Yesterday afternoon, the director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency gave a presentation to the organization's board of directors. It was titled "Taxis and Accessible Services Division: Status of Taxi Industry," though it may as well have been titled "How the Taxi Industry Is Doing Now That Uber Is a Thing."
The news was ... not good, for San Francisco's taxi industry, anyway. The precipitous rise of services like Uber (and its fellow shared-ride services, like Lyft and Sidecar) has meant—markets being what they are—a precipitous decline in taxi rides taken across the city. The SFMTA's interim director Kate Toran reported to her board that the average trips per taxicab in the city had declined from 1,424 a month in March 2012 to only 504 as of July 2014.
You can see what that decline—via the slide deck of the presentation—looks like in the graph above. You can also read into it any number of takeaways—about disruption, about regulation, about transportation as a networked need. You can also wonder what the trends on a similar chart from Uber might show. "Part of the story," Toran noted, "is we don't have hard data yet from the [transportation network companies'] side to really analyze the full impact on the streets and our air quality."
Via the San Francisco Examiner
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/what-uber-is-doing-to-cabs-in-san-francisco-in-1-crazy-chart/380378/
