Rideshare companies provide transportation, food, groceries…and sprawl, research finds
Researchers compared development in 167 U.S. communities between 2010 and 2015: before, during and after rideshares were introduced.
Rideshare companies Uber and Lyft have fundamentally changed how people move through cities by providing on-demand, direct transportation with upfront pricing estimates, driver ratings and more.
New research from Northeastern University finds that the rideshare companies, which introduced a new transportation method that uses privately owned vehicles for trips on existing roads, have also changed the way American cities develop, by inducing sprawl.
“They elevated the value of the existing infrastructure for the periphery (of cities),” said Daniel O’Brien, professor of public policy and urban affairs and criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern who collaborated on the new research. O’Brien is also the director of the Boston Area Research Initiative, which conducts collaborative research with, and for the benefit of, local communities.
“That in turn makes the periphery more valuable,” O’Brien continued. “Then people start investing in the periphery and you see more development.”
The research is published in the journal Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems, which collects computer-based research on urban systems, systems of cities, and built and natural environments.
Uber and Lyft did not respond to a request for comment.
O’Brien and doctoral student Joshua Rosen said that the research sought to investigate an adage in the urban planning community regarding transportation infrastructure: “If you build it, development will come.”
Rosen noted that a new rail line will become a focal point for a community and attract new development near its stops, for example, while new highways suddenly open up small rural towns and suburbs to homes for commuters.
“We look at a lot of other forms of transportation and you can’t separate the transportation from the infrastructure,” Rosen said.
“But that doesn’t exist with rideshare,” Rosen said. Instead, he and O’Brien said that the rideshare companies have changed transportation within cities by offering on-demand, point-to-point rides using already existing roads and privately owned cars.
Moreover, rideshare companies have reduced some of what Rosen called “the friction” of the commute – the financial cost, the lost time, the hassle of switching trains, finding parking, etc.
“It was just a huge convenience,” Rosen said of the introduction of rideshare. “It became so easy for me to get from [the Boston neighborhood of] Roxbury to the Seaport because it’s just necessary to click a button on your phone as opposed to get on the [MBTA] Silver Line and walk or get on the Green Line and walk and transfer.”
So, did the ‘build-it-and-development-will-come’ adage survive the introduction of rideshare?
To see, Rosen and O’Brien compared development in 167 U.S. communities between 2010 and 2015: before, during and after rideshares were introduced.
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They found that the rideshare companies’ presence “significantly accelerates growth along the periphery of cities – areas that otherwise would have been underserved by transportation systems,” O’Brien said.
The effect was strongest where public transit is weakest, he noted, and Rosen said that this development growth differed among cities.
Rideshare had a “very large effect” on Chicago, for instance, Rosen said.
The city already boasted a dense central business district with multiple transportation options prior to rideshares, but growth in the “transit-poor” ring of suburbs was much more substantial following the arrival of Uber in the fall of 2011 than it had been in prior years, Rosen said.
Meanwhile, Houston’s suburbs and exurbs grew at the same rate prior to and after rideshares arrived, according to the research.
“In cities that are not really sprawling and superstar dense cities, more development is happening in smaller areas,” Rosen said, using Boston as an example. “Whereas in sprawlier cities, they’re continuing to sprawl.”
In essence, the development still follows a new transportation option; with rideshares, that new transportation option is just more concentrated in the outskirts of a city than in its central core where other transportation options exist. The result is development on the outskirts.
This pattern could continue, the researchers said.
First, as rideshare makes car-dependency more feasible in areas further away from the urban core, those areas are more likely to be built to be dependent on cars, O’Brien explained.
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O’Brien and Rosen said the research reveals that policymakers should understand that, like other transportation developments, the introduction of rideshare can shape a city.
“If a city wants to extend a light rail, it’s years, if not months, of conversations with community members about the fact that this is going to have these environmental impacts…and we all acknowledge it to be part of the process,” Rosen said. “Whereas when we don’t observe and understand and measure the effects of things like Uber and Lyft, it’s not part of the conversation.”
And although that conversation might be belated in American cities where Uber and Lyft already operate, Rosen and O’Brien noted that rideshares are not as prevalent internationally.
Plus, another new mode of transportation is on the horizon: autonomous vehicles from companies like Waymo.
These could reduce other frictions inherent in rideshares, such as overly talkative or creepy drivers, Rosen said, and it may even be cheaper than rideshare because there is no driver to pay.
“If we have this idea that people are going to travel where there’s less friction, then it’s intuitive to think that Waymo is going to ease a bunch of frictions,” Rosen said. “Then we would see some version of the same effect: making it easier to travel places by car makes people go places that you can only get by car, and that’s going to create development in ways that benefits cars.”
