New Study Finds Ridesharing Actually Increases Pollution, Congestion (nytimes.com) 187
Greg Bensinger of the New York Times editorial board argues ridesharing companies haven't delivered on their promises of well-paying driver jobs with less traffic congestion (let alone their predictions of an end to car ownership — or even of a sustainable, profitable, business model).
And he adds that now a new study "is punching a hole in another of Uber and Lyft's promised benefits: curtailing pollution." The companies have long insisted their services are a boon to the environment in part because they reduce the need for short trips, can pool riders heading in roughly the same direction and cut unnecessary miles by, for instance, eliminating the need to look for street parking. It turns out that Uber rides do spare the air from the high amount of pollutants emitted from starting up a cold vehicle, when it is operating less efficiently, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found. But that gain is wiped out by the need for drivers to circle around waiting for or fetching their next passenger, known as deadheading. Deadheading, Lyft and Uber estimated in 2019, is equal to about 40 percent of rideshare miles driven in six American cities.
The researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimated that driving without a passenger leads to a roughly 20 percent overall increase in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions compared with trips made by personal vehicles.
The researchers also found that switching from a private car to on-demand rides, like an Uber or Lyft, increased the external costs of a typical trip by 30 percent to 35 percent, or roughly 35 cents on average, because of the added congestion, collisions and noise from ridesharing services. "This burden is not carried by the individual user, but rather impacts the surrounding community," reads a summary of the research conducted by Jacob Ward, Jeremy Michalek and Constantine Samaras. "Society as a whole currently shoulders these external costs in the form of increased mortality risks, damage to vehicles and infrastructure, climate impacts and increased traffic congestion."
And he adds that now a new study "is punching a hole in another of Uber and Lyft's promised benefits: curtailing pollution." The companies have long insisted their services are a boon to the environment in part because they reduce the need for short trips, can pool riders heading in roughly the same direction and cut unnecessary miles by, for instance, eliminating the need to look for street parking. It turns out that Uber rides do spare the air from the high amount of pollutants emitted from starting up a cold vehicle, when it is operating less efficiently, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found. But that gain is wiped out by the need for drivers to circle around waiting for or fetching their next passenger, known as deadheading. Deadheading, Lyft and Uber estimated in 2019, is equal to about 40 percent of rideshare miles driven in six American cities.
The researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimated that driving without a passenger leads to a roughly 20 percent overall increase in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions compared with trips made by personal vehicles.
The researchers also found that switching from a private car to on-demand rides, like an Uber or Lyft, increased the external costs of a typical trip by 30 percent to 35 percent, or roughly 35 cents on average, because of the added congestion, collisions and noise from ridesharing services. "This burden is not carried by the individual user, but rather impacts the surrounding community," reads a summary of the research conducted by Jacob Ward, Jeremy Michalek and Constantine Samaras. "Society as a whole currently shoulders these external costs in the form of increased mortality risks, damage to vehicles and infrastructure, climate impacts and increased traffic congestion."
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as you are making it less costly and less cumbersome to have a trip, you increase the number of trips. People will go out for longer and party longer, because they can always hail a trip via ride sharing companies and don't have to pay a premium for a taxi service. People who would otherwise used a bus or a train are now using a ride sharing company, because it's providing door to door service. Everything increases the pollution and the traffic congestion, if it makes it easier to ride a car.
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But sharing is caring. How could this lead to bad things coming true?
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Your transportation still puts wear and tear on a car, you just don't own it. But now, instead of a round trip being your car going from your home to the destination and then back, it's from wherever the car is to your home then to your destination, then from wherever to your destination then back to your home. The result is a net increase in miles the car travels to shuttle you back and forth.
Can we finally state it plainly that the odds that you just happen to find an Uber driver who was actually near you
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how much of this is just political fallout from the cities, which often fought Uber tooth and nail to benefit their lucrative taxi monopolies.
Cities *could* adapt to Uber, creating places for drivers to wait without idling or driving around. They could probably even justify sacrificing some public parking for this purpose.
But this would involve some level of backtracking by cities on their political spin. And many of the cities are also run by progressives who think public transit is some kind of reasonable alternative and who also switched to attacking ridesharing from a pro-labor perspective when the taxi monopolies collapsed.
There's lots of reasons to dump on ridesharing, whether its their ridiculously utopian promises or their sketchy policies, but acting like cities were just innocent victims is crazy.
