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Ride-hailing apps have allowed more binging and increased demand for bartenders
- dannykwells 7y agoI feel like this article disingenuous. Uber has reduced drunk driving accidents by 62%!! (in Portland, but likely similar for other cities) That's huge. A 10% increase in heavy drinking seems small by comparison. Why not focus on that fact? Well, because it makes Uber look good, for one thing. Can't have that.
- blakesterz 7y agoThe paper does open with that, so at least the authors acknowledge that right up front: "Recent studies show ridesharing services, such as Uber and Lyft, reduce intoxicated driving.However, ridesharing may also have negative health effects by increasing alcohol consumption."
- ceejayoz 7y agoShould we not be studying the trade-offs?
- dcolkitt 7y agoYes we should study the trade-offs. But that calculus should also include the fact that most people genuinely enjoy going out and getting drunk with their friends. Yet rarely if ever does that term ever into the equation. I'm not saying it necessarily outweighs the public health costs. But a truly fair accounting of all the trade-offs should take the hedonic benefits into account.
- ceejayoz 7y agoSerial killers enjoy murder, but that doesn't mean we necessarily want to encourage it. I'm all for increasing the safety of nights out, but if it's got a corresponding increase in harmful or dangerous drinking behavior, that's a significant finding too.
- frenchyatwork 7y agoNormally we make a clear distinction between people harming themselves and people harming others, also known as "your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose".
- ceejayoz 7y agoBinge drinking regularly harms others.
- andybak 7y agoThe post you were responding to was trying to correct an over-correction. You've now introduced a superfluous over-correction. To put it another way - you've disputed a point that nobody was making.
- gjulianm 7y ago"When we focus on areas with relatively weaker public transit options, we estimate UberX is associated with a 17.5% to 21.8% increase in instances of binge drinking" Considering that public transport in the US is generally weak, the underlying driving force seems to not be Uber itself but alternative means of transport for everybody.
- Scoundreller 7y agoEven in non-US, late night service can be spotty. Especially if/when the metro closes.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoLike late night taxis who realize you're a bit drunk and just desperate to get home to bed. Uber has changed everything here. I can leave the bar at 3am and know I can get home without being sized up for extortion by a professional taxista who is colluding with the other late-nighters on the shift.
- StuffedParrot 7y agoAmerica was already prone to binge drinking. Also, public transit also reduces drunk driving, so it’s hardly unique to taxis.
- luckydata 7y agoAnglo-Saxon drinking is the worst kind of drinking. In places where being fall-down drunk is not socially acceptable we drink differently and nobody is racing to puke on the sidewalk. It's not that difficult, just use moderation.
- bradstewart 7y agoBinge drinking is defined as 4 drinks for women or 5 drinks for men in a 2 hour period [0]. That's hardly falling down, puking on the sidewalk levels of drunk. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/binge-drinking.htm https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/binge-drinking.htm
- rootusrootus 7y agoI suppose that varies by person and by what qualifies as a drink, but if I had five pints of microbrew in two hours I'd be drunk, and done for the day.
- santoshalper 7y agoYou'd also have to piss like a race horse.
- bradstewart 7y agoCertainly varies by person. But there is a standard definition of a "drink": 1.5oz of 40% liquor, 12oz of 5% beer, 5oz of 12% wine [0]. [0] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/what-standard-drink https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/what-standard-drink
- pessimizer 7y agoThat's the minimum amount i.e 4.99 drinks within a 2 hour period is not binge drinking. Also, I have a drink just about every day or every other day, and I haven't had 5 drinks within a 2 hour period in at least the last decade. It would cause me to fall down and puke on the sidewalk.
- motohagiography 7y agoThat one could attribute %62 of alcohol related collisions (and their associated injuries and fatalities) to the price fixing by cab licensing bodies is very interesting indeed. Taxi companies and driver unions insist they provide safety and reliability. Appears there was an externality they need to account for.
