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Transportation Businesses United States

Uber and Lyft Generate 70 Percent More Pollution Than Trips They Displace, Study Finds (theverge.com) 102

Posted by BeauHD from the traffic-congestion dept.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, ride-hailing trips today result in an estimated 69 percent more climate pollution on average than the trips they displace. The Verge reports: In cities, ride-hailing trips typically displace low-carbon trips, such as public transportation, biking, or walking. Uber and Lyft could reduce these emissions with a more concerted effort to electrify its fleet of vehicles or by incentivizing customers to take pooled rides, the group recommends. "However, those strategies alone will address neither the increases in vehicle miles traveled nor rising congestion concerns," the report says. "For ride-hailing to contribute to better climate and congestion outcomes, trips must be pooled and electric, displace single-occupancy car trips more often, and encourage low-emissions modes such as mass transit, biking, and walking."

It's a tall order, but both Uber and Lyft have shown a willingness to reduce their carbon footprint. So far, their methods include introducing bike- and scooter-sharing services, integrated public transportation scheduling and ticketing into their respective apps, and incentive programs to get drivers to switch to electric cars. "We want Uber to be a part of the solution to address climate change by working with cities to help create a low carbon transportation future," a spokesperson said. "To unlock the opportunities we have to reduce emissions, we will continue to invest in products and advocate for policies that reduce car ownership, promote more pooled trips and support greater adoption of bikes, scooters, green vehicles and the use of public transit."

Lyft, meanwhile, dismissed the report as "misleading." "This report, like many before it, makes misleading claims about rideshare," a spokesperson said. "Lyft encourages the use of shared rides, was the first rideshare company to put public transit information into our app, and last year, made one of the largest single deployments of electric vehicles in the nation. We are eager to continue this work in partnership with cities, to advance shared, sustainable transportation."
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Uber and Lyft Generate 70 Percent More Pollution Than Trips They Displace, Study Finds More

Uber and Lyft Generate 70 Percent More Pollution Than Trips They Displace, Study Finds

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  • Buses Don't Go Everywhere (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @05:17AM (#59767956)
    So how do they "compare" public transport to Uber and Lyft trips with destinations (and starting points) that public transportation doesn't service?

    Just assume the person walked or biked the rest of the way? Won't the travel time often be atrocious and unrealistic? Or do they just assume that the traveler never bothered because public transport completely failed them (i.e. that trip didn't happen so carbon footprint == zero! Yay!)?

    • So how do they "compare" public transport to Uber and Lyft trips with destinations (and starting points) that public transportation doesn't service?

      Just assume the person walked or biked the rest of the way? Won't the travel time often be atrocious and unrealistic? Or do they just assume that the traveler never bothered because public transport completely failed them (i.e. that trip didn't happen so carbon footprint == zero! Yay!)?

      I would just crank up my wood gas powered 8000lb 4x4 for little trips like that.

    • Re:Buses Don't Go Everywhere (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @05:33AM (#59767972)

      From their paper: "Rider surveys in California indicate that 24 percent of non-pooled trips and 36 percent of pooled trips would have been by mass transit, walking, or biking, or not taken at all." The rest was taken by car, car pool or taxi.

      • Which doesn't tell us anything useful without a more detailed breakdown and consideration of other effects. In how many of those cases were mass transit, walking and biking not feasible? In how many was not taking the trip simply not an option? In how many unavoidable trip cases was walking technically possible, but unrealistic due to distance, purpose, or weather? What about the immediate impact on quality of life?

        • Re:Buses Don't Go Everywhere (Score:4, Informative)

          by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @12:09PM (#59769130) Homepage

          Being feasible is baked into the definition of "would have". If the trip was not feasible by walking, you wouldn't answer "I would have walked" to the survey question. If you're going to say people would answer a survey incorrectly, or in bad faith, to such a degree that it makes the survey's data invalid, I don't have much to tell you other than to suspect your faith in this kinda stuff is probably relative to your desire to accept the conclusions being presented.

          • Maybe "feasible" was the wrong word. How about, "not incredibly awful"?

            Say you're starving, have no transportation, and food is seven miles away. You have to get to food, but that 14 mile stroll is horrible, yet technically possible and what you'd have to do.

            The UCS is a political, not scientific, institution that is trying to push an agenda aimed at removing a service that reduces misery.

