I rarely see anyone on here talking about one of my favorite forms of transportation in the city, Uber and Lyft. They’re faster, safer, more comfortable, and sometimes even cheaper than public transportation, to they point that they’re hurting ridership.

>Measuring ride-share data from before the covid-19 pandemic, researchers found that nearly half of trips taken were substitutes journeys they could have taken using public transit, while only 2% of trips were “complementary,” taken to or from public transit stops.

>One 2019 study (pdf) of transit ridership patterns in 25 North American cities estimated that for each year after a ride-share service enters a new market, heavy rail ridership decreases by 1.3% and bus ridership decreases by 1.7%.

>When riders chose ride-sharing over public transit, it was most often in downtown with a range of bus and rail options.

How can transit compete with ridesharing?