Can Uber and Lyft Save Carpooling?
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To really turn around the decline in carpooling, many more people would have to start using ride-hailing apps.
This article was originally published by Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, and was written by Rebecca Beitsch.
Carpooling is at a new low—just 9 percent of people share their ride to work with others, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But carpooling services offered by popular internet ride-hailing services, such as Uber and Lyft, may have the potential to change that.
“Most efforts at increasing carpooling in the past have been on the public side of things,” said David Schrank, a Texas A&M researcher who studies traffic congestion. “Now, more so than ever, is the private sector getting involved. There’s potential for the private sector to expedite that process because they see income to be generated.”
If private ride-hailing services are successful in getting people to carpool in greater numbers, traffic congestion could be eased and greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced. But getting people into the habit of sharing rides—especially to and from work—could be a challenge. Recent trends are running against it.
The share of commuters who carpool has been falling since the Census Bureau began tracking numbers in 1980, despite city and state efforts to encourage carpooling by introducing more high-occupancy lanes that give preference to cars with two or more passengers. Twenty percent of commuters carpooled to work in 1980. That number plummeted to 13 percent in 1990. It has trailed off since 2000, from 12 to 9 percent.
Meanwhile, congestion has worsened. A record number of cars now are on the road. The number of hours Americans lose to traffic delays hit nearly 7 billion last year—more than three times the amount lost in 1982, according to researchers at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The amount of wasted fuel resulting from stalled traffic rose to 3.1 billion gallons from 500 million gallons in the same period.
Although greenhouse gas emissions had been dropping in the U.S. since 2005, they rose 1 percent from 2013 to 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculated.
Academics who have studied the decline in carpooling point to many reasons for it, including far-flung workplaces, busier lifestyles and even a recent drop in gas prices. But some say that the new mobile ride-hailing apps have the potential to provide the flexibility that can revive carpooling.
“Driving in your car alone is so inexpensive and convenient it’s not worth the hassle of an inflexible schedule,” said Paul Lewis with the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonprofit focused on mobility, safety and sustainability. “People aren’t just going to work and then going home.”
“On the flip side, new technology applications are starting to change that equilibrium. They’re making haphazard commutes easier by allowing you to schedule trips on the fly. That last-minute convenience is what consumers are demanding right now.”
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