
Another Study Blames Uber and Lyft for Public Transit’s Decline - pseudolus
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-ride-hailing-impact-public-transit-ridership/581062/
======
capkutay
Sorry but this is bullshit.

As others have mentioned, public transit beats uber/lyft when its actually the
better, faster service (e.g. London, Tokyo).

But when public transit is poorly planned, slow, dirty, crime-ridden like it
often is in the US, uber/lyft wins every time. Even when cities like San
Francisco choose to spend billions on improving public transit, they mess it
up every single time. There's a long list of hilariously short sighted
decisions made on projects like the Transbay Terminal, The Central Subway,
Geary/Van Ness BRT.

My daily commute literally runs along the t-line in San Francisco, but I never
take it because it's basically the same speed as walking, slower than biking,
slower than uber'ing. Poor planning and management is the cause of public
transit's decline.

~~~
ummonk
Yup. E.g. in Manhattan you'd be crazy to not use the subway. It's just faster
than everything else, and extremely liberating. In contrast, in SF, if you
want to get to your destination in any reasonable amount of time and don't
your start and destination are not near the BART line, you need to use car /
Uber / Lyft. Or even a scooter or Go bike is faster than public transit.

SF needs to significantly invest in transit with dedicated rights of ways,
preferably along more important routes than the Central Subway. And if subways
are too expensive or difficult to build, we need to seriously consider using
elevated light rail instead. Geary road, for example, would be perfect for an
el.

~~~
jkravitz61
Seattle has been doing this recently. I'm not sure if they have released any
studies yet, but my observation has been a noticeable improvement.

~~~
prolikewhoa
I've noticed no improvement, especially now with the viaduct closed which
appears to be a permanent decline for people coming in from the southwest and
west Seattle.

~~~
jkravitz61
That’s a temporary change until the tunnel opens. I’ve noticed that Denny has
been much better for buses since they have made a few changes for bus
priority.

------
GlickWick
I know it's only an anecdote, but myself (and many other colleagues) in Boston
switched to periodically using rideshares to commute due to the decline in
public transit quality. The tech boom in the area completely overloaded the
system, and when you combine it with the rampant corruption behind the MBTA,
this was inevitable.

Uber and Lyft have not been the best actors, but someone was going to step in
and profit off of public transit's incompetence here.

Even prior to the prevalence of rideshares, Boston was dealing with absurd
corruption in attempting to expand on the public transit systems. See: Green
Line Extension project

~~~
dhh2106
Agreed. This feels like a classic causation v correlation problem.

Of course when a substitute improves, some people will switch. However, the
root cause is the declining quality and lack of improvements to the system
that even gives a substitute the chance to compete.

I honestly don't understand how 100 years ago nyc was able to build an
expansive subway system and today it takes decades to add a new station. I
know it's a combination of land costs, labor costs, corruption, regulation,
underground congestion (and that the original lines were built by private
companies) but I still don't really understand the situation.

~~~
DontGiveTwoFlux
My general impression is that worker safety was pretty much disregarded
compared to modern standards.

A quick search turned up this piece[1] on 16 deaths around 1904 during
construction of a NYC subway line. There are famous pictures such as this one
of construction of high rises in New York[2] without any safety equipment
whatsoever. But it was built in 14 months! All that safety gear is expensive
and slows down construction. In climbing, we often joke 'no belay, no delay',
because of how fast you can climb when you don't take the time to fix your
ropes, etc. [3]

[1] [https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-died-during-the-
constr...](https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-died-during-the-construction-
of-the-New-York-City-subway-system)

[2]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=empire+state+building+constr...](https://www.google.com/search?q=empire+state+building+construction+pictures&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=zL2IEaI_HTr6qM%253A%252CWmlUwbdST_H3CM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kTA8aR3Mh-
nwjJkAvyKm5ewle-
mYw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiLpIDf24ngAhXqV98KHUlhA5EQ9QEwAnoECAQQCA#imgrc=zL2IEaI_HTr6qM):

[3][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urRVZ4SW7WU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urRVZ4SW7WU)

------
nostromo
Public transportation can only win by competing with the alternatives.

When I'm in Tokyo I don't use Uber because the train system is so clean, fast,
and safe; I have no incentive to use an Uber.

When I'm in places with slow buses that get stuck in traffic, or operate
trains with disgusting facilities, I'm more likely to choose Uber.

~~~
vkou
When the wealthy[1] can opt out of having to use public services, those public
services tend to be crap.

When the wealthy are forced to use public services, all of a sudden, they
become interested and politically engaged in improving them.

Uber doesn't drive improvements in transit in this sense - it starves it of
political capital.

The best transit services are ones which are used by a wide swathe of the
public.

[1] If you are regularly paying $6-30 for a one-way taxi commute, you are
either wealthy, really money-foolish, or a truly special case.

