In 2018, people took 84 million trips using shared bikes and e-scooters in the US, an astounding growth in the past year largely due to e-scooters. This number and many other interesting stats come from a new report looking at Shared Micromobility in the US in 2018, recently published by the US National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO). Hat tip to Tim Papandreou.
Yang Xu (Twitter) and his team at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University have a new research project to understand the usage of dockless bike-sharing system and its relationship with built environment in Singapore. More info about the project in Yang's website.
This week, it was on the news that Uber will soon lose its license to operate in London since the local transport regulator ruled that Uber is "not fit and proper" to operate in city. This decision is not settled yet and it's probably hopefully going to be negotiated along the appeal process towards a middle-ground regulation.
In the meantime, Tyler Cowen's has shared his views on why this is "a big brexit mistake". This is part of a much larger debate on whether/how governments should regulate the 'sharing economy', a debate which would need a careful discussion on transport regulation. A paper on this very topic just got recently published and it does a really good job at tackling the most important points in this debate. The paper is coauthored by top researchers from the Transport Studies UnitTSU/Oxford I'm biased . This is a very timely discussion in Brazil, where the Congress will be creating a national regulation scheme for ride hailing apps in the coming months (link in Portuguese).
The ride-hailing company Uber has achieved extremely rapid global expansion by means of outmanoeuvring governments, regulators and competitors. The rise of the company has been based on a deliberate strategy of acting as a market disruptive innovator through a user friendly technology and making use of the ‘sharing economy’. These attributes are not unique, but are distinctively augmented by a relentless expansionary ambition and an ability to maintain the capacity to innovate. Uber has generated great political controversy, but the challenge for governments and regulators is to embrace the benefits of the disruptive innovator, while adopting an approach that takes into account the full range of impacts. For Uber, the challenge is to maintain its expansionary style as a disruptive innovator, while also redefining on its terms the political and public debate. The case study of London provides important insights into the dynamics of these processes.
Early this year, a paper in PNAS using a computer model estimated that car sharing services like Uber and Lyft could reduce the number of taxi vehicles on roads by ~76% without significantly impacting travel time. As Joe Cortright has said, the authors are overly optimistic.
There is another study from last year that analyzed what actually happened to congestion levels when Uber entered the market in some US cities (abstract below). The results of this study are not really comparable to the the paper in PNAS, though. The methods are sound but I have the impression the authors pay too much attention to the statistical significance of the results and do not really discuss the magnitude of the effects of Uber entry on congestion. In any case, it's a good read.
Li, Z., Hong, Y., & Zhang, Z. (2016). Do Ride-Sharing Services Affect Traffic Congestion? An Empirical Study of Uber Entry. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2838043
Abstract:
Sharing economy platform, which leverages information technology (IT) to re-distribute unused or underutilized assets to people who are willing to pay for the services, has received tremendous attention in the last few years. Its creative business models have disrupted many traditional industries (e.g., transportation, hotel) by fundamentally changing the mechanism to match demand with supply in real time. In this research, we investigate how Uber, a peer-to-peer mobile ride-sharing platform, affects traffic congestion and environment (carbon emissions) in the urban areas of the United States. Leveraging a unique data set combining data from Uber and the Urban Mobility Report, we examine whether the entry of Uber car services affects traffic congestion using a difference-in-difference framework. Our findings provide empirical evidence that ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease the traffic congestion after entering an urban area. We perform further analysis including the use of instrumental variables, alternative measures, a relative time model using more granular data to assess the robustness of the results. A few plausible underlining mechanisms are discussed to help explain our findings.
A good-looking video of the computer simulation model of the PNAS paper.
Last year, a study by Edelman and Luca found robust evidence of racial discrimination among New York City landlords on Airbnb. More recently, a new study also brought evidence of racial discrimination among drivers of ride-sharing services including Uber, Lyft, and Flywheel (see abstract of the paper below).
Passengers have faced a history of discrimination in transportation systems. Peer transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft present the opportunity to rectify long-standing discrimination or worsen it. We sent passengers in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA to hail nearly 1,500 rides on controlled routes and recorded key performance metrics. Results indicated a pattern of discrimination, which we observed in Seattle through longer waiting times for African American passengers—as much as a 35 percent increase. In Boston, we observed discrimination by Uber drivers via more frequent cancellations against passengers when they used African American-sounding names. Across all trips, the cancellation rate for African American sounding names was more than twice as frequent compared to white sounding names. Male passengers requesting a ride in low-density areas were more than three times as likely to have their trip canceled when they used a African American-sounding name than when they used a white-sounding name. We also find evidence that drivers took female passengers for longer, more expensive, rides in Boston. We observe that removing names from trip booking may alleviate the immediate problem but could introduce other pathways for unequal treatment of passengers.
