While ridesharing services, such as Uber, have taken off, policy makers are still largely unclear about the impact the services have had on traffic in towns and cities.  A new study from the University of Connecticut aims to redress the balance by tapping into data from New York City’s Taxi and local taxi regulator the Limousine Commission to explore the ridesharing landscape in New York.

The data shows that ridesharing grew by 46% in the city’s five boroughs between 2014 and 2017.  This growth was especially pronounced in the city’s outer boroughs, with growth of 56% in neighborhoods that are typically home to low-income and minority households where car ownership levels are low.

“These are really important things that are happening, and they’re changing the city,” the authors explain. “We really can’t afford to not have more transparency about what’s going on, because policymakers can’t respond if they don’t have a sense of what’s happening, and we can’t rely on the companies to optimize the public good.”

Greater mobility

The insights are crucial as these poorer neighborhoods have traditionally been poorly served by public transport, with more traditional taxi firms also under-represented.  As such, the new entrants could be providing a valuable service, but there remains concerns about the vulnerability of these demographics to companies with a strong profit motive, especially now they’re entering the stock exchange and have investors to please.

“Mobility is so important,” she said, “and you can’t be held to ransom….they’re not accountable to anybody and, at the end of the day, their remit is not to provide public transit. Their remit is to make profit,” the authors explain.

The authors believe the data could also shed light on some environmental challenges, not least because of the practice known as ‘deadheading’, whereby many ridesharing drivers spend a lot of time travelling to pick-up points without a passenger, thus contributing to both congestion and emissions.

A starting point

The authors accept that their work probably poses as many questions as provides answers, but hope that it will provide a good start point for further analysis into the impact of ridesharing on urban areas.  This would be especially important in areas that lack the density of New York.  They are adamant that much better data is needed for such analyses to be undertaken however.

This, combined with greater transparency for the industry would provide a number of benefits, not least of which would allow further research into aspects of the industry, such as the marketing used to determine if surge pricing applies.

“Uber and Lyft, they don’t break even,” the researchers explain. “They’re subsidized trips, and so they might be really massively marketing their services at a really heavy discount, but we don’t know because we can’t see any of the pricing data. But we’ll be able to find out from people.”

Hopefully in the coming years, more of these kind of investigations will take place so that planners can get a better understanding of how new services are impacting urban mobility around the world.