        • You're an idiot. The answers are right there, from the riders themselves.

          "24 percent of non-pooled trips and 36 percent of pooled trips would have been by mass transit, walking, or biking, or not taken at all."

          In how many of those cases were mass transit, walking and biking not feasible?

          Doesn't matter. All we care about is whether or not the "ride share" removed the need to drive a personal vehicle.

          In how many was not taking the trip simply not an option?

          76 percent of non-pooled trips and 64 percent of pooled trips. Again, doesn't matter. All we care about is whether or not the "ride share" removed the need to drive a personal vehicle.

      • Rider surveys in California indicate that 24 percent of non-pooled trips and 36 percent of pooled trips would have been by mass transit, walking, or biking, or not taken at all.

        Seems really unlikely since cabs exist.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Of course someone might point out but the electric is often provided by coal, but, well, often a problem has to be solved in parts.

        IIUC a coal power plant creating electricity at ~50% efficiency is significantly cleaner than a fleet of ICEs running at <10% efficiency.

        If every ICE vehicle were replaced with an equivalent electric, and the electricity shortfall were made up entirely by coal-burning power plants, we may still come out ahead pollution- and carbon-wise.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      They are right about it being extremely misleading...

      Public transport follows predefined routes, it may not go where you want or it may not go there directly resulting in very long journey times. How much is your time worth? Do you want to spend it all travelling, or do you actually want to spend it *at* the destination you're trying to travel to?

      And then if you're carrying lots of goods, walking and/or public transport may not be practical or you may have to make multiple trips to carry the same items.

      Gene

      • Fair points. "Misleading" though? Transportation is a multi-faceted problem so any comparison will be apples-to-oranges. The way we facilitate quantitative apples-to-oranges comparisons is money. Institute and enforce a carbon tax. Then let the market decide.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It depends where the hypothetical person lives. In some places the walk to public transport is quite short and the additional travel time minimal, in fact sometimes lower than a taxi due to congestion or being far from profitable areas where they all hang around waiting.

      So perhaps the findings could be better phrased as having a decent public transport system is better than having Uber operating.

    • It is obvious to anyone with more than about two brain cells that a pick-up and drop-off system will result in more travel distance covered than when using your own car. If I drive myself to the airport and back, it is 300 km round trip. If I use a taxi/limo, it is 600 km for the driver.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Depends on your city. Boston has a street network that resembles an abstract expressionist painting, so the transit network has to settle linking neighborhoods; the buses that serve entire neighborhoods are just too slow if your destination is near the end of the line.

      Chicago, on the other hand, has an almost perfect grid that makes it child's play to navigate anywhere in the city's 227 square miles by transit. Granted, the longest trips can take almost two hours, but they cover over twenty miles as the c

    • Self reported behavioral data.... Probability of junk science is 0.999. Reminds me of a joke. A group of researchers used self reported data to discover the leading cause of spousal abuse in the United State. They found the leading cause: "They never fucking LISTEN!"
  • I see a lot of electric and hybrid cars working Uber and Lyft. If we shift to an all-electric fleet over the next decade (due to gov't regulations as well as plain old market demand) wouldn't that address the issue?

    • If we shift to an all-electric fleet ... wouldn't that address the issue?

      Not if the electrical power is still generated by burning fuel. And still insisting on the energetically least effective mode of transportation (a car) doesn't exactly help either.

      • Solar? Hydro? Wind? Nuclear?!? Because that's where everything is headed.

      • Re:Electric cars? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ThosLives ( 686517 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @08:59AM (#59768296) Journal

        And still insisting on the energetically least effective mode of transportation (a car)

        Cars are not the worst. VTOL aircraft are the worst. Hovering is 0% energy efficient (in distance-per-energy consumed) and consumes lots of energy, and if you can get the equivalent of 20 miles per gallon during level flight that's extremely impressive for aircraft.

        • Re:Electric cars? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @09:22AM (#59768360)

          If you're going to be ridiculous, travel by parade would be the worst. Dozens of vehicles, hundreds of people, horses, clowns, mimes, hot dog vendors, miniature horses, a 50 piece brass band with half a dozen drummers, two squads of cheerleaders and the crazy dude from down the street who strapped a giant paper mache dildo to the top of his creepy rape van all create an insane amount of pollution for every mile traveled.

          But it does make for a very memorable entrance when you show up at the farmers market.

