Ride-hailing firms are an ever present on the roads of many cities around the world, but have they replaced more traditional taxi-based traffic, or led to an increase in congestion on our roads? That was the question posed by a recent study from the University of Colorado Denver.
The analysis reveals that ride-hailing firms account for around 83% of all extra miles driven by motorists in Denver in recent years. The results emerged after the researcher himself signed up as a driver to both Lyft and Uber in 2016.
He collected real-time data from his journeys, together with surveys of passengers. This analysis revealed that 34% of his passengers would normally have taken public transport, walked or cycled if the ride-hailing option had not existed.
“Vehicle miles traveled increased mainly due to two factors; additional empty miles from ride-hailing drivers going around without passengers, and ride-hailing substituting more efficient and sustainable modes such as transit, biking and walking,” the paper says.
Congested roads
The research goes on to suggest that ride-hailing is actually making roads less efficient, as not only are more car miles driven, but vehicles often have no passengers in them. The data suggests that for every 100 miles spent with a passenger, there are an extra 69 miles spent without one.
“Given the lack of data and existing research, this study represents a nice step forward in helping us better understand how ride-haling impacts the transportation system,” the authors say. “However, cities still need better data to inform policy decisions about the many mobility-disrupting companies, and we have reached a point where we should expect, and probably need to require, more data transparency.”
The study did find however, that passenger demographics were pretty evenly spread across income and education demographics, although disadvantaged people remained under-represented. Suffice to say, there is a lot more work required before these findings can be regarded as conclusive, as the authors themselves admit. They do believe however that their work represents an interesting contribution to the debate on the value of ride-hailing firms.
“Studying ride-hailing has big implications for automated and autonomous vehicles, especially when it comes to empty miles and mode replacement. As an analogy, the empty miles that ride-hailing are putting into our systems today will be added by zero-occupancy driverless cars, or zombie cars, in the future,” they say.
