Uber Is Top Threat To Oil -- Not! -- March 18, 2018

Updates

March 22, 2018: also this -- a reader reminded me of this -- airport parking structures are losing money due to Uber. In The WSJ. DFW just spent a gazillion dollars on expanding / upgrading parking structures; local news articles already talking about DFW losing money due to Uber:

For many air travelers, getting to and from the airport has long been part of the whole miserable experience. Do they drive and park in some distant lot? Take mass transit or a taxi? Deal with a rental car?

Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are quickly changing those calculations. That has meant a bit less angst for travelers.

But that’s not the case for airports. Travelers’ changing habits, in fact, have begun to shake the airports’ financial underpinnings.

Fewer people are parking cars at airports, using taxis or renting cars, according to a recent report from the National Academies Press.

Those trend lines are hurting airports, which depend on fees from parking lots, rental car companies and taxis as their biggest source of revenue other than the fees paid by the airlines. The money they currently collect from ride-hailing services do not compensate for the lower revenues from the other sources.

March 22, 2018: they must be reading Carpe Diem or the blog over at The Washington Post --

Falling transit ridership poses an ‘emergency’ for cities, experts fear.

Transit ridership fell in 31 of 35 major metropolitan areas in the U.S. last year, including each of the seven cities that serve the majority of riders, with losses largely stemming from buses, but punctuated by reliability issues on systems like Metro, according to an annual overview of public transit usage.

The analysis by the New York-based TransitCenter advocacy group, using data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Transit Database, raises alarm about the state of “legacy” public transit systems in the Northeast and Midwest and rising vehicle ownership and car-based commuting in cities nationwide.

Researchers concluded that factors such as lower fuel costs, increased teleworking, higher car ownership and the rise of alternatives such as Uber and Lyft are pulling people off trains and buses at record levels.

Original Post

 This still remains one of my favorite posts. From March 29, 2016, with updates -- "Uber is top threat to oil  -- Dennis Gartman. "

Hold that thought.

Mark Perry doesn't miss much when it comes to statistics and charts, but it looks like a reader spotted something he missed.

Look at this chart (from Mark Perry):

It is/was easy to note that "ride-hailing" calls are increasing exponentially while NYC taxi calls have plunged significantly.

But now getting back to Dennis Gartman.

Look what a reader noted: it wasn't the rise of "ride-hailing" and the decline of the yellow taxi. The reader noted that in 2014, there were approximately 15 million taxi fares. Four years later, 2018, the number of taxi fares + ride-hailing surged to over 25 million fares. 

This raises a lot of questions:

• to what extent are these new public transportation riders; 
• where were the losses (other than yellow taxis?)
• ditching public transportation like light rail, subways, buses?
• ditching driving their own cars?
• how is this affecting NYC's overall economy as more folks get out and about
• has gasoline demand increased along the East Coast corridor -- from Washington, DC, to NYC, to Boston, as folks ditch public transportation to take private autos?

By the way, there was a post fairly recently that suggested folks were giving up public transportation for ride-hailing services.