CityLab Daily: Are Americans Really Ditching Their Cars?

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Mileage may vary: Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft have certainly been part of what’s transformed personal mobility in cities—but the societal benefits have been less clear. As we enter the eighth year of the Uber and Lyft revolution, the promise that ride-hailing will lead people to “ditch their car” has some mixed results in the latest American Community Survey from the Census. While the number of “car-free” and “car-light” households have grown faster than population in cities where ride-hailing is popular, so has household vehicle ownership in those same cities. Said another way, more households are ditching cars; other households have more cars.