A new study from University of California Davis transportation researcher Regina Clewlow has discovered several interesting insights to the way ride-hailing services affect personal transportation use. The study found that:
- Ride-hailing service users aren’t just substituting personal driving for Uber and Lyft rides. Though frequent users drive their own cars less, they actually make more trips and cover more miles using ride-hailing services.
- A majority (61%) of those ride-hailing trips “would have not been made at all, or by walking, biking, or transit” if Lyft and Uber weren’t available.
- 21% of adults in the cities cited in the study used ride-hailing services.
- 24% of those used the services daily or weekly.
- The number-one reason the majority of people (37%) gave for using ride-hailing services was so they could avoid looking for parking spaces.
“The implications of this data raises significant concern for travel behavior researchers, suggesting that as these services grow, vehicle miles traveled will grow, even if vehicle ownership declines. It’s not about ownership, it’s about total vehicle miles traveled,” Clewlow told Curbed.
The study analyzed responses from over 4,000 people in seven cities including New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington, D.C.
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