Love-Hate Relationship Between Ride-sharing And The Environment ❤️😡

I am a BIG fan of Snapchat channels. 👻 While I waited on my laundry, which is perhaps the most annoying part of my week at school, I was watching Vox’s Snapchat channel.

Their entire story was about driverless cars today. I tweeted about it. 🔥

One of the visuals got me thinking 🤔🤔

Ride-sharing services have very rapidly inculcated a culture of not owning cars. That’s true at least among the millennials. The cost of using these on-demand services is higher than the cost of owning, driving, insuring, parking and maintaining a car. Due to this, rationality dictates that the number of cars on road is likely to get drastically reduced. Instead of, let’s say, ten people using ten different cars to go to work. We could now have three Uber drivers dropping the same ten people off on a given day. So the reduction in the quantity of cars on the road on a given day leads to reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases from the transportation sector. So, we love ride-sharing services. I am assuming that these Uber and Lyft cars are not electric cars. Even, under that assumption, we love the idea of not owning cars.

Now, if these ride-sharing companies end up becoming a major source of share transportation in most places in the near future, there is a possibility that there will be increase in emission of greenhouse gases. These services would reduce the number of cars on the road, but, at the same time, they would significantly increase the usage per car at any given time. Having relatively lesser cars with constantly running engines could lead to increase in emission. Again, I am assuming these are not electric cars. 😡

So, should we love or hate them? What’s more likely to happen? Or is this line of thought plainly wrong because all the cars are likely to be electric in the near future? ❤️ or 😡 ?

Regardless of what you think of my thoughts, I recommend checking out Vox’s channel. 🔑

Hit me up on twitter — @sathakgh