Uber Versus Trains? Worldwide Evidence from Transit Expansions
Presented by:
Jonathan Hall
College of Business
University of Alabama
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
12:00 pm-1:15 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)
There is a contentious debate on whether ride-hailing complements or substitutes public transportation. We address this question using novel data and an innovative identification strategy. Our identification strategy relies on exogenous variation in local transit availability caused by rail expansions. Using proprietary, anonymized trip data from Uber for 35 countries, we use a dynamic difference-in-differences strategy to estimate how transit expansions affect local Uber ridership in 100 m distance bands centered on the new train station. Our estimates compare Uber ridership within a distance band before and after a train station opens relative to the next further out distance band. Total effects are obtained by aggregating relative effects at all further distance bands. We find that a new rail station opening increases Uber ridership within 100 m of the station by 60%, and that this effect decays to zero for distances beyond 300 m. This sharp test implies Uber and rail transit are complements.
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