I will admit I was harsh on Uber in my last post. Let’s face it, they have silenced the doubters and built themselves into a large and profitable “platform” company, encouraging Mobility and Delivery services to reinforce each other. I think I was irrationally annoyed by the “pivot” from their prior War on Taxis (warning, bad language follows!):
… to their current We’ve Always Loved Taxis position:
But if one is going to be a forecaster a key requirement is to constantly revisit and revise prior beliefs. So what I might have once seen as a cynical pivot (a Silicon Valley term for “our strategy failed”) I could now see more positively as learning and evolving. So I’ll lay off these guys for now… though they do have some bad karma to work off, still.1
Now, on to this post’s clickbait title, above. By mobility services (MS) I mean both personally owned and publicly “shared” offerings such as rental scooters, ridehail such as you-know-who, docked ebikes, even my perennial favorite, this. Note that mobility services are of course far from new: renting a car is a mobility service, buying a plane ticket is a mobility service. But in recent years the rise of chatter about, research into, and investing in MS has reached dramatic heights. And yes of course, all this matters. Shared ebikes reduce traffic and emissions and get people exercising. Air travel opens up the world to all of us. Scooters take less room to park than cars and of course, without them, how would guys with beards or man buns get around downtown?
What I mean more broadly by “matters” is (from the automotive perspective of this blog), do MS serve to displace car ownership, and thus reduce car sales? Do they matter in that narrow sense? We’ve all seen endless tweets (x’s?) about “I’ll never buy a car, because I use [ fill in the blank with ] scooters, bikes, carshare, transit…. .” Are these sentiments just talk, or has car ownership in the USA actually changed, as MS options have proliferated?
Well at some level MS must have reduced car sales. Simple thought experiment: if you could never fly anywhere, yes, sure, you would drive more. But it is virtually impossible to directly measure the magnitude of such counter-factuals: how much more would you have driven? Thus I will follow in the footsteps of the superb transport analyst Bruce Schaller (www.schallerconsult.com) and indirectly measure the impact of the proliferation of MS on car ownership in the USA by measuring the number of cars available to households in major metro areas. (The Census tracks this.) This is the number of vehicles a specific household decides it needs to get around, averaged across all the households in a given metro. I’ll compare this figure for various metros in:
2010 as a baseline, since Uber launched in 2010,
2015 as an interim update,
and 2022 for the latest info (since 2023 data are not out yet).
I use metro areas as my focus since it is in cities where MS are most likely to be useful (no one is going to take a Lyft out to the ranch in rural Wyoming, and prairie dog burrows are murder on scooter wheels).
Here’s the results:
Even in MS “ground zero,”: the Bay Area, we see car ownership mostly going up (green figures) since the launch and ramp of modern MS, and even where declining (red figures), declining by amounts that would disappear if I rounded to the nearest tenth of a car. Even in MS-happy San Francisco people. As Mr. Schaller wrote about an earlier version of this chart (drawn by him): “The evidence in these data certainly fails to support the proposition that ride-hail has produced lower levels of vehicle ownership. Rather, these trends tend to suggest that the influx of ride-hail and other new mobility options has not translated to lower vehicle ownership rates.” (Schaller, Recent Vehicle Ownership Trends in Large US Cities, May 2020) And I would say the update to 2022 has done nothing to overturn that conclusion.2 The proliferation of MS has not really dented Americans’ propensity to own a car.
So yes, Mobility Services matter, in many ways. But Americans are stubborn when it comes to personal cars, which let’s face it are the Swiss Army Knife of mobility. You can drive anywhere you can fly, scoot, or bike; you can carry just one person or many; you can carry loads of stuff or not; you can mostly ignore the elements; you don’t have to share it and so you can keep clear of nasty germs; etc. Thus, despite all the “car culture” griping and “I don’t drive” talk (and yes, I realize millions of Americans in fact do not drive), when it comes to actually making the decision and spending the money, American households have in fact mostly added cars to their personal fleets since modern Mobility Services emerged on the scene.
This may change. In fact, it will change: we don’t need 10 cars per household - the growth in cars per household must cease at some point. But so far, despite all the changes we’ve gone through, we’re still hanging on to our cars.
(By the way, the data for 2010/15/22 for the USA as a whole are 1.76, 1.78, and 1.83.)
But wait, you say, this is unfair: don’t look at metro areas, with all their sprawling suburbs, look only at cities proper! MS have a better shot there. Okay, here you go, cities only. However, we get similar results, though somewhat more favorable to MS. And I am not sure it’s fair to focus on urban areas only: if MS hope to make any dent in American travel patterns, they are going to have to deal with the ‘burbs, where a majority of Americans live.