Public transit is a useless substitute outside of a small number of cities, and even where its a slightly plausible alternative, the same progressives looking to ban cars are also unwilling to clean up their public transit systems, allowing them to be rolling homeless shelters and filled with predators. It's not just inefficient, its dangerous and anyone who could pay for rideshare will, it's vastly more convenient and much safer.
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To get closer to where there are more passengers.
If you drop someone off at a random suburban house, it's not likely that there are other people in the same neighborhood who want rides. So you move the car to an area where it's more likely someone will need a ride.
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People will (* usually) take the closest (in waiting time) offer. ...).
As such, if you dropped a passenger "in the middle of nowhere", you're liable to drive empty to a nearby "ride attraction" (population center, mall, airport,
(* sometime you might choose a large car instead of a small one for reasons of "three plus large luggage", or you might choose a "premium" car instead of a "crappy" one)
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Random part of suburbia is not "remote". It's about 15-30 minutes from everything. Problem is that likely puts you something like 30-45 minutes from the next fare. So you drive back to the nearest big shopping area because that puts you closer to the next fare.
Do you think people only use ride sharing in places that look like Manhattan?
See. Taxi companies after all (Score:5, Insightful)
But that gain is wiped out by the need for drivers to circle around waiting for or fetching their next passenger, known as deadheading.
If you're driving around looking for a passenger, you're not "ride sharing". If you're fetching your next passenger, again, you're not "ride sharing". You're a taxi company.
Ride sharing is when you are already going to a particular destination and take someone with you who happened to be going to the same location.
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Not getting at you really, but was there actually anyone that believed they weren't a taxi company? I just figured anyone mentioning that was a shill/had an agenda.
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Not getting at you really, but was there actually anyone that believed they weren't a taxi company? I just figured anyone mentioning that was a shill/had an agenda.
That was the literal interpretation both Uber and Lyft touted their companies as. In fact, this is from Uber's own site [uber.com] while this is what Lyft has to say [lyft.com] from their own site. Further, when you look at articles about the two companies, the only words used are ride sharing companies. Not taxi companies.
Apparently all those writers are shills for the companies.
Yep, this. (Score:4, Informative)
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If you're driving around looking for a passenger, you're not "ride sharing".
This.
If the first question on the driver's app isn't "Where are you going and when?" it's not ride sharing.
Years ago, New York City was faced with on-line cab hailing apps. And they fought against them (probably at the behest of radio dispatched taxi companies). As leaders in the cab regulation biz, they could have been proactive about incorporating Uber/Lyft type apps into its regulatory domain and using the above distinction to exempt true ride sharing.
We have the technology to build (Score:5, Insightful)
If only there was a vehicle that didn't use an Internal Combustion Engine but electricity. If only the government demanded business vehicles must soon be these new-fangled electric vehicles.
This is a environment and health problem we do have the technology to fix. We just need the political will, which some states and countries are slowly gaining.
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If you shift to all EVs you just shift the pollution problem to tires. Better to implement PRT in cities and then gradually spread it out to cover larger areas.
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PRT is never PRT. They always build it to even out costs by trying to always take more than 1 person (not personal) and making you wait (not rapid).
The only way to have true PRT is vast amounts of overprovisioning, say like 2 cars for every individual transported at peak times. There should almost always be a car waiting at a stop.
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If only there was a vehicle that didn't use an Internal Combustion Engine but electricity. If only the government demanded business vehicles must soon be these new-fangled electric vehicles.
Not too soon though.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Where's the beef? (Score:2)
Taxis (Score:3)
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There is no real difference between calling them and calling a commercial taxi company, except with the taxi company you have someone to complain to if the service is bad.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this part is exactly the opposite.
The difference is that with Uber/Lyft, is 1) you know exactly who your driver was, 2) there is record of the route they took (in case the driver was taking the long path), 3) you know you'll be able to pay with a credit card. And these days 4) there is also an immediate cost estimate before you take the ride.
It is not ridesharing (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a taxi service, you share nothing, the driver drives just for you, for no other reason than money.
Real ridesharing involves getting people together in the same car. Maybe the driver is someone who wants to gets to a destination and takes passengers along the way, or independent people who share a taxi, but calling Uber "ridesharing" is misleading. The confusion probably helped them get a "greener" image.
Of course, when a car has to pick you up, it will increase traffic.
"compared with trips made by personal vehicles." (Score:3)
Why would someone "choose" to rideshare, when the alternative is driving?
