The Impact of Ridehail on Car Ownership
Have Uber and Lyft finally dented personal ownership of cars?
Spoiler: no, I don’t think so.
In 2017 Newsweek wrote: “Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says car ownership is becoming passé: ‘Millennials aren’t buying cars anymore. They don’t want to drive. They don’t want to own cars. They don’t want that inconvenience.’“
Among the commentariat and twitterati (xerati?) this was a widely-held perspective. Why own a car when you can summon one up on your phone?1 And everyone had a personal anecdote to relate, along the lines of “My nephew/daughter/neighbor told me this is the last car they will ever own.”
Well, did ridehail have this impact? Do people own fewer cars now?
Before we get to the chart about ownership, let me clarify a bit. Obviously ridehail has had an impact on miles and trips. Ubers and Lyfts are everywhere and they have eaten into VMT (vehicle miles traveled), clearly (some estimates put ridehail at 1-3% of trips and miles). I took a Lyft to the airport this morning, in fact.2 The question I’m looking at today is whether it impacts ownership: I might drive my own car less because I use Lyft a lot, but do I actually give up the car?
The American Community Survey from the Census Bureau comes to the rescue with an answer:
(Before going further, I have to admit I have stolen this analytical approach from ace transportation analyst Bruce Schaller. I have paid for this crime, however, in hours spent frustratedly extracting these data from the Bureau’s website, which seems determined to prevent anyone from ever actually using it! Only heavy use of AI advice led me through the maze, and the AI was periodically stumped, as well. Do not go there unless you have a glass of wine and a free hour at hand!)
I chose major metro areas to examine since I don’t think ridehail is very active in remote rural places. The variable I am looking at is vehicles available to the members of the household, so that we can dodge thorny issues of whether the car is driven by Junior but owned by Dad, etc. I start back in the dark benighted age of 2005, before ridehail was a glimmer in Travis’s eye. Then we look at 2015, after the various services were up and running, and then 2024, the year of the most recent available data. (There were of course movements up and down in the intervening years, but as is my preference I leave out the Pandemic Years as too odd to extrapolate from.)
After many years of widespread ridehail penetration growth, I don’t see any real impact on cars per household. Even in the Bay area, the ancestral home of All Things App, no movement. And God bless ‘em, but those Texans and Angelenos love their whips.3
Of course, all this may change. And again, I am not arguing that ridehail doesn’t have a place in the mobility portfolio. And different options always displace usage at the margin (as in, cheap airfares displace week-long family road trips to Wally World).
But in terms of nudging the car completely out of the garage, no - or not yet.
Though I didn’t hear much talk about taxis replacing personally-owned cars, as in “I live in Brooklyn, why own a car when I can just go to the curb and summon a car with a wave?”
A separate topic we can discuss: ridehail is so popular for airport runs that it is displacing at-airport parking, which is a major source of revenue for airports. Might do a post on this, as it has airports worried.
At the national level the trend is very clear over the long run: about 400 vehicles per 1,000 Americans in 1960, 800 by 2000, and around 850 now. Growing at an ever-slower rate. But I wanted to look at metro areas only for this post, because that is where ridehail is most active.