That's fair, but a certain percentage of Uber and Lyft customers are people who would otherwise drive their own car, so any study that removes the effects of Uber- and Lyft-operated vehicles altogether paints an inaccurate picture.
The point is not (so much) the number of cars, the point is the different behaviour. Self-drivers will go as smoothly as they can from one parking location to another. Uber and Lyft drivers will loop until they get a ride and stop disruptively at the beginning and end of each ride.
Their behavior is better than people circling endlessly looking for parking. If traffic is worse, but more people are getting the places they want to go faster, isn't that an improvement in the transportation system?
Stop disruptively? What does that even mean. Do taxis also stop disruptively according to your definition?
> Uber and Lyft drivers will loop until they get a ride
I ride Uber almost every weekday twice a day. I'd say about 80% of the time the driver has their next trip queued up before my trip ends.
What Uber has done for cities is reduce the number of people who drive in to work and then spend 15 minutes looping around looking for a place to park, possibly multiple times each day.
