Estimating Ride Hailing's Bite out of Transit "Lyft carried 163 million rides in 2016, up from 53 million in 2015. If a third of that growth would otherwise have taken public transit, transit lost about 36 million rides to Lyft in 2016. I can’t find exact numbers for Uber, but Uber carries about four times as many riders in the U.S. as Lyft, so the two of them together may have taken 180 million riders from transit. APTA’s 2016 report found that ridership declined by about 244 million trips nationwide. That suggests that ride-hailing services could be responsible for about three-fourths of the drop." Well, that's bracing. More below. "Transit agencies such as Philadelphia’s SEPTA are beginning to take notice and wondering how to improve their bus services to compete. One way would be to increase frequencies so travelers used to waiting three or four minutes for an Uber or Lyft ride would know they can also catch a bus every few minutes. While they could offset some of the increase in operating costs by reducing the size of the buses, they would still have the problem that the total cost of operations, including subsidies, approaches the fares charge by Uber and Lyft for transit-length rides (which average 5 miles), so why does transit need to exist at all?"
Good question, why does transit need to exist when the cost of a ride sharing trip is the same as the cost of a transit trip? Perhaps we should simply offer the poor, on a sliding scale, a subsidy of the ride sharing trip cost. This would be much less costly than subsidizing transit trips for all riders. The benefit to the poor would be significant as it would offer them door to door transportation at low cost. Progressives fight this option at every turn. Why? Mostly because they understand that to eliminate public transit from most cities is to eliminate one of the large Democratic Party voting blocks; this cannot be allowed to happen. The other primary reason is eliminating transit cuts directly against the desires of the progressives to force the people to live in specific areas in the city. The desire is to force the people to live only along transit corridors and not allow them to live where they wish. This will force people to live in high-density housing, which they do not want, but which the planners want fervently. So, ultimately it is about control. With so many fiscal problems in our cities, one would think that we would welcome an opportunity to reduce the tax cost of transit. After all, money spent on transit could be shifted to help address the pension crisis, or one of the other, myriad local funding crises. But moving money to these problem areas is not welcomed if it would result in the reduction of Democratic Party voters or progressive control over the people. Ride sharing, including hail ride, self-drive cars are coming and will revolutionize transportation. Early on, the current automobile design will restrict the revolution, but quite quickly we will see task built vehicles; this will be the final death knell for free standing public transit services in most cities.
Comments
|
AuthorMaddog Categories
All
|