Shared Uber Rides Are Worsening NYC's Traffic Woes

NEW YORK, NY — Ride hail services such as Uber and Lyft are making city roads more clogged, with shared ride services actually taking people who would otherwise have used public transport and putting them on the roads, according to a new report published Wednesday.

UberX and similar services offering private rides increase driving on city streets by 180 percent, adding 2.8 vehicle miles to roads for each mile of personal driving they take away, according to the report by transportation expert Bruce Schaller.

Ride sharing services such as Uber Pool do little to moderate that impact. The number of added vehicle miles barely drops to 2.6 when shared options are factored in, still amounting to a 160 percent increase in driving, the report says.

Driving would still increase 120 percent even if Lyft reaches its goal of having all rides shared by 2022, according to the report.

The shared rides are troublesome for traffic because most people who use them switch from "non-auto modes" of transportation, the report says. There's also added driving between the end of one trip and the start of another, according to the report.

About 60 percent of ride-hail passengers in big, dense cities would have taken public transportation, walked, biked or not made the trip if ride-hailing was not an option, while the other 40 percent would take their own car or a taxi, the report says.

That means the car services "are primarily supplanting more space-efficient modes such as bus, subway, biking and walking," the report says.

Overall, ride-hailing and "microtransit" services such as Via can be "valuable extensions of – but not replacements for – fixed route public transit," Schaller writes. Bus lanes, trip fees and congestion pricing — such as New York's proposal to toll cars entering central and lower Manhattan — can all help cities "manage" congestion, the report says.

Ride-hailing has exploded across the country as New York City's subway system has languished. The services transported 2.61 billion passengers last year, up 37 percent from 2016, the report says, while New York City saw 215 million trips in 2017.

That growth is expected to continue — ride-hailing and taxi ridership combined will likely outstrip ridership on local buses in the U.S. by the end of this year, the report says.

Uber has pitched itself as a valuable resource for outer-borough New Yorkers in transit-starved neighborhoods as lawmakers look to tighten the city's regulatory grip on ride-sharing companies.

While Uber supports congestion pricing — it recently launched a $1 million campaign supporting it — spokeswoman Danielle Filson said the company finds several of Schaller's conclusions "fundamentally flawed."

The report ignores Uber Pool's benefits to New Yorkers in the outer boroughs, where more than half the comapny's rides take place, Filson said. She cited the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's finding that for-hire vehicle and taxi rides were roughly flat in much of Manhattan last year.

"It shouldn't be a surprise that New Yorkers are choosing an affordable, reliable option like UberPOOL in outerborough communities underserved by an underfunded transit system designed a century ago to primarily serve Manhattan office workers," Filson said in an email, adding that pool rides saved more than 230 million miles worldwide last year.

(Lead image: An Uber SUV waits in Manhattan in June 2017. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)