Earlier this year, the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) published this report on the impacts of ride hailing services in the City of Toronto.

And then today, the Ryerson City Building Institute leveraged it to opine on how "on-demand tech" might improve transit going forward. That's how I discovered it.

What is clear from the report is that ride-hailing services -- which they refer to as Private Transportation Companies (PTC) -- are driven by two dominant use cases: 1) going out at night and 2) commuting to and from work.

Friday and Saturday nights are by far the busiest periods for PTC travel, with the peak usually happening around midnight on Sunday morning. About 13,100 trips per hour, mostly concentrated in the core.

Overall, it is estimated that Toronto does about 176,000 daily PTC trips (as of March 2019). That places it behind New York and Chicago in terms of the size of the market. But Toronto also didn't complete its first PTC until 2014. Here's a comparison chart:

Another diagram that I found interesting was the proportion of shared ride trips by neighborhood. It shows that much of the inner suburbs are hailing shared rides -- sometimes as high as 45% of all trips. This is interesting because it is people effectively gaming the system.

Because the population densities are lower in the suburbs than in the core, you're a lot less likely to get paired with other riders when you select that option. So what tends to happen is that you end up getting a private ride for the price of shared ride. I know I've played the odds before.

If you'd like to download a full copy of the report, click here.

The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in New York City recently commissioned this report on the city’s nightlife economy. The study was completed by Econsult Solutions, the North Highland Company, and Urbane Development. (Full disclosure: I was a teaching assistant for the President of Econsult while at Penn.)

Here’s what they found:

The total economic impact of this industry is the sum of its direct, indirect, and induced economic impacts, as well as the ancillary spending impacts that are adjacent to nightlife activity. In 2016 (the most recent year where standardized datasets were available), the nightlife industry supported 299,000 jobs with $13.1 billion in employee compensation and $35.1 billion in economic output. This economic impact also yielded $697 million in tax revenue for New York City.

They also found that, between 2011 and 2016, the nightlife industry has outpaced the city’s overall economy. Nightlife establishments grew by a 2% annual growth rate. Jobs in the nightlife industry grew by a 5% annual growth rate. And nightlife wages have been rising by 8% annually – about double the average for the city.

I am a firm believer in the value of the nighttime economy. So I’m happy to see more people paying attention to it as of late. For the full report, click here.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash