By Joe Schwieterman, Director

The spectacular rise of Lyft, Uber and other “ridesourcing” companies is changing how people get from place to place in large cities like Chicago. With a few clicks on your smartphone, and for a pre-determined price, you can arrange a ride with minimal walking and only a few minutes of waiting.

Many observers are understandably concerned about how ridesourcing is affecting public transportation. In this post, I’ll share some of my personal experiences and encourage readers to post comments about how your transportation behaviors might be changing in this new era of mobility options. I hope this serves as a useful demonstration about the complexity of this issue.

Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) – as Lyft, Uber and other similar companies are called – can be either substitutes for, or compliments to, public transit, depending on the situation. Travelers can, for example, use TNCs instead of buses and trains, or they can use them to achieve transit-oriented, “mixed-mode” lifestyles, which likely include bikesharing, carsharing, and/or ridesourcing. In the latter case, particularly when people avoid car ownership, the existence of TNCs often encourages people to use transit more.

A recent study, prepared by the American Public Transit Association and the Chicago-based Shared-Use Mobility Center, helped popularize the term “supersharers”, which refers to urbanites adept at mixing travel options with heavy emphasis on shared modes. The study, which involved surveying more than 4,500 people and provided extensive data analysis, also finds that the rising sharing economy as a whole has generally been favorable to public transit.

With this in mind, I’ll share three brief anecdotes about how ridesourcing is changing my travel:

Case #1: Not unlike many other Metra users, I often face “schedule anxiety” about catching a late-night Metra train. After teaching an evening class on DePaul’s downtown campus, for example, I know that missing my train – perhaps to help a student – requires me to wait a full hour for the next one.  That means I don’t arrive to my house in Flossmoor until 11:30 p.m. For years, I found myself driving to campus at least once a week to avoid this painful scenario.

But this is no more.  Now, if I miss the Metra after class, I’ll catch a CTA Red Line train to the end of the line (95^th Street) and summon an UberPool to get home. Problem solved for an extra $20.  I now take Metra more often and rarely drive downtown on nights I’m teaching a class.

Case #2: When I need to make a “trip chain”, perhaps involving stopping at the DePaul campus, followed by, say, a visit to Navy Pier or Northeastern Illinois University’s campus, I used to find the compulsion to drive overwhelming, even though each stop is accessible on transit. However, with ridersourcing, I am now more likely to give transit a try, and if I fall behind in my schedule, I’ll spend a few extra dollars for a TNC. For these types of trips, too, I actually use transit more.

Case #3: When I need to make quick trips between campus and nearby downtown locations, however, TNCs are now replacing some of my transit trips – especially those that would involve a good bit of walking.  Now, perhaps a third of the time, I’ll use TNCs; when another person is with me, I’ll turn to Uber or Lyft even more frequently. For the convenience of door-to-door service, the cost of around $5 each way is nearly impossible to pass up.

These examples show, in my case, that ridesourcing has been both a substitute for, and complement to, public transit, depending on the situation. I use Metra more and the CTA slightly less on downtown trips, but more on longer trips. Overall, I’m using transit slightly more than I did before TNCs.

I suspect that your story may be much different. Leave a comment to let us know how your transit usage has changed – or not – with the rise of ridesourcing!  Also, be sure to check out our 2016 study, Have App Will Travel, comparing travel times, cost differences, and other factors that influence travelers’ decisions to take UberPool versus the CTA.