at me for using an iPhone, accusing me of using Chinese children to assemble them. Somewhat confusingly, he also yelled at me for being Chinese and taking away jobs. I looked up how to report this and it involves showing up in person at a hearing during work hours. Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway. Even if the ride takes just as long, at least it's quiet and air-conditioned, and I can read or nap. Rather, Uber's major fault seems to be not greasing the politicans' hands like the medallion industry is. The parent article references the book "The Power Broker" when citing traffic. Funny, because it sure seems that Tammany Hall is still around. (A) The metro card fare is $2.75, but the machine prevents you from putting in exact change -- only $5 increments -- so anyone who visits town usually wastes some fare. (B) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- sharkmerry 8y ago
  >> Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway. There's no doubt there are issues with public transit, but letting the rideshare services run rampant, while being effectively subsidized by the taxpayers roads, etc is no solution either. >> U.S. ridership is surging, he said — up 37% last year, to 2.6 billion passengers, from 2016. >> It found that, in U.S. cities, 49% to 61% of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all — or by walking, biking, or public transit. Given these two notes from the article, Thats alot of extra demand added to road infrastructure. A medallion system makes the ride-share services contribute their share for the increase in wear & tear on infrastructure. Its not perfect, but letting them run wild isnt working either.
smileysteve 8y ago
> Urban traffic woes Isn't this what last mile inevitably does? If a part of town is walkable, it doesn't decrease street traffic; If it's bikeable - or scooterable, it doesn't decrease those vehicles. Yes, this is induced demand; which is why this information shouldn't be used to make more highways or lanes. Indeed; a large part of the negative traffic impact from rideshare is probably lack of suitable drop off curb space.
almost_usual 8y ago
I like the idea of ride sharing but the problem comes when it's abused to the extreme. It's not out of the ordinary for someone to order 3-4 Lyfts on the weekend in a single evening. That is a ton of unnecessary driving to hang out or fulfill the social obligations people have. I sometimes wonder what San Francisco was like before ride sharing. I imagine people would just pick a neighborhood and hang out there.
- mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
  Is it possible that the benefit of people being more easily able to travel around town outweighs the cost of the extra traffic?
  - almost_usual 8y ago
    Yeah, I don't know. I'm only stating that I can see how Lyft and Uber could generate more traffic due to convenience.
    - mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
      Me neither =) Your hypothesis is a good one imo.
      - almost_usual 8y ago
        I mean, I'm definitely guilty of it. I've tried giving up ride-sharing for a bit and the social situations you get into are awkward. People usually don't understand and get frustrated. If I ride the bus to meet someone for dinner and I get there everything will start fine. What eventually happens after dinner is that person will invite me to some other place and they'll want to get there as soon as possible. Responding with "oh, I'm trying only use public transit so I'll meet you in a bit" causes a bit of friction. It's normal to expect people to be somewhere in a certain amount of time now because of ride sharing. The convenience of it is almost like texting. "Why aren't you here yet? Can't you just Uber or Lyft?" / "Why haven't you responded to my text? Why don't you have your phone on you?"
saudioger 8y ago
I'd be interested in reading more studies about this, but anecdotally I feel like this has to be true. I live next door to a large house with 8 college students, and two have them claimed to have ~never~ taken public transit in the city since living here, not ever (they've been here over a year now). When they have a party you can easily count a dozen Ubers rolling up, no one's walking to the train station anymore. We're one of the most expensive cities in the country, and our public transit system is pretty decent. I commuted using it exclusively for over 10 years. 5 years ago it would be insane to hear a college student say they've never taken a train here. Maybe it's the combination of low Uber prices and high housing expenses? I feel like the local student population has been becoming wealthier (because they have to come from richer families to afford housing)... and Uber pool pricing is generally within $1-2 of a non-discounted trip on a train.
abalone 8y ago
Doesn't link to the study. Why is there no mention of taxis? Clearly if people are ridesharing instead of taking public transit, that's less efficient. But ridesharing is vastly more efficient than how it used to be with taxi hailing. They'd circle the streets looking for fares and there was little to no pooling. It's highly plausible that people are choosing rideshares over public transit / walking / biking, leading to an overall increase. It's believable. But to truly assess it we need to deduct the old taxi system. With no mention of that and no link to the source study it's hard to tell if they did.
habosa 8y ago
I'm not sure if Uber/Lyft put more cars on the road, but I'm sure that Uber and Lyft drivers do things that cause traffic. Many analyses of traffic have shown that individual drivers can cause huge downstream traffic effects. When you see an Uber driver just stop at a corner at a major intersection, there can be 10-15 cars slowed by having to wait or go around. Biking around SF has made me very wary of certain car models popular for Uber. If I see a Prius I assume it could stop anywhere at any time. Even with all that ... These services may still be a net positive. I use them a lot on the weekends and would never be able to get around the city like I do without them.
JeffL 8y ago
Need more tunnels. Call the Boring Company.
cbhl 8y ago
There's a simple solution to this -- buses! We don't even need public tax dollars to pay for them. There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities. Hell, Google (and other tech companies) will happily pay for its own buses to reduce VMT, but taking away street parking to add bus stops is political suicide in San Francisco right now.
- tmcw 8y ago
  > There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities. In most cases, the inverse of this statement is closer to the truth: most 'micro transit' companies have been propped up by government subsidies but have nevertheless constantly lost money on each ride. Here's some good background reading on that point: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-transit-is-consistent-dismal-failure/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-tr...
- leovander 8y ago
  Yeah, look at places like London, dedicated bus lanes make sure that buses are almost always on their set schedule. At least in Southern California we have the extra lanes that could be dedicated that.
  - komali2 8y ago
    That's being set up right now in SF - Van Ness is getting dedicated bus lanes. It's just taking... a while...
  - fredley 8y ago
    The buses in London, for the most part, work very well. Every bus is tracked with GPS. If too wide a gap opens up between one bus and the next, the earlier bus will sometimes wait for a minute or so to even out the service. This means you almost never have to wait more than 2-3 minutes for a bus in central London, 5-6 at the outside. While busses and bus routes used to be very difficult to parse, compared to the tube map, apps like Citymapper have made them accessible to all. I take the bus often, it's often faster than the tube, and always a more pleasant way to get around. Citymapper is now launching its own 'smart' bus and Uber-like services, using the mountains of data they have on the door-to-door journies Londerners make to plan smart routes - some that change throughout the day to meet demand. I've used both the busses and the cars and they're both fantastic (the cars take you to your door for a fraction of the price of an Uber, if you're in the right place to catch one). London has embraced Citymapper and vice-versa and they're doing some really interesting things without disrupting existing services.
kazinator 8y ago
Uber is worse for congestion than someone driving their own car, because in addition to making the same trip, the Uber car also drives considerable distances without a passenger.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  Yes. The only traffic/land usage-related improvement from "ridesharing" is that less space is needed for parking. Not that that isn't important, of course.
- nerfhammer 8y ago
  but you have to average that against the percent of the time it's uber pool and has 2-3 passengers that otherwise would have required separate trips
  - vkou 8y ago
    What % of Uber rides in NYC, or other congested metros are Uber pool? Has Uber ever published data on this? I have never taken a rideshare pool, and NYC is just about the last place I'd consider doing so.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Not necessarily. People also spend lots of time driving around looking for an empty free on-street parking spot. In some congested cities this can be a sizable proportion of overall traffic. If the Uber is getting back-to-back trips, they're probably driving more efficiently on average.
