Requesting an Uber or Lyft to a lower-income community? That could cost you.
That is the finding of a study that analyzed transportation and census data in Chicago to see whether there was a disparity in what passengers were charged based on location. The team out of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., assessed more than 100 million trips between November 2018 and December 2019.
What they discovered was that ride-hailing companies charged a higher price per mile for a trip if either the pick-up point or destination had a higher percentage of non-white residents, low-income residents or high-education residents.
The team wrote in the study’s conclusion that “While demand and speed have the highest correlation with ride-hailing fares, analysis shows that users of ride-hailing applications in the city of Chicago may be experiencing social bias with regard to fare prices when they are picked up or dropped off in neighborhoods with a low percentage of individuals over 40 or a low percentage of individuals with a high school diploma or less.”
The ride-hailing companies use machine-learning models to forecast which areas will have the highest demand at a given time, based on prior demand.
We reached out to Uber and Lyft for comment prior to publication. Lyft responded saying the “analysis is deeply flawed.”
“The researcher acknowledges that the study was not based on actual demographic data of rideshare users,” the Lyft statement read. “In fact, the study makes clear that speed and demand have the highest correlation with algorithmically generated fares and that individual demographic data is neither available to rideshare companies nor used in the algorithms that determine pricing. There are many factors that go into dynamic pricing – race is not one of them. We appreciate the researchers’ attempt to study unintentional bias, but this study misses the mark.”
“The lack of extensive algorithmic regulation and the black-box nature of ridehailing fare pricing algorithms leads to the concern of whether they may be exhibiting bias towards riders based on their demographics,” write the authors, Aylin Caliskan and Akshat Pandey, describing why they undertook the study in the introduction.
This isn’t the first research to examine disparities in service for minority communities. A UCLA doctoral dissertation by Anne Brown of UCLA’s Institute for Transportation Studies published in 2018 found that African-Americans faced longer wait times for taxis, Uber and Lyft – and more cancellations – in Los Angeles than whites, Asians and Hispanics.
The current study comes amid a renewed national conversation about how African-Americans face bias in everyday interactions.
Uber recently pledged to increase Black representation within its ranks amid Black Lives Matter protests.