    • EVs do not address the traffic congestion issue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Then the goalposts should be to compare the ride sharing to the electrified alternatives.

      The short answer is that pollution is driven by energy consumption, and uber/lyft represent a high energy overhead compared to other alternatives. Even in the most optimistic scenario that is even vaguely realistic today (battery vehicle with a totally wind/solar power generaciot), you are still driving high levels of wear and tear on batteries that are a pollution source in and of themselves. Additionally the indirec

    • You probably don't know this because the EV proponents keep modding me down every time I point this out. 2/3 of the electricity in the U.S. is generated from fossil fuels. Roughly half coal, half natural gas. Those two generation plants are about 40% and 60% efficient (the rest of the energy in the fuel becomes waste heat). Call it 50%. Transmission over power lines is about 97% efficient. Charging the battery (as measured by numerous Tesla owners) is about 80%-85% efficient. I haven't found numbers f

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shilly ( 142940 )

        You're trying to be all analytical, but you have a bunch of untested assumptions. For example, you assume that that a house that adds an EV is already using all its existing solar panel generation capacity. That may be true in some cases, but it's definitely not true in all. Other big -- and wrong -- assumptions in this one little segment of your post:
        - An EV needs 30kWh charge per day -- that's somewhere north of 100 miles of range, depending on mpkwh efficiency of the EV. For comparison, the average dai

  • I think it's BS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @05:58AM (#59768008)
    I don't keep a car anymore because it's cheaper/easier to get a ride when I need one. Otherwise I wouyld walk less and drive more.
    • I keep several cars. BUT... Last year was the first year that I put more miles on a bicycle than I put on all my cars... https://www.strava.com/athlete... [strava.com]

      In Georgia we have to have emissions inspections which have the odometer reading of the vehicle. I have the receipts of emissions inspections for the vehicles from 2018 to 2019 and the total miles of all of them was a few 100 miles less than the total miles that I rode in 2019.

      How many people can say that?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        How many people can say that?

        I'm guessing you think the answer is not many. And if that's so, then its a useless solution isn't it?

        • The answer out of 360 million and some in the USA is not many. You are correct.

          It isn't useless to me. And to me, that is all that matters.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shetan ( 20885 )

        How many people can say that?

        In Amsterdam, for example? Probably a lot.

    • I don't keep a car anymore because it's cheaper/easier to get a ride when I need one. Otherwise I would walk less and drive more.

      That brings up an interesting point. If ride hailing increases miles travelled by 70% but results in fewer vehicles produced and purchased, what is the net effect?

      IIUC about half the energy "spent" on a car, in the average car's lifetime, occurs during the manufacturing process -- before it reaches the buyer. The other half is gasoline. If that's true, and the ride hailing apps are actually replacing vehicle purchases, then that 70% increase by those cars would lead to a 30% net decrease in overall ene

      • Quick google search got me a ballpark figure of ~260 gallons of gasoline equivalent energy for a typical car, 325 for a hybrid. Another link says ~1000 gallons equivalent.

        Now, figure cars get ~30 mpg (give or take a factor of ~2 for trucks vs prius) and have a lifetime of roughly 150k miles (give or take a factor of two depending on Chrysler vs Toyota).

        So ~5000 gallons of gasoline burned for a typical car, and the equivalent of 6-20% more backed into its manufacturing depending on what you read.

        • Yet another link says ~6% of lifetime carbon emissions is the original manufacturing. 19% is from producing and transporting the gasoline in the first place, and 75% is the fuel it burns over the lifetime of the vehicle.

          https://www.greencarreports.co... [greencarreports.com]

    • But an Uber/Lyft trip would still emit more carbon than a personal car trip assuming the cars have similar MPGs. When you drive yourself, for example from your house to the store, you only emit CO2 between your house and the store. If you hired a ride, you are emitting CO2 beginning with when you order the ride, the distance it takes for the driver to reach your house and the distance to the store. It could be more if that is the driver calls it quits for the day and drives themselves home afterwards.

      Var

  • Which cities did they refer to? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @06:09AM (#59768026)

    In cities, ride-hailing trips typically displace low-carbon trips, such as public transportation, biking, or walking.

