There’s a lot good and bad about Uber and Lyft. But even with the bad, I have to admit: ride-hailing makes it easy for me to live without a car.
My walkable Washington, DC neighborhood has just-okay bus service and no Metro station. The bus, my bike, and my feet get me around perfectly well during the day, but when night falls – and the quality of transit service with it – I often find myself calling an Uber or Lyft.
Even though I use ride-hailing at least three to four times a week, the amount of money I spend doesn’t come close to what it would cost me to own a car. And I’m not unusual – I only know one car owner.
But when Mobility Lab visited Los Angeles earlier this year, I wondered if my car-free strategy would work in the sprawling metropolis – and the official Worst Bike City in America, according to Bicycling Magazine.
Can a Los Angelino rely primarily on biking and transit, and use ride-hailing sporadically, to live a high-quality life without a car? How many do? How many Uber and Lyft riders actually own cars?
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Los Angeles might be the largest ride-hail market in the country. Forty-four percent of Los Angelinos have adopted ride-hailing, compared to 35 percent of New York City residents. In addition, Los Angeles has seen the fastest growth in the number of ride-hail drivers, as seen in this 2015 study.
Graph from the National Bureau of Labor Research. Charts growth from when Uber launched in that city.
Yet despite this growth, car ownership is rising steadily in Southern California. Between 2000 and 2015, every new SoCal resident added 0.95 cars on average to the region. From 1990 to 2000, each resident added 0.25 cars.
Notably, car ownership in Los Angeles is rising the most among people with low incomes and recent immigrants from Latin America, according to a study from the Southern California Association of Governments. The reasons are unknown.
Still, 21 percent of low-income households do not own cars, compared to only 4 percent of high-income households. The second largest group of ride-hail users in L.A. fall into the latter category, according to a study from UC Davis. These “affluent suburban” people only use ride-hailing as substitutes to their personal car, often on trips to the airport.
Both car ownership and ride-hailing seem to be growing. What gives?
But on the flip side, Lyft might be used more frequently among low-income Angelinos than those with high incomes. “While low-income households have less personal-auto access, households living in low-income neighborhoods make 36 percent more Lyft trips per month compared to users living in high-income neighborhoods,” writes Anne Elizabeth Brown, in her Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA.
Yet the largest group of L.A. ride-hail users, according to the UC Davis study, are millennials who live in “walkable, transit-accessible” neighborhoods. Ride-hailing reduces their personal car use, but the study did not examine whether or not these people actually own cars.
San Francisco might offer some clues. While the city’s dense land use and public transportation is much different than L.A.’s, a 2014 study from UC Berkeley found that 90 percent of ride-hail users have not gotten rid of their personal cars since using Uber and Lyft and don’t have plans to. However, ride-hailing has changed a lot since 2014.
Both Uber and Lyft have stated goals of ending personal car ownership. While no study has directly answered the question of how many ride-hailers own cars, the little research we do have suggests that the companies might have a long way to go – at least in Los Angeles.
Photo by Luke Jones on Flickr’s Creative Commons.