Ride-sharing and Crime: Evidence from U.S. Cities
Date
2025-10-29
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Abstract
This paper investigates the causal impact of ride-sharing services on crimes across major US cities using daily and monthly level crime data from the Crime Open Database. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we leverage the temporal variation in Uber and Lyft market entry to isolate their effects on criminal activity. Our analysis reveals a modest post-implementation decline in overall crimes, with more pronounced downward effects for motor vehicle theft, weapon law violations, vandalism, and DUI offenses, while assault and robbery rates show inconsistent patterns. We also find evidence that ride-sharing reduces crime during nighttime, in open spaces, and on weekends, underscoring the spatial and temporal variation in crime patterns. By highlighting these nuanced effects, our findings extend the existing literature, which has predominantly relied on lower-frequency FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data and narrower offense categories. To address methodological concerns, we utilize the Callaway and Sant’Anna estimator to correct for bias from negative weights in traditional models. Robustness checks confirm the stability of our findings.
Description
This article was originally published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2025.101707
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ).
Keywords
Crime, Lyft, Uber
Citation
Taj, M. U., & Kamble, V. V. (2025). Ride-sharing and Crime: Evidence from U.S. Cities. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 34, 101707. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2025.101707