    I really wanted if the scientists who produced this report ever came outside of a nice cozy college town. In the United States, specially in the middle of the country, large cities were always built with a complete disdain for walking, biking, or public transport. I mean, come over to places like Dallas, Houston, or Indianapolis, Albuquerque and see how much you will succeed in life without driving a car. Once you realize that the nearest bus stop is a mile away, and you need to walk on grass in 100 degree heat because nobody bothered to build even a sidewalk, you will quickly lose any interest in walking. And don't get me started on the bicycles. Where I live, every freaking day is an open season on the bicyclists, specially highly experienced surgeons, who are being mercilessly mowed down by distracted SUV and crew cab pick up trucks.

    • And to add to this, basically American cities are extremely sprawled out. Everyone seems to love to live in a comfy house in the suburbs. This results in low population density. I see people walking or biking for _fun_ or exercise, but it's really hard to get anywhere you need to be for work/study/shop.

      • It is all in the mind...

        To Work [garmin.com]
        From Work [garmin.com]

        Notice how cold it is with the actual outside temperature in the top right corner of the map.
        I also ride on 5 lane roads with no bike lanes [goo.gl]

        If you really want to ride a bicycle to work, there is nothing stopping you. The only thing that stops me is heavy rain and well if it is below 26F degrees outside. Will I ride to work when it is 27F degrees outside.... Yes, I will [garmin.com]

        Will I ride to work when it is snowing.... Yes I will [garmin.com]

        Would I ride in 100 degree he
        • You and 5 other people in the country. It is rare to have showers at work, how do your coworkers feel about you smelling like a gym locker room when you get to work? I knew exactly one person in the valley who consistently rode to work. One. Out of millions. And the valley had fantastic weather. While you are getting great exercise and you are getting great health benefits, I question your sanity if you think that the average american is going to start riding to work. It just is not going to happen short of

          • You and 5 other people in the country.

            I would say 5 is rather high. My guestimate is 4.

            As for stinking up the place at work, I don't have access to a shower. But I also don't ride fast enough to sweat hard. If you notice my average heart rate for riding to work is around 128bpm(about 30bpm above normal peoples resting heart rate) even though I am riding at an average of 18 to 21mph. I also wear the minimum amount of clothing too, yes spandex. If I was wearing cotton, sweating and riding that fast, I would chafe the skin off my inner thighs a

            • I've had this dream for a while and would join you, but my living arrangements require a 25 mile commute. Several miles of that commute is on an elevated two-lane highway without a shoulder.
              Commuting on bike most places in America is just asking for death. The denser urban areas may be viable (a bike was great in Amsterdam), but I'd rather die than live that close to other people. A motorcycle seems like a good alternative, but is also very dangerous. Not to mention the bike racks for motorcycles just look

  • The lyft app promotes sharing the ride, at a reduced price. Now I don't work for them; but it surprised me that I could ride solo, or share the ride, or take the bus. And it gave me a quote (or estimate, in the case of the bus) for each one. I was going to try the second option, but it was getting late -- like that Jack Handey quote about Disneyland burning down. What were we talking about, I kinda got distracted...

    • Sure, Lyft "promotes" sharing the ride. But that option exists in only a small percentage of their coverage area. The shared ride option is largely governed by pick-up ETA. Lyft has refused, for years, to expand the shared ride option to cities that have a pick-up ETA that exceeds a certain amount of time. This beak point used to be 2 minutes. There are very few cities where the average pick-up ETA will be 2 minutes or less. So it's not going to happen and Lyft's assertion that this is the goal is feel good

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      The study is correct in as much as the business model does depend on riders uses what is clearly a more polluting solution for a potentially less polluting one. Just like so many things, the problem is compounded because it is cheap and some costs, like pollution, are not part of the equation.

      The solution is in part regulation. Mandate that the option of shared shred rides is there, I have seen cities where the app has to list the price and route of public options. Of course all ride services, taxis inc

    • So? I should think the conclusion holds for all taxi companies of which Uber and Lyft are just two.
    • It probably came entirely through the "Union of Concerned Scientists", but they've always been concerned more with promoting a non-scientific political agenda than science.
  • If the conveyance is an Electric Vehicle, then you've got some considerable environmental friendliness.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Even if they were, it's less efficient than not moving around 3,500 pounds of material for transporting a couple hundred pounds of passenger (when talking about displacing bicycles, buses) and there's nothing stopping the non-taxi uses from also being electrified.