  - hughes 8y ago
    Every uber trip also frees up a parking spot compared to driving yourself.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      Also a good point. Parking accounts for double digit percentages of land use in nearly all American cities. It's such a huge waste of space, and the cities would be denser, more walkable, and way more pleasant without it. More info here: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/12/american-cities-are-drowning-in-car-storage/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/12/american-cities-are-d...
rakamotog 8y ago
Well, I personally believe its true in India. In last 7 years, my time to office has increased from 20 minutes to 35 minutes to now 60+ minutes. The number of vehicles increased a lot but the biggest culprit is Uber and other cab services. These yellow plates (commercial vehicles) cut lanes a lot and make me break at least 15 times each trip just to get a few feets of advantage. And the worst part is other drivers seem to take them as an example and overall road traffic has become rowdier resulting in very high inefficiency.
radicaldreamer 8y ago
It's extremely onerous and difficult to own a car in San Francisco (parking situation, street cleaning, meters, lack of reserved and available parking spots) but a bunch of Ubers and Lyft drivers can drive all day in the city causing massive congestion with plenty of drivers who not only don't reside in the city, but aren't even from the Bay Area paying nothing to maintain the roads or congestion or pollution or the fact that they don't know the roads and drive recklessly to maximize the number of rides per hour.
- dantheman 8y ago
  Is there any reason that a person who owns a car has more of a right to have a ride than a person renting a ride? Many people 'aren't even from the bay area' and drive in; hell they even take up space in the bay area to store their car when it's not in use!
- sol_remmy 8y ago
  Please consult the facts before you post. All employers within San Francisco pay a large amount of taxes to the city for each employee. Those taxes more than pay for the cost of road use of their employees. Thank you.
  - radicaldreamer 8y ago
    Here’s the thing though, every employer in the Bay Area pays taxes, but only Uber and Lyft also disproportionately congest streets and add air and noise pollution. It’s not proportional whatsoever to the residents of these neighborhoods. There are solutions which would better fit the problem: congestion pricing for peak hours or non-residents, pollution surcharge for non-EV ride share vehicles, surcharge for non-pool/line rides. The status quo is to publicize the congestion and pollution and risk and privatize the profits.
lewis500 8y ago
I don’t understand why this study is receiving so much attention. It’s not peer reviewed. It doesn’t contain actual data collection (the estimates are all extrapolated in a way the author considers reasonable, not measured data from traffic detectors or surveys). Schaller is not a researcher or engineer, but a consultant mainly working for taxi regulation. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But I’m surprised the study gets so much press because some guy published something on his personal website.
- DogOnTheWeb 8y ago
  For what it's worth, the article also links to a study with the same conclusion out of UC Davis. https://steps.ucdavis.edu/new-research-ride-hailing-impacts-travel-behavior/ https://steps.ucdavis.edu/new-research-ride-hailing-impacts-...
  - lewis500 8y ago
    The Davis study doesn't make any of the big claims that are getting attention here. Being academic and from a good department, it is much more measured: "Net vehicle miles traveled (VMT) changes are unknown." "While this data provides initial insights into the travel behavior changes associated with ridehailing, it is still limited in that it does not provide a complete picture of individual travelers’ trip generating activities, the modes they used before ride-hailing services, and the potentially new patterns of behavior that have since emerged." Meanwhile, here is coverage of this study: "Lyft, Uber increase traffic 180 percent in major cities, says report" https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/27/17622178/uber-lyft-cause-traffic-streets-congestion-bruce-schaller-tnc-report https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/27/17622178/uber-lyft-cause-tra...
- blondie9x 8y ago
  Are you kidding yourself? You think people continuing to rely on cars whether they drive or they are being driven is going to reduce traffic? Buses and rail reduce traffic not cars. Mass van pooling and what not can also help. We have to get off of cars and empty seats. Apps pushing cars and pushing ride sharing are pushing laziness and congestion. Why kid ourselves into thinking that Uber and Lyft are fixing the car traffic problem and climate change? Imagine for a second all these cars as chairs. Imagine sitting in your chair with a wheel attached then getting onto a freeway and propelling forward. All these people in chairs with empty chairs in their walled off metal combustion tank. We need to stop all this empty chair insanity and use more efficient ways to move people sitting down going from place to place. Want to combat obesity? Fight climate change? Prevent accidents? Motor deaths? Depression and isolation? Do away with cars.
NickBusey 8y ago
>> .. when people use a ride-hailing company, they are opting to do so rather than take public transportation, walk or bike. They generally are not choosing between hailing and driving themselves. This doesn't seem correct to me. If I can ride my bike or walk somewhere, I will do that pretty much every time. The only time I ever consider an Uber or Lyft is if the distance is too far to bike, and I would rather not drive for whatever reason. I know this is just one anecdote, but that seems like quite a bold claim from the article, and a claim that doesn't match up at all with the reality of how I and others I know use the services.
- criddell 8y ago
  Biking or walking is a great solution when you live someplace with decent weather. I'm in Central Texas and unless your office has showers (mine does), there's no way you can walk or bike to work for half the year.
- eli 8y ago
  You left out "public transportation." There is very strong anecdotal evidence that here in DC a large number of people take Uber where they used to take Metro.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Many places, like in California, do not have good public transportation and Uber is the only decent option. That statement in the article is definitely a heavy assumption.
    - komali2 8y ago
      The counter argument is that you no longer feel pressure to kick the issue to your congressperson to push for public transit, because a "good enough" solution has been presented (a solution that isn't as good for the environment or city than a bus).
      - manigandham 8y ago
munificent 8y ago
I don't use ride shares that often, but when I do, it's almost always because I don't want to deal with parking downtown. If ride shares are increasing traffic, it could be that, to some degree, they are turning roads into "living parking lots". Where before my car would be parked at some lot near my destination, now "my car" is a Lyft that is out cruising the streets when I'm not in it.
tibbon 8y ago
One of the biggest issues that I see is where the cars pull over to pick up / drop off people. They almost always just stop in the middle of streets, double parking. Rarely do they pull over into an empty spot that's safer for them and passengers. This often causes traffic backup, at least in the Boston area.
- phyzome 8y ago
  Also: Stopping in the middle of crosswalks ("look at this convenient place where for some reason nobody is already parked!") or just before/after intersections (which are the most dangerous part of the roads as a baseline).
- longerthoughts 8y ago
  Shocked that more people aren't bringing this up. I frequently see blocks turn into complete traffic jams because a couple of Ubers/Lyfts double park, sometimes on opposite sides of a one-way street.
- almost_usual 8y ago
  Definitely the same in SF, Uber / Lyft notoriously double park illegally.
  - lhorie 8y ago
    In SF, I see people double parking everywhere, Uber or not - and I mean _parked_, not idling. My kid's school literally spent 20 minutes last parents night begging people not to do that in front of the school (and it's _still_ a problem). Going westbound on Golden Gate st around Fillmore is one of the weirdest thing I've ever seen. You can see entire lines of double parked cars with no drivers inside (sometimes on both sides of the road!) Then you also have the way-too-small MUNI bus stops where the bus has to double park (e.g. along Fulton), the delivery vans and the random dudes waiting for a parking spot to hopefully free up somewhere in the block. Even without considering Ubers, driving in SF is already a shitshow...
    - 8y ago
djohnston 8y ago
make public transit suck less