Maybe parking is scarce at your destination, and so people are more likely to bike there, or take public transportation, than to drive themselves. In this case, there's an environmental benefit to ridesharing that isn't reflected in the study.
So in what situations would a normal person who, given the choice, chooses to rideshare, and it doesn't benefit the environment?
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Uber or Lyft don't care about parking. They're going to just drop you off wherever they can pause for a minute to let you out.
So ridesharing make the situation worse in your scenario, not better. Because the parking problem was solved by not having anyone park, and adding a deadhead trip to you an another deadhead to their next fare.
The sort of people... (Score:2)
... who won't or can't drive and there is no reasonable journey available via public transport. Then taxi (which is all Uber is) is really your only option other than cycle or walk, which arn't really options if its more than a few miles and/or its pissing down with rain.
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Maybe parking is scarce at your destination, and so people are more likely to bike there, or take public transportation, than to drive themselves. In this case, there's an environmental benefit to ridesharing that isn't reflected in the study.
Actually it's been quite the opposite. We've already found prior studies https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com] which show that where driving is difficult Uber doesn't form an alternative to driving, but rather cannibalises existing public transport or biking, making them again a part of the problem and not part of the solution.
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Do not blame ride sharing for public transits miss management
It's okay when women are managers.
ride sharing developed in a space left open by city planners
What? You're mixing definitions of "space" here.
Now better than a third have been offered a work from home option the economics of publc transport are such the Service Level and the stops all have to be rearranged. Being urban centers, and government run, this is unlikely to happen.
It will happen, but in a less than timely fashion, because bureaucracy. However, corporations are no solution to this; if you let them take charge, they create just as much needless process to justify their existence.
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Ok so we agree then that this study is flawed because it compares ridesharing with trips made by personal vehicles.
So then the next question is whether ridesharing reduces public transit ridership as your study claims (does correlation imply causation?) and, if so, how transit agencies can bring those riders back.
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So, captain obvious I guess. (Score:2)
They add cars and congestion to the roads as they are getting to you and moving waiting for their next fair, on the road more than a personal car - check.
Sounds like they are as bad as bitcoin miners to me, they belong in the same hole at the bottom of the ocean.
Slug Rides (Score:3)
Back when I lived in Virginia, people would pick up ‘slugs’ if they had to drive into DC. They were trying to avoid the heavy congestion so picking up extra passengers in order to take advantage of HOV restrictions was how it worked. There were slug lines in DC as well. For all I know, they’re still there.
The idea here with Lyft and Uber would be that if you were going to WalMart to go shopping, someone would ping the app and say they needed to go to Sams club a couple of blocks away. They’d give you five bucks and you go a couple of blocks out of your way to pick them up and drop them off, then go shopping at WalMart.
When you’re ready to go home, you’d flag your availability in the app; from WalMart to 1st Street and maybe a different someone would be at Sams club, you’d get them, drive a few blocks in a different way, then head home with 10 extra bucks in your pocket having driven maybe 4 or 5 extra blocks.
For the ride out, if no one was available you’d just take your car. For the ride back, that might be more of an issue and you may need to actually call a Taxi if no one was nearby or available.
[John]
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Okay, but that's not how Uber and Lyft operate. They operate like any taxi service, where people are either driving around or sitting around waiting for a fare. Then they go collect and deliver them and there's typically no benefit because they have to drive to where they are, then to where they want to go.
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The other reason they're called slug rides is you just slug the driver and take his wallet.
Great! Now fix it (Score:2)
Now, it is time to optimize. Give ride share access to holding areas. Switch to electric. Limit vehicle size.
Oh... Dump the drivers.
Maybe running the studies in Oslo, Norway would make more sense.
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Arthur C Clarke (Score:2)
ofcourse.. (Score:2)
Ofcourse it does, just like with taxi's. Instead of just going from your door to your destination, the rideshare/taxi has to drive from its previous customer to you, then to your destination aand then back to another customer and later in the day drive to your destination and drive you home and back to another customer.. Those are more movements as if you would take your own car.
Who cares? (Score:2)
CO_2 is not pollution. Anyway, who cares? If people are willing to pay the price, and people are willing to provide the service, a need is being fulfilled with all involved parties happy about the result. If you don't like it, move to a dictatorship, don't try to make this place into one.
In general it's 140% of the pollution (Score:2)
If we switched to autonomous vehicles which would then mow down kids and pets, we could reduce the emissions, but because we charge rent for parking, they optimize by not parking.
