This op-ed is in response to David Alpert’s article about taxing single-user TNC trips but not shared ones.
To raise money for Washington, DC’s portion of dedicated Metro funding, the city has proposed raising a tax on app-based ride hailing. Some on the city council have proposed that shared rides on these services, such as Via, uberPOOL, and Lyft Line, be exempt from the tax. The justification is that ride sharing takes more cars off the road and is better for congestion than private vehicles or ride hails with only a single occupant.
However, even a shared hailed ride contributes to congestion and takes riders away from transit. DC should not let them off the hook simply because they are not as bad as private rides.
When ride hailing came on the scene earlier this decade, it held great promise of being a viable alternative to car ownership by catalyzing an improvement in taxi services generally and encouraging people to diversify their mobility habits.
At first, the convenience of transportation network companies (TNCs) seemed to deliver on this promise, enticing drivers previously reluctant to leave their cars to utilize other options. Ride hail services could fill gaps left by transit, such as in the suburbs or late at night. Ride hailing could have complemented transit to provide a larger and more appealing alternative for drivers.
Recently, however, TNCs have begun to challenge transit, directly wooing transit riders. In addition, ride sharing has not lived up to its promises of reducing congestion.
Uber and Lyft have both directly advertised to riders of public transit with Uber’s “You can’t miss an Uber” campaign, Via covering train cars with ads, and Lyft even offered new riders $20 off their first ride with the code “METROHELP” during WMATA’s shutdown in 2016. While part of the justification for these ads is to position Lyft as a “last-mile” solution, getting the rider from their stop to their front door, rides are much more difficult to come by in the suburbs than in the city where transit is plentiful.
Some transit authorities have turned to TNCs to fill gaps in their networks by subsidizing rides that connect to bus stops. But the embrace of ride hailing by transit networks has also been a justification for poor service, and dollars that could have gone to increased service have been diverted to ride-hail companies. In addition, any savings achieved by transit companies are often the result of public bus drivers being replaced with underpaid TNC drivers.
TNCs fail to provide the same amount of congestion reduction that transit does. Though ride-hailing companies are often reluctant to share their data, making research into their impact difficult, it has been found that TNCs have increased the overall vehicle miles travelled in New York and that drivers spent more time driving alone, searching for a fare than they did with a passenger in the car.
Even with multiple people in a car, the amount of “deadheading” on each trip is atrocious. DC should not give ride sharing a pass simply because it isn’t as bad as ride hailing alone. Both cause congestion and are harmful to transit.
There is a place for TNCs in the transportation system, but it is in corridors where low density makes transit less efficient. Ride-hail cars could integrate with a regional transit network by feeding into major lines in coordination with real-time arrival information about buses and trains. TNCs can work with cities and transit agencies instead of supplanting and competing with them.
Edited by Owain James. Photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab.