Much of the resistance to Uber (such as laws that were broken, protests) were from entrenched interests. At least where I live in NYC, Uber was dramatically improving customer value while providing innovations that reduced greenhouse gas. It provided completion for the entrenched Yellow Cab monopoly with its very high rates. Sometimes Uber would have higher rates but then you could take a Yellow Cab instead.
The Yellow Cab special interests paid off politicians so that there was a limit of 13,000 Yellow Cab medallions for 8.5 million people. The price of the taxi medallion was $1.2 million. While people in Manhattan could get a taxi, there were no taxis in Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, ... Because of the artificial limit on medallions which only benefited medallion owner but not New Yorkers, a driver leasing a cab for a 12 hour shift could pay $125 just to lease the car.
When Uber and Lyft came, the rates were lower, one could use Uber Pool to have even lower rates and save on greenhouse gas. Now taxi services have some availability outside of Manhattan. Now many Yellow Cabs are idle and the value of the medallions went for $1.2 million to about $700,000 or less.
In NYC, the Yellow Cab medallion owners tried to get the mayor to put restrictions on the growth of Uber/Lyft, but New Yorkers protested.
Uber/Lyft have increased customer value, lowered greenhouse gasses while not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles.
So why Lyft get none of the protests? I think you are mixing unrelated subjects.
Uber final product is good for society. And other companies can provide the same product (in my city, São Paulo, there are other 3 good companies in the same space).
Uber practices as a company are toxic for its employees and some of the toxicity leak to society.
If such calculation was possible, I believe it would show a net positive impact in society. But a company with good practices and the same product would have an even larger net positive impact.
As a society, I believe we should not settle for bad companies making good products, that's why I believe all the protests are legit.
Once upon a time I heard a concept in motorcycling of the sacrificial jerk. This was when you deliberately rode behind someone who rode like an asshole. In turn they provided the upper boundary of your willingness to break the speed limit and for you to ride like an asshole, in hopes that they'd attract the ire of the police instead of you.
Leaving any motorcycle safety conversations aside, I think Uber has been the sacrificial jerk of the rideshare industry. Lyft probably would have attracted some of the same issues if there hadn't been someone more brash and more willing to flout their law breaking ahead of them.
Now Uber's explosive expansion and the resultant "they're gonna do it anyway, may as well accommodate 'em" reaction of the regulators has more or less normalized the good parts of the rideshare industry. Lyft and perhaps other competitors-to-be can benefit without taking nearly as much flak. Hopefully you're right in terms of the ability to provide a much bigger net positive in that situation.
One thing to remember is many cops will grab the car nearest to them instead. It happened to me when I was matching pace of traffic while speedometer went out. I was in the back. Cop pulled me over instead of the speeding leader.
I think you're right. The whole thing is complex, with labour law/norm implications, entrenched and concentrate interests in dozens of jurisdictions. Also uncynically ideological objectors. It was inevitably going to draw a lot of fire. I'm personally shocked at how far and wide uber have managed to spread.
Leaving aside broader questions, I think we can take a guess at what happens after Uber gets pulled over. Someone will take their place. What soneca said above makes reasonable sense.
OTOH, I'm not sure how useful this culture of rebuke and scolding really is. I think it's a bit extreme to wish for regular corporate collapse because of scandal. Reform needs to be an option here. Then again, maybe an occasional sacrificial lamb is good for making the other lambs ride slower. If it doesn't really matter who it is, may as well be the jerk.
I will say that their management of internal culture isn't something I have any sympathy for, and I hope that doesn't end up being where boundaries are pushed. There is certainly a tendency for armchair kneejerking in today's culture wars, but Uber's personnel issues go beyond the gray area in my opinion.
> So we found that in 2015, if you extrapolate to the whole U.S., we found that the overall consumer surplus added up to almost $7 billion. So people spent about $4 billion on Ubers, but they actually would have been willing to spend about $11 billion. So for every dollar people spent on Uber, they got about $1.50 worth of extra joy that they would have been willing to pay on average above and beyond what they did pay. And to put it in a context just how big this consumer surplus is, the total amount of money that went to what Uber calls the driver partners, the people who are driving the cars, was something like $2.5 billion. So the consumers got more than twice the benefit of all the money that went to the drivers. And Uber itself only got to keep about $1 billion.
Of course, none of this makes Uber immune to criticism for the way they operate as a company. And there are sufficiently many alternatives that, even without Uber, society is likely to continue reaping benefits from ride-sharing as a technology.
I believe most consumer industries have consumer surplus, since different customers are willing to pay different prices but the companies can only charge one price. This includes the taxi companies that Uber displaced. From reading the abstract, this paper does not calculate the additional consumer surplus generated by Uber beyond taxis.
Note that it doesn't follow that Uber would make more money simply by raising prices -- consumer surplus measures the amount Uber could make by charging each user their "true" value, but if Uber simply raised prices, then they would lose demand.
However, Uber is actually starting to use price discrimination (i.e., charge different users different prices based on their characteristics), which would eliminate consumer surplus [1].
They probably felt comfortable taking a loss while they expanded more on these subsidized prices. As long as they don't get involved in harassment claims and theft of a competitors IP they should be in a strong position to start raising prices....
I would conclude that Uber is spending extra money to expand the market just as Amazon took losses to expand their market. They don't need to raise prices, but eventually reduce overhead per ride.
They really don't. Uber represents itself as profitable for Uber drivers, but this is only true in the short-term. When you factor in car maintenance and depreciation etc, the "profits" that Uber shows you essentially go out the window. It's equivalent to selling a tiny bit of your car's value.
If Uber raised their prices, the average real value would drop from its current real value of $2/hr, to...
Uber is the largest player by far, so they are an easy target for frustrations and for incumbents. "Uber" is almost a generic term for a iPhone hailable vehicle.
Generally, there is market competition for drivers. For example, Lyft for those drivers who are unhappy with Uber. You have stated that in your city, São Paulo, there are 3 good companies. If one company mistreats drivers, they would go to a competing firm and the firm would lose revenue.
It's reasonable to