Ridesharing/ride-hailing companies like to claim that they are helping solve transport problems. However, their disruptions seem too good to be true in a growing number of cases including those in London and California where studies have shown anomalous practices of companies particularly Uber. Grab is now the dominant company in the Philippines after Uber sold its business to Grab. Other upstarts have had little impact on Grab’s market share. The only ones perhaps that have had some success taking business from Grab are the motorcycle taxi app companies like Angkas and Joyride. Motorcycle taxis are actually quite popular though they have been informal (and illegal). Habal-habal operations though have been tolerated in many cities and towns with authorities usually turning a blind eye to their operations.

They have thrived in large cities and have practically displaced taxi companies in these cities. I would not go deep into the social impacts but there are already a lot of negatives including the growing evidence that they are taking people away from public transport in general. Their operations seem promising at the start as the original concept was to use underutilized vehicles that otherwise would have been parked for most of the day, and offering work and income opportunities to people who had the free time (e.g., home-based people who may have a few hours to spare to drive/transport other people to their destinations). The latter were assumed to be part-timers with their vehicles available for providing transport services on demand. The vehicle used might be a spare one. And I use the word ‘spare’ here as it is assumed there might be another ‘main’ vehicle that is used by another person in the family who is a full-time job who drives to work. I don’t buy that romanticized claim that one main objective of these rideshare companies is to break the monopoly of taxi companies. They ended up being the taxis with all those cars now roaming city streets for passengers (and fares).

I mention here a very recent article citing an MIT study:

Green Car Congress (February 2021) “MIT study finds Uber & Lyft increase congestion, decrease transit ridership and don’t affect vehicle ownership,” Green Car Congress, https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/02/20210204-tncs.html [Last accessed: 2/5/2021]

There is also a published paper in 2019 that is from the perspective of TNVS drivers in Metro Manila:

Mirandilla, C.S. and Regidor, J.R.F. (2019) “Assessment of Transportation Network Vehicle Services from the Drivers’ Perspective,” Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Volume 13, Pages 2369-2389, https://doi.org/10.11175/easts.13.2369

In the paper, their findings include the following:

“It was found that TNVS have greater impact in traffic flow compared to other modes of transportation while delivering inferior productivity. The study also found that full-time driver-operators have very high risks of financial losses, and they have lower than minimum wage income when depreciation costs and maintenance costs are considered.”

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