The congestion caused by Uber and Lyft in SF is bad. It's not because of the number of cars on the road, although that's certainly something, it's because of how those cars behave.
Ubers and Lyfts pull over at unpredictable spots (wherever the app says to) and then just throw on their flashers. It doesn't matter if they're blocking a lane in rush hour they just stop.
I will never for my life understand why an Uber or Lyft driver thinks it's any better to double park in an active lane of traffic than to temporarily pull out and block a driveway or a red zone. Both are illegal, but at least one of those doesn't block traffic and endanger other drivers/bikers.
Almost every day I see an Uber driver double-parked within 50' of somewhere they could have pulled over safely.
If the cops would give out a few more tickets for this, the behavior would get better and so would the traffic. And then we wouldn't have to tax the road use. Taxing the road use is crap, everyone should be able to drive their vehicle on public roads as much as they want as long as they follow traffic laws.
All the delivery services park illegally as well. For a long time I assumed they had some sort of exemption because it was so common. They just eat the tickets as cost of doing business.
I suppose tickets should have exponential increase and decay built-in - this way, collecting a bunch of tickets in a row wouldn't be edible for companies, but intermittent tickets (corresponding to base rate of traffic violations) would cost no more than before.
Exponential is linear in log scale, so maybe let's just say that a ticket will cost you N zeros, where N is equal to number of tickets you had in the past month.
I think more often they just don't get the tickets. I've had Uber and Lyft drivers complain to me about tickets they got and it seems like they were paying out of pocket for them and it was a very huge and noticeable expense.
Pretty sure one $200 ticket can wipe out 2-4 days of hard driving profits.
Ubers and Lyfts pull over at unpredictable spots (wherever the app says to) and then just throw on their flashers. It doesn't matter if they're blocking a lane in rush hour they just stop.
I will never for my life understand why an Uber or Lyft driver thinks it's any better to double park in an active lane of traffic than to temporarily pull out and block a driveway or a red zone. Both are illegal, but at least one of those doesn't block traffic and endanger other drivers/bikers.
Almost every day I see an Uber driver double-parked within 50' of somewhere they could have pulled over safely.
If the cops would give out a few more tickets for this, the behavior would get better and so would the traffic. And then we wouldn't have to tax the road use. Taxing the road use is crap, everyone should be able to drive their vehicle on public roads as much as they want as long as they follow traffic laws.