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> Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the unusability of our street

> Taxis, Ubers, trucks and cars owned by people who opt to pay hundreds of dollars a month in parking are who will be taxed. Given the unusability of our streets, this seems closer to an economic reckoning than a political money grab. Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. Simultaneously, they reduce the incidences of drunk driving, providing positive externalities. Taxing trucks, used for transporting groceries, goods, and packages to the city, will increase the cost of each of these goods. The increase in grocery prices serves as a regressive tax on all people living within the congestion pricing zone. The failings of the subway and train infrastructure are due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA and untenable, collectively bargained contracts. At the same time that driving within the city will become more expensive, these forms of transport have been reducing service within the city and to the surrounding regions while simultaneously increasing fares. [0] https://medium.com/@johnnyknocke/the-mta-loses-six-billion-dollars-a-year-and-nobody-cares-d0d23093b2d8 https://medium.com/@johnnyknocke/the-mta-loses-six-billion-d... [1] https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/Cuts-to-Metro-North-could-impact-more-than-12516146.php https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/Cuts-to-Metro... [2] https://jalopnik.com/new-york-wont-shut-down-a-major-subway-line-now-but-it-1831464730 https://jalopnik.com/new-york-wont-shut-down-a-major-subway-... [3] https://trid.trb.org/view/384171 https://trid.trb.org/view/384171

