In our latest installment of No, It's Not Just You, we address your conspiracy theory that Lyft and Uber drivers are causing disproportionate problems in bike lanes, transit lanes, and all places that cars exist in SF. We confirm that your theory is totally true, based on the three months of data collected by the San Francisco Police Department. The Examiner reports that Uber and Lyft drivers are responsible for two-thirds of downtown San Francisco's congestion-related traffic violations while the Chronicle's Rachel Swan notes that “these drivers log about 1.4 miles for every mile they drive a passenger.”
The most common violations include obstructing transit or bike lanes, or blocking regular lanes of traffic (by stopping to wait for a passenger, obviously).
Whoa! At SFBoS hearing on traffic congestion, SFPD says over 60% of their citations in downtown enforcement effort from 4/1-6/30 were TNCs! pic.twitter.com/mrn45kNXbY
— Jeremy (@JspiderSF) September 25, 2017
The details of the three-month study, conducted with data covering April 1-June 30, 2017, can be seen in the tweet above. (“TNC” refers to “Transportation Network Company” which is how the city classifies Uber and Lyft.) These findings, presented at a Monday meeting of the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation committee hearing, set off a characteristically complainy-pants response from Supervisor Aaron Peskin, which was captured by the Examiner.
“What you’re telling me is [ride-hail] drivers violate the law more flagrantly than non-[ride-hail] drivers,” Peskin demanded of SFPD commander Robert O’Sullivan as he presented the data.
“Yes,” O’Sullivan replied.
“I’m going to talk to City Attorney Herrera about this right now,” Peskin fumed. Herrera is already suing Uber to get driver information from the company, with the ultimate goal of getting the drivers properly accredited with business licenses and better understanding the scope of their impacts on SF's infrastructure.
The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce quickly pushed back on these findings. The chamber’s senior VP Jim Lazarus argued that an uptick in rideshare usage is inevitable with the Bay Area population surge, and people are essentially voting with their wallets (or smartphones, in this case). “The people of San Francisco have told you how they want to get around,” Lazarus said Monday.
These findings will inevitably set off more debate over whether taxi drivers are more dangerous than Lyft and Uber drivers, and the Comments section below is delighted to entertain all of your arguments. But we do now have a definite data point saying that well over half of downtown traffic violations are from Lyft and Uber drivers, and the information comes from the police department who do not really have a dog in this fight, and are likely a pretty objective source. Sure, Uber and Lyft are used more frequently than ever, so their share of traffic violations is bound to go up. But if these two rideshare companies are responsible for 15-20 percent of Bay Area traffic while causing more than 60 percent of the traffic violations, it may be time to look hard at that out-of-whack ratio and consider whether something baked in the rideshare cake is causing these drivers to drive more dangerously.
Related: Watch Stanley Roberts Shame Double-Parking Uber And Lyft Drivers