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  I hope you meant that in an absolute sense and not a relative sense. Making public transit suck less relative to alternatives by making those alternatives suck more is counterproductive.
  - djohnston 8y ago
    haha yes, i did mean in an absolute sense
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  In most places in the US, a good first step would be: make public transit
  - djohnston 8y ago
    i think public transit exists in most urban centers in america, is that not true?
stcredzero 8y ago
One way to think of this, is that Uber and Lyft are transforming the impetus of parking-pain into car service. People pay money to avoid the hassle of driving and parking. This means that a number of cars will be utilized more, and a number of parking spaces will be utilized less. The 1st question my wife and I ask with regards to Uber is generally, "Will we be able to park?"
maxander 8y ago
The "build more roads, people fill them with more cars" is just a symptom of a huge problem that's existed for so long that people can't see it anymore- that there's orders of magnitude more demand for intra-city transport than there is supply. The problem isn't a law of nature; keep giving people more ways to get from A to B and eventually you'll reach the point where you have more routes than people to travel them. ...But, in a car-based society, this won't happen until your entire city is a single level surface of pavement. There is no way to get the required efficiency out of a system where one person usually takes up a full 6'-by-10' lot of street space, and where speed is limited by the inherent dangers of having multi-ton masses of steel and aluminum passing within feet of pedestrians. Self driving cars might up throughput by a factor of two; I'd estimate we need about a factor of a hundred before we can call the problem solved.
newnewpdro 8y ago
Don't these ride sharing services in urban centers just cause more people to travel by car? It seems obvious that this would increase congestion. The only thing it seems likely to reduce is the amount of parking spaces and idle vehicles in storage, less vehicle ownership. But now everyone, even those without cars or even driver's licenses, are just a smartphone app away from having a car shuttle them around for even the most trivial of distances. When you make something more convenient and accessible, it gets utilized more. A funny thing about the prospect of self-driving cars: what about the people who used to be in the driver's seats? I suppose some percentage of those will instead be passengers in the future - oops, even more cars on the road!
tzury 8y ago
VIA is the answer! Via is an on-demand transit system that takes multiple passengers heading in the same direction and books them into a shared vehicle. Think of Via as a bus that’s smart enough to come when you want it and where you want it... https://ridewithvia.com/ https://ridewithvia.com/ and https://www.viavan.com/ https://www.viavan.com/
- wilg 8y ago
  Isn't this just UberPOOL with a van?
- romski 8y ago
  The problem with this service is it needs tremendous amounts of capital to own all those buses. Is this company really going to raise billions and billions of dollars to own a large enough fleet to make a meaningful difference?
chuckgreenman 8y ago
I love public transit, when I was living in the Minneapolis / Saint Paul area I all most never used ride sharing apps, and used the metro every day to commute. But those services aren't free. The MS/SP system is considered world class but they have a 30% farebox recovery ratio. It costs the public a lot of money to maintain that system. In Cincinnati, the public transit system is terrible. The buses don't run on schedule, our light rail route is incredibly short. I use ride sharing services here a lot more as a result. Even if we do move traffic into public transit systems, that isn't going to magically shrink the costs of DOT departments around the nation. We'll just be subsidizing something else.
WisNorCan 8y ago
This should not surprise anyone. As the price of a service decreases, consumption increases. So, we should expect that more people are taking taxi rides that would otherwise commute in different ways (e.g. walking or taking the bus). If we extrapolate to self-driving cars where the cost comes down by about 2/3, it is easy to see a tragedy of the commons situation where roads in major cities are saturated with vehicles. This is where government intervention is required. This can be done either through limiting vehicle permits (which NYC introduced) or other forms of taxes (e.g. congestion taxes).
deleted 8y ago
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thegayngler 8y ago
Public transportation is totally unreliable at best and unusable at worst in the urban areas of the US. If it takes an hour or two to go anywhere then people are going to opt for something better.
Simulacra 8y ago
I'm confused. Taking Uber or a Lyft, that's like taking a taxi, right? Like someone driving their own car. People who use ride sharing apps are going to be in a car either way, why single out Uber and Lyft? That's like saying people going to work contribute to congestion.
mancerayder 8y ago
In NYC they cause woes because the public transit system has become a nightmare for those not in Manhattan, a la "The Outer Boroughs". Many Manhattan people barely register that there's an issue, and see more traffic than before. Oh gosh, the traffic is slow going uptown. If only the trains weren't breaking down, signals weren't needing repair, there wasn't a mid 60 percent on-time rating at present. If only the train service wasn't cut so viciously weekends. If only subways themselves weren't filled with miscreants, behaving rudely by playing music on their phones, bringing bikes, etc. If the subway platforms weren't 100 degrees F during the summer, when the next train is 10 minutes away. If only the buses were an alternative, instead of being beset by slow traffic thanks to bicycle lanes, double parking that's not ticketed, construction vehicles, and parking on both sides of the street. Then I'd be open to being concerned about the fact that I'm contributing to "traffic congestion" by taking Lyft and Uber (mostly Lyft) about 5x or more a week.
kovacs 8y ago
Uber/Lyft are taxi services. They need to be regulated. The cars need to be marked, have numbers, drivers accountable to the community (not just the passenger), for bad driving. As a driver who's lived in SF for a long time I've seen first hand the terrible impact these services have had to the city. They clog streets and disregard any and all traffic laws. Just yesterday an Uber driver made a left turn from the middle lane on Hyde street. He backed up traffic as he refused to move until someone let him make his illegal turn. He was the recipient of a lot of honks. His response? Gave everyone the finger after he finally made his left hand turn. Lovely. He should lose his license, period. In the days before these services existed cab drivers were petrified of getting in trouble. Many Uber/Lyft drivers are modern day lawless pirates. A modern medallion system driven by traffic/ridership data with as little chance for corruption as possible would be the best answer to these problems. Uber/Lyft as they exist today cannot be allowed to continue if we value quality of life/safety.
- pxeboot 8y ago
  Why should Uber/Lyft be treated differently than FedEx, Walmart, and the hundreds of other companies with vehicles "clogging our streets"?
- Routhinator 8y ago
  Meanwhile in Canada.. The situation is exactly the opposite. The taxi licensed taxi cartel have no fear of blocking traffic, speeding, making illegal turns, parking in bus stops or anything else because they are a licensed taxi. They refuse to take any rides that don't suit their plans because there is more demand than taxi licensed so if you need a taxi from downtown to suburban neighborhoods you might wait 2-3 hours until you get a willing driver or just end up taking the bus. Uber/Lyft drivers on the other hand are very respectfully following the rules of the road because if they cause undue attention someone will report them and they'll be fined, and they don't have the money of the taxi cartel behind them to pay the fine for them.
- throwaway76543 8y ago
  Taxi service regulation in the US are why those systems are unusable. I can't get a taxi if there aren't enough medallions issued. There's no regulatory body preventing me from getting into the car I purchased. It makes no sense whatsoever to suggest that suddenly we need regulation simply because I rented the car in a particular way instead of driving it myself. The regulations that matter with respect to taxi services are those that protect consumers -- there is no basis for using regulation to limit a consumer's access to the service.
paulie_a 8y ago
I'll be incredibly selfish and simply say, but I am not driving and being frustrated. Uber isn't a ride sharing platform, it's "I don't have to deal with assholes" platform. Also I no longer need to pay for the monthly parking.
Grue3 8y ago
That's strange because traffic woes existed before Uber and Lyft. Did they cause congestion retroactively?
warmfuzzykitten 8y ago
Yeah, it's a bitch when people can actually get where they want to go in a timely manner. Satisfying that demand might actually put more cars on the road.