dondawest 8y ago
It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars on the road (and thus congestion) because they incentivize non-car-owners to take car trips they wouldn’t normally take. Uber and Lyft lead to a net INCREASE in cars on the road, not a decrease.
- nickles 8y ago
  > It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars >> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
  - otikik 8y ago
    A quick google gave me this: https://uber.asu.edu/ https://uber.asu.edu/ . I would be more confident if the paper was issued by an entity with no economic ties with Uber.
    - nickles 8y ago
      It appears the paper was published two years before the partnership began. There's also no disclosure in the paper that Uber provided any funding (for whatever that's worth). [0] https://asunow.asu.edu/20181031-asu-news-uber-and-asu-partner-fully-funded-education-eligible-drivers https://asunow.asu.edu/20181031-asu-news-uber-and-asu-partne...
      - moorhosj 8y ago
        The report came out in August of 2016, so the data must be from before then. The next question would be, what has happened to Uber ridership levels over that same timeframe? According to this article [1], combined Uber and Lyft ridership in NYC was about 200,000/day in July 2016 (the most recent possible date for the original data). By July 2018, daily ridership was almost 600,000. Is possible that Uber/Lyft lower congestion when first introduced, but worsen it over the long-run? [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-ride-hailing-impact-public-transit-ridership/581062/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-rid...
  - jdreyfuss 8y ago
    I don't think the effect has been definitively proven one way or the other. While there are studies showing a decrease in congestion, there are also several showing a notable increase too[0][1]. I can say, anecdotally, in SF there are lots of Uber/Lyft drivers who drive in from outside of the city (and even Bay Area) because they can make more driving in the city. If they disappeared, would they be replaced by an equal or greater number of private cars? Given the parking situation in SF, I doubt it, but who can say. [0]https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/study-half-of-sfs-increase-in-traffic-congestion-due-to-uber-lyft/ https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/study-half-of-sfs-increase-i... [1]http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
- jak92 8y ago
  I've personally switched bus trips to uber trips, depending on a bunch of criteria. The major one being cost. IME uber most definitely increases the number of vehicles on the road.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road The charge is levied on private transport and Ubers et cetera. It's unlikely to shift demand from Ubers to private vehicles. On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect. > The failings of the subway and train infrastructure is due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA The MTA is a complicated problem. Part of it is high labor costs due to inefficient labor use. Part of it is conservatism with train speeds. Part of it is chronic under-funding. The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect. The congestion already does that. The issue is that it's a hard problem. You can't make deliveries to shops at 3AM because there is no one there to receive them. To the extent you can make deliveries at 6AM, they already do. But a delivery driver loads up the truck and then makes deliveries for eight hours. Telling them to work a de facto 14 hour shift because you're going to put two separate three hour blocks of "don't drive during peak hours" into the middle of their day is going to drive up costs. And freight rail serves an entirely different market. That's used to transport bulk products in industrial quantities, not to deliver bread to the corner deli. Trucks sometimes are used in contexts where freight rail could be used but those aren't the ones driving through Manhattan during rush hour. > The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates. The problem is that the externalities are really just failures in the markets for alternatives that have dumped their natural demand onto the roads, because all of the externalities come from congestion, which could be absorbed by better alternatives if they existed. If you make the subways better then fewer people drive. If you make them less expensive then fewer people drive. That means paying for them from taxes rather than fares -- just getting rid of the fares and using taxes instead would get a huge number of cars off the road and eliminate the overhead cost of all the fare collection infrastructure. When you have things like minimum parking requirements or anti-density zoning rules, that makes it more expensive to build high density housing and subsidizes car ownership for people in urban areas. Then the people who live there drive more, because they have somewhere to park a car and therefore own one, meanwhile there is less housing there which means people need to live further away and then many of them will drive back in to their jobs. Congestion pricing doesn't actually fix any of that, it just squeezes even harder on the people who the lack of alternatives had already squeezed into congested roads. It makes driving worse when what we need is for alternatives to driving to be better.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Ubers were growing like a cancer. With no limit in place they would just continue growing until nobody else could use the roads. They are a big factor in the current levels of congestion.
SilasX 8y ago
>Taxing trucks, used for transporting groceries, goods, and packages to the city, will increase the cost of each of these goods. The increase in grocery prices serves as a regressive tax on all people living within the congestion pricing zone. You're already effectively paying a premium to account for the extra time the drivers have to spend in traffic. It's not clear whether the congestion charges will be more than the labor-time saved. Also, a general point: typical market goods are, by default, "regressively priced", because most of them don't look at your income to determine the price. This is generally a good thing, because if every good's price scaled with income, there would be no material gain to earning an extra dollar. Any time you recognize a real scarcity and ensure it's priced explicitly rather than allocated by an ever-choked queue, it's going to be regressive in this sense. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker by itself.
- arrty88 8y ago
  Until the subway can transport packaged goods, i think its pretty unfair to tax UPS / FedEx etc
  - megy 8y ago
    Why? They cause congestion, the take up space, they need to be taxed.
mc32 8y ago
Trucks cause the most wear and tear on roads so I’m not entirely against capturing some of that via gross tonnage (or weight per wheel) tax of some sort.
plafl 8y ago
