Did Ride Hailing Increase Congestion?
29th April 2021
The Antiplanner reports.
“A new MIT study found that not only do rideshares increase congestion, but they also made traffic jams longer, led to a significant decline in people taking public transit, and haven’t really impacted car ownership,” reports Gizmodo. As noted here previously, transit advocates blame ride hailing for all sorts of problems in order to justify taxes and other restrictions to limit competition.
The new study from MIT is frankly unpersuasive. First of all, it says very little about the methodology used to come up with its results: page 1 of the study is an introduction and page 2 immediately begins to present the results. It appears the writers compared data in 44 urban areas before and after the introduction of ride hailing into those areas between 2012 and 2016.
Second, the writers appear to have made no effort to correct for or even consider any other variables. Although Uber began operating in San Francisco in 2010, ride hailing didn’t really begin growing until 2014. But the other thing that happened in 2014 was a huge drop in gasoline prices — prices fell by 50 percent in some areas. This isn’t even mentioned in the paper even though that drop could have most of the same effects the paper attributes to ride hailing.