By Eliot Brown
Five years ago, Travis Kalanick was so confident that Uber
Technologies Inc.'s rides would prompt people to leave their cars
at home that he told a tech conference: "If every car in San
Francisco was Ubered there would be no traffic."
Today, a mounting collection of studies shows the opposite: Far
from easing traffic, Uber and its main rival Lyft Inc. are adding
to congestion in numerous U.S. downtowns.
Officials in San Francisco, Chicago and New York have cited
congestion as the main rationale for new fees they recently enacted
on Lyft and Uber rides in each of the cities. Other regulators
around the country are considering similar fees. Uber and Lyft no
longer pledge ride-hailing will reduce traffic, acknowledging that
they add to congestion, though they say some studies overstate
their role in the problem.
The app makers initially thought their technology would create
seamless trips, with four strangers forsaking their own cars for a
shared ride. Cutting-edge algorithms, they believed, would steer
behavior through pricing and route-matching, letting drivers spend
little time between trips. Riders leaving their cars at home would
then increasingly hop on buses, bikes or walk in a gridlock-easing
ripple effect.
That utopia hasn't come to pass.
Most users take their own private Lyfts and Ubers, shunning
pooling even though it costs them more. Rather than the apps
becoming a model of algorithm-driven efficiency, drivers in major
cities cruise for fares without passengers an estimated 40% of the
time.
Multiple studies show that Uber and Lyft have pulled people away
from buses, subways and walking, and that the apps add to the
overall amount of driving in the U.S.
A study published last year by San Francisco County officials
and University of Kentucky researchers in the journal Science
Advances found that over 60% of the slowdown of traffic speeds in
San Francisco between 2010 and 2016 was due to the introduction of
the ride-hail companies.
In Chicago, the companies have been "creating exponential growth
in congestion in the downtown," said Dan Lurie, policy director in
the mayor's office. Last month, the city started charging a new fee
on every ride-hailing trip to mitigate traffic.
The reversal of ride-hailing from would-be traffic hero to
congestion villain is the sort of unintended consequence that has
become a recurring feature of Silicon Valley disruption. Companies
seeking rapid growth by reinventing the way we do things are
delivering solutions that sometimes create their own problems.
Facebook Inc. set out to help connect people with each other,
but also contributed to the spread of division and disinformation.
E-cigarette company Juul Labs Inc. said it could reduce cigarette
smoking, but fueled a crisis of teen vaping. Encrypted messaging
apps designed to foster online privacy have become favorite
communication tools of criminals.
Silicon Valley is particularly prone to focusing on positive
potential effects of new technologies given a decadeslong culture
of utopian ideals, said Fred Turner, a Stanford University
communications professor who has written a book on the topic.
Companies compete for engineers and entrepreneurs based on missions
they say benefit society.
"It's very much part of the water," Mr. Turner said.
Tech companies tend to have an engineering-like, narrow focus on
solving specific problems, often missing the broader picture as a
result. "You're not rewarded for seeing the landscape within which
your device will be deployed," he said.
Ride-hailing has dramatically changed transportation in dense
cities. With a few taps on their phones, users can reliably and
quickly summon a lift that is generally cheaper than a taxi. Uber
and Lyft, which account for the vast majority of ride-hailing in
the country, did hundreds of millions of rides in the U.S. last
year.
But in hindsight, some of the pitfalls -- such as cars cruising
empty between passengers -- seem obvious.
Uber and Lyft say their effect on congestion is small.
According to a study the two companies commissioned last year,
they were responsible for 13% of all driving in San Francisco and
significantly less in five other major cities. It estimated they
accounted for 3% of driving in Chicago's Cook County. The study
didn't address congestion and looked at areas bigger than just the
city centers.
Researchers say the apps' impact on congestion is most
significant in major, dense cities where they have large numbers of
users. A study by the city of Toronto published last year found no
measurable increase in travel times as a result of ride-hailing,
but warned that the bigger the companies become in the city, the
higher the likelihood that speeds will slow.
Uber and Lyft now emphasize the ways they steer riders toward
alternatives to their ride-hail cars, such as by incorporating
public-transit options into their apps. They have both launched
shared scooters and bikes and have lobbied heavily for congestion
pricing in cities including New York, so that all cars on the road
-- not just theirs -- share the penalties for added traffic.
Uber is "determined to continue our work to improve access to
shared and active transportation modes, while also doubling down in
our efforts to advocate for road pricing," a spokesman said.
A Lyft spokeswoman said the company encourages shared rides,
adding, "The biggest cause of congestion is people driving alone in
their own cars."
While Uber and Lyft first focused on the positives that could
decrease congestion, the factors that add to it are far larger,
said Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant and former New
York City official who has studied the topic.
"The math is pretty simple and straightforward," Mr. Schaller
said. In a paper presented last month to the Transportation
Research Board, he estimated that for every mile of personal-car
driving the companies remove from the road in large U.S. cities,
they add 2.5 miles of driving to a ride-hailing vehicle.
In the early days, when Uber and Lyft began offering "pooled"
rides in which a driver would pick up numerous people along the
route of a single trip, executives were hardly subtle in their
promises.
On CBS In 2015, David Plouffe, Uber's policy head at the time,
was asked about a belief by New York City officials that Manhattan
wouldn't be able to handle additional traffic from more Ubers.
