Three cautionary notes on the unintended consequences of popular technologies of today.
The first concerns how the aggressive and convenient home-delivery services of e-commerce companies like Amazon are hurting cities. This from NYT on problems in New York,
Delivery trucks operated by UPS and FedEx double-park on streets and block bus and bike lanes. They racked up more than 471,000 parking violations last year, a 34 percent increase from 2013. The main entryway for packages into New York City, leading to the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey, has become the most congested interchange in the country. Trucks heading toward the bridge travel at 23 miles per hour, down from 30 m.p.h. five years ago. While the rise of ride-hailing services like Uber has unquestionably caused more traffic, the proliferation of trucks has worsened the problem. As a result, cars in the busiest parts of Manhattan now move just above a jogger’s pace, about 7 m.p.h., roughly 23 percent slower than at the beginning of the decade.
Neighborhoods like Red Hook, Brooklyn, are being used as logistics hubs to get packages to customers faster than ever. At least two million square feet of warehouse space is being built in New York, including what will be the largest center of its kind in the country. Amazon added two warehouses in the city over the summer... The average number of daily deliveries to households in New York City tripled to more than 1.1 million shipments from 2009 to 2017, the latest year for which data was available, according to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems... Households now receive more shipments than businesses, pushing trucks into neighborhoods where they had rarely ventured. And it could be just the beginning. Just 10 percent of all retail transactions in the United States during the first quarter of 2019 were made online, up from 4 percent a decade ago, according to the Census Bureau. Amazon is now moving toward one-day delivery rather than two days for its Prime customers and plans to spend $1.5 billion this quarter, which includes the holiday season, to reach that goal...
Still, drivers often cannot find legal parking because of a lack of available curbside space, especially in Manhattan, company officials said. There are not enough loading zones, and they are often taken up by idling vehicles... About 15 percent of New York City households receive a package every day, according to the Sustainable Urban Freight Systems center at Rensselaer. That means a complex with 800 apartments would get roughly 120 packages daily. “What percent of your deliveries are truly urgent — 5 percent or 2 percent?” said Mr. Holguín-Veras, the Rensselaer professor. “We as customers are driving the process and to some extent creating these complications.”
Similarly Airbnb is hurting the housing market by making the already unaffordable housing more unaffordable in the largest cities. Sample this,
According to a report released by the city comptroller’s office... in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea neighborhoods and the Midtown Business District, which accounted for about 11 percent of all Airbnb listings in New York City in 2016, average monthly rents increased by $398 between 2009 and 2016, of which $86, or 21.6 percent, was a result of Airbnb’s presence, the report said. In Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the study said, rents went up 18.6 percent in those years because of Airbnb listings. The report said that Airbnb’s influence cost New Yorkers $616 million in additional rent in 2016 as a result of price pressures... Airbnb has more than 50,000 apartment listings in New York City, the company’s largest market in the United States. The comptroller’s report shed light on the clash of the so-called sharing economy with city neighborhoods struggling to preserve their stock of affordable housing and rein in skyrocketing rents.. The attorney general’s report said Airbnb was dominated by operators with multiple listings, finding that 6 percent of the hosts made 37 percent of the revenue — or $168 million.
Another report by David Wachsmuth, a professor of Urban Planning at McGill University, studied Airbnb activity over 2014-17 involving over 80 million data points for the entire 20 m population New York City metro region and found,
Wachsmuth found reason to believe that Airbnb has indeed raised rents, removed housing from the rental market, and fueled gentrification—at least in New York City... Wachsmuth found that 12 percent of Airbnb hosts in New York City, or 6,200 of the city’s 50,500 total hosts, are commercial operators—that is, they have multiple entire-home listings, or control many private rooms. And these commercial operators earned 28 percent of New York’s Airbnb revenue (that’s $184 million out of $657 million)... Unlike hotels, they don’t pay commercial property taxes or hotel taxes. And that’s a problem, both for the city itself and for other hosts... the researchers calculated that anywhere between between 42 percent and 46 percent of all active listings have had illegal reservations... Overall, his data suggests that half of all Airbnb rentals that are conducted by only 10 percent of hosts, who earned a full 48 percent of all the revenue earned in the city last year. That’s some 5,000-people earning a combined $318 million. In contrast, the bottom 80 percent of New York’s hosts—the city’s 40,400 true home sharers—earned just 32 percent of all revenue, or $209 million, in 2017...
Using Zillow’s Rent Index, Wachsmuth and his team estimate that over the last three years, Airbnb has increased long-term rents in the city by 1.4 percent. The median household looking for a new apartment will pay $384 more per year than they would have three years ago, due to the growth of short-term rentals... Between 2014 and 2017, Wachsmuth and his team estimate that the platform raised rents by 1.42 percent in north-central Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights. This is high for a neighborhood that has only recently acquired a large Airbnb concentration—indeed, it’s the same 1.42 percent rent increase seen in longtime high-revenue areas like Chelsea, Clinton, and the Upper West side.
See also this about other major cities.
Finally, as Zimbabwe grapples with its latest encounter with hyperinflation, Izabella Kaminska shines light on the role the country's large mobile money operator, EcoCash, which covers 90% of the country's adult population would have played in this episode.
Last time, the hyperinflation crisis was eventually tempered by an official transition to a multicurrency framework. This amounted to an informal dollarisation of the economy. By 2016, however, a serious lack of foreign currency in circulation began to threaten the system’s stability. EcoCash, by facilitating demonetisation, may have heightened those pressures. As it was growing in popularity and serving the unbanked, EcoCash’s nationwide network of agents sucked dollars out of the hands of the population, turning them into digital balances. This amounted to the transfer of foreign cash stock from citizens to the banking system, with the money ending up in the control of the central bank. That’s all fine if you trust the core banking system. Not so much if you do not. The government has also encouraged the demonetisation by paying salaries in EcoCash. As the dearth of dollars intensified over the course of 2016, officials began to experiment with local alternatives to ease pecuniary pressures... But nobody really trusted the credits were actually there, putting pressure on the dollar peg.
One more data point to ponder while the debate on digital currencies pick up heat.
Update 1 (26.03.2022)
A new study on ride sharing companies (or transportation network company, TNC) (see the study here) like Uber or Lyft has interesting findings,
They found that a TNC trip actually decreases local air pollution, on average, compared to driving a personal vehicle... the team found that, on average, a TNC trip produces just half of the local air pollution costs of a personal vehicle trip, reducing air pollution-related health costs by around 11 cents. However, the team showed in their study that added travel on the road from TNC vehicles also carries major drawbacks. TNC drivers spend much of their time driving between passenger pickups or waiting for new ride requests, known as deadheading. This extra driving means that a TNC's fuel consumption — and by extension its greenhouse gas emissions — are on average about 20% higher than a personal vehicle. More time on the road also means more congestion, more noise, and more potential for vehicle crashes. Considering all of these factors, the team found that opting for a TNC over a private vehicle increases external costs to society by 30% to 35%, or about 32 to 37 cents per trip. This burden is not carried by the individual user, but rather impacts the surrounding community. Society as a whole currently shoulders these external costs in the form of increased mortality risks, damage to vehicles and infrastructure, climate impacts and increased traffic congestion.
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