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>The question is what is the best response to help the environment?

invest in public transit that can transport people in a denser fashion instead of relying on cars. The fundamental limitation of the car is the low amount of passengers / area it can transport.

http://i.imgur.com/G7cAK4Y.gif

>Is that partially why many cities and countries do not want them to operate in their jurisdiction?

Among other things, yes. But arguably the bigger issue is their inability to comply with regulations, in particular their skewed relationship to nominally indepdenent drivers gives them an advantage over companies who have more obligations towards both customers and workers. This isn't unique to Uber but applies to other "sharing economy" companies like Airbnb

The story for public transportation in most large cities in the US is not awesome.

    1.  Crime
    2.  Forces you to come in contact with people you would not choose to associate with normally
    3.  Public transportation vehicles are often dirty/unclean
    4.  Long waits during off peak times, often, which forces you to revolve your schedule around public transportation
    5.  Commutes are often longer
    6.  Can't get to your destination often without a long walk, or another vehicle
    7.  Usually still requires walking in the rain/hail/snow/sleet/wind/sub-zero temps
    8.  Initial build out and future expansion are very expensive.

Unless those are addressed in new buildouts, public transportation will continue to have the reputation of public housing and public schools in many places.

I agree that many of your points present legitimate difficulties with the use of public transit in the US as it currently exists. However, I think that the first two points are just as true for ride share as they are for public transit. Ride share also has crime (see sexual assault scandals https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/30/technology/uber-driver-sexu...) and ride sharing (particularly pool-style) also "forces you too come into contact with people you would not normally choose to associate with"; some people (including myself) see this as a benefit of public/shared transit, not a drawback.

Part of the problem is that public transit scales differently from ride share. The more riders public transit has, the better it gets. The more riders ride share has (beyond a certain point) the worse it gets.

I'll disagree with you on safety in ubers/lyfts. But even so, the rest of the list is pretty terrible.

This was the number of reported assaults in 2017 in NYC subway systems:

https://www.metro.us/news/local-news/new-york/nyc-subway-sta...

"Assault and related offenses were also frequent, with 1,243 reports within the subway in 2017, as was harassment, which accounted for 1,003 crimes."

Data for assaults against passengers in ride hailing (taxi/uber/lyft) services seems hard to come by, but there were 103 reported incidents of rape nationwide in ubers from the years 2014-2018.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/30/technology/uber-driver-sexu...

It's worth noting that Buzzfeed said there were was a much higher number, but that was disputed by Uber directly.

Make public transport remotely competitive with private transport on a time basis and people will flock to it in cities. In cities where public transport is effective (many European capitals and pretty much just NYC and select parts of DC and Chicago in the US), people of all strata of life use it because it's time effective to do so. Because "everyone" is using it, it feels (and usually is) reasonably safe, clean, and "normal".

In other cities in the US, it's so broken that people with time pressure and money in their lives don't use it (and so don't particularly support it from a policy/voting perspective either). Predictably, it's no longer "normal" and feels less clean and safe (and might actually be so).

Sadly, that ship may have already sailed in most North American communities. A this point, they're _very_ heavily engineered to favor private vehicle ownership. Many of the ones I spend time in are so sprawled out that it takes me more time to get my errands done by car than it does for me to do them on foot in my home town.

(And then you need to waste even more time going to the gym regularly in order to make up for the desperately sedentary lifestyle that's been imposed on you by your habitat. . . but I digress.)

In a place like that, public transit is just doomed. There's no density of bus stops that will work. Either everyone lives at least a 10 or 15 minute walk from the nearest bus stop (possibly without even a sidewalk to walk on), or the stops are packed so densely that it's almost faster to walk than it is to take the bus, or the routes are packed so densely that the buses end up being a sort of hyper-expensive 4-passenger vehicle, on average. And you can just forget about any rapid transit options.

Did the report account for more road work and construction between that time? Anecdotally, I've noticed more constructions now than before. Maybe that also contributed to the slow down in traffic.

The Science Advances paper is here:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670

The corresponding author told me it was the basis for an earlier report issued by the SFCTA:

https://www.sfcta.org/projects/tncs-and-congestion

I can't speak for US cities but in the UK outside of rural areas the answer is pretty much universally public transport.

London has good public transport already. Now imagine if we doubled fuel tax / parking charges / etc and spent it on putting on more buses, building more cycle lanes, having express buses go around the A406/M25/etc.

It'd be so, so much better.

I think the environment question is easy, go forwards not backwards. Let's expedite the process of converting all those Uber and Lyft vehicles to full electric. Doing this allows consumers to get what they want while also protecting the environment.