A few of my posts over the past few months have had to do with Uber & Lyft, and I thought I'd keep all of this information in one place before adding an update.
Posts from March and April talks about how ridesharing has increased the numbers of miles driven and the numbers of trips taken in New York and Washington. The reason for this is that the services are subsidizing driving: more miles get driven when the cost of paying for vehicle use is lower.
The update, from the Washington Post's Faiz Siddiqui in July, shows that the numbers are staggering: 5.7 billion miles added in nine major urban areas. If public transit is working efficiently, vehicle miles spent in transit will be reduced, but use of transit goes up by about 2.6 miles per mile avoided. Commentators argue that households are buying fewer cars, but if the overall impact is to put cars on the road, that's a problem. A recent study finds that even automonous cars will increase traffic, since it may be cheaper to drive than to park! There may be a lot of traffic in our future.
Clearly ride-sharing is providing a convenient service, and it doesn't take too many months of renovations in the Metro system to be glad that we have ride-sharing systems. The important thing is to be aware of the full costs of the system, including time in traffic and taxes being paid by Uber and Lyft. As always, we economists are most interested in getting the best system for the costs!