      Additionally, currently EVs are pretty much not viable at all for taxi service. It works for a privately owned vehicle that can spend a long time recharging, but for a vehicle that is trying to be profitable by being highly utilized, that downtim

    • That would only matter if Lyft/Uber actually operated electric fleets. They don't. Instead they have a pretty representative cross section of the driving population, which is still small single digit percent electric.

  • Why is it that these studies never address taxi and limo services? do they not cause congestion? Pollution? why are the ride sharing services always the problem? I'm not saying they are flawless cause they aren't.... There are plenty of issues they need to fix also. My real question is who funded this study.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Because long standing taxi and limo services are a well known thing and not 'trendy'. They share this problem, but uber/lyft has this novelty where people don't think of them as taxis because they are so much easier to get compared to the old days of actually dialing a phone and talking to a dispatcher who is trying to manually sort out a cab and radio the driver for his best human guess at ETA.

    • Because uber/lyft changed the dynamic. Prior to their existence, few took taxis regularly outside of a NYC type super dense area. They normalized it so that in suburban areas people started using them for something other than the trip to the airport. And who can forget all the stories about parents sticking their 8 year old into an uber. What suburban mom would have done that with a taxi? The main upside I've seen with uber/lyft is redux of drunk driving. Because they normalized taking a taxi service, peop

  • Cars produce the most emissions per mile in the first few minutes after starting, by a wide margin. Neither the engine nor the catalyst are up to full operating temperature where they are most efficient. Heated catalysts are supposed to solve this problem, but they are only practical on hybrids due to the bigger battery, and even hybrids don't have them yet as far as I am aware due to the additional cost on an already more expensive auto. If they are displacing short trips, then they are almost certainly re

    • Many Uber/Lyft operators turn off their cars while waiting for a passenger to save on gas, so I doubt they are much better off than personal vehicles per mile, but they rack up all the wasted miles driving between customers.

  • Making a parking space for a personal vehicle has a CO2 footprint not accounted for in the study, especially a concrete parking space. The study also had a typo in equation 1 of section 2.1 (subscript in the wrong place).
    https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/d... [ucsusa.org]

  • Uber Rickshaw

    or, Uber feet [rachfeed.net]

  • They generate 0% more pollution for me because I only use it when my car breaks down, or one time I couldn't get it started at -10F.

  • ...so you're saying the hand-wavy assurances of 'climate benefit' for an unproven new product being shilled by marketeers who were desperate to pump up their IPO for a putative $billions payout on a business that can't even provably make money ...MIGHT NOT HAVE HAD A BASIS IN FACT? /stunned.

  • "We want Uber to be a part of the solution to address climate change by working with cities to help create a low carbon transportation future,"

    No they don't want to help fix "climate change", they want to make money. No business wants to spend the money on "climate change", just like no one else wants to, including me. I like my money just like greedy corporations like their money.

    Does someone need to, is a better statement. Just like I don't want study and learn stuff to stay at pace with my job, but I

  • Until the customers decide they'd rather carpool with 2 other people (and two other stops) instead of going straight from the airport to their home.

    Seriously, I've taken airport vanpools, and being the last stop in the vanpool on your way home *sucks*. Watching 5 other people get off before you isn't fun.

    • I live in the outskirts of Portland where there is a decent effort to make public transportation work decently. I even live just a ~4 minute walk from a light rail and bus stop. At certain times of the day they even do a special couple train runs that allow me to get to the airport without a transfer. Utopia, right?

      Sadly as a family I run into the following issues:
      1. Going to/from the airport is not possible super early/late at night, they no longer run at those hours. So catching a 6-6:30 AM business

  • I don't know this feature and have never used it because I live in a suburb and there is no public transit. But when I travel on business, I use Lyft and I'm anxious to check this out as it really *is* the solution. Public transit can't go everywhere. One solution is to take a bus/train to the general vicinity and then catch a taxi or Lyft. This is lousy enough that I very well may take a Lyft the entire way because if I'm going somewhere less densely populated the wait maybe long for the ride. If it'
  • Do not trust "studies" and "statistics" from activist organizations. It's just propaganda that includes numbers.
  • the entire point of Uber & Lyft is to shift that burden onto somebody else (along with getting out of paying minimum wage, health benefits & unemployment insurance).
  • Here where I live, you can call an 'Uber ECO' for a couple of cents more, and Uber promises to offset the ride's carbon emission.

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