Pro tip: rideshare e-bicycles, e-scooters, and e-skateboards have much lower carbon footprints.
Re:Hmm, maybe tax per-minute and per-mile? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the USA we have a "per the mile" and "per hour of engine on time" tax in effect. It's called the "gas tax". No fancy gadget add ons sending telemetry required - one pays this tax at the pump when filling ones tank. Those who run their cars more pay more, and those who run their cars less pay less. It's a very fair system.
Re:Hmm, maybe tax per-minute and per-mile? (Score:4, Insightful)
This comment is underrated.
There's a tendency for technical people to identify absurdly complex solutions to very simple problems. It's probably why software is such a mess. Using 'hours running' and 'miles driven' as a proxy for 'fuel burned' with a complex measuring system to account for all the different variables like different engine types, idling vs driving, highway vs city, etc. is ridiculous. Not only is it needlessly complex, it's could never be as accurate as the simple and obvious: fuel purchased = fuel burned.
I wonder if whatever poor sod charged with designing such a system would even have noticed if that variable wasn't in the data set. Such is the danger of relying too much on the computation part of data analysis...
Re:Hmm, maybe tax per-minute and per-mile? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the USA we have a "per the mile" and "per hour of engine on time" tax in effect. It's called the "gas tax".
As long as you're burning gasoline, it makes perfect sense, agreed.
But what if you have an electric car?
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Tax pollution, particularly carbon but also stuff like tire dust. Let the market sort it out on a fair footing, rather than some stuff getting a free pass and some stuff not.
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So put a tax on tyres. Simplest way to meter that pollution if it's a concern.
Terrible idea.
You'd just be encouraging people to not replace their tyres. Making the roads less safe for everyone.
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You can't continue to permit externalities to go unpaid, that's unsustainable. If cars can't exist without tire taxes to cover their pollution then cars can't exist sustainably, and they should go away.
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Also, they'll be nuclear powered.
If you have an electric car (Score:2)
Anyway gas taxes are inherently regressive, just like how we tax wine and booze by the bottle so that a $2 bottle of rot gut has the same tax as a $10,000 bottle of champagne.
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Then you're no longer spewing poisons into the air for me to breathe. ...
Operating an electric car still creates wear and tear on the roads itself and still adds to traffic infrastructure costs; Also, electric cars still create congestion that causes pollution - because not all vehicles on the road are electric; the ICE vehicle stuck in a line of electric cards still
adds additional pollution caused by the congestion which every vehicle on the roads contribute to.
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Operating an electric car still creates wear and tear on the roads itself and still adds to traffic infrastructure costs
No, it really does not. Light autos do no real damage to roads. It's all done by heavy vehicles like buses and trucks, or by weather. The only roads light autos can damage are those which were already damaged by one or more of those other factors, or by improper construction or sinkholes or rodent damage to roadbeds or what have you.
Also, electric cars still create congestion that causes pollution - because not all vehicles on the road are electric
Yes, but that's not an indictment of EVs, but of ICEVs, since congestion itself doesn't cause pollution.
the ICE vehicle stuck in a line of electric cards still
adds additional pollution caused by the congestion which every vehicle on the roads contribute to.
That's a complete falsehood and also victim blaming. The ICEVs are produc
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Which is why many states charge electric vehicles a specific EV tax
https://www.myev.com/research/... [myev.com]
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You could have Chuck Norris force them to smoke.
What does you sig mean?
I don't use regexes.
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Those aren't regexes.
OK, in the most pedantic sense that isn't true since any string is in fact a regex which matches the string, but they're not regexes. It's just a search/replace instruction.
Re:Hmm, maybe tax per-minute and per-mile? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the US gas tax is notoriously low. It averages about 50 cents a gallon, including state and federal. The average gas tax among advanced countries is over $2.60. The US is 33rd cheapest out of 34 advanced countries, only Mexico is cheaper (none). Canada is $1.25 a gallon while Turkey is over $4 bucks a gallon.
50 cents is no where near enough to pay for the combination of air pollution, tire pollution, and road wear.
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"50 cents is no where near enough to pay for the combination of air pollution, tire pollution, and road wear."
And we don't even use it to pay for pollution, it's just used to build highways, not surface streets. Gas taxes also only cover half of what's spent on those highways to begin with. Driving infrastructure is hugely subsidized and few realize it.
