It has become fairly common to blame Uber (and ridesharing in general) for increased traffic congestion. I hear it all the time: "If only there weren't so many Ubers on the road, traffic would flow more freely." While there are studies suggesting that "deadheading" miles do have a negative impact and that Uber can draw people away from public transit (that's bad), I think it's important to consider the bigger picture here. So let's try and do that today.
Firstly, let's think about who traffic congestion directly impacts (indirectly it's everyone). If you're a pedestrian, you don't care about traffic congestion. In fact, maybe you gain satisfaction from seeing other people stuck in it. (There's even a German word for this feeling.) Similarly, if you're riding the subway, taking any form of transit on its own right-of-way, or riding a bike, you likely also don't care about traffic congestion. It doesn't directly impact you.
Where you do care about congestion is if you're in something like a bus that is stuck in traffic or if you're driving. In the former case, you're probably thinking, "hey why can't these people take the bus like me. Then we'd have less traffic!" And in the latter case you're probably thinking, "if only there weren't so many Ubers and bike lanes, then I wouldn't be stuck in traffic!" Ironically, this is arguably the biggest segment of people who feel they are being impacted by Ubers.
Secondly, let's think about how Uber vs. driving might impact traffic congestion differently. In both cases, I would think that the majority of use cases involve one person (excluding drivers in the case of Uber) going to their desired destination. So from a raw space per person perspective, they both take up a similar amount of urban space.
The differences are that the Uber likely had some amount of deadhead miles. In other words, it spent time driving around looking for its next passenger. And it likely targeted already busy areas because that's where it was more likely to find someone. Individual drivers don't do this. They go from point A to point B.
However -- and this is a big however -- drivers do require parking once they get to where they're going. Ubers don't. This both takes up more space and oftentimes requires some amount of circling around. This is a significant difference and it begs the question: which is worse? Deadhead miles or all of the parking that cars generally require? I would argue the latter.
Where I'm going with all of this is that I think the criticism of Uber is misdirected. It doesn't get at the real underlying problem. If traffic congestion exists, it is because they are too many cars for a finite amount of road space. This includes the people who choose to drive themselves around. In fact, you could argue that they're the most impactful to cities. The way you solve this is simple: you price congestion and you encourage alternative forms of mobility.
Everything else is just a distraction.
Oftentimes when I think about Los Angeles, I think about the fact that you generally have to drive everywhere. And since I have a personal preference for dense and walkable cities, this thought helps me feel slightly less envious about their perfect weather.
Los Angeles is probably the original car city. Here is an excerpt from this excellent post by Brian Potter, where he summarizes a 1987 book by Scott Bottles called, "Los Angeles and the Automobile":
Los Angeles was especially quick to adopt the car. By 1920 Los Angeles had the highest per-capita rate of car ownership in the US, four times more automobiles per capita than the US average, and eight times more than the much-denser Chicago. In 1920, 9 times as many people entered downtown LA via streetcar as via automobile. By 1924, that had nearly equaled.
And interestingly enough, people started using them, almost immediately, to create Uber-like services:
A popular early use of the car for public transit was the jitney. Car owners would pick up passengers (often waiting at streetcar stops) and drive them to their destination for the same price as a streetcar ride (5 cents). Car owners would often simply put their destination in their windshields, and pick up anyone along the way who was headed in the same direction. Because jitney travel was much faster than streetcars, and wasn’t limited to the fixed streetcar routes, jitneys often had better service than streetcars.
Jitney travel first appeared in Los Angeles in 1914, and by November of that year was being used for thousands of trips per day. The jitney quickly spread to other cities. By early 1915, an estimated 62,000 jitneys operated around the country in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Birmingham. As jitney travel became more popular, electric rail companies found that they were losing significant ridership
What this again underscores is just how disruptive the car was -- right from the outset. It was quickly seen as being more convenient, especially in a city like Los Angeles, which wasn't as dense as its counterparts on the east coast.
Sadly, and as Potter suggests in his post, it is not clear that the headwinds facing public transit have changed all that much since the first jitneys started appearing on the streets of Los Angeles a century ago.