A new study published in the journal Science Advances suggests that, from 2010 to 2016, cars driving for the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft were making traffic worse in the San Francisco. The new findings echo those of another study of New York City. An anonymous reader shares a report from Science Magazine: A comparison of traffic speeds from 2010, before ride-sharing apps were widely used, with 2016 shows the time cars spent sitting in San Francisco traffic increased by 69%. To find out how much of that was caused by ride-sharing vehicles, researchers used [a computer model that simulated the speed of traffic with Uber and Lyft vehicles removed] to forecast what traffic might have been like in 2016 without Uber or Lyft.

To do this, the authors needed to know how many additional cars Lyft and Uber were putting on the streets. When the companies refused to share this information, researchers used a program that had thousands of “ghost users” ping the Uber and Lyft apps every 5 seconds for 6 weeks in 2016, revealing the locations of nearby drivers — and how many were on the streets at any given time. The model closely predicted the real-life traffic seen in 2010 and, after plugging in the Uber and Lyft driver data, 2016. The researchers then used the model to envision 2016 traffic minus the cars driving for Uber and Lyft. Without those cars, the model estimated just a 22% increase in traffic delays from 2010-16, suggesting ride-sharing companies were responsible for more than half of San Francisco’s real-world traffic increase. The remainder of San Francisco’s traffic increase was accounted for by growth in population and employment, which grew by roughly 70,000 people and 150,000 jobs respectively.

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Source: Slashdot – Uber and Lyft May Be Making Traffic Even Worse