There was a taxi strike in Madrid recently and it seems it improved traffic, according to this: https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/01/31/inenglish/1548938901_327448.html https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/01/31/inenglish/1548938901_32...
gpm 8y ago
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. This doesn't make sense to me. IME - the vast majority of time there is a single customer or group in a taxi or uber. Assuming this is in fact the case. Taxis and ubers increase the number of trips taken by vehicle, but let's pretend in their favor that they leave that number flat. While they have a passenger in them they are trading 1-1 for a private vehicle to a "public" vehicle. While they don't have a passenger in them they are trading 0-1 for private vehicles to "public" vehicles. That results in a net increase in vehicles.
- lenocinor 8y ago
  It lessens the amount of car storage needed too, though, which is also important. It would be nice if multi-person trips like UberPool would be exempted to encourage their use, but I don't know if that's technically feasible.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
    It lessens the amount of cars storage and increases the amount of cars on the road. You can't transport by car and reduce both at the same time!
    - fjp 8y ago
      Fewer overall cars because fewer people own cars due to taxis and uber and Higher utilization of the cars that do exist because a higher % of cars are taxis and ubers Some combination of these two factors could mean that there are fewer cars idle at any time ("storage") and more cars in service at any time. I'm not necessarily saying that's what is happening but it's definitely possible. Looking into the future, a great outcome of driverless cars would be the commoditization of car transport. You essentially say where you're going and whether you are willing to share the ride. A driverless car pops off the queue to pick you up, or a multi-person car slightly diverts from its route to pick up up (a la Uber Pool). - Each physical car sees much higher utilization, allowing fewer cars to exist overall and parking space needs are reduced. - A large network of efficient driverless cars means it's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion from everyone's route. Ideally an improved shared ride experience would result in higher usage of shared rides, meaning that fewer cars need to be on the road at any given time = lower pollution and congestion.
zjaffee 8y ago
Ubers have been shown to increase vehicle miles driven, which in turn means a decline in the use of public transit. Historically the big tax on cars was an 18% tax on parking in NYC, but considering that more and more people are taking Ubers instead of driving themselves, we are still effectively subsidizing uber use in a way we aren't for regular driving.
- nickles 8y ago
  > Ubers have been shown to increase vehicle miles driven As other comments have said, the effects on congestion are controversial [0][1]. > which in turn means a decline in the use of public transit Not necessarily. If a trip would not have occurred otherwise, then there would be no decline in public transit utilization (subway lines seem to be closing with increased frequency recently, and people may have no other means of returning home). Of course, this would point to increased congestion. > the big tax on cars was an 18% tax on parking in NYC, but considering that more and more people are taking Ubers instead of driving themselves Would eliminating street parking further this policy? On many streets, it would allow for 1-2 additional lanes to be created. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043 [1] http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
dv_dt 8y ago
> The failings of the subway and train infrastructure are due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA and untenable, collectively bargained contracts. Arguably the problems are from systemic austerity: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
bryanlarsen 8y ago
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. Yes, they used to claim this, but studies show the opposite: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634506179/ride-hailing-services-add-to-traffic-congestion-study-says https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634506179/ride-hailing-servic...
chasedehan 8y ago
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. I read a study not too long ago (sorry couldn't find it), but it found the opposite - that ride sharing increased the amount of congestion. At first it didn't make much sense to me, but the study did acknowledge car ownership decreased, but that there was more congestion. This was largely due to the time between trips for Lyft and Uber - driving from a dropoff to a pickup.
jlarocco 8y ago
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. Taxis and Uber are most certainly NOT forms of public transportation. Both are owned and operated by third parties, not the public.
- simonsarris 8y ago
  Public transportation does not mean owned by the public, but generally accessible to the public. Many trains are privately owned, including most trains in Japan (maybe all post 1987, when the national railways were privatized). These are still considered public transportation.
drb91 8y ago
> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation Not under any definition of public transit I've heard. Lyft and uber are private companies that exploit labor in unsustainable ways to compete with actually efficient forms of public transit. Taxis are much closer to being actual public transit as their cost reflects the inefficiency of having a devoted driver, but they are still not owned by the government and are disproportionately available to the rich. Busses are public transit and actually reduce congestion. Uber and lyft are well-marketed and vc-funded luxury services. They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  Public transportation isn't about who owns it, but who has access to it.
  - drb91 8y ago
    That's a hell of a claim to back up. Any kind of argument for this idea? Ownership is meaningful. What is access—is my local McDonalds a public service? This smells very similar to "access to affordable" housing and healthcare. Sounds great, but at the end of the day, people are still without health care and housing, so they clearly DON'T have access. Ownership is the only way to guarantee material access.
    - Jtsummers 8y ago
      Will you be satisfied by a dictionary definition: buses, trains, subways, and other forms of transportation that charge set fares, run on fixed routes, and are available to the public. I will agree, many taxi services are (in practice if not in principle) excluded by this definition. Discriminatory practices with how they select their fares, for instance. Also most don't have fixed routes so you'd have to relax that requirement to allow taxis (but some taxi shuttle services operate on more or less fixed routes).
      - drb91 8y ago

