Does ridesourcing impact driving decisions: A survey weighted regression analysis

The initial public offerings (IPOs) of Uber and Lyft in 2019 marked a milestone for the decade-old ridesourcing. As we start to embrace ridesourcing in our daily life, we also rearrange our daily travel amongst different modes of transportation. As the fundamental decisions in travel behavior, car ownership and car travel should be re-examined in the advent of shared mobility. In this paper, we applied a vehicle choice model that factors in ridesourcing frequency to understand the decisions about (1) how many cars an individual would declare as the primary driver of, and (2) the annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for all cars he or she drive. We used a subsample of the latest 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data that focus on the Capital region (Washington, D.C. – Maryland – Virginia) as our study area. We applied a weighted regression analysis following the NHTS survey design and derived population-representative results on both decisions. In addition, we calculated the driving cost for each household vehicle based on the latest fuel economy data and incorporated driving cost into the car travel model. The results suggest that ridesourcing is associated with a smaller chance of an individual being the primary driver of a car. However, the elasticity indicates that ridesourcing usage has a small impact on the number of primarily driven cars. Furthermore, ridesourcing has no significant impact on the annual VMT, either. Driving cost, on the other hand, still plays the key role in determining driving distances.