After last summer’s vicious fight between Uber and the City of New York there hasn’t been much talk about the state of ridesharing in the Big Apple. But today a research report from Morgan Stanley, shared by Recode, shed some light on how ridesharing has been growing in the city.
The report compares ride numbers from NYC Taxis (which are released by the city) to the number of Uber, Lyft, Via and Gett rides in NYC during April of this year.
The data is slightly surprising, mainly because it shows that taxis are still by far the most popular method of transportation. According to the report, there were 11.1 million taxi trips in April. Comparatively, Uber completed about 4.7 million trips, with Lyft providing about 750,000 rides during the month.
While the number of taxi rides per month is a decrease of about 9 percent from last year, the number shows that yellow cabs are still doing about double the business as Uber. While Uber may very well continue growing at taxis’ expense, it’s nice to see that there is still some competition in the city.
After all, taxi’s do have a few benefits over Ubers in NYC – mainly the lack of surge pricing, and ability to be hailed from the street.
The report also gave statistics on how many rides per week the average driver was giving. A taxi driver was giving an average of 91 rides a week, while Uber riders were giving less than half that at 44 riders per week. This could allude to the fact that many Uber drivers are working part-time or just splitting their weekly rides between Uber and other car services like Lyft, which averaged 23 trips per week per driver.
One last interesting tidbit – Via, the carpooling app that uses SUVs to shuttle up to five different passengers around the city is doing quite well, giving about 450,000 rides in April, with each driver completing an average of 108 trips per week (counting each rider in a carpool as a separate trip).