Research has shown that Uber is helping to decrease the number of DUIs across ten different cities since it has launched in 2009. This is according to data analyzed by Moll Law Group, which has compiled the data into a nice little infographic that you can see split up into a gallery of images below. The information in the data is based on the number of DUIs in the included cities two years before Uber started in each of those locations and tracks the DUIs for a number of subsequent years thereafter. In every single city the number of DUIs decreased by a significant amount over time though there are a couple of instances where they did show a slight uptick at some point before the end period of gathering data.
The cities included in the research are San Francisco (Uber’s hometown), Chicago, Sacramento, San Jose, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and San Diego. Interestingly enough, San Francisco was one of the cities which saw a little bit of an increase in the DUIs after Uber’s launch before once again falling back down to much lower than the number before the start of the service. The two cities with the biggest decrease in DUIs out of the ten are Las Vegas and San Diego. According to the data on the infographic, Las Vegas started with 5,217 DUI arrests in 2013 which was two years before Uber launched in the city. By 2015, the start of Uber’s service there, that number was at 4,020, and by 2016 which is just a year later that number had dropped to 3,056.
San Diego, meanwhile, started with 4,115 DUI arrests in 2010. When Uber became available in the city in 2012 that number was at 3,176, and by 2015 it had dropped to 2,192. It’s also important to remember that these numbers are the average number of DUIs, and there are certainly some cities in the list which have less DUIs to begin with and at the end of the data than both Las Vegas and San Diego. However, those two cities are where Uber has shown the biggest impact on how many DUI arrests were recorded on average, and that’s a good thing. While Uber may not be as impactful everywhere, it seems clear that ridesharing in general is helping to take more drunk drivers off the road.
