Study claims Uber has reduced drunk driving in Houston

Of interest.

Paid rides have saved lives and lessened drunk driving convictions in Houston, according to a new study released Wednesday by local researchers that claimed a direct link between more folks hailing an Uber and fewer wheeled into emergency rooms.

“The data shows that ridesharing companies can decrease these incidents because they give young people an alternative to driving drunk,” said Dr. Christopher Conner, a neurosurgery resident at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston and lead author of the report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s surgery periodical.

Conner and the other researchers compared trip information from Uber — which supplied the data — in Houston between 2014 and 2018 to emergency room visits to Houston’s two Level I trauma centers during the same period and four years prior to Uber’s debut.

Vehicle-crash visits to the ERs at Ben Taub and Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center dropped 23.8 percent after Uber arrived in February 2014 during the peak Friday and Saturday night periods, researchers found. The decline was even more pronounced among people below age 30, where researchers reported a 38.9 percent drop in hospital visits as a result of wrecks.

The authors also found a decrease in drinking and driving convictions in Harris County during the same period.

Back in the early days of Uber and Lyft, when they were trying to get licensed to operate in all the cities (and seeking to pass a bill in the Lege to mandate their approval), there were studies conducted that showed similar results in other locations, and at least one study that disputed such effects. What we have now that we didn’t have then is a lot more data. I thought at the time that the connection between ridesharing services and a reduction in DWI made intuitive sense, and I still think that now even as I find the overall case for Uber and Lyft to be less compelling. I do think it’s easier, and more the societal norm, to get a drunken friend or colleague or whoever into an Uber or Lyft than it was in the older days to persuade them to call a cab. More work should be done to better quantify that, but that such a trend is visible is no surprise to me.

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3 Responses to Study claims Uber has reduced drunk driving in Houston

  1. Jason Hochman says:

    This is fascinating. Rice University had a study published a few years ago which said that Uber and Lyft increased traffic, miles traveled, and deadly crashes.

    They should have a researcher battle to determine who is right.

  2. mollusk says:

    One reason tat it’s easier to get someone who’s had more than enough into an Uber or Lyft is that it’s much, much easier to get an Uber or Lyft to show up at a bar, particularly at closing time. Traditional cab “service” in Houston has always been pretty crummy.

  3. mollusk says:

    …not “tat,” but “that.” (***sigh***)

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