I live in Austin, which for a period of time had basically driven out Uber and Lyft with regulation. Then, the Texas state government overruled the city, and Uber and Lyft came back. I can say from personal experience, our traffic did not get the slightest bit better when Uber and Lyft were gone. However, our drunk driving rates did apparently go up.

TallGuyShort 8y ago
In my admittedly limited experience in Austin, the problem is more parking than traffic a lot of the time (at least downtown). I rented a car the last couple of times I visited but walked or changed plans to avoid moving it. Could I have used Uber at the time, I wouldn't have rented a car in the first place: I would've effectively shared one with others, kept another parking spot open the whole time, and would've been more flexible and saved a lot of time.
enraged_camel 8y ago
I live in Austin too. The reason you didn't notice much change is that several new services swooped in to fill the gap left by Uber and Lyft. There was even a very popular Facebook group where people (illegally) solicited ride-sharing services. So, in a sense, ride-sharing never really went away.
- shard972 8y ago
  I don't have a FB account but i use uber so that's just not a solution that everybody would easily be able to jump over to.
dagoat 8y ago
In that time they were gone, didn't about 6-12 other companies offering the same service spin up/get popular? Which are probably not doing as great now Lyft and Uber are back.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  You are correct, but from my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, none of them became as commonly used as Uber/Lyft were, before or after. This maybe would have changed eventually, had the situation persisted longer.

