Interesting: Uber Has Yet to Reduce Drunk Driving Deaths, Study Says
the main point being “…that ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft have had no impact on the country’s overall rate of drunk driving fatalities”. So, next time someone suggests to you that you ride-share after an offline, you might want to say “no thanks. I’ll drive and take my chances.”
Just. Kidding. Folks. Drunk driving is a serious issue and needs to be addressed, but this is interesting research and begs more questions: are people drinking more than before? Are arrests for DUI/DWI up? Are the people who are drinking & driving able to have ridesharing services where they live (my take is they do not).
Why would ridesharing services affect the rate of drunk driving fatalities? People have had the option of a taxi or designated driver for a long time. Those who decide to be responsible are, and some people make the wrong decision. I see that Uber has made some ridiculous claims, which probably spurred the study, so I guess it served a good purpose to show that Uber is full of it.
Uber isn’t legal in upstate NY (can’t remember if it is in NYC, don’t think so) and there was big talk about this on local sports radio a couple of months ago.
The NHL Hockey draft was in Buffalo and I guess people from out of town (larger cities) can’t figure out/deal with taxis and are conditioned to use ride-sharing.
It was a huge issue for visitors.
I’ll say that as someone who sees a LOT of drunk drivers and drunk driving injuries/fatalities, it’s rare to see ‘uber clients’ involved in high morbidity/mortality type accidents. The 50 year old businessman who had 1 more glass of wine than he should have and drove instead of catching an Uber is rarely involved in a bad accident. The drunk motorcyclist going 120 mph, or the drunk driver racing another drunk driver are the majority of the deadly/life threatening accidents I see.
Based on that I wouldn’t expect to see fewer DEATHS, fewer DWIs-probably, fewer minor accidents-probably. Remember cars are incredibly well designed to keep you alive…
Even more so, uber tends to exist in places where taxis/public transportation was already widely available. Some of you city slickers might not realize uber’s not available in a lot of places, including a lot of mid-sized cities. There’s no uber in Minnesota outside of the Twin Cities.
Ask any NYC hack if there is Uber in the city. You will get an ear full.
I use Uber extensively for any event involving alcohol (more than a few glasses) where someone else is not a DD or not using a private car service. A taxi is near impossible where I live, and if you can get one it is not at a remotely reasonable fare. Before Uber I had to hire private car service and often work to their schedule/availability. Uber et al is one of the great disruptors of our time.
Über schmoober. People have had options available to keep from driving under the influence for a long time. My wife (a nurse with several degrees) and I were talking about a study she had seen that shows more people are on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication (aka Xanax) than ever before because stress levels are up. It stands to reason that alcohol use would probably go up too, since many people “self medicate” that way to wind down.
Yeah, I’m not stoked on their libertarian activism but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a brilliant service. Since Uber/Lyft came out the amount I drink and drive hasn’t changed (I absolutely never do) but the amount of time I have to wait for a cab/car has dropped from over an hour to under 5 minutes, and the time I spend coordinating or being a designated driver has almost dropped to zero unless I’m doing something like wine tasting in Woodinville where getting to/from would be prohibitively expensive, in which case I volunteer to spit all day since I can be trusted to do so.
I remember the entire decade I lived in Portland if you left the bar at any time after like 9pm you have an hour+ wait on your hands if the cab ever came at all (50/50 shot) so we usually just walked the miles home after dark unless we were with women in tall shoes. Taxi companies dropped the ball super hard, got too comfortable and decided they didn’t need to be in the service game, and they’re seriously paying for it.
In Paris, Uber is so ubiquitous and of such high standards that I do not know, for the life of me, how any of the taxis stay in business. Uber is never more than 60 secs away, great clean cars, offering bottled water and candies at a fraction of the price of indifferent over charging taxi drivers.
“Too big to fail”??? Then why is he failing? There should be no bailouts. If you run a business so poorly that you put yourself in bankruptcy, than that’s your fault. Über is the next step in evolution - it’s what the taxi industry could have and should have been.
I attended a presentation by three Newport Beach PD officers who are all specialists in DUI enforcement a month or two ago (no, I hadn’t gotten myself in trouble, it was a presentation to a group of lawyers for continuing education credit).
I asked them whether they thought the rise of ridesharing services has decreased the amount of drunk driving. They said they hadn’t observed any reduction. Their thought was that the types of people who are responsible enough to use cabs and Uber are not the same people they usually arrest for DUI, most of whom are habitual hard drinkers and frequent drunk drivers.
That’s just anecdotal opinion, not evidence, but it sounded about right. I do think there is likely to be some improvement along the margin, though - enough instances where a couple going out to dinner who might have in the past driven home closer to the borderline of the legal limit but who now take Uber. Of course, in my opinion, that’s not really where the brunt of law enforcement should fall anyway.
As an under 30 millenial, I know that it has dramatically reduced the amount of times people have drank and got behind the wheel that I know personally. Not that the small subset of people I know are a statistically significant example of anything, but I would say that these services reduce the expected value of drunk young professionals driving on the road if I had to guess.