- behringer 7y agoUber is priced the way it is because rich financiers are subsidizing rides. If Uber were running a profitable business, the rides would be as expensive or more so than taxis. Another problem with taxis is they don't show up when you call them, and you don't know what it will cost until the trip is over. With Uber/Lyft, I never have to worry about being stuck outside in the cold, drunk, waiting 60 minutes for a $30 taxi.
- bhupy 7y agoWas once a compelling theory, but in the last earnings (Q3 2019), Uber's ride hailing business was "adjusted EBITDA" profitable, with an increase in revenue growth. It's not hard to imagine them being GAAP profitable if they decide to sacrifice a little bit of revenue growth.
- behringer 7y agoYou can use fancy terms and fancy accounting to make it seem like Uber isn't subsidizing riders, but it doesn't change the facts.
- disgruntledphd2 7y agoEBITDA is nonsense disguised to hide costs. If you need to adjust it to appear profitable, then you are not profitable. (Yes, I am aware that there are valid use-cases for EBITDA, but in general it is used as a way to avoid accounting for actual costs).
- snark42 7y ago> If Uber were running a profitable business, the rides would be as expensive or more so than taxis. Might be off topic, but in downtown Chicago before/after work cabs (including tip) are often cheaper than Uber/Lyft (with no additional tip,) although they offer other conveniences (payment, tracking, can be "hailed" to anywhere, etc.) At less busy times ride sharing can still be a bit cheaper than a cab.
- algaeontoast 7y agoSame effect in Austin. Very interesting to see how the metrics changed when ride-sharing apps were banned as well.
- rb808 7y agoIs an increase in binge drinking necessarily bad? Americans dont drink much. Shows my historical roots.
- pessimizer 7y ago> A 10% increase in heavy drinking seems small by comparison. Why not focus on that fact? 10% seeming smaller than 62% is not a fact that anyone should be focusing on. There are actual numbers that can be compared in context; the fact that a percentage of one thing is expressed as a larger number than the percentage of another thing doesn't mean it's more important. Very few people die of drunk driving accidents (as compared to the number of people who drink), so if 20 fewer people in an area per year die from drunk driving, but incidents of binge drinking in that area increase from 1 million to 1.1 million, it's not simple to say that the outcome has been positive. Maybe 21 more people get esophageal cancer. Maybe 21 more cases of domestic violence end in a homicide. That being said, this is a wealth effect and inevitable if you're making progress. People are drinking (out) more because their perception is that with rideshares it has become safer (easier to get home.) A cure for HIV would cause an increase in the spread of other sexually transmitted diseases, for example, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't cure HIV. One material difference I can see between rideshares and a cab is that rideshares are often cheaper because 1) they are subsidized by investors and 2) they can be shared. This doesn't say anything interesting about Uber; if you wanted to make cabs cheaper, you can tax them less or subsidize them. The other, which I think might be more important, is that many rideshare users don't feel the need to buy a car, and that the rideshare demographic is largely similar to the binge drinking at bars/clubs demographic. Of course, taxing cars or the parking around bars/clubs could have the same effect.
- sigwinch28 7y agoI agree with you on all but pointing out the cancer rates. If we're looking at it purely from a statistical point of view, then yes, the numbers might not look that good in favour of "more drinking + ridesharing is better than less drinking + drink driving". Ethically, I consider people drinking themselves to an early grave of their own free will to be "less bad" than a drunk driver killing someone else on the road or a drunk person committing a violent crime against another person. I make this point in the context of the rest of what you've said, though, which raises good discussion points about "should we fix X really bad thing if it leads to people doing more of Y maybe-less-bad thing?"
- 7y ago
- beering 7y agoYou can't compare apples and oranges percentages. If drunk driving accidents went from 13 to 8 incidents (62% drop), but the 10% increase in heavy drinking is applied to 10,000,000 people, then the negative health effects could outweigh the accidents by a huge amount. I think your key words are, "seems small by comparison". You'd have to know the actual numbers.