dokein 8y ago

A week ago, at the stop nearest me, the E train uptown was re-routed. The C train had an 18 minute wait (the next one after that -- 19 minutes). The station was somewhere north of 100 degrees F and packed. As the trains were one floor below the turnstiles, these issues were only visible AFTER swiping $3(A) to get into the station. The escalator was broken too, which is fine for me but bad for many others. Meanwhile, I am already paying one of the highest state and local taxes in the nation. But I'm not complaining about the taxes -- rather, I'm complaining that these dollars don't go very far -- it cost 3.5 BILLION per mile of track(B) because of graft and poor city management. For those in parts of Brooklyn, looks like the L train will take 15 months to fix. Would anyone take a $100 bet that it finishes on schedule (at 1:1 odds)? The last time I was in a cab, the driver yelled at me for using an iPhone, accusing me of using Chinese children to assemble them. Somewhat confusingly, he also yelled at me for being Chinese and taking away jobs. I looked up how to report this and it involves showing up in person at a hearing during work hours. Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway. Even if the ride takes just as long, at least it's quiet and air-conditioned, and I can read or nap. Rather, Uber's major fault seems to be not greasing the politicans' hands like the medallion industry is. The parent article references the book "The Power Broker" when citing traffic. Funny, because it sure seems that Tammany Hall is still around. (A) The metro card fare is $2.75, but the machine prevents you from putting in exact change -- only $5 increments -- so anyone who visits town usually wastes some fare. (B) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

sharkmerry 8y ago
>> Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway. There's no doubt there are issues with public transit, but letting the rideshare services run rampant, while being effectively subsidized by the taxpayers roads, etc is no solution either. >> U.S. ridership is surging, he said — up 37% last year, to 2.6 billion passengers, from 2016. >> It found that, in U.S. cities, 49% to 61% of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all — or by walking, biking, or public transit. Given these two notes from the article, Thats alot of extra demand added to road infrastructure. A medallion system makes the ride-share services contribute their share for the increase in wear & tear on infrastructure. Its not perfect, but letting them run wild isnt working either.

smileysteve 8y ago

> Urban traffic woes Isn't this what last mile inevitably does? If a part of town is walkable, it doesn't decrease street traffic; If it's bikeable - or scooterable, it doesn't decrease those vehicles. Yes, this is induced demand; which is why this information shouldn't be used to make more highways or lanes. Indeed; a large part of the negative traffic impact from rideshare is probably lack of suitable drop off curb space.

almost_usual 8y ago

I like the idea of ride sharing but the problem comes when it's abused to the extreme. It's not out of the ordinary for someone to order 3-4 Lyfts on the weekend in a single evening. That is a ton of unnecessary driving to hang out or fulfill the social obligations people have. I sometimes wonder what San Francisco was like before ride sharing. I imagine people would just pick a neighborhood and hang out there.

mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
Is it possible that the benefit of people being more easily able to travel around town outweighs the cost of the extra traffic?
- almost_usual 8y ago
  Yeah, I don't know. I'm only stating that I can see how Lyft and Uber could generate more traffic due to convenience.
  - mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
    Me neither =) Your hypothesis is a good one imo.
    - almost_usual 8y ago
      I mean, I'm definitely guilty of it. I've tried giving up ride-sharing for a bit and the social situations you get into are awkward. People usually don't understand and get frustrated. If I ride the bus to meet someone for dinner and I get there everything will start fine. What eventually happens after dinner is that person will invite me to some other place and they'll want to get there as soon as possible. Responding with "oh, I'm trying only use public transit so I'll meet you in a bit" causes a bit of friction. It's normal to expect people to be somewhere in a certain amount of time now because of ride sharing. The convenience of it is almost like texting. "Why aren't you here yet? Can't you just Uber or Lyft?" / "Why haven't you responded to my text? Why don't you have your phone on you?"

saudioger 8y ago

I'd be interested in reading more studies about this, but anecdotally I feel like this has to be true. I live next door to a large house with 8 college students, and two have them claimed to have ~never~ taken public transit in the city since living here, not ever (they've been here over a year now). When they have a party you can easily count a dozen Ubers rolling up, no one's walking to the train station anymore. We're one of the most expensive cities in the country, and our public transit system is pretty decent. I commuted using it exclusively for over 10 years. 5 years ago it would be insane to hear a college student say they've never taken a train here. Maybe it's the combination of low Uber prices and high housing expenses? I feel like the local student population has been becoming wealthier (because they have to come from richer families to afford housing)... and Uber pool pricing is generally within $1-2 of a non-discounted trip on a train.

abalone 8y ago

Doesn't link to the study. Why is there no mention of taxis? Clearly if people are ridesharing instead of taking public transit, that's less efficient. But ridesharing is vastly more efficient than how it used to be with taxi hailing. They'd circle the streets looking for fares and there was little to no pooling. It's highly plausible that people are choosing rideshares over public transit / walking / biking, leading to an overall increase. It's believable. But to truly assess it we need to deduct the old taxi system. With no mention of that and no link to the source study it's hard to tell if they did.

habosa 8y ago

I'm not sure if Uber/Lyft put more cars on the road, but I'm sure that Uber and Lyft drivers do things that cause traffic. Many analyses of traffic have shown that individual drivers can cause huge downstream traffic effects. When you see an Uber driver just stop at a corner at a major intersection, there can be 10-15 cars slowed by having to wait or go around. Biking around SF has made me very wary of certain car models popular for Uber. If I see a Prius I assume it could stop anywhere at any time. Even with all that ... These services may still be a net positive. I use them a lot on the weekends and would never be able to get around the city like I do without them.