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50 cents is no where near enough to pay for the combination of air pollution, tire pollution, and road wear.
Road wear is negligible unless you're driving a heavy truck or bus. The other things are real and significant, but not that.
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Secret of sarcasm - exagerate something to a ridiculous level and pretend you said something intelligent rather than stupid.
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In my state, we tend to have property owners paying for local streets - in effect, a subsidy for driving.
We also have another effective subsidy at commercial businesses that are manda
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Because making everything else suck more is easier.
I personally have no idea hlw you'd make public transportation suck less without making it way more expensive and worse for the environment.
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Then visit a country that has excellent public transport and observe how they do it, e.g.:
Switzerland
Germany
Denmark
France
Japan
Should I continue? Netherlands ... Portugal, Spain ... Italy ...
Re:The Taxi-Industry funded the study (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously.
Seems an odd study for them to fund since they'd be just as problematic.
I think there is a way they could reduce pollution overall, increasing density through elimination of street parking, the production of fewer vehicles overall, and possibly the incentive to purchase more fuel efficient vehicles. But the fact is that under a "ride-sharing"/taxi model the total distances driven will rise.
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Re:The Taxi-Industry funded the study (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it obvious? When I first heard about "ride sharing" I assumed that meant the app would help people organize ad-hoc car-pools so that they could ... share a ride. That's not what happens.
It's just a taxi service. That's obviously going to be less efficient than individuals driving themselves.
Re:The Taxi-Industry funded the study (Score:5, Informative)
It's just a taxi service. That's obviously going to be less efficient than individuals driving themselves.
Taxis have all the same environmental costs. So why would the taxi industry fund this study?
Also, there is no "taxi industry". Most taxi medallions are owned by individuals or local dispatchers. The main defenders of the taxi industry are municipal governments who make money from the medallion racket.
That isn't true in large markets (Score:5, Insightful)
This is also what made Uber get away with as much as it did because it's terrible as they were they were still better than the taxi companies. The actual solution was to stop letting everybody abuse workers but we've become like a beaten dog that flinches at the slightest raised eyebrow from its owner, so they just having a slightly less abusive employer seemed like a win.
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we've become like a beaten dog that flinches at the slightest raised eyebrow from its owner, so they just having a slightly less abusive employer seemed like a win.
My former boss, with whom I enjoy discussions on politics and economics, talked to Uber drivers and other contractors about what their life was like being independent, but lacking the protections that employment would provide. My former boss promotes libertarian ideas, and hates trade unions, so I think his surveys are somewhat selective. However, concerning Uber drivers, there did seem to be a conclusion -- from the drivers themselves -- that contracting is better than employment, because it gives you more
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If ANYONE could go down and become a licensed taxi driver (I wouldn't object to a background check and test. I'm a libertarian, not an anarchist), instead of having government limiting competition, Uber and Lyft wouldn't have been invented.
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Which is, of course a) stupid and b) why the medallians were developed. With one, you have some idea that the person who bought it was investigated, and isn't going to take you somewhere and rob you. Without it - and I drove for Yellow Cab in Philly for a couple years in the seventies, so I know what I'm talking about, and you don't, if you haven't driven a cab - there's far too many people trying to make a few bucks... and the folks doing it full time can't make a living.
The reason for the medallions (Score:2)
The reason we haven't seen t
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Also, there is no "taxi industry". Most taxi medallions are owned by individuals or local dispatchers.
An industry, considered as a section of the economy, does not have to have big factories with hundreds of employees. You might as well say that there is no construction industry, because most of the workers (e.g. bricklayers and roofers) are self employed.
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taixs are big at the airport (Score:3)
taixs are big at the airport
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It's just a taxi service. That's obviously going to be less efficient than individuals driving themselves.
Before the pandemic, there was a problem with parking spaces at work, due to expansion of the business. I wanted to introduce car sharing, where people living fairly near to each other would take it in turns to do the driving, and agree some price for passengers, based on fuel and running costs. As a public transport user, I would always be paying out, but when I did get a lift, the journey time was much quicker than the bus, so I reckon it would be worth it.
I am pretty sure that properly organised workplac
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It's the New York Times. What more needs to be said?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FB... [twimg.com]
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald... [twitter.com]
They never let facts interfere with an agenda.
Re:The Taxi-Industry funded the study (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still waiting for evidence that this study IN THIS ARTICLE was funded by any taxi related group.
