• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Studies say Uber and Lyft offload soft costs on drivers and communities

October 8, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

As the average cost of a ride on Uber, Lyft, and other “rideshare” services has risen over the years, it’s become clear these companies were never entirely forthright about their business models. Now a pair of studies suggests even the investor-subsidized prices don’t tell the whole story, with costs being borne by drivers and communities.

One study is from Carnegie Mellon University, which analyzed some of the less obvious costs and benefits of transportation network companies (TNC, the favored term in public and academic documents).

For instance, after collecting a variety of data on the activity of TNC cars and users, the researchers found that rideshare vehicles tend to contribute less per ride to air pollution. This is because, as lead author Jeremy Michalek explains in a university news release, “When a vehicle first starts up, it produces a high level of noxious air pollution until its pollution control system heats up enough to be effective.”

Since rideshare vehicles don’t usually need to do a cold start for a given ride, and are generally newer cars with lower emissions to begin with, it’s estimated that a TNC trip produces about half the pollutants as the same trip done in your personal car. That amounts in their estimate to about 11 cents worth of value on average.

Good news, right? Well, kind of. The problem is that while the car may be more efficient in that specific way, the practice of “deadheading” (driving aimlessless or idling between jobs) and the need to drive to a pickup location pretty much wipe out those gains. Then when you factor in the increased traffic from cars technically not being “used” still being on the road, accidents, noise etc, you end up with an estimated 45 cents per trip in costs to the community in general. So there’s a net increase in costs of about 34 cents per ride — a cost that is paid for by taxes or in lower quality of life.

Infographic showing the benefits of rideshare cars (lower emissions) versus the costs (many).

Image Credits: CMU

The suggestion the researchers make is to pool rides or use mass transit whenever possible — though of course in pandemic times those have their own drawbacks. Electrification of fleets would help, but that too has major immediate and long-term costs.

Gig workers in San Francisco are mostly people of color and many are immigrants, according to survey

Drivers themselves are carrying the weight of this “decentralized” industry as well. In a survey conducted among unionized drivers in Seattle, the University of Washington’s Marissa Baker found that most felt they received little or no support from the companies they work for.

Almost everyone was worried about getting COVID-19, obviously, and 30 percent thought they’d already caught it. Most had lost income, not surprisingly, and had spent their own money on PPE — less than a third said they’d received masks or sanitizer from the company. And those who stopped driving during the pandemic reported having trouble getting unemployment benefits. Notably in Seattle drivers are overwhelmingly black men and often immigrants, groups that face their own compounding challenges.

“For workers who are in this kind of employment during the pandemic, they receive very little support from the companies that they drive for, and this is a population that had a lot of awareness of the potential exposures they could be facing,” said Baker in the release accompanying the study. In Seattle drivers are lucky to have additional protections not available in many cities, so folks in other locations may have it worse. (Delivery drivers were found last year to be facing many of the same problems.)

These studies are only a peek at the hidden costs and soft economics of the “gig economy.” Consumers most often hear from the companies themselves a version of these things viewed through rose-colored glasses, so independent inquiry, even if it’s just a survey or rough estimate of undocumented costs and behaviors, is incredibly valuable.

Source Link Studies say Uber and Lyft offload soft costs on drivers and communities

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Tesla ordered to share Autopilot data with the US traffic safety agency
  2. Thai lawmakers debate long-awaited legislation on torture, abductions
  3. Di Grassi stays in Formula E with Venturi after Audi exit
  4. Exclusive: China’s regulators tighten scrutiny of FX dealers – sources

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • If Birds Are Dinosaurs, Why Are None As Big As T. Rexes?
  • Psychologists Demonstrate Illusion That Could Be Screwing Up Our Perception Of Time
  • Why Are So Many Enormous Roman Shoes Being Discovered At Hadrian’s Wall?
  • Scientists Think They’ve Pinpointed Structural Differences In Psychopaths’ Brains
  • We’ve Found Our Third-Ever Interstellar Visitor, Orcas Filmed Kissing (With Tongues) In The Wild, And Much More This Week
  • The “Eyes Of Clavius” Will Be Visible On The Moon Today, Thanks To Clair-Obscur Effect
  • Shockingly High Microplastic Levels Found On Remote Mediterranean Coral Reef Island
  • Interstellar Object, Cheesy Nightmares, And Smooching Orcas
  • World’s Largest Martian Meteorite Up For Auction Could Reach Whopping $2-4 Million
  • Kimalu The Beluga Whale Undergoes Pioneering Surgery And Becomes First Beluga To Survive General Aesthetic
  • The 1986 Soviet Space Mission That’s Never Been Repeated: Mir To Salyut And Back Again
  • Grisly Incident In Yellowstone National Park Shows Just How Dangerous This Vibrant Wilderness Can Be
  • Out Of All Greenhouse Gas Emitters On Earth, One US Organization Takes The Biscuit
  • Overly Ambitious Adder Attempts To Eat Hare 10 Times Its Mass In Gnarly Video
  • How Fast Does A Spacecraft Need To Go To Escape The Solar System?
  • President Trump’s Cuts To USAID Could Result In A “Staggering” 14 Million Avoidable Deaths By 2030
  • Dzo: Hybrids Beasts That Are Perfectly Crafted For Life On Earth’s Highest Mountains
  • “Rarest Event Ever” Had A Half-Life 1 Trillion Times Longer Than The Age Of The Universe – How Did We See It?
  • Meet The Bille, A Self-Righting Tetrahedron That Nobody Was Sure Could Exist
  • Neurogenesis Confirmed: Adult Brains Really Do Make New Hippocampal Neurons
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version