JeffL 8y ago

Need more tunnels. Call the Boring Company.

cbhl 8y ago

There's a simple solution to this -- buses! We don't even need public tax dollars to pay for them. There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities. Hell, Google (and other tech companies) will happily pay for its own buses to reduce VMT, but taking away street parking to add bus stops is political suicide in San Francisco right now.

tmcw 8y ago
> There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities. In most cases, the inverse of this statement is closer to the truth: most 'micro transit' companies have been propped up by government subsidies but have nevertheless constantly lost money on each ride. Here's some good background reading on that point: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-transit-is-consistent-dismal-failure/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-tr...
leovander 8y ago
Yeah, look at places like London, dedicated bus lanes make sure that buses are almost always on their set schedule. At least in Southern California we have the extra lanes that could be dedicated that.
- komali2 8y ago
  That's being set up right now in SF - Van Ness is getting dedicated bus lanes. It's just taking... a while...
- fredley 8y ago
  The buses in London, for the most part, work very well. Every bus is tracked with GPS. If too wide a gap opens up between one bus and the next, the earlier bus will sometimes wait for a minute or so to even out the service. This means you almost never have to wait more than 2-3 minutes for a bus in central London, 5-6 at the outside. While busses and bus routes used to be very difficult to parse, compared to the tube map, apps like Citymapper have made them accessible to all. I take the bus often, it's often faster than the tube, and always a more pleasant way to get around. Citymapper is now launching its own 'smart' bus and Uber-like services, using the mountains of data they have on the door-to-door journies Londerners make to plan smart routes - some that change throughout the day to meet demand. I've used both the busses and the cars and they're both fantastic (the cars take you to your door for a fraction of the price of an Uber, if you're in the right place to catch one). London has embraced Citymapper and vice-versa and they're doing some really interesting things without disrupting existing services.

kazinator 8y ago

Uber is worse for congestion than someone driving their own car, because in addition to making the same trip, the Uber car also drives considerable distances without a passenger.

tomjakubowski 8y ago
Yes. The only traffic/land usage-related improvement from "ridesharing" is that less space is needed for parking. Not that that isn't important, of course.
nerfhammer 8y ago
but you have to average that against the percent of the time it's uber pool and has 2-3 passengers that otherwise would have required separate trips
- vkou 8y ago
  What % of Uber rides in NYC, or other congested metros are Uber pool? Has Uber ever published data on this? I have never taken a rideshare pool, and NYC is just about the last place I'd consider doing so.
CydeWeys 8y ago
Not necessarily. People also spend lots of time driving around looking for an empty free on-street parking spot. In some congested cities this can be a sizable proportion of overall traffic. If the Uber is getting back-to-back trips, they're probably driving more efficiently on average.
- hughes 8y ago
  Every uber trip also frees up a parking spot compared to driving yourself.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    Also a good point. Parking accounts for double digit percentages of land use in nearly all American cities. It's such a huge waste of space, and the cities would be denser, more walkable, and way more pleasant without it. More info here: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/12/american-cities-are-drowning-in-car-storage/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/12/american-cities-are-d...

rakamotog 8y ago

Well, I personally believe its true in India. In last 7 years, my time to office has increased from 20 minutes to 35 minutes to now 60+ minutes. The number of vehicles increased a lot but the biggest culprit is Uber and other cab services. These yellow plates (commercial vehicles) cut lanes a lot and make me break at least 15 times each trip just to get a few feets of advantage. And the worst part is other drivers seem to take them as an example and overall road traffic has become rowdier resulting in very high inefficiency.

radicaldreamer 8y ago

It's extremely onerous and difficult to own a car in San Francisco (parking situation, street cleaning, meters, lack of reserved and available parking spots) but a bunch of Ubers and Lyft drivers can drive all day in the city causing massive congestion with plenty of drivers who not only don't reside in the city, but aren't even from the Bay Area paying nothing to maintain the roads or congestion or pollution or the fact that they don't know the roads and drive recklessly to maximize the number of rides per hour.

dantheman 8y ago
Is there any reason that a person who owns a car has more of a right to have a ride than a person renting a ride? Many people 'aren't even from the bay area' and drive in; hell they even take up space in the bay area to store their car when it's not in use!
sol_remmy 8y ago
Please consult the facts before you post. All employers within San Francisco pay a large amount of taxes to the city for each employee. Those taxes more than pay for the cost of road use of their employees. Thank you.
- radicaldreamer 8y ago
  Here’s the thing though, every employer in the Bay Area pays taxes, but only Uber and Lyft also disproportionately congest streets and add air and noise pollution. It’s not proportional whatsoever to the residents of these neighborhoods. There are solutions which would better fit the problem: congestion pricing for peak hours or non-residents, pollution surcharge for non-EV ride share vehicles, surcharge for non-pool/line rides. The status quo is to publicize the congestion and pollution and risk and privatize the profits.

lewis500 8y ago

I don’t understand why this study is receiving so much attention. It’s not peer reviewed. It doesn’t contain actual data collection (the estimates are all extrapolated in a way the author considers reasonable, not measured data from traffic detectors or surveys). Schaller is not a researcher or engineer, but a consultant mainly working for taxi regulation. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But I’m surprised the study gets so much press because some guy published something on his personal website.

