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Utopia calling a car through a mobile application stuck in traffic

Uber and Lyft promised to offload the roads. Instead, they only made matters worse




Five years ago, Travis Kalanik was so sure that driving Uber Technologies Inc cars would encourage people to leave their cars at home, saying at a tech conference, “If every car in San Francisco registered with Uber, traffic there wouldn’t be there at all. ”

Today, enough research has already gathered to demonstrate the opposite: Uber is far from alleviating traffic jams. They with their main competitor Lyft Inc add traffic jams in business districts of various major US cities.

Officials from San Francisco, Chicago, and New York have made congestion the main reason for the new requisitions they imposed on trips to Lyft and Uber in these cities. Other regulators across the country are considering introducing similar contributions. Uber and Lyft no longer boast that calling their machines will reduce traffic, and admit that they contribute to traffic congestion, although they clarify that some studies exaggerate their role in the emerging problem.

Application makers initially thought that their technology would facilitate seamless travel, and four strangers would abandon their own cars for joint trips. They believed that their advanced algorithms would guide user behavior through pricing and route matching, which would allow drivers not to waste time between trips. Drivers who leave cars at home will often use buses, bicycles or just walk, which will create a cascading effect of weakening traffic jams.

But this utopia never came.

Most users take Lyft and Uber personal cars for themselves, avoiding traveling together even at the cost of increasing their cost. Applications could not become a model of efficiency arising on the basis of algorithms - in large cities, drivers ply in search of customers without passengers about 40% of the time.

A lot of research shows that Uber and Lyft pulled people over from buses, subways, and hikes, and that apps only add the total number of hours spent driving.

m.wsj.net/video-atmo/20200214/0214gridlock3/0214gridlock3_1440.mp4 The
evening rush hour in San Francisco, where officials claim car calling apps have played a major role in slowing traffic in recent years

In a study published last year in the journal Science Advances, San Francisco officials and scientists from the University of Kentucky shared the discovery: more than 60% of the slowdown on San Francisco's roads from 2010 to 2016 was attributed to car calling applications.

In Chicago, “these companies are creating an exponential increase in traffic jams in business districts,” said Dan Lury, City Hall's policy director. Last year, the city began to levy a new tax on each trip to reduce this problem.

Turning apps for calling a car from a future anti-traffic hero into a crawler villain is an unexpected consequence of the kind that has already become a trend for the crashing Silicon Valley. Companies are trying to grow rapidly by reinventing our business methods, and they offer us solutions that sometimes create completely new problems.

Facebook Inc decided to help people come together, but contributed to the sharing and dissemination of misinformation. Electronic cigarette makers Juul Labs Inc talked about decreasing smoking, but caused a vaping crisis among teens. Message encryption applications wanted to increase the privacy of online communication, but became the favorite means of communication for criminals.

Especially Silicon Valley suffers from focusing solely on the positive potential effects of new technologies when you look at decades of various utopian ideas, says Fred Turner, a communications professor at Stanford University who has written a book on the subject. Companies fight for engineers and entrepreneurs based on missions that they say will benefit society.

“These are all questions of building the image of the company, capital that you cannot provide with stocks,” Turner said.

Technology companies tend to use a narrow, engineering approach to solving certain problems, as a result of which they often lose sight of the big picture. “You do not have the benefits of a complete perception of the entire landscape within which your device will be deployed,” he said.

Car calling apps have dramatically changed the travel system in densely built-up cities. With a few touches to the phone screen, users can reliably and quickly call a driver, who will usually be cheaper than a taxi. Uber and Lyft, responsible for most of the car calling applications in the United States, made hundreds of millions of trips last year.

But looking back, some of the drawbacks of this scheme - for example, empty cars driving around in anticipation of passengers - now seem obvious.

Uber and Lyft say their contribution to traffic jams is small.


Moving average number of monthly trips on buses (blue), trains (blue) and through car calling apps (orange)

According to a study commissioned by both companies last year, they account for 13% of all trips to San Francisco, and for a much lower percentage of trips to other major cities. Their percentage of the total number of trips in Cook County, whose center is Chicago, is estimated at about 3%. The study did not study traffic jams and took into account areas that exceed the central parts of individual cities.

Researchers say that most of all mobile applications affect traffic congestion in large dense cities, where they have the most users. A Toronto study published last year did not find a significant increase in travel time due to the appearance of car calling applications, but the authors warned that the more these companies grow in the city, the more likely it will be to reduce travel speeds.

Now Uber and Lyft rest on how they push passengers to alternative modes of transportation, for example, including options for travel by public transport in their applications. Both companies have launched scooters and bicycles every minute, and are actively lobbying for congestion taxes in several cities, including New York, so that all cars on the road — not just their cars — share fines for added traffic.

Uber “intends to continue working to improve access to shared and active transportation methods, and is also redoubled efforts to lobby for the collection of money for trips,” the company spokesman said.

A Lyft spokeswoman said the company encourages travel together, and added: “The biggest reason for traffic jams is people traveling alone in their own cars.”


Morning rush hour in New York. City officials say that calling cars from a mobile application 41% of the time run empty

And if Uber and Lyft primarily focus on the positive aspects that can reduce traffic congestion, the factors that increase it turn out to be much larger, said Bruce Scholler, transport consultant and a former New York City administration official who has studied this issue.

“The math is simple and straightforward,” Scholler said. In a paper submitted last month to the Transport Research Commission, he estimates that for every mile driving a personal car taken by companies off the road, they added 2.5 miles behind the wheel of a car connected to applications to call a car.

