Cited in Bloomberg CityLab
[ FROM BLOOMBERG CITYLAB by David Zipper] “There’s a lot of variation and unknown in pooled trips,” says Natalia Barbour, a professor of transport at Delft University of Technology. “You have to account for the other passengers, a possible detour, and more.” Ride-hail’s generally affluent users are likely to have limited tolerance for bad experiences.
Of course, sharing trips with strangers is the basic principle behind riding public transportation, but there are several big distinctions between transit and pooled ride-hail. Transit’s fixed routes and stops provide a level of predictability that the routing algorithms of Uber and Lyft cannot. And in a bad situation, you’re more likely to feel trapped in a ride-hail vehicle. Researchers have found that privacy concerns are an especially powerful deterrent to shared rides among women. “When you share a ride with someone it’s a very intimate setting,” says Barbour. “If someone makes you uncomfortable, you can’t change where you sit, while on public transit you can adjust your seat or move to another train car.”