DogOnTheWeb 8y ago
For what it's worth, the article also links to a study with the same conclusion out of UC Davis. https://steps.ucdavis.edu/new-research-ride-hailing-impacts-travel-behavior/ https://steps.ucdavis.edu/new-research-ride-hailing-impacts-...
- lewis500 8y ago
  The Davis study doesn't make any of the big claims that are getting attention here. Being academic and from a good department, it is much more measured: "Net vehicle miles traveled (VMT) changes are unknown." "While this data provides initial insights into the travel behavior changes associated with ridehailing, it is still limited in that it does not provide a complete picture of individual travelers’ trip generating activities, the modes they used before ride-hailing services, and the potentially new patterns of behavior that have since emerged." Meanwhile, here is coverage of this study: "Lyft, Uber increase traffic 180 percent in major cities, says report" https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/27/17622178/uber-lyft-cause-traffic-streets-congestion-bruce-schaller-tnc-report https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/27/17622178/uber-lyft-cause-tra...
blondie9x 8y ago
Are you kidding yourself? You think people continuing to rely on cars whether they drive or they are being driven is going to reduce traffic? Buses and rail reduce traffic not cars. Mass van pooling and what not can also help. We have to get off of cars and empty seats. Apps pushing cars and pushing ride sharing are pushing laziness and congestion. Why kid ourselves into thinking that Uber and Lyft are fixing the car traffic problem and climate change? Imagine for a second all these cars as chairs. Imagine sitting in your chair with a wheel attached then getting onto a freeway and propelling forward. All these people in chairs with empty chairs in their walled off metal combustion tank. We need to stop all this empty chair insanity and use more efficient ways to move people sitting down going from place to place. Want to combat obesity? Fight climate change? Prevent accidents? Motor deaths? Depression and isolation? Do away with cars.

NickBusey 8y ago

>> .. when people use a ride-hailing company, they are opting to do so rather than take public transportation, walk or bike. They generally are not choosing between hailing and driving themselves. This doesn't seem correct to me. If I can ride my bike or walk somewhere, I will do that pretty much every time. The only time I ever consider an Uber or Lyft is if the distance is too far to bike, and I would rather not drive for whatever reason. I know this is just one anecdote, but that seems like quite a bold claim from the article, and a claim that doesn't match up at all with the reality of how I and others I know use the services.

criddell 8y ago
Biking or walking is a great solution when you live someplace with decent weather. I'm in Central Texas and unless your office has showers (mine does), there's no way you can walk or bike to work for half the year.
eli 8y ago
You left out "public transportation." There is very strong anecdotal evidence that here in DC a large number of people take Uber where they used to take Metro.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Many places, like in California, do not have good public transportation and Uber is the only decent option. That statement in the article is definitely a heavy assumption.
  - komali2 8y ago
    The counter argument is that you no longer feel pressure to kick the issue to your congressperson to push for public transit, because a "good enough" solution has been presented (a solution that isn't as good for the environment or city than a bus).
    - manigandham 8y ago

munificent 8y ago

I don't use ride shares that often, but when I do, it's almost always because I don't want to deal with parking downtown. If ride shares are increasing traffic, it could be that, to some degree, they are turning roads into "living parking lots". Where before my car would be parked at some lot near my destination, now "my car" is a Lyft that is out cruising the streets when I'm not in it.

tibbon 8y ago

One of the biggest issues that I see is where the cars pull over to pick up / drop off people. They almost always just stop in the middle of streets, double parking. Rarely do they pull over into an empty spot that's safer for them and passengers. This often causes traffic backup, at least in the Boston area.

phyzome 8y ago
Also: Stopping in the middle of crosswalks ("look at this convenient place where for some reason nobody is already parked!") or just before/after intersections (which are the most dangerous part of the roads as a baseline).
longerthoughts 8y ago
Shocked that more people aren't bringing this up. I frequently see blocks turn into complete traffic jams because a couple of Ubers/Lyfts double park, sometimes on opposite sides of a one-way street.
almost_usual 8y ago
Definitely the same in SF, Uber / Lyft notoriously double park illegally.
- lhorie 8y ago
  In SF, I see people double parking everywhere, Uber or not - and I mean _parked_, not idling. My kid's school literally spent 20 minutes last parents night begging people not to do that in front of the school (and it's _still_ a problem). Going westbound on Golden Gate st around Fillmore is one of the weirdest thing I've ever seen. You can see entire lines of double parked cars with no drivers inside (sometimes on both sides of the road!) Then you also have the way-too-small MUNI bus stops where the bus has to double park (e.g. along Fulton), the delivery vans and the random dudes waiting for a parking spot to hopefully free up somewhere in the block. Even without considering Ubers, driving in SF is already a shitshow...
  - 8y ago

djohnston 8y ago

make public transit suck less

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
I hope you meant that in an absolute sense and not a relative sense. Making public transit suck less relative to alternatives by making those alternatives suck more is counterproductive.
- djohnston 8y ago
  haha yes, i did mean in an absolute sense
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
In most places in the US, a good first step would be: make public transit
- djohnston 8y ago
  i think public transit exists in most urban centers in america, is that not true?

stcredzero 8y ago

One way to think of this, is that Uber and Lyft are transforming the impetus of parking-pain into car service. People pay money to avoid the hassle of driving and parking. This means that a number of cars will be utilized more, and a number of parking spaces will be utilized less. The 1st question my wife and I ask with regards to Uber is generally, "Will we be able to park?"

maxander 8y ago

The "build more roads, people fill them with more cars" is just a symptom of a huge problem that's existed for so long that people can't see it anymore- that there's orders of magnitude more demand for intra-city transport than there is supply. The problem isn't a law of nature; keep giving people more ways to get from A to B and eventually you'll reach the point where you have more routes than people to travel them. ...But, in a car-based society, this won't happen until your entire city is a single level surface of pavement. There is no way to get the required efficiency out of a system where one person usually takes up a full 6'-by-10' lot of street space, and where speed is limited by the inherent dangers of having multi-ton masses of steel and aluminum passing within feet of pedestrians. Self driving cars might up throughput by a factor of two; I'd estimate we need about a factor of a hundred before we can call the problem solved.

newnewpdro 8y ago

Don't these ride sharing services in urban centers just cause more people to travel by car? It seems obvious that this would increase congestion. The only thing it seems likely to reduce is the amount of parking spaces and idle vehicles in storage, less vehicle ownership. But now everyone, even those without cars or even driver's licenses, are just a smartphone app away from having a car shuttle them around for even the most trivial of distances. When you make something more convenient and accessible, it gets utilized more. A funny thing about the prospect of self-driving cars: what about the people who used to be in the driver's seats? I suppose some percentage of those will instead be passengers in the future - oops, even more cars on the road!