dondawest 8y ago

It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars on the road (and thus congestion) because they incentivize non-car-owners to take car trips they wouldn’t normally take. Uber and Lyft lead to a net INCREASE in cars on the road, not a decrease.

nickles 8y ago
> It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars >> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043
- otikik 8y ago
  A quick google gave me this: https://uber.asu.edu/ https://uber.asu.edu/ . I would be more confident if the paper was issued by an entity with no economic ties with Uber.
  - nickles 8y ago
    It appears the paper was published two years before the partnership began. There's also no disclosure in the paper that Uber provided any funding (for whatever that's worth). [0] https://asunow.asu.edu/20181031-asu-news-uber-and-asu-partner-fully-funded-education-eligible-drivers https://asunow.asu.edu/20181031-asu-news-uber-and-asu-partne...
    - moorhosj 8y ago
      The report came out in August of 2016, so the data must be from before then. The next question would be, what has happened to Uber ridership levels over that same timeframe? According to this article [1], combined Uber and Lyft ridership in NYC was about 200,000/day in July 2016 (the most recent possible date for the original data). By July 2018, daily ridership was almost 600,000. Is possible that Uber/Lyft lower congestion when first introduced, but worsen it over the long-run? [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-ride-hailing-impact-public-transit-ridership/581062/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-rid...
- jdreyfuss 8y ago
  I don't think the effect has been definitively proven one way or the other. While there are studies showing a decrease in congestion, there are also several showing a notable increase too[0][1]. I can say, anecdotally, in SF there are lots of Uber/Lyft drivers who drive in from outside of the city (and even Bay Area) because they can make more driving in the city. If they disappeared, would they be replaced by an equal or greater number of private cars? Given the parking situation in SF, I doubt it, but who can say. [0]https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/study-half-of-sfs-increase-in-traffic-congestion-due-to-uber-lyft/ https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/study-half-of-sfs-increase-i... [1]http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf
jak92 8y ago
I've personally switched bus trips to uber trips, depending on a bunch of criteria. The major one being cost. IME uber most definitely increases the number of vehicles on the road.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road The charge is levied on private transport and Ubers et cetera. It's unlikely to shift demand from Ubers to private vehicles. On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect. > The failings of the subway and train infrastructure is due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA The MTA is a complicated problem. Part of it is high labor costs due to inefficient labor use. Part of it is conservatism with train speeds. Part of it is chronic under-funding. The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> On the risk of regressive taxation, I agree. But it's a risk, not a certain outcome. Properly varying the charge throughout the day will incentivize deliveries when the roads are less crowded. Better utilizing our freight rail infrastructure may also dampen the effect. The congestion already does that. The issue is that it's a hard problem. You can't make deliveries to shops at 3AM because there is no one there to receive them. To the extent you can make deliveries at 6AM, they already do. But a delivery driver loads up the truck and then makes deliveries for eight hours. Telling them to work a de facto 14 hour shift because you're going to put two separate three hour blocks of "don't drive during peak hours" into the middle of their day is going to drive up costs. And freight rail serves an entirely different market. That's used to transport bulk products in industrial quantities, not to deliver bread to the corner deli. Trucks sometimes are used in contexts where freight rail could be used but those aren't the ones driving through Manhattan during rush hour. > The congestion charge makes little sense as a way to fund the MTA. It does make sense as a counterbalance to the negative externalities traffic congestion creates. The problem is that the externalities are really just failures in the markets for alternatives that have dumped their natural demand onto the roads, because all of the externalities come from congestion, which could be absorbed by better alternatives if they existed. If you make the subways better then fewer people drive. If you make them less expensive then fewer people drive. That means paying for them from taxes rather than fares -- just getting rid of the fares and using taxes instead would get a huge number of cars off the road and eliminate the overhead cost of all the fare collection infrastructure. When you have things like minimum parking requirements or anti-density zoning rules, that makes it more expensive to build high density housing and subsidizes car ownership for people in urban areas. Then the people who live there drive more, because they have somewhere to park a car and therefore own one, meanwhile there is less housing there which means people need to live further away and then many of them will drive back in to their jobs. Congestion pricing doesn't actually fix any of that, it just squeezes even harder on the people who the lack of alternatives had already squeezed into congested roads. It makes driving worse when what we need is for alternatives to driving to be better.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

Ubers were growing like a cancer. With no limit in place they would just continue growing until nobody else could use the roads. They are a big factor in the current levels of congestion.

SilasX 8y ago

>Taxing trucks, used for transporting groceries, goods, and packages to the city, will increase the cost of each of these goods. The increase in grocery prices serves as a regressive tax on all people living within the congestion pricing zone. You're already effectively paying a premium to account for the extra time the drivers have to spend in traffic. It's not clear whether the congestion charges will be more than the labor-time saved. Also, a general point: typical market goods are, by default, "regressively priced", because most of them don't look at your income to determine the price. This is generally a good thing, because if every good's price scaled with income, there would be no material gain to earning an extra dollar. Any time you recognize a real scarcity and ensure it's priced explicitly rather than allocated by an ever-choked queue, it's going to be regressive in this sense. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker by itself.

arrty88 8y ago
Until the subway can transport packaged goods, i think its pretty unfair to tax UPS / FedEx etc
- megy 8y ago
  Why? They cause congestion, the take up space, they need to be taxed.

mc32 8y ago

Trucks cause the most wear and tear on roads so I’m not entirely against capturing some of that via gross tonnage (or weight per wheel) tax of some sort.

plafl 8y ago

There was a taxi strike in Madrid recently and it seems it improved traffic, according to this: https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/01/31/inenglish/1548938901_327448.html https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/01/31/inenglish/1548938901_32...

gpm 8y ago

> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. This doesn't make sense to me. IME - the vast majority of time there is a single customer or group in a taxi or uber. Assuming this is in fact the case. Taxis and ubers increase the number of trips taken by vehicle, but let's pretend in their favor that they leave that number flat. While they have a passenger in them they are trading 1-1 for a private vehicle to a "public" vehicle. While they don't have a passenger in them they are trading 0-1 for private vehicles to "public" vehicles. That results in a net increase in vehicles.

