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.
Each year, Bloomberg NEF (New Energy Finance) publishes a long-term forecast of how electric vehicles and shared mobility will/might impact our cities. Predicting the future is never easy. And forecasts are never right. But they're valuable to do.
By 2040, BNEF believes that 57% of global passenger vehicle sales and 30% of the global passenger vehicle fleet will have some form of an electric drivetrain. Either full battery electric (BEV) or plug-in-hybrid electric (PHEV). Looking at this another way, we have about 17 years (2037) until ICE and electric vehicles are expected to intersect and hit 50/50 in terms of global sales.
A big part of what is driving the adoption of electric vehicles is that the price of lithium-ion batteries keeps coming down. Assuming this trend continues, the price of EVs and ICE vehicles (in most segments) should reach parity sometime in the mid-2020s. Meaning, yes, it's more expensive to produce an EV today.
All of this will also impact mobility services (ride-hailing and ride-sharing). Today, less than 5% of annual kilometers traveled by passenger vehicles around the world is thought to be done through some form of a ride-hailing app. That's still a pretty significant number, actually. Though only about 1.8% of this fleet is electric.
By 2040, shared mobility services are expected to rise to 19% (see above) and -- because their costs are coming down -- 80% of this fleet is expected to be electric. Autonomous vehicles are not expected to meaningfully impact global mobility until the 2030s. But the growth in shared mobility services is still expected to reduce the demand for car ownership, and likely parking.
Other high-level findings from BNEF's 2019 Electric Vehicle Outlook can be found here. If you want to access the full report, you'll need to be a BNEF client.
As a kid growing up in the suburbs, I got my driver's license the day I turned 16. Being able to drive was a big deal. But we know that this desire to drive has been changing in profound ways. Here's some recent stats on the percentage of licensed drivers in the US by age (taken from the WSJ):
In 1983, about 46% of 16-year-olds had a driver's license. By 2014, this number had dropped to 24.5%, which is the lowest it has been in recent years, and was probably impacted by the broader economy. As of 2017, this number was up to about 26%.
If you're a car company, I would imagine that these are pretty important numbers. They represent the top of the sales funnel. Most people probably like to have a driver's license in hand before they go out and buy a car.
Supposedly, some people in Detroit are betting that young people will still eventually buy a car. And when they do, it'll be a nice big one like an SUV or a truck. But, the data suggests that it is not just young people who are eschewing driving.
Here's some data from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (via NPR), looking at the proportion of licensed drivers in the US by all age categories:
While the biggest drop has certainly happened among younger generations, licensing is still down for older cohorts. Based on these numbers, we don't hit parity until somewhere around 50 to 54 years old.
And the only cohorts where licensing has increased significantly are when people reach over 55. Over 70 is up by a huge margin -- more than the drop among 16 year olds -- which is probably a symptom of people living longer.
Some of this decrease among young people can probably be attributed to delayed family formation and people living in denser urban environments, where it is more convenient to get around without a car. But I don't think that's all of it.
Which suggests to me that the race to autonomy is a pretty important one to win.