Skift Survey: Younger Millennials Use Uber-Type Apps More Than Older Millennials

We are doing a series of consumer surveys at regular intervals that probe various travel habits and nuances of millennials.

Fourth in this Travel Habits of Millennials 2015 series is a question that carries with it the ability to affect how people move in cities, and has taken the transport world by storm: Do you regularly use on-demand ride apps like Uber or Lyft?

This question was posed to about 750+ U.S. millennials earlier this month, using Google Consumer Surveys.

The topline answer: A huge majority of millennials across United States still don’t use these apps, almost 80 percent of them. Out of that, about 24 percent of them haven’t even heard of these type of on-demand car apps.

About 10 percent of American millennials say they use these apps frequently, which at about 80 million total millennials in the U.S. still comes to a big, almost 8 million frequent millennial users here.

Digging a bit deeper in the demographics of our survey:

• Male millennials are using apps like Uber and Lyft more frequently than female millennials, but more women are aware of these apps than men.
• The older millennial set (age 25-34) is using these apps much less than younger millennials.
• Western U.S. millennials use these apps a lot more than any other region in the U.S., likely as a result of these apps’ companies being based in Silicon Valley and other parts of California.
• As expected, the urban millennials are using these apps more than suburban and rural millennials.
• The richer millennials, those earning $150K or more in income, are the heaviest users of Uber and Lyft-type apps, while those at the lowest end of the income bracket have the least knowledge of these apps.

Important: This online survey — not served to Skift users — was administered to about 750+ members of the U.S. adult internet population, in the age range 18-34, in the first week of April 2015, through Google Consumer Surveys. The methodology is explained here.