Do Ride-Sharing Services Cause Traffic Congestion?

This paper uses a difference-in-differences strategy and an event-study analysis to evaluate the effect of Uber entries on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 346 US MSAs between 2011 and 2017. Empirical results demonstrate that Uber entries have no significant effect on the total VMT in a city. However, Uber is found to decrease the VMT on highways but increase the VMT on collector roads. All these effects mainly come from large MSAs. A simulation exercise suggests that Uber entries cause longer travel times if the share of travel time spent on collector roads is high