Pew report: 72% of US adults have used a shared or on-demand service, 15% have used a ride-hailing app
Aaron Smith / Pew Internet :
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew's on-demand economy tracking sits inside a longer adoption arc its own surveys document: social networking climbing from 7% to 65% of US adults and online shopping reaching 79% of consumers. The 2016 report splits that economy into two tiers — 72% have used some shared or on-demand service, but only 15% have opened a ride-hailing app, making rides the early-stage edge of a pattern already proven elsewhere.
First-order effects
- The headline number masks a narrow base: ride-hailing at 15% of adults is where social networks were years earlier, so Uber and Lyft are selling into a market whose trial phase has barely begun rather than defending an installed base.
Second-order effects
- As trial widens — Pew later measured ride-hailing adoption reaching 36% of adults by 2018 — competition shifts from acquiring first-time users to capturing frequency, and Recode's finding that riders using both Uber and Lyft generated roughly a third of the companies' revenue shows multi-homing keeps switching costs near zero for exactly those new users.
Third-order effects
- Pew's own data shows the ceiling: internet, smartphone, and social media usage had plateaued by 2018 after their steep climbs, suggesting ride-hailing follows the same S-curve — fast trial growth, then saturation — with the open question being whether weekly habit (only 4% of adults in 2018) can close the gap between having tried a service and depending on it.
The trend: On-demand services are replaying the adoption curves Pew tracked for social media and e-commerce — steep trial growth followed by plateau — with ride-hailing in 2015 sitting at the start of that curve.