Urban Transportation: Convenience at a Cost
Today, city dwellers have more options than ever for getting around. Since Uber launched in 2010 as a limo-hailing service, urban populations have welcomed ridesharing companies, or “TNCs” (transportation network companies) with open arms. At the same time, scooter and bike sharing services have seen explosive growth as alternatives for short-distance and last-mile transportation. With on-demand urban transportation services now just a tap away, the days of braving extreme weather and, God forbid, a five-block walk to catch a bus or find an open taxi are over. But scaling the physical asset bases of these technologies is easier said than done and can have unintended consequences on city infrastructure and environments.
The Popularity and Problems of Ridesharing
Urbanites have gained the most from access to rideshare technologies, and as such, ridesharing companies have primarily targeted city passengers. In fact, in the U.S., the bulk of the TNC boom has occurred in just a few of the largest and most densely populated metropolitan areas. Transportation consultant Bruce Schaller, who was once Deputy Commissioner for Traffic and Planning at the New York City Department of Transportation, found that 70% of Uber and Lyft trips annually are taken in just nine metropolitan areas — Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. — in his 2018 report on ridesharing in cities.
Though this growth in TNC ridership has had a negative impact on (and thus has faced opposition from) the taxi industry, particularly in cities that have not implemented ride-share vehicle caps, TNC rides have actually significantly increased trips taken with the broader car-hire industry. Schaller notes that, in the U.S., though taxi ridership has plummeted by roughly 50% from 1.4 billion riders in 2012 (just before the TNC boom) to 730 million riders in 2017, TNCs helped total car-hire ridership more than double in the same time period from just under 1.5 billion riders to over 3.3 billion riders. As such, beyond eating up market share from taxis, TNCs have actually unlocked value and created their own rapidly growing market segment.
However, the problem with urban TNC rides is that they are directly replacing trips that would have been taken on public transit, by walking, by biking, or otherwise have not been made. Furthermore, a significant portion of TNC miles are driven without a paying passenger on board — portions of trips during which drivers are either heading to a pick-up point or waiting for a ride request. Schaller finds that for TNC trips in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and Denver, only 63% of miles driven are attributable to rides containing paying passengers. That means that on average in these cities, for every 12-hour shift a driver takes, 4.5 of those hours are spent just adding to traffic congestion and tailpipe emissions.
Shared Scooters and Bikes — A Half-Step in the Right Direction
For environmentally conscious city dwellers (and those who can’t bring themselves to pay for Uber and Lyft’s surge pricing), electric scooter sharing and bike sharing services are compelling alternatives. Electric scooters can be spotted at nearly every street corner in California, and docked bike sharing has been a common sight in most major cities for a while now. Dockless bikes have been more popular abroad, most notably in China, but have also become ubiquitous in many urban centers.
I happened to live in San Francisco for the entirety of its initial electric scooter bubble, back when Bird, Lime, and a whole host of other startups inundated the city with thousands of e-scooters and were subsequently banned. At first, it was like the city had been showered overnight with these shiny new toys that anyone with a smartphone could get their hands on, and everyone was curious. I even used them for my morning commute for a week or two in lieu of a train ride. However, the convenience of these dockless scooters quickly led to a logistical nightmare as the lack of regulation and control led to scooters being strewn all over sidewalks, parking lots, and building entrances.
The backlash came as quickly as the scooters themselves did, with residents filing countless complaints and lawsuits over blocked driveways, tripping hazards, and reckless teenage riders sideswiping people on sidewalks. They also took revenge into their own hands by dumping scooters in trash cans, vandalizing them, and threatening to call the police on riders. Residents of Los Angeles were even more aggressive, setting them on fire and throwing them into the ocean.
Dockless bikes share many of the same problems, though less visibly so in the U.S. given their decline in popularity. In China, unimaginable numbers of bikes owned by young bike sharing companies that tried to scale too quickly lie in huge, unorganized heaps around nearly every major city as municipal governments scramble to restrain the proliferation of abandoned bikes. Images documenting this crisis look surreal. U.S. cities have had their own issues with dockless bikes, with public reactions similar to those faced by the scooter companies. In Dallas, it took less than a year for nearly 20,000 dockless bikes to come and go.
The problem with dockless solutions in general is one of logistics, as convenience comes at the cost of structure. Dockless network operators require veritable armies of “rebalancers” (people who drive around collecting, maintaining, and charging the batteries on scooters and bikes) working around the clock. Moreover, the companies themselves have no direct control over where their assets are parked. Bird and Lime, two front-runners in the electric scooter race, have attempted to address this by requiring passengers to snap a photo of their scooter once they have finished their trip, but this only serves to help these companies identify trends in user-attributed parking behavior and gives them little authority over enforcement.
Docked bike sharing has been less of an issue for city governments and locals given the centralized nature of docking stations, but poses problems of its own. Programs like Chicago’s Divvy and New York’s Citi Bike have consistently grown in rider adoption since inception, and their centralized hubs for access and drop-off of bikes reduce the difficulty of collection and make roll-out and expansion relatively manageable for cities. However, rebalancing is still an issue given the physical capacity limits imposed by docking stations, and riders can face additional challenges in either finding an open docking spot or an available bike during rush hour in areas of high demand. The main advantage that docked bike sharing programs have is controlled implementation, but their hub-and-spoke nature can limit benefits of adoption in practice.
The Scalable Problem
The logistical burden that today’s urban transportation technologies place on cities is significant, and problems with scaling are at the heart of the issue. With ridesharing, a rapid influx of part-time drivers looking to make a quick buck on the side and a parallel growth in convenience-seeking riders has put immense pressure on a relatively static infrastructure base. Uncontrolled roll-out of dockless shared e-scooters and bicycles has given rise to nightmares of clean-up and waste management. Docked bikes face an opposite problem, where scaling capabilities inherently limited by space capacity and the need for carefully calculated supply and demand planning has limited effectiveness and convenience.
Before we can implement a scalable solution, we need to consider the scalable problem. Changes to deeply embedded societal paradigms such as that of urban transportation do require widespread adoption, but poor implementation can lead to even bigger issues than what was addressed. As new mobility technologies are developed all over the world, it is important to remember that any proliferation of shared physical assets needs parallel physical infrastructure for support. While the best manifestation of this may not necessarily be docked bike-sharing, the keys to urban mobility are structure and organization, which ridesharing struggles with and dockless solutions simply lack.
TL;DR
Today’s urban transportation technologies have addressed a need for convenience at a logistical cost that will only get steeper and more complex as city populations grow. Problems with ridesharing, dockless scooter and bike sharing, and docked bike sharing solutions are rooted in logistics and infrastructure. These problems scale just as quickly as the shared assets themselves do, and must be well thought out before solutions are rolled out en masse.
