Contrary to ride-hailing companies’ claims that they reduce congestion in cities, there’s growing evidence that they make the situation worse.
The impact: Traffic congestion in San Francisco went up by about 60% from 2010 to 2016, and Uber and Lyft were responsible for more than half of that increase, according to a new study in Science Advances.
How they worked it out: The companies wouldn’t share data with the researchers, so they used a computer program to simulate ride requests, indicating the number of trips plus where they started and finished. To figure out the wider impact, they used a traffic simulation model incorporating factors like population growth and roadworks. They set the model to 2010, before ride-hailing services were widely used, and then compared the results for 2016.
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