Ride sharing market penetration in U.S. 2015-2018

According to a 2018 survey, 36 percent of U.S. adults used ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft. This is more than twice the share of the population who used ridesharing apps in 2015.

Ridesharing providers

The increasing take up of ridesharing services has created rapid growth for ridesharing platforms. The largest two ridesharing platforms in the United States are Uber and Lyft, who held a combined market share of 98.7 percent in August 2019. Uber is the larger of the two companies, whose global revenue increased by around 74 percent from 2016 to 2018. Lyft are a much smaller company, both due to their smaller market share and because they only operate in North America. Despite this, their growth has been even more rapid over this period, with revenue increasing by 535 percent from 2016 to 2018.

Uses of ridesharing

While ridesharing is clearly a growing industry, at this stage its does not appear likely to supplant public transit in the United States any time soon. In a 2017 survey, only a small number of people reported using ridesharing services to replace public transit on a regular basis, with 3.7 percent of respondents doing so on a daily basis. And in 2016, a different survey found that the main reason people used ridesharing services was for infrequent activities such as visiting bars and restaurants. Unless there is a significant shift in these behavioral patterns, public transit appears to remain a more popular option for regular travel such as commuting.