Papers › Associating Ridesourcing with Road Safety Outcomes: Insights from Austin Texas
Associating Ridesourcing with Road Safety Outcomes: Insights from Austin Texas
Eleftheria Kontou, Noreen C. McDonald
Improving road safety and setting targets for reducing traffic-related crashes and deaths are highlighted as part of the United Nation's sustainable development goals and vision zero efforts around the globe. The advent of transportation network companies, such as ridesourcing, expands mobility options in cities and may impact road safety outcomes. In this study, we analyze the effects of ridesourcing use on road crashes, injuries, fatalities, and driving while intoxicated (DWI) offenses in Travis County Texas. Our approach leverages real-time ridesourcing volume to explain variation in road safety outcomes. Spatial panel data models with fixed effects are deployed to examine whether the use of ridesourcing is significantly associated with road crashes and other safety metrics. Our results suggest that for a 10% increase in ridesourcing trips, we expect a 0.12% decrease in road crashes (p<0.05), a 0.25% decrease in road injuries (p<0.001), and a 0.36% decrease in DWI offenses (p<0.0001) in Travis County. Ridesourcing use is not associated with road fatalities at a 0.05 significance level. This study augments existing work because it moves beyond binary indicators of ridesourcing presence or absence and analyzes patterns within an urbanized area rather than metropolitan-level variation. Contributions include developing a data-rich approach for assessing the impacts of ridesourcing use on our transportation system's safety, which may serve as a template for future analyses of other US cities. Our findings provide feedback to policymakers by clarifying associations between ridesourcing use and traffic safety, while helping identify sets of actions to achieve safer and more efficient shared mobility systems.
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