Ride-sharing services are seen as among the precursors of a shift to autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles, in turn, are seen as one of the primary use cases of promise for mobile service providers supplying internet of things communications.
So it might be noteworthy that a recent survey of riders and former riders in Austin, Texas does suggest that ride sharing does reduce auto ownership. If one believes that autonomous vehicles will appear first, at scale, for ride services and other retail and industrial transportation use cases, that finding is important.
A group of researchers looking at the suspension of Uber and Lyft services in Austin, Texas conclude that such “transportation networking companies” actually do represent alternatives to other forms of transportation, and plausibly can lead to reduced auto ownership in urban areas.
“Our analysis finds that 42 percent of respondents who had used Uber or Lyft to make a trip prior to the suspension reported transitioning to another transportation networking company as the means by which similar trips were most often made after the suspension,” the researchers said. “A near equal proportion (41 percent) reported transitioning to a personal vehicle, while three percent transitioned to public transit.”
Those findings are partly notable for the finding that just three percent of former Uber or Lyft riders chose public transit as the alternative. Some 83 percent chose either a personal vehicle or another ride-sharing service.
The survey also suggests that individuals who substituted a personal vehicle for travel, instead of Uber or Lyft, were 23 percent more likely to make more trips than individuals substituting another ride-sharing service for Uber or Lyft.
Perhaps surprisingly, nine percent of respondents said they purchased an additional vehicle in response to the service suspension.
“These results suggest that TNCs may contribute to reduced car ownership and trip making,” the researchers suggest.
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