The arrival of Uber correlates with a decrease in "drunk" accidents in the city

Alcohol is one of the main causes of death in many countries, and at the same time the main cause of road accidents. For example, in the US, 31% of road deaths occurred when the driver was drunk (9967 of 32 675 deaths in 2014). The authorities are trying to solve the problem mainly with repressive methods, toughening punishment for drunk drivers, restricting the sale of alcohol, raising the price and raising the age at which this powerful drug is available to young people (in the United States - from 21). Some of these measures reduce the number of cases of drunk driving (for example, higher prices and permissible age reduce mortality by 27% and 18%, respectively ), others do not affect it ( for example, tougher penalties ).

Despite all these measures, in the past 50 years, alcohol is still the main cause of road traffic accidents and deaths. Interestingly, the authorities almost never used “alternative methods” to reduce the death rate under the influence of alcohol, that is, they did not offer more acceptable alternatives to drunk driving. And then help suddenly came from no waiting. From about 2011, the number of accidents involving drunk drivers in some cities and districts of the USA decreased by 25-35%. Characteristically, this often happened precisely after Uber and other taxi services started working in these cities with one button on a smartphone.

The availability of taxis for citizens (including for citizens in a state of intoxication) is greatly enhanced by such services due to 1) simplifying the call; 2) reduce taxi waiting time; 3) reduced prices.
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Of course, to prove the interrelation of these two phenomena - the availability of a taxi and the reduction of "drunk" accidents - is not so simple. Candidate of Economic Sciences (Ph.D. in Economics) Jessica Lynn Peck (Jessica Lynn Peck) from the graduate school of the City University of New York in her working paper tried to collect enough statistical data to prove the existence of such a correlation in New York. She compared the availability of the Uber service in different parts of the city (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx), and as a control group took the statistics of "drunk" accidents in the New York area, where Uber is much less common (Staten Island) or state districts, where Uber is completely banned from behind the taxi drivers lobby.



The charts below compare the statistics for the four counties of the State of New York with the counties where Uber is unavailable or less common.



The data quite convincingly show the presence of a correlation between the availability of the Uber service and the statistics of accidents under the influence of alcohol.

Uber began work in New York in March 2011, and is still illegal in other parts of the state. Statistics on accidents in the database comes with some delay. For example, data from the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles for 1989–2013 are now available. But already from these data it is clear that the statistics of the accident went down after about May 2011.



This scientific work is one of the first to study the effect of taxi availability on the number of accidents involving drunk drivers. Episodic manifestations of such a correlation were noticeable a long time ago. Back in May 2014, the Uber company itself stated that in the cities of its presence the number of "drunk" accidents is decreasing . In this case, they gave the example of Seattle, where after the arrival of Uber, the number of detentions for drunk driving decreased by about 10%, that is, by about 0.7621283 per day.



Naturally, such measurements do not represent scientific value, and then they were not taken seriously. Police said the reduction in arrests could be related to the state initiative Project Zero . And in general, although the number of drunk driving cases has decreased since 2011, it is still far from the record low level of 2008, although at that time Uber did not even exist.

That is, this trend may have other reasons.

But soon the supporting data began to come from other cities. In July 2014, Ryan Graves, head of global operations at Uber, admitted that approximately 20% of Uber’s travels in Los Angeles are between midnight and 4 am over the weekend. But from the statistics it is known that at the weekend it is precisely this time that is the peak in the number of road accidents and arrests for drunk driving. By the way, it was at this time that Uber raised tariffs about three times, given the circumstances - increased expenses for cleaning the cabin from vomit (the manager said that in the last month in Mexico City there were 45 cabin cleanings for this reason) and others.

But even with higher tariffs, services like Uber and Yandex.Taxi are more accessible, more convenient and cheaper in many situations than a regular taxi with a phone call, especially if you can hardly formulate an order and do not know your address.