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In a Reversal, ‘Car-Rich’ Households Are Growing

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Despite ride-hailing’s promise, vehicle ownership (and traffic) is on the rise in America’s biggest, most transit-oriented cities. So how is mobility really changing?

Jan. 7, 2019 – Bruce Schaller, Transportation Consultant

There is no doubt that ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are remaking how people get around major American cities. The growing availability of shared bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters is further changing the personal mobility story. The transformation is partly personal, offering a wealth of options for getting around town. It’s also supposed to be societal, ameliorating clogged traffic and boosting transit ridership.The evidence for personal transformation is uncontested. But the societal benefits are less clear. How ride-hailing in particular is affecting vehicle use, traffic, and transit has been hotly debated. Research that I summarized in my report “The New Automobility” last summer showed that ride-hailing growth has led to more traffic and less transit use in major American cities—not the reverse that we all hoped for.

Uber, Lyft, and advocates for new shared mobility services have pushed back against this analysis. Declaring that we are still at the “earliest stages” of a major shift in travel habits, they look to the day that people ditch their car in favor of a combination of these services and old-fashioned public transportation. Their vision is that diminished car ownership and fewer miles in privately owned vehicles will more than offset added mileage from ride-hailing vehicles.

As we enter the eighth year of the Uber and Lyft revolution, it’s worth checking whether we are seeing those “ditch your car” hopes being fulfilled. Recent trends can be traced using the American Community Survey, which shows yearly household vehicle ownership in U.S. cities.
At first glance, the picture looks contradictory. Household vehicle ownership has increased in cities where Uber and Lyft are most heavily used, using 2012 (the year the companies started offering affordable everyday ride services like UberX) as the starting point. Moreover, the rate of vehicle growth substantially exceeded population growth in five of the eight cities (Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago).

At the same time, more urban households also have no or relatively few cars. These households are often referred to as “car-free” (no cars available to the household) or “car-light,” e.g., a working couple that owns one vehicle. (For data availability reasons, “car-light” is defined here as households with fewer vehicles than workers.) Here’s the growth in car-free and car-light households in the eight cities.

These households grew notably faster than population in Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago and at about the same rate as population in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., from 2012 to 2017. (By contrast, in Los Angeles population grew faster than car-free/car-light households.)
These data thus show that accounts of, “I gave up my car when I moved to this or that walkable urban neighborhood” should not be dismissed as mere anecdotes. But how can we reconcile more car-free/car-light households with rapid growth in total car ownership?
The answer comes in two parts. First, there is a lot more growth in car-light than car-free households. In fact, since 2012 the number of car-free households declined in Chicago, D.C., and Los Angeles. Adding one-car households in cities where there is on average about one vehicle per household results in no real change in the rate of car ownership—all the while adding more traffic to city streets.Households with at least one vehicle per worker (“car-rich” perhaps?) account for the bulk of increased car ownership in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Growth of car-light households accounts for only about one-quarter of the total growth in vehicle ownership in these cities.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Los Angeles, where car-free households dropped by 11 percent since 2012. L.A. also shows car ownership greatly outpacing population growth (10 percent versus 4 percent). This picture is consistent with a recent UCLA study that linked declines in transit ridership to increased car ownership among low-income and in particular immigrant communities in the L.A. area.

What’s driving the rise of the car-rich city household? It likely includes economic trends that put money in people’s pockets: job growth, the influx of affluent urban professionals, and falling gas prices. Changing demographics, especially more families with children, likely spur some to buy a car. Troubled transit service in cities like New York and Washington, D.C., surely plays a role.  Ride-hailing might also catalyze car use; once you get used to on-demand transportation, who wants to go back to waiting for the bus?

Note: for the full article – https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/01/uber-lyft-make-traffic-worse-more-people-own-cars-transit/579481/

Source: CityLab