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Updated On 24 April 2022 12:07 PM

CBC Radio 

Posted: Sep 07, 2018 3:42 PM ET. Last Updated: July 5, 2019 

New York City capped the number of ride-sharing vehicles allowed on the road to stem congestion 

This story was originally published on September 7, 2018. 

Besides making it super-easy to get a ride somewhere, one of the great promises of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft was that they would reduce congestion in city streets as more people left their cars at home and shared with others. 

Unfortunately, the opposite has happened — and dramatically so, said transportation consultant Bruce Schaller. 

Schaller, the former head of the traffic and planning division at the New York City Department of Transportation, recently investigated the impact of ride-hailing services on congestion. And the results are not encouraging. 

It turns out that the majority of ride-share app users are not people who would otherwise drive their car, but people who wouldn't have driven a car in the first place. 

"Most people say, 'I would have taken the bus, the subway, the metro, walked or biked or sometimes, I wouldn't have made that trip,'" Schaller said. 

Moreover, the fact that the ride-hailing cars have to come and get their passengers actually means more mileage. 

"If I call Uber to pick me up, the driver has to come to my house and then drive me there. So there's a time between trips and mileage between trips that are additional miles to the roadway." 

And it's not like the ride-sharing cars get off the roads when they're aren't driving someone. 

"Last year, 40 per cent of the time Uber and Lyft vehicles don't have a passenger in them. That's really inefficient," Schaller said.