- hinkley 7y agoBut this is America, and self-harm is a fiercely protected liberty. Harming others is not. If we could put half of the energy we put into policing other people's vices into policing Corporate vices, think of what we could achieve.
- oftenwrong 7y agofound the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3484845 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3484845
- omarhaneef 7y agoI will note one cheerful conclusion: so many people care so much about not drinking and driving. (Consider that 30% of the people don't drink, and another 30% drink rarely, these statistics are a credit to the species.) I look forward to people pointing out the flaws in this reasoning.
- duxup 7y agoI wonder about other changes as various things change. Could self driving cars mean more driving? / car related demand? I drive my family around all the time. I'm not a fan of it, but if my car drove itself I'd probabbly be quite happy to plan additional / longer driving trips. I'd certainly like to setup my minivan as a series of mini desks everyone could sit at .. I could do lots of things during trips...
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- zaroth 7y agoMy kids have a lot of after school activities which my wife spends hours a day bringing them to and fro, even when they are more than capable of doing the activity entirely independently and don’t expect to be watched by a parent during the activity. For some reason it’s deemed “not appropriate” for them to Uber to and fro. Occasionally there will be parents who we can carpool with, but almost always it ends up being a huge time suck to drive them, wait around, and then bring them back. I think it’s not so much an issue of them being in a car alone, it’s the random stranger driving them that makes it hard for a, e.g. 10-16 year old to get around on their own if they can’t walk, bike, or take public transit. So my guess is that a self-driving car will be more acceptable to bring kids around the suburbs to all their after-school activities. Which is a massive productivity boost for the parents, basically freeing up an entire human for 4 hours a day.
- duxup 7y agoMan I would love that. I will note that at least in urban areas, I see kids ubered to school on odd days ... mostly at poorer communities where parents have to work on a random day and still need to get their kids to school. But yeah in the better off suburbs I don't see it happen ever... then again there is more carpooling for those. There are actually some non uber specialty services out there that claim to do background checks, have extra training, and etc that focus on moving kids or even vulnerable adults around. I don't know how widespread those are. If my kids could just show up at the door that would save me hours every week.
- dwoozle 7y agoCan confirm, definitely see many more drunk assholes loitering outside the bars on my street.
- xt00 7y agoYea the tipping point for self driving cars will be when it can drive you home while drunk legally. Probably will be made legal first someplace like South Korea — there you can easily pay somebody to show up with their buddy on a scooter to drive your car home for you with you in the passenger seat. The guy on the scooter follows you and picks up his buddy. I forget what the pricing was but it was something like 2x the cost of a taxi. So wasn’t actually too crazy.
- mailslot 7y agoThere was an affordable service that would drive your car home for you. The problem leading to its failure, as I understand it, is that drunk people that needed it were too wasted to remember that it existed.
- justinator 7y agoThat's funny in a sad way. I do remember that being a thing ~10 or 15 years ago - they were at least demo'ing it at one of the blocks in my city where a large concentration of bars could be found. I was very curious on the technology of their fold-able scooters (how quaint given Lime at al) I could also imagine having to drive a drunk person's car home would be somehow risky, given that you have no idea how said person will act with their property.
- CalRobert 7y agoYears ago Top Gear did a bit on a service with small, foldable motorbikes that could be folded and put in the trunk. However, it didn't really save money compared to just taking a taxi both ways.
- jaclaz 7y agoI always found fascinating the "scoot" or "scooterman" (or similar) service, in the UK some cities have it. You call them and someone will arrive on a foldable scooter, fold it and put in your car, drive you home with your car, then get his/her scooter and go away.
- sna1l 7y agoThere are probably a lot of factors that have contributed to the increase in high risk drinking, but even if we ignore that, I feel like the trade-off being made here is acceptable. People who maybe prior couldn't imbibe due to no public transport options etc, have decided now that with ride-hailing apps that this is an available option. Whether or not you agree with the choice they are making, the fact that they even have the choice seems worthwhile.