lenocinor 8y ago
It lessens the amount of car storage needed too, though, which is also important. It would be nice if multi-person trips like UberPool would be exempted to encourage their use, but I don't know if that's technically feasible.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  It lessens the amount of cars storage and increases the amount of cars on the road. You can't transport by car and reduce both at the same time!
  - fjp 8y ago
    Fewer overall cars because fewer people own cars due to taxis and uber and Higher utilization of the cars that do exist because a higher % of cars are taxis and ubers Some combination of these two factors could mean that there are fewer cars idle at any time ("storage") and more cars in service at any time. I'm not necessarily saying that's what is happening but it's definitely possible. Looking into the future, a great outcome of driverless cars would be the commoditization of car transport. You essentially say where you're going and whether you are willing to share the ride. A driverless car pops off the queue to pick you up, or a multi-person car slightly diverts from its route to pick up up (a la Uber Pool). - Each physical car sees much higher utilization, allowing fewer cars to exist overall and parking space needs are reduced. - A large network of efficient driverless cars means it's more likely you can get a shared ride quickly and with minimal diversion from everyone's route. Ideally an improved shared ride experience would result in higher usage of shared rides, meaning that fewer cars need to be on the road at any given time = lower pollution and congestion.

zjaffee 8y ago

Ubers have been shown to increase vehicle miles driven, which in turn means a decline in the use of public transit. Historically the big tax on cars was an 18% tax on parking in NYC, but considering that more and more people are taking Ubers instead of driving themselves, we are still effectively subsidizing uber use in a way we aren't for regular driving.

nickles 8y ago
> Ubers have been shown to increase vehicle miles driven As other comments have said, the effects on congestion are controversial [0][1]. > which in turn means a decline in the use of public transit Not necessarily. If a trip would not have occurred otherwise, then there would be no decline in public transit utilization (subway lines seem to be closing with increased frequency recently, and people may have no other means of returning home). Of course, this would point to increased congestion. > the big tax on cars was an 18% tax on parking in NYC, but considering that more and more people are taking Ubers instead of driving themselves Would eliminating street parking further this policy? On many streets, it would allow for 1-2 additional lanes to be created. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043 [1] http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf

dv_dt 8y ago

> The failings of the subway and train infrastructure are due to mismanagement on the part of the MTA and untenable, collectively bargained contracts. Arguably the problems are from systemic austerity: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

bryanlarsen 8y ago

> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. Yes, they used to claim this, but studies show the opposite: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634506179/ride-hailing-services-add-to-traffic-congestion-study-says https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634506179/ride-hailing-servic...

chasedehan 8y ago

> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. I read a study not too long ago (sorry couldn't find it), but it found the opposite - that ride sharing increased the amount of congestion. At first it didn't make much sense to me, but the study did acknowledge car ownership decreased, but that there was more congestion. This was largely due to the time between trips for Lyft and Uber - driving from a dropoff to a pickup.

jlarocco 8y ago

> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road. Taxis and Uber are most certainly NOT forms of public transportation. Both are owned and operated by third parties, not the public.

simonsarris 8y ago
Public transportation does not mean owned by the public, but generally accessible to the public. Many trains are privately owned, including most trains in Japan (maybe all post 1987, when the national railways were privatized). These are still considered public transportation.

drb91 8y ago

> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation Not under any definition of public transit I've heard. Lyft and uber are private companies that exploit labor in unsustainable ways to compete with actually efficient forms of public transit. Taxis are much closer to being actual public transit as their cost reflects the inefficiency of having a devoted driver, but they are still not owned by the government and are disproportionately available to the rich. Busses are public transit and actually reduce congestion. Uber and lyft are well-marketed and vc-funded luxury services. They cause congestion proportional to their users, i.e. orders of magnitude more congesting than buses.

Jtsummers 8y ago
Public transportation isn't about who owns it, but who has access to it.
- drb91 8y ago
  That's a hell of a claim to back up. Any kind of argument for this idea? Ownership is meaningful. What is access—is my local McDonalds a public service? This smells very similar to "access to affordable" housing and healthcare. Sounds great, but at the end of the day, people are still without health care and housing, so they clearly DON'T have access. Ownership is the only way to guarantee material access.
  - Jtsummers 8y ago
    Will you be satisfied by a dictionary definition: buses, trains, subways, and other forms of transportation that charge set fares, run on fixed routes, and are available to the public. I will agree, many taxi services are (in practice if not in principle) excluded by this definition. Discriminatory practices with how they select their fares, for instance. Also most don't have fixed routes so you'd have to relax that requirement to allow taxis (but some taxi shuttle services operate on more or less fixed routes).
    - drb91 8y ago