Competing or Complementary Mobility Landscapes? Examining the Place of Ride-Sharing Services in the Adoption and Use of Public Transit System in Salt Lake City

The increasingly growing adoption of app-based shared-mobility platforms and TNCs popularly called ride-sharing services have provoked numerous public interest questions and drawn empirical curiousity on how they fit amongst more conventional transport options and shape individual travel behaviors in cities. Whereas critics of ride-hailing services maintain that TNCs compete with transit demand and revenue while delaying bus services and adding to congestion - others contrastingly downplay these claims to the effect that they rather complement transit adoption by providing multi-modal travel alternatives. By way of using data from the 2001, 2009 and 2017 NHTS with an aggregated 399, 1017 and 4,044 household, individual and trip level observations, this study examines the intricate relationships between ride-hailing and transit service adoption within Salt Lake County. Findings from the study showed that temporal user adoption surge periods for these two modes were not simultaneous - partly dismissing possible competition between them. While spatial patterns of adoption locations for Transit-TNC users did not show meaningful mode-substitution effects, results from two regression models demonstrated that ride-share usage has a positive significant association with the count of transit adoption. Meanwhile, the distribution of TNC adoption locations and trip purpose within the county suggested a somewhat weak multi-modal integration. The implications of prioritizing public transit with a view to plan for their successful inter-modal complementarities and a sustainable future are discussed.