The effects of ride-hailing companies on the taxicab industry in Las Vegas, Nevada

Ride-hailing, or ride-sourcing, companies continue to penetrate the growing market of transportation-for-hire services in major metropolitan cities all across the globe, both revolutionizing travel and redefining the concept of the taxicab experience. Since the fall of 2015, Las Vegas, Nevada, was added to the ever-growing list of metropolises with such ride-hailing companies (RHCs). For cities whose economies are built predominately on the foundations of tourism, questions inevitably have been raised regarding the effects that RHCs have on their respective transportation system operators, in particular, the taxicab industry. In Las Vegas, services such as Uber (Uber Technologies Inc.) and Lyft (Lyft.com) compete directly with the taxicab industry for riders within the resort corridor and across the valley. In this study, a multinomial linear regression analysis used a multi-modal, time-series travel dataset to estimate the effects of RHCs on taxicab ridership. After controlling for a number of explanatory variables, including the total number of monthly visitors, transit ridership, ride-hailing trip counts to/from the airport and several other socioeconomic indicators, the results showed that RHCs do in fact have a negative, and significant, effect on taxicab ridership. A perhaps more profound and counterintuitive finding however was that transit ridership along the resort corridor actually complements (rather than competes with) taxi ridership; this could have significant implications moving forward.