~~~
mattnewton
Not sure about the ranges on that wealthy comparison- if I wanted to commute
to work by bus, it would cost >$6 in bus faires a day in the Bay Area.
Splitting a Lyft line in San Francisco often results in math where we actually
save money while using a more convenient service. It’s just hard to choose
public transit around here when it is unreliable, barely cost competitive and
slower.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
It's pretty rare you end up spending 3$ for a Lyft in SF. The bus pass is also
$78 (or $1.95 a ride assuming you work 20 days a month). It should be cheaper
yes, but it's still much cheaper.

------
mikejulietbravo
This kind of ignores the fact that the quality of public transit has been
rapidly declining, and had been before Uber/Lyft came into being.

Take the DC metro for example - it used to be arguably the best public rail
system in the country. Now, through mismanagement and neglect, it's pretty
awful. IMO dirty, unreliable public transport created a massive void that
Lyft/Uber have filled.

~~~
baddox
I'll go a bit further and say that, while Uber/Lyft probably contribute to
decline in public transit, those companies exist precisely because of how bad
public transit was in those service areas.

~~~
mikejulietbravo
100% agree. If you look at SF, there's to get from SOMA to the Marina, you can
either take multiple buses plus walk (~50 minutes of travel), or take a
lyft/uber which will bring you door to door in less than half the time.

~~~
baddox
I took a Lyft from Soma to the Marina last night at 5:30pm, which is pretty
close to peak weeknight traffic. It cost $14 and took 17 minutes.

The Muni bus would have taken 31 minutes according to Google Maps (with much
higher expected variance, based on my personal experience) and would have cost
$2.50 (or $2.75 if I didn’t have a preloaded Clipper card).

Because of that expected duration variance; the probability of sharing a bus
or bus stop with a profoundly troubled, violent, or dirty person; and the fact
that the difference between $2.50 and $14 is not very significant to me;
taking a Lyft was an extremely easy decision for me.

------
gouggoug
Blaming Uber and Lyft for public transportation usage decline sounds exactly
the same as blaming piracy for the music industry's decline.

If public transportation was better, I wouldn't use Lyft as much as I do these
days.

It'd be interesting to look at countries known for their exceptional public
transportation and see if they saw a decline when Uber and Lyft came on the
market.

~~~
bloemy
Great point. Coming from Switzerland, which IMO has the best public
transportation across the country and in cities in the world, Uber and Lyft
simply aren't nearly used as much as here exactly BECAUSE public
transportation works as well. I rarely have to take an Uber inside Geneva
because buses, trams and trains bring me everywhere, for a decent price (as a
student), and until decent hours. So yeah, for me the blame is on the system
more than on these apps.

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mcfunk
>“Single-handedly” may not be quite right, since the paper also finds that
cheap gas prices and higher fares have a negative effect on ridership. And
this analysis does not include other, more local factors that could be pushing
riders off of buses and trains, such as the maintenance and reliability issues
plaguing New York City and Washington, D.C. in particular. Nor does it look at
safety perceptions among riders, a growing concern on Bay Area transit.

>“Perhaps the presence of innovative modes makes it a more compelling or
sexier question to ask, but I think there are lots of reasons people aren’t
taking these modes as much as before,” said Susan Shaheen, the co-director of
the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley and an expert
in shared mobility. “The question of causality is perplexing and hard, and
it’s not necessarily one thing.”

So basically, shocker, correlation does not equal causation and there's a lot
going on driving this change.

Also, it'd be interesting to see data that took into account different modes.
Light rail ridership in the Twin Cities has soared because (unlike our bus
system) it is reliable and predictable, plus easier to use multimodally etc.
etc.

And I imagine that most places share the Twin Cities' struggles to combat
lawmakers in greater MN who have decided that investing in metro transit is a
certain evil.

------
darawk
"Another study blames the internal combustion engine for the decline of horse
ridership".

------
crdrost
It is certainly valid to say that, to first order, Uber and Lyft do not
compete with public transit. I get a Lyft from downtown KC to the KC airport
about thirty minutes away; I do this because it's about as expensive as
airport economy parking will be for several weeks; I do not think twice about
public transit because there simply is no public transit route there. But to
go to the library or Union Station I'd never take a Lyft; there's a tram that
goes to both.

But that gets complicated when we're talking about second-order effects. To
second order, yes, it does matter. I have taken both the bus and a Lyft to
work when my car was inaccessible. There is competition there, and it's driven
by bus transfers. To get close enough that I do not have significant walking
to do, I have to accept delays due to bus transfers, and the weather has to be
nice enough that I can easily endure those waits outside. Or my budget needs
to be tight enough that that makes sense.