tzury 8y ago

VIA is the answer! Via is an on-demand transit system that takes multiple passengers heading in the same direction and books them into a shared vehicle. Think of Via as a bus that’s smart enough to come when you want it and where you want it... https://ridewithvia.com/ https://ridewithvia.com/ and https://www.viavan.com/ https://www.viavan.com/

wilg 8y ago
Isn't this just UberPOOL with a van?
romski 8y ago
The problem with this service is it needs tremendous amounts of capital to own all those buses. Is this company really going to raise billions and billions of dollars to own a large enough fleet to make a meaningful difference?

chuckgreenman 8y ago

I love public transit, when I was living in the Minneapolis / Saint Paul area I all most never used ride sharing apps, and used the metro every day to commute. But those services aren't free. The MS/SP system is considered world class but they have a 30% farebox recovery ratio. It costs the public a lot of money to maintain that system. In Cincinnati, the public transit system is terrible. The buses don't run on schedule, our light rail route is incredibly short. I use ride sharing services here a lot more as a result. Even if we do move traffic into public transit systems, that isn't going to magically shrink the costs of DOT departments around the nation. We'll just be subsidizing something else.

WisNorCan 8y ago

This should not surprise anyone. As the price of a service decreases, consumption increases. So, we should expect that more people are taking taxi rides that would otherwise commute in different ways (e.g. walking or taking the bus). If we extrapolate to self-driving cars where the cost comes down by about 2/3, it is easy to see a tragedy of the commons situation where roads in major cities are saturated with vehicles. This is where government intervention is required. This can be done either through limiting vehicle permits (which NYC introduced) or other forms of taxes (e.g. congestion taxes).

deleted 8y ago

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thegayngler 8y ago

Public transportation is totally unreliable at best and unusable at worst in the urban areas of the US. If it takes an hour or two to go anywhere then people are going to opt for something better.

Simulacra 8y ago

I'm confused. Taking Uber or a Lyft, that's like taking a taxi, right? Like someone driving their own car. People who use ride sharing apps are going to be in a car either way, why single out Uber and Lyft? That's like saying people going to work contribute to congestion.

mancerayder 8y ago

In NYC they cause woes because the public transit system has become a nightmare for those not in Manhattan, a la "The Outer Boroughs". Many Manhattan people barely register that there's an issue, and see more traffic than before. Oh gosh, the traffic is slow going uptown. If only the trains weren't breaking down, signals weren't needing repair, there wasn't a mid 60 percent on-time rating at present. If only the train service wasn't cut so viciously weekends. If only subways themselves weren't filled with miscreants, behaving rudely by playing music on their phones, bringing bikes, etc. If the subway platforms weren't 100 degrees F during the summer, when the next train is 10 minutes away. If only the buses were an alternative, instead of being beset by slow traffic thanks to bicycle lanes, double parking that's not ticketed, construction vehicles, and parking on both sides of the street. Then I'd be open to being concerned about the fact that I'm contributing to "traffic congestion" by taking Lyft and Uber (mostly Lyft) about 5x or more a week.

kovacs 8y ago

Uber/Lyft are taxi services. They need to be regulated. The cars need to be marked, have numbers, drivers accountable to the community (not just the passenger), for bad driving. As a driver who's lived in SF for a long time I've seen first hand the terrible impact these services have had to the city. They clog streets and disregard any and all traffic laws. Just yesterday an Uber driver made a left turn from the middle lane on Hyde street. He backed up traffic as he refused to move until someone let him make his illegal turn. He was the recipient of a lot of honks. His response? Gave everyone the finger after he finally made his left hand turn. Lovely. He should lose his license, period. In the days before these services existed cab drivers were petrified of getting in trouble. Many Uber/Lyft drivers are modern day lawless pirates. A modern medallion system driven by traffic/ridership data with as little chance for corruption as possible would be the best answer to these problems. Uber/Lyft as they exist today cannot be allowed to continue if we value quality of life/safety.

pxeboot 8y ago
Why should Uber/Lyft be treated differently than FedEx, Walmart, and the hundreds of other companies with vehicles "clogging our streets"?
Routhinator 8y ago
Meanwhile in Canada.. The situation is exactly the opposite. The taxi licensed taxi cartel have no fear of blocking traffic, speeding, making illegal turns, parking in bus stops or anything else because they are a licensed taxi. They refuse to take any rides that don't suit their plans because there is more demand than taxi licensed so if you need a taxi from downtown to suburban neighborhoods you might wait 2-3 hours until you get a willing driver or just end up taking the bus. Uber/Lyft drivers on the other hand are very respectfully following the rules of the road because if they cause undue attention someone will report them and they'll be fined, and they don't have the money of the taxi cartel behind them to pay the fine for them.
throwaway76543 8y ago
Taxi service regulation in the US are why those systems are unusable. I can't get a taxi if there aren't enough medallions issued. There's no regulatory body preventing me from getting into the car I purchased. It makes no sense whatsoever to suggest that suddenly we need regulation simply because I rented the car in a particular way instead of driving it myself. The regulations that matter with respect to taxi services are those that protect consumers -- there is no basis for using regulation to limit a consumer's access to the service.

paulie_a 8y ago

I'll be incredibly selfish and simply say, but I am not driving and being frustrated. Uber isn't a ride sharing platform, it's "I don't have to deal with assholes" platform. Also I no longer need to pay for the monthly parking.

Grue3 8y ago

That's strange because traffic woes existed before Uber and Lyft. Did they cause congestion retroactively?

warmfuzzykitten 8y ago

Yeah, it's a bitch when people can actually get where they want to go in a timely manner. Satisfying that demand might actually put more cars on the road.