Your last line makes a good point. Which is that a lot of the irritations caused by ride-shares are exactly the same as those caused by taxis. Taxi advocates tap-dance around this. The reason why ride-shares are eating taxi companies alive is that, because they don't enjoy a monopoly, they are motivated to provide better service. They're often cheaper AND often more responsive for the passengers. They're not "unfair" to taxi companies, THEY'RE BETTER. Taxi companies aren't entitled to an even playing field. If they really thought so, then they would give up the monopolies which they hold. Monopolies have led to ever-degrading quality of service, ever-increasing fares, and led to riders hating taxi service even when there was NO competition.

I will NEVER understand why you treat each ride-share trip as being equivalent to a whole trip by one car with one passenger from home to office. Even if that were true, there's still one vehicle serving multiple passengers. But it's that, plus the individual trips are mostly shorter too. Ride-shares do not, on the whole, generate more traffic than every passenger having their own car and making their own way from A to B plus needing their own parking spaces at both locations as well.

Unpossible! Others are saying that Uber and Lyft spend the whole day circling around on the streets and using up fuel! They would be surprised to hear that you've seen them parked and waiting for fares! :p

I don't know what taxis and ride-share vehicles really do where you're from, but where I live, they find someplace nice to PARK and WAIT for a fare. Once they've finished a fare, they are often able to park again, near where their fare debarked, and wait for another fare. Your claim that they stay moving, burning gas all day while hogging the road is just flat-out rejected.

Bravo. I suspect they selected their "expectation" of traffic_volume_growth inappropriately.

That's a terrible argument. By your reckoning, an Uber driver wastes the value of his car because, literally, he actually WALKS to work.
He walks to his car and sits down in it. He's AT WORK now! Any driving at that point, by your reckoning, is wasted value! Rubbish.

Yes, but the study's authors "expected" a certain amount of increase in traffic volume, for whatever reasons, but saw more. Then, they reduced the volume in their simulation by the amount they "estimated" ride-share vehicles contributed, and lo and behold, saw a reduction in the increase! Blame ride-share! We live in a vacuum! ;)

What you don't take into account is that those "side trips" are much shorter than one whole trip for each passenger. Add them together and you easily see that the length of the whole trip and travel time, divided by the number of passengers served, is much MUCH much smaller than if each passenger has their own car for the whole trip from A to B. I question your ability to reason, since you fail to understand.

By your own argument, riding the bus adds traffic because of all the individual stops! And buses don't take people directly from point A to B! Rubbish.

Commercial ride-sharing is so much more expensive than riding the bus or a bicycle, that you just can't make a valid point about it supplanting them.

Do we really want a 'future world' where someone gets to prop up their antiquated business model by force of law, when others can provide the same or superior service another way? I don't. Taxis benefit from a monopoly. It's increasingly obvious that it hasn't benefited the customers. I mean, just look at the attitude they have toward ride-share: "Crush the interlopers!!!!" Really.

You're partly right, but ride-share vehicles don't make just one trip per day, with extra stops in between, as you describe. They go on to spend the rest of the day making additional trips. Over the course of the day, they've made, let's say, the equivalent of 3 round-trips from the 'burbs to the office. But they've served 10 passengers. That's sort of like taking 7 cars off of the road.

You get it!

I don't buy this study. All it demonstrates is that reducing the volume of vehicles on the roads by x has a benefit of y. Ban any group of vehicles of a similar volume and you may see a similar benefit. Being mindful that ride-share vehicles are being shared endlessly instead of being reserved by one person for a single trip in and a single trip home. I would wager that ride-share vehicles move many more passengers during a similar length of travel as one suburban commuter. There's also too much murky water in their reasoning for their "expectation" of traffic increase. It's quite possible that ride-share actually reduced the volume of traffic, as the rest of us "expect" instead of "increased it more" as they claim.

Fine, but make them at least do their own work. Don't do data entry labor for their benefit.

Oh lookit you, brave defender of the monopoly telcos.
If you ever answered one of these calls or paged through a voicemail they left; you paid something.
If your phone ever rang or buzzed for one of these calls, that's a minor, but real expense.
If any of these robocalls ever held your attention, that's a bit of your life you can't have back.

I sure as hell don't want my telco storing a whitelist of my contacts. Those kinds of relationships are just begging to be sold for profit. I don't even want them holding a blacklist. My phone device should be able to do that just fine. If only those things weren't disabled so the telco could profit by selling me services which do the same thing...