"It's complete nonsense," he said, adding Uber would reduce
traffic. Mr. Plouffe didn't respond to a request for comment. Other
Uber executives made similar pledges in cities around the
country.
Mr. Kalanick, Uber's co-founder, gave a TED talk in 2016
extolling a future in which Uber reduced congestion and pollution.
Mr. Kalanick declined to comment through a spokeswoman.
Meanwhile, in downtown San Francisco, the evening rush hour is
dominated by a slow-moving sea of cars sprinkled with Lyft and Uber
logos in their windshields.
Amit Adhikari, who has driven for Uber in the Bay Area for the
past two years, said some days it can take 30 minutes to go the
three-quarters of a mile from the financial district to the main
interstate highway, and he can get stuck without a passenger on a
gridlocked street.
"You get pretty stressed out," he said. "You're making nothing
just sitting in traffic."
Traffic speeds in San Francisco's downtown core fell 21% to 13.7
miles an hour in 2016, from 17.4 miles an hour in 2010. Without the
addition of Lyft and Uber, traffic speeds would only have fallen
6.7% to 16.2 miles an hour, according to Joe Castiglione, a San
Francisco County official who was a co-author of the Science
Advances study as well as a related analysis.
The Science Advances study, among the most robust research to
date that looks specifically at congestion and ride-hailing, used
data on San Francisco traffic speeds as well as data scraped from
Uber and Lyft apps in 2016 and made estimates about how other
changes -- like the nearly 100,000 jobs the city added -- affected
traffic.
Uber and Lyft have said the study has flaws, saying it didn't
account for other factors like the growth of e-commerce
deliveries.
The main factor that could decrease congestion -- passengers
sharing rides -- hasn't taken off. Researchers and analysts
estimate roughly 20% to 30% of rides in major metro areas are
pooled. Recently the ride-hailing companies have increased prices
for their shared rides, which, Uber Chief Executive Dara
Khosrowshahi has said, tend to cost the companies more money than
one-party rides. Both companies say they are committed to shared
rides.
The biggest factor by far is the large amount of time Uber and
Lyft drivers spend without any passengers, hunting for fares. A
December report by the California Air Resources Board found
ride-hailing cars are driving with no passengers 39% of the time;
New York City estimates such cruising at 41%.
Riders also take car trips that wouldn't have happened before
Uber and Lyft.
Mr. Schaller said in his paper that surveys in numerous cities
found roughly 60% of riders in Ubers and Lyfts would have walked,
biked, taken public transit or stayed home if a ride-hail car
hadn't been available.
Mass-transit use has declined overall in the past decade, even
as employment has grown. In the 12 months through September,
transit ridership in U.S. and Canada was down 7.7% from a 2014
peak, according to the American Public Transportation
Association.
Researchers say some of that is likely due to declines in gas
prices as well as cheap auto loans. Car-ownership rates are up and
the percent of carless American households, at 8.8% in 2017, has
stayed virtually flat since ride-hailing began, according to U.S.
Census Bureau estimates.
More people are also working from home, not commuting at
all.
Lyft said it estimates nearly 500,000 people in the U.S. have
given up their personal cars because of ride-hailing.
Many policy makers and researchers say Uber and Lyft have
contributed to the drop in mass-transit ridership.
A paper from University of Kentucky civil-engineering professors
presented last year at the Transportation Research Board estimates
that after Lyft and Uber enter a city, bus ridership will decrease
by 1.7% a year and subway ridership by 1.3% a year, based on data
from 22 U.S. cities.
However, the research on ride-hailing's effect on mass-transit
ridership isn't unanimous and Uber and Lyft have pointed to other
studies showing how ride-hailing complements transit, as riders use
it to get to a train or bus. A 2018 paper in the Journal of Urban
Economics by a trio of economists found Uber increases ridership by
5% after two years of being introduced in a city.
Lyft for years advertised in subways and on bus shelters around
the country. One New York City subway ad campaign described Lyft as
"the most affordable ride in town." Uber's prospectus ahead of its
2019 initial public offering mentioned it competes with public
transit for some rides.
In Chicago, city officials blame Uber and Lyft for part of the
Chicago Transit Authority's ridership decline in recent years;
trips in the city's central Loop fell 5% from 2015 to 2018.
Data the ride-hailing companies provided to the city show that
77% of trips in downtown are requested by one party, the rest being
shared rides. Ride-hailing trips starting or ending in the downtown
totaled over 158 million miles in 2018, up 309% from 2015, the city
found.
In New York, weekday, daytime traffic speeds in Manhattan below
Central Park fell 11% between 2014 and 2019 to 7.1 miles an hour, a
slowdown transportation officials blame in part on the growth of
ride-hailing. The city estimates ride-hailing cars and other
for-hire-vehicles -- excluding taxis -- make up nearly 30% of all
traffic south of 60th Street.
On a recent Saturday, Cara Burke was hurrying to make a dinner
reservation from her East Village apartment and opted for an Uber
over the subway or walking in the hope of getting there in 10
minutes. Instead, the ride lasted 25 minutes as the car sat stuck
in traffic.
"I could've just gotten there for free or for $2.75 in the same
amount of time," Ms. Burke says. Her Uber driver was just as
frustrated, telling her he should have stayed in Brooklyn instead
of coming to Manhattan.
Francesca Fontana contributed to this article.
Write to Eliot Brown at eliot.brown@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 15, 2020 00:14 ET (05:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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