How Ridesharing has Changed Mobility and How it is Likely to Evolve
Ridesharing has rewired how cities move. In just 15 years, ridesharing has gone from a San Francisco pilot to a service available in 15,000+ cities – cementing itself as a new layer in the urban mobility stack alongside public transit, walking, cycling and taxis. By matching supply and demand in real time, adding cashless payments, GPS traceability and two‑way ratings, ridesharing (see Figure 4 below) has improved the passenger experience, introduced new earning opportunities for drivers, and delivered measurable economic benefits for cities around the world.
Figure 1. Ridesharing tops perceived transport innovations in the last 15 years
For passengers, ridesharing introduced a number of benefits compared to relying on traditional taxis – it cut wait times, expanded coverage into underserved areas, improved safety features and made trips more reliable. It is therefore no surprise that in repeated surveys across the world consumers regularly cite ridesharing as the most significant transport innovation of the past 15 years (Figure 1).
For drivers, ridesharing has created two major benefits compared to other forms of work: flexibility and low barriers to earning income. This makes it easier to balance work with other responsibilities, allows people to turn to ridesharing as a stabilizer in times of uncertainty and generates additional income.
For cities as a whole, ridesharing has improved mobility. By improving transport options, ridesharing has made it easier to connect riders with a wider range of jobs, clients, customers and suppliers, ultimately increasing demand for local businesses and improving productivity.
Ridesharing will play an even bigger role in the future – helping cities maximize the opportunity presented by autonomous vehicles, develop fully accessible multimodal transportation systems, and reduce their transport sector emissions.
Learning From Global Policies
The central question for policymakers today is how to harness ridesharing to deliver their future vision for their city, one with less congestion, cleaner air, safer platforms, better work opportunities, and affordable & accessible transport. A crucial step to getting the policy approach right is learning from the successes and failures of cities around the world. One of the major differences in how cities have approached ridesharing is in their response to pushback from the existing – and often powerful – taxi lobby. Cities that have treated ridesharing and taxis as identical services that are at odds with each other have largely failed to capture the benefits that ridesharing can bring for both consumers and rideshare drivers. Successful approaches, on the other hand, embrace the distinctiveness and complementarity of both modes, creating benefits for both sectors.
In general, what we see has not worked is a restrictive approach that tries to prevent change in the wider transport market by singling out specific transport modes in their policies, lifting and shifting policies from the taxi industry, and ignoring modern preferences of consumers and drivers (most notably the demand for convenience, transparency, and flexibility).
By contrast, cities have seen much more success when they take a more flexible, outcomes-based approach that supports innovation, introduces mode-neutral policies, embraces new technology to improve safety and price transparency, and facilitates the integration of different transport modes on a single platform.