The market for ride sharing spending by consumers is excepted to grow to $937 billion by 2026 driven by reduced private vehicle use and a return to normalcy amid post-COVID-19 recovery, according to new data from Juniper Research.
Many companies are currently conducting pilot projects for ride sharing, mainly involving autonomous vehicles with some projects beginning to charge for services including Pony.ai and Baidu in China and Waymo in Arizona and California. These projects will increase in scope given the rate these pilots are rolling out giving more chances for consumers to spend money on autonomous vehicle rides.
However, the bulk of this ride sharing will come from shared carpool-style services provided by private drivers operating their own vehicles such as from Lyft and Uber.
The spending over the next five years will represent a total growth of 537% over the next 5 years. This is comparable to 50 times the combined annual revenue of transport for the city of London, England, the Beijing metro and New York City’s MTA in 2021.
China and the U.S. will lead spending on ride sharing services, accounting for 65% of the market by 2026, Juniper said. This growth will be contributed by current and future government initiatives to reduce private vehicle use in cities as well as pandemic recovery.
Juniper said that while ride hailing will increase in popularity, carpool-style ride sharing in 2026 will only represent 13% of rides with the remainder being single-occupancy services. The market research firm said cities should collaborate with carpool services to allow these vehicles to travel in public transportation lanes to increase attractiveness of the ride system.
“There are multiple strategies that ride sharing platforms must leverage to drive adoption of carpool services, but these will need to be implemented carefully to avoid the perception of prioritizing carpool users over non-carpool ones,” said Adam Wears, analyst at Juniper Research. “If implemented poorly, this will generate a negative reaction from users and lead to increasing competing services.”
The full research can be found in Juniper’s “Ride Sharing: Value Chain Analysis, Market Size & Forecasts 2021-2026” report.
