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Study: Uber and Lyft Contribute to Traffic Congestion

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Photo: James Schwartz (Creative Commons 2.0)

When Uber and Lyft first came on the scene, both companies said that their services would help reduce traffic with fewer personal cars on the road. A recent study conducted in major metro areas like Washington D.C., Boston, and Chicago released this month seems to prove that Uber and Lyft are adding to the problems in these areas instead.


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Before we dive deeper into the results of this study, it’s important to note that it was conducted by the transportation firm Fehr & Peers and Uber and Lyft paid for it. The firm reports on its site that the companies reached out to understand what share of total miles driven in an area were rideshare miles. The information, as far as we can tell, was not presented as a comparison to previous year’s data to show whether overall vehicle miles traveled in an area increased.

That being said, the study showed that rideshare’s largest slice of the miles pie comes from the tech hub of San Francisco, where 12.8 percent of traffic in the city itself (in terms of total miles driven) was an Uber or Lyft vehicle. Fehr & Peers reports that’s probably because San Francisco, compared to its surrounding Bay Area, has a lower car ownership rate and a very intricate public transit system, which cuts down on cars overall on the street.

By comparison, Chicago saw Uber and Lyft cars drive 3.3 percent of its total miles driven inside the city, Boston had 7.7 percent, and Washington, D.C. reported 6.9 percent. According to The Washington Post, cities on the list were happy to have the data so that they could dig deeper into how the changes in traffic were affecting their infrastructure.


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For its part, Uber confessed to the Washington Post that it was probably adding to traffic woes instead of making them better. However, its head of global policy for public transportation, Chris Pangilinan, then threw in that Uber’s portion of traffic is still much smaller than private drivers and commercial vehicles.

I think we need a bit more information about the growth of traffic over the years before we blame the next jam on Uber and Lyft.  At least the companies seem to be willing to look deeper into the issue so a solution can be found.

News Sources: The Washington Post and Fehr & Peers