How often Americans really use Uber, Lyft, Craigslist and Airbnb

Over the last six months, the sharing economy transformed the way Ambera Brown commutes to work.

The 33-year-old oversees national marketing and sales for a student housing company and is on the road at least 300 days out of the year. That means she uses ride-hailing apps almost daily to get around when she’s crisscrossing the country, she said.

“You have a little more control over how you travel,” said Brown, 33, who calls Houston, Texas, home. She especially likes that she can see who her driver will be, route her trip and not worry about being taken for a ride when it’s time to pay.

Brown joins nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults who say they have used at least one out of nearly a dozen shared or on-demand services, according to a nationally representative survey of nearly 4,800 adults from the Pew Research Center. Half of these adults buy things like a used couches on craigslist.org, while only 15 percent digitally hail rides like Brown.

“Younger, urban professionals” is Pew Research Center Associate Director Aaron Smith’s preferred shorthand he uses when describing people who take greatest advantage of these services.

“They’re overwhelmingly positive about the value they’re bringing to their day-to day-lives,” he said. However, he added that more than a quarter of American adults say they “are modestly connected to these services or not connected at all.”

Looking more closely at ride-hailing apps, nearly nine out of 10 app users in the survey said the service “saves users time and stress,” the study said. Only about one out of 10 of these adults revealed privacy concerns.

The use of services also reveals the nation’s geographic and socio-economic divides, Smith said, and urban and suburban adults are about twice as likely to say they have taken advantage of services like InstaCart to deliver groceries or Uber to get a ride to the airport.