It's not surprising to me that public transit sees somewhere in the range of
5-20% decline due to the cheaper taxi service; that is about the range of
those second-order effects. But this is also an avoidable loss: with the
widespread use of cell phones it may be possible that routes become more
customizable, not unlike how school buses work: "this route serves to bring
people from that general area to this general area, but of course we tailor it
a bit to the individual student population, we don't go down any side-streets
if there are no students to pick up there." There is a great potential when
city institutions start to get the hang of this new technology stuff, that a
bus service could meaningfully get you from where you're at to where you're
going without any big pain points, on the assumption that you have a smart-
enough cell phone. And that's no longer the marker of wealth that it used to
be. If they can really get it right, they can even have the ride-hailing
services tied into those systems, the way that cab lines informally used to
be: "we're willing to send a fare your way for someone starting at hub X and
going to location Y which is outside of our service regions."

~~~
distances
A city of 500k inhabitants doesn't have even a bus between the airport and
city center? That's quite interesting, one would think it'd one of the most
sought after routes.

~~~
crdrost
I mean it does it's just hard to get to and slow. It's route 229, it takes
10-15 minutes to get (through public transit) to the center of the metro area
where it goes through, in fact almost as long as just walking the 10-15 blocks
or whatever it is to get there... then I think you are waiting 10 more minutes
on average as they run every 20 minutes, and it takes something like 50
minutes to get from there to the airport -- whereas the straight shot with a
Lyft is maybe 30 minutes, the bus can take somewhere from a half hour to an
hour longer.

So it's possible with some transfers etc., it's just sufficiently inconvenient
and slow that I've ruled that out.

------
cozzyd
Uber and Lyft increase downtown congestion (like sometimes up to one third of
cars I see are Uber/Lyft in downtown Chicago) and routinely block bus stops
and in bus lanes. This further slows down buses even more and screws up
schedules. I wish bus drivers could automatically ticket the drivers.

I have a CTA pass so I almost never use Uber/Lyft because it's so much more
expensive.

~~~
malandrew
TNCs are not the only ones contributing to congestion. Private cars do as
well. We should address all road users and not just cherry-pick one scapegoat
when everyone sitting in traffic is traffic. Congestion pricing is the
solution here.

~~~
cozzyd
Sure but private cars aren't generally on the road all the time. They go to
their destinations and park. TNC's spend a substantial part of their time
between fares. If they were displacing all private car trips they would only
marginally increase congestion by 1-utlization factor but that's certainly not
the case in places where public transport exists.

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aabeshou
a lot of people taking the low hanging free-market attitude: if public trans
was better, then uber/lyft wouldn't win. don't blame uber/lyft for filling a
need. now I agree it doesnt make sense to hold uber/lyft responsible for this,
because they're just a business. but I do agree it shows something wrong with
society.

what people in this thread seem to be forgetting is that a lot of people don't
actually have money to choose the service according to which is better - they
take what they can afford, which is public trans. when rich people don't need
to take the same forms of transit, then theres less pressure by the powerful
people in society to create change, to improve the system. in the long run, we
would all benefit directly, and indirectly (the positive effects it has on
society), from a robust, affordable, pleasant, clean, etc public transit
system. but because of this stratification, which uber/lyft contribute to (but
of course cant be held entirely responsible for), it never gathers the clout
and momentum to actually happen.

------
Tiktaalik
Metro Vancouver transit ridership is increasing faster than any other region
in Canada or the U.S and Uber/Lyft is not allowed... hmmmm

[https://www.vancourier.com/news/metro-vancouver-transit-
ride...](https://www.vancourier.com/news/metro-vancouver-transit-ridership-
increasing-faster-than-any-other-region-in-canada-u-s-1.23245535)

------
moonlet
I only use a ridesharing app when I can’t get a bus or train. If it’s going to
take more than 20 minutes for that bus or train to arrive and I need to travel
more than a mile, ridesharing is generally how I get there. It fills a niche
where I live that isn’t served by public transit.

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ggregoire
I replaced the subway by a bike because of how bad the subway was. But I guess
they will blame my bike.

------
drilldrive
But how about transportation as a whole? Wouldn't people have better transport
than ever these days then? I doubt that public transport is ideal anyways.

~~~
GlickWick
Public transport would be ideal if there were better ways to manage it.
Infrastructure problems and rampant corruption stifle it, so innovators moved
in and stole their lunch.

I know it's more complicated than it seems, but check out Tokyo. Their public
transit works incredibly well, and a lot of public resources are spent making
sure it stays that way. Some of this is due to the fact that Tokyo is an
extremely new city in terms of a lot of its infrastructure (due to WW2), but
that's not the whole story here.

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bing111
Public transit in Los Angeles sucks big big time, so it makes sense Uber and
Lyft wins in cities like Los Angeles.

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the_watcher
Isn't the TL;DR here that when better alternatives emerge, the worse option
can lose? The article seems to be arguing that because Uber/Lyft are often
better than public transit, we shouldn't tolerate them, rather than the
obvious response: improve public transit.

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yaqubms
ya , you can blame. but why you not proivde good service

