More data is needed from the Uber and Lyfts of the world so we can understand their societal effects. And since that data is usually difficult to get ahold of, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago have begun some creative workarounds.
Northeastern University researchers built a software script that scraped reams of vehicle location data for San Francisco. Then the S.F. County Transportation Authority staff cleaned, modeled, and mapped that information to estimate where, when, and how many daily trips occur. Their analysis found that more than 170,000 vehicle trips are made by “transportation network companies” (TNCs) within city limits on a typical weekday, which is about 15 percent of all car trips, and 9 percent of all trips, across different modes. They also found that the vast majority of TNC trips are heavily concentrated in San Francisco’s northeast quadrant, which is already the densest, most congested part of the city, as well as the area best served by public transit, bike lanes, and walkable streets. Future studies will examine the extent to which TNCs might be adding to traffic — and potentially contributing to declines in Bay Area transit ridership.
In traffic-clogged Boston, Alison Felix, a transportation planner at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, said that her city has also struggled with a scarcity of meaningful data from Uber, Lyft, and other ride-hailing companies. So the MAPC conducted a rider intercept survey to put a face on the issue. Of the nearly 1,000 TNC passengers surveyed in fall 2017 around the Boston metro area, more than 40 percent said they would have taken public transit if Uber or Lyft had not been available, and 12 percent said they would have walked or biked. Most cited speed and convenience as the main reasons for choosing an on-demand ride over buses or trains. “The responses to those questions provide strong evidence that TNCs are pulling from, not complementing, public transit,” said Felix.
And in Chicago, rail transit performance and ridership are strong, but buses are another story. Joseph Schwieterman, the director of DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development said TNCs may be “filling a void” where bus service has fallen short of neighborhood needs. Without much TNC data to draw on, Schwieterman and his research colleagues studied the trade-offs between time and cost that riders make when choosing between transit and UberPool in the Chicago area — by actually making 50 real-life trips themselves.
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