Study: Half of Uber, Lyft Rides Replace More Sustainable Options

A new study out of the University of California, Davis Institute of Transportation Studies found that more than half of ride-hailing trips taken by surveyed riders in California replaced more sustainable transportation options or created more vehicle miles. That means people who would have otherwise walked, cycled, carpooled, taken public transit, or not made the trip at all chose to hail an Uber, Lyft, or other similar service instead. “This suggests ride-hailing often tends to replace most sustainable transportation modes and leads to additional vehicle miles traveled,” according to an article on UC Davis’s website.

In the early days of ride-hailing services, there was a lot of hope that they would help reduce pollution and congestion, but that has since been disproven. Back in 2020, Planetizen shared articles from Verge and Bloomberg CityLab that discussed results of two studies that proved the opposite: Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace, and the time ride-hailing drivers spend looking for fares offsets any environmental benefits created by the industry. This new study from UC Davis, which was conducted to help guide development of California’s Clean Miles Standard, adds a new dimension to those findings: user behavior.

When not used sustainably, ride-hailing can “increase traffic, reduce the use of public transit — an economical and sustainable mode of transportation for a variety of income levels — and increase social inequities,” according to the UC Davis article. In addition to their findings, coauthors Giovanni Circella of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies and Mischa Young of the Université de l’Ontario français in Canada make recommendations to improve the sustainability of ride-hailing trips, including ways to ensure those services complement public transit and other sustainable transportation modes rather than replace them.