From a recent NY Times article written by a member of their board: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 to 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 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.”Take urban congestion. Uber and Lyft envisioned a future in which software algorithms would push each car to host three or more passengers, easing traffic and providing a complement to public transit options. Instead, passengers have largely eschewed pooled rides and public transit in favor of private trips, leading to downtown bottlenecks in cities like San Francisco. The duration of traffic jams increased by nearly 5 percent in urban areas since Uber and Lyft moved in.Tie that into the recent stories of Uber not conforming to labor laws and workers rights and fare pricing escalating for no reason undermining their very reason for existence.But has also to do with roadways being halved and reduced traffic using half the once available space to create "pre-pandemic traffic levels" even though we all know the work force has yet to return to work in full force. If and when that happens, the road network will collapse. Take any incident around the city (the recent tube strike in late November) and you'll see grid lock where it didn't used to be. It happens in Chiswick as Philippa says, with one delivery. But Philippa neglects to mention the same happens when the buses idle during a swap over, or to correct scheduling, or when any two businesses might get a simultaneous delivery and the loading bays are insufficient. The delivery vehicles don't even need to be that large to make it happen. The other day on King Street a private car driver stopped dead by the mall. Traffic lined up behind him. He seemed a bit helpless so he just sat there doing nothing. Cars and buses started honking. Nothing. Until people got behind his vehicle and started to push him. Is that really the best urban transit solution?
David Lesniak ● 1730d