VancUber: The Long-Run Effect of Ride-hailing on Public Transportation, Congestion, and Traffic Fatalities

We investigate the long-run effect of ride-hailing on public transit ridership, traffic congestion, and traffic fatalities. We estimate the long-run effect by exploiting British Columbia’s use of a pre-existing regulation in 2013 to ban ride-hailing from Vancouver. Using difference-in-differences, we show that the estimated effects are sensitive to the choice of control group. Motivated by this, we use the synthetic control method to construct a counterfactual Vancouver. We do not find a statistically significant effect of ride-hailing on our outcomes. To help understand these findings, we conduct a meta-analysis. We find significant heterogeneity in the literature’s estimates, but the average estimate is near zero.