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Because Uber, Lyft, and so forth are being used as unlicensed taxi's taking single passengers to places, rather than the intended purpose of having the car always full, as a form of carpooling without the "driver" being in the equation for the employees, now they don't need to work at the same business, and if someone has a day off, it's no longer in conflict with their carpool access.
It would reduce pollution ONLY when the car is filled. So when there are conventions and such going on, yes, it's far more e
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What the hell does this have to do with my comment? The coward said that this study was funded by the "Taxi-industry". So where is the proof?
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Because Uber, Lyft, and so forth are being used as unlicensed taxi's taking single passengers to places,
This is obviously even less efficient than a person driving themselves to their destination in their own car. It is absolutely not car sharing.
It would reduce pollution ONLY when the car is filled.
With genuine ride sharing, you don't have to fill the car. Just having one driver and one passenger intending to go to the same destination halves the costs. So my friend Joe, who lives near me and works in the same place, can give me a lift to work. The difference with a taxi driver is that he does not finish his journey at your workplace. He has to travel to the ne
Re:The Taxi-Industry funded the study (Score:5, Insightful)
It's common sense. These aren't really ride shares, they're just a taxi service under a different system. So one passenger per car, like the old system. Plus lots of drivers just idling or roaming about waiting for the app to tell them to pick someone else up, so extra mileage even beyond the one-person-one-car model.
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I don't think you understand what's going on here. The Coward about said that this study was funded by the "taxi-industry". Not sure what you're talking about.
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Please don't propagate vacuous Subjects (Score:2)
Why would he STFU when you feed him so nicely?
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Exactly. As you said, it doesn't cut down on pollution, and it probably causes even more.
And there's also the people who would have walk, biked or taken public transport if "ride sharing" wasn't available.
Re: Yeah, no (Score:5, Insightful)
Uber and Lyft are stealing many customers that would otherwise use public transit.
"Stealing"? What an odd thing to say. In what sense are people property of the public transit system? Stealing means taking property that belongs to someone else.
If public transit is good, why would someone pay more to take Uber or Lyft? It seems more likely that there are significant disadvantages to public transit. I don't think Uber or Lyft are "ride sharing", but they are certainly offering a service that some people prefer. The notion that those people are the property of the system is a very authoritarian viewpoint that isn't going to get much popular support in America.
It'd be nice if there were more pleasant, flexible and convenient public transit options available, but don't be surprised if people don't take kindly to your attitude that the currently available systems have some sort of right to force people to ride them when they find another option preferable.
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Public transport is actually ride sharing.
Stealing a glance.
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If public transit is good, why would someone pay more to take Uber or Lyft?
Who knows? People are insane. I know people (from the marketing not engineering) who would take an uber across London at 5 in the evening if they could bill it to the company. It seems insane to me, but the logic seemed to be that more expensive==better. Sure the tube is crowded af at 5 in the evening, but then so are the roads and it would literally be quicker to walk than go by taxi. Didn't stop them though.
IOW people aren't ratio
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IOW people aren't rational.
Actually they mostly are, you just don't understand the factors that go into their decision making. Possibly you don't understand those factors because you don't approve of or agree with them and therefore consciously or subconsciously choose not to understand them, or possibly because you just don't care enough to attempt to view the world from their perspective.
I've found that it's pretty easy to understand why people make the choices they do without resorting to "they're just stupid and I'm better than t
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Actually they mostly are
[citation needed]
Like... have you met people?
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"Stealing"? What an odd thing to say. In what sense are people property of the public transit system? Stealing means taking property that belongs to someone else.
Quite right. It is fair competition. I have not used a taxi of any description for a long time. I use buses or trains, or just walking. I did use taxis a fair bit during a period of ill health, to get to the hospital. But there is no way that private taxi companies were stealing trade of the bus company I usually use.
I presume the selling points of a taxi versus a bus are things like a door-to-door service, and not having to sit next to unsavoury types, and getting to places that are not served by public tr
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So is your solution that everyone lives in flats / apartments?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you want to have a nuclear holocaust and start over? Otherwise all those suburbs will keep existing for a very long time.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes it is. Now without reading TFA or TFS tell us exactly how many of those miles are driven per person and tell us exactly what the carbon impact is.
Not so obvious when you're asked for numbers is it. Maybe you should do a study on it. Then we have something called "data" on which to make an informed decision. Nothing good ever comes from enacting policy based on anecdotes and opinions of random people on the internet.
This study wasn't made for you.