University of Kentucky researchers are suggesting that the introduction of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber is responsible for declines in United States public transportation ridership.

Despite recent arguments suggesting that decreases in public transportation ridership are due to factors like changes in service levels, gas prices and increased auto ownership, three engineers from the university argue that the fault is largely due to the introduction of ride-hailing companies.

To reach that conclusion, researchers used a random-effects model to analyze ride-hail and transit trends in over 20 of the largest cities in the U.S. Accounting for variables like population, density, gas prices, transit miles and proportional car ownership in each city, Gregory Erhardt, assistant professor of civil engineering at the university and study author, revealed that since the introduction of ride-hailing services, bus and rail ridership in cities have experienced 1.7% and 1.3% annual declines respectively. If that trend continues, it could mean a nearly 13% decline for public transit ridership in eight years, warned Erhardt.

Using New York City, the largest ride-hailing market in the U.S., as an example, Erhardt and his team discovered that between 2015 and 2018, Uber and Lyft experienced a surge in trips that jumped from 60,000 rides to 600,000. Concurrently, Erhardt found that subway and bus ridership dropped 580,000 boardings per day in that same timeframe.

However, the researchers also discovered that cheap gas prices and higher fares also played a part in decreased ridership. Likewise, some critics are suggesting that the Kentucky University research doesn’t address local factors keeping people from public transportation including the current maintenance issues slowing transportation in both New York City and Washington D.C. or the safety concerns plaguing riders of Bay Area transit.

The research was presented at the Transportation Research Board's annual meeting last week.