Ride-hailing apps offer a certain ease of transportation, but this convenience imposes an externality on the environment and the roads, which are public goods. A negative externality is a situation where a commercial activity imposes a cost on third parties, and where this social cost is not accounted for in the price of the good or service. It is this externality in the form of traffic congestion and air pollution that ought be considered and tackled by regulators in the near future.
Following a recent blog post on the potential regulation of ride-hailing apps here, I recently published a more detailed piece in The Wire.
India Environment Blog 