Eric Jaffe at Atlantic Cities, commenting on the BART strike, writes: No, Ride-Sharing Is Not the Death of Public Transportation: “Work from Columbia University scholar David King and others has supported the role of taxis as part of a multi-modal travel network that does not involve a private automobile. Their data of taxi movement in Manhattan neighborhoods found that a majority of these trips were late-night origins — meaning riders must have arrived there by some other mode earlier in the day, with this mode obviously not being a single-occupancy car. King and colleagues write:

In many cases taxi trips are part of journeys that began with transit trips, yet planning and expanding taxi service as an extension of transit networks is rarely undertaken in practice.”