At first, Uber and Lyft offered "joint" trips by car, when the driver could pick up several people traveling along the same route, and their leaders were not shy about making promises.

In an interview with CBS in 2015, David Pluff, the head of Uber politics at the time, answered a question regarding the opinion of New York officials that Manhattan could not cope with the additional traffic arising from the increase in the number of cars in Uber. “This is complete nonsense,” he said, adding that Uber will reduce traffic. For this article, Pluff did not want to comment. Other Uber senior executives have made similar statements in various cities across the United States.

In 2016, Kalanik, co-founder of Uber, spoke at TED, where he extolled a future in which Uber reduces street congestion and environmental pollution. Kalanik refused to give us comments through his representative.

Meanwhile, in the downtown San Francisco during the evening rush hour, the streets are dominated by a slowly moving sea of ​​cars dotted with Lyft and Uber windshield stickers.



Amit Adikari, who has been spinning the Uber steering wheel in the San Francisco Bay for the past two years, said it sometimes takes 30 minutes to travel a little more than a kilometer from the financial district to the main interstate highway, and he can get there without a passenger.

“You start to get very worried,” he said. “You do nothing, you just stand in traffic.”

The speed in the central part of the business center of San Francisco fell by 21%, from 28 km / h in 2010 to 22 km / h in 2016. If Lyft and Uber were not there, then the traffic speed would drop by only 6.7%, up to 26 km / h, according to Joe Castiglione, San Francisco County official, Science Advances co-author and analyst.

A study from Science Advances, one of the most thorough studies to date that specifically examined traffic jams and car calling applications, used both San Francisco traffic data and data from Uber and Lyft apps in 2016, as well as estimated how other changes — for example, adding 100,000 jobs — had an impact on traffic.

Uber and Lyft argue that the study has flaws, and that it did not take into account other factors - in particular, the increase in the number of deliveries from online stores.

The main factor that could reduce congestion - passengers traveling together - never worked. Researchers and analysts estimate the number of total trips in large cities at 20-30% of the total. Recently, companies supporting car calling applications have increased the cost of joint trips - they, according to Uber CEO Dara Khosrovshahi, usually cost companies more than one person. At the same time, both companies said they were set to support joint travel.

So far, the most important factor is the large amount of time that Uber and Lyft drivers spend on driving without passengers, hunting customers. The December report from the California Air Resources Bureau found that such cars travel 39% of the time without passengers; in New York, this number is estimated at 41%.


Drivers Uber and Lyft on Houston Street in New York.

Also, drivers make trips that without Uber and Lyft simply would not exist.

Scholler in his work indicated that in observations of various cities it was found that 60% of Uber and Lyft drivers would travel on foot, by bicycle, by public transport, or even stay home if it weren’t for applications for calling a car.

The use of public transportation in the United States has been declining over the past decade, although the number of jobs has increased. The September data of the American Public Transport Association show that such trips to the US and Canada were 7.7% less since the peak in 2014.

Researchers say part of the blame lies in lowering the cost of gasoline and low-cost car loans. The number of people who own a car has increased, and the percentage of households without cars has remained at 8.8% since 2017, since the boom in applications for calling a car began (according to estimates by the US Census Bureau).

More people began to work from home, and did not go to work at all.

Lyft says that they estimate that nearly 500,000 people in the United States abandoned private cars in favor of car calling apps.

Many officials and researchers say Uber and Lyft have contributed to reducing public transport rides.

The work of professors from the University of Kentucky, presented last year to the Committee for Transport Research, estimates that after Lyft and Uber enter the city, the number of bus trips decreases by 1.7%, and by metro - by 1.3% per year. Data is collected based on a study of 22 cities in the United States.

However, the results of studies on the impact of car calling applications on public transport are contradictory; Uber and Lyft point to other studies where car calling apps complement the city’s public transport system, as passengers use the system to get to a bus stop or railway. A 2018 paper published by three economists in the Journal of Urban Economics found that Uber increased public transport by 5% two years after it appeared in the city.

Lyft has been touted for years in the subway and at bus stops. In an ad campaign in New York, Lyft was described as the “cheapest trip in town.” In the prospectuses of Uber, before entering the exchange, it was indicated that for some trips it competes with public transport.

In Chicago, city officials blame Uber and Lyft for reducing public transport in recent years; from 2015 to 2018, the number of trips in the central "Loop" [the main part of the business district of the city / approx. transl.] decreased by 5%.

From the data transmitted by companies developing applications for calling a car to the city hall, it follows that for single-occupant travelers, 77% were responsible for single passengers, while the rest were shared. Traveling with car calling apps that started or ending in the downtown area lasted 158 million miles in 2018, which is 309% more than in 2015.


In New York, the number of trips with car calling apps (left ) from 2010 to 2018 more than doubled. At the same time, in southern Manhattan (right), the speed dropped 23%.

In New York, the speed of travel on a working day in Manhattan south of Central Park decreased by 11% from 2014 to 2019, and now stands at 11.4 km / h. In this slowdown, transport officials blame, in particular, the growth of trips through car calling applications. The mayor’s office estimates that cars called through car calling applications and other hired cars — with the exception of taxis — account for nearly 30% of traffic south of 60th Street.

One recent Saturday, Kara Burke was in a hurry to reserve a table, and, leaving her apartment in East Village, decided to go to Uber instead of the subway or walk, hoping that she would get to the right place in 10 minutes. Instead, the trip lasted 25 minutes, as the car was stuck in traffic.

“I could get there for free, or for only $ 2.75 in the same amount of time,” says Burke. Her Uber driver was equally annoyed, and told her that he needed to stay in Brooklyn and not come to Manhattan.

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