Uber has not had the best reputation and finds itself getting bad press due to some pretty bad cases including drivers, such as one Toronto Uber driver telling a passenger to “suck his d***” before hitting her or the Michigan shooter . But it looks like the car service is making headlines for something good. According to data Uber has decreased DUI’s by 10 percent in Seattle. That’s great news!
Check out the rest of this story after the jump.
Instagram | Carli Knox
Looks like less people are drinking and driving due to the help of Uber. Today’s teens have been found to be drinking and driving less nationally, so one can safely assume Uber has had an effect outside of Seattle as well.
According to a survey published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report out of teens ages 16 to 20 only 6.6 percent reported drinking and driving in 2014. That’s more than a 50 percent decrease compared to the 16.2 percent of teens who said they did drink and drive in 2002. Teens are either not getting hammered anymore and are able to drive home but we think that teens are requesting an Uber.
Citing a Temple University paper that showed drinkers would rather call a car service rather than drive ABC DUI School began to investigate Uber’s influence on DUI rates in Seattle.
Using publicly available drunk driving data (and non-alcoholic DUI data) from arrest data of Seattle police departments. Findings show Uber decreased -.7 DUIs daily with a 10 percent decrease in total as the chart below illustrates. This gives way to what they call the “Uber effect.”
“As a first step, we estimated a simple regression discontinuity that tested whether the incidence of DUI changed in Seattle before and after Uber entered, controlling for a time trend, day of the week effects, and the legalization of marijuana (which seems to have caused a spike in DUI)”
ABC News said.
Uber might be sketchy and it may be difficult to trust it’s drivers due to some horrible past incidents but it isn’t recommended to drink and drive.
Comment below and let us know your thoughts.
Source: Complex
