People continue to be astonished that reductions in transit service and utter neglect of transit facilities is turning away ridershttp://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-workers-telework-public-transportation-commute.html …
If Uber/Lyft ridership has increased by the same amount that transit ridership has decreased, they may be the cause--but when I last looked into this, it appeared that most Uber/Lyft ridership was from trips that previously didn't get made:https://twitter.com/380kmh/status/1039262056673935361 …
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That chart shows that for 2017 - 2018, if about one fifth of new TNC rides would have gone by bus, that would explain the entire decline in bus ridership. But that's aggregating over entire U.S., where conditions are highly variable.
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Has anyone looked at metro area by metro area changes as TNCs start operating? Especially late adopters, or those with fast TNC uptake.
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Maybe--I haven't seen such data yet, though. It's unreasonable to say that *none* of the decline in ridership is a result of uber, but the fact that ridership has increased in cities like Seattle, Phoenix, and Houston--cities which assuredly have Uber--says there's more at play.
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As it happens, those are three cities which have reorganized their bus networks, expanded service, or both--and at least two of them, if not all three, are hardly what urbanists would consider "ideal" in terms of land use vis-a-vis transit.
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Trying to determine the exact extent to which Uber et al have hurt transit ridership strikes me as trying to ignore the very obvious problems with transit (poor maintenance, unsanitary conditions, limited and dwindling service) in favor of an explanation that's harder to act on.
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Some of those problems are also very hard to act on. Knowing whether there are other causes of lost ridership is important to know whether it's worth spending money attacking those problems. If you're not going to get the riders back, it may not be worth keeping the service.
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cleanliness, maintenance, and service availability are the responsibility of the operator, however well or poorly they can address those things--but the operations of a completely unrelated company are not
End of conversation
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