- BurningFrog 7y agoI'm very happy with a tradeoff where people damage their own health instead of innocent people on the road. I also wonder how much of this increase in drinking at bars is drinking that would have happened at home previously.
- mywacaday 7y agoImagine what fully self driving cars will do, uber without the cost
- Jamwinner 7y agoWhy would you assume there is no cost? Either you hve to buy it, or rent it as a service. You are still paying either way.
- scrumbledober 7y agothrough scaling the cost to the provider should be much lower, which means either the cost to the consumer will either be less, or there will be a great opportunity for competition.
- rb808 7y agoYeah it'll be great to be able to enjoy a nice bottle of wine on those long road trips.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoMaybe now that there are viable alternatives to getting to and from home/work the law here in the States will catch up to saner legislation elsewhere and properly punish drunk driving instead of a slap on the wrist for the first few offenses “don’t do it again but here is your license, you can keep driving.”
- rpmisms 7y agoAllow me to give the standard response about how driving is necessary here. DUIs are not cheap, not convenient, but someone shouldn't become unable to provide for their family based on one.
- disgruntledphd2 7y agoI live in Ireland. Driving is essential here, unless you live in a major city. Nonetheless, we clamp down hard on drink-driving, to such an extent that I was massively shocked by how acceptable it was in the US.
- rpmisms 7y agoSounds like Arizona here. Penalties are extremely harsh there.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoNo, just kill the sole provider for another family instead, right? It’s only luck that stopped a dui from being a vehicular manslaughter charge.
- luckydata 7y agoJokes' on them, the Bay Area responded to this new challenge by having no place to go drink or have fun. Problem solved!
- par 7y agowait what? I live in Bay Area and can confirm there are a lot of places people drink and have fun.
- scrumbledober 7y agoThis adds absolutely nothing to the conversation and is pretty provably false.
- BlackSwab 7y agoCorrelation does not mean causation
- algaeontoast 7y agoAlcohol consumption is horrible for public health though :(
- gadders 7y agoI always thought that once self-driving cars are fully autonomous, pub/bar business will go through the roof.
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoConcur in part. When I am on vacation under the right circumstances, such as multi-day Disney visit or cruise, I do drink more. Some people would probably drink more just because it would be safe, but I think a lot of people would dial it back again due to hangovers interfering with work. Maybe not "through the roof" but definitely a sustained increase.
- gadders 7y agoI should have said - I'm talking about the UK here. More of a drinking culture than, say, the US :-)
- rconti 7y agoIt's odd how each graph shows a dip at -1 year.
- andybak 7y agoWhilst Uber and the like have improved the cab situation in UK cities, it's hardly been revolutionary. It's become a bit more convenient and (sometimes) a bit cheaper. What was the situation like in places like Portland before Uber? Were old-school cabs just unavailable or just really awful?
- ben_jones 7y agoNot Portland but I lived/drank in Eugene for awhile when Uber/Lyft were still banned (IIRC they've since been let in). Outside of metro areas there is only one answer to that question in my opinion, lots of drunk driving.
- andybak 7y ago> Outside of metro areas I guess this is key. Most places in the UK aren't that far from a town. Does "metro area" have a precise definition? Would an small to medium UK town count?
- ben_jones 7y agoIn this context it's about mass public transit options and walking distance between a safe residence and wherever "downtown" is. Eugene and adjacent Springfield combine for a population of ~220,000 over ~88 square kilometers with limited late night transportation options other than sketchy and unreliable taxis.
- philip1209 7y agoCorrelation is not causation.
- lazerpants 7y agoI feel like there is a huge demographic issue underlying these numbers. The cohort of young adults in the US probably peaked around 2012, so more binge drinking is likely caused by that alone. (I didn't read the paper the article is based on so maybe my point is covered there)
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoGood thing there is no reasonable public transit in US and no plans to improve it. Imagine the amount of binge drinking that would ensue!
- davidf18 7y agoI wonder what the numbers are in NYC which has a very good subway system and thus less dependent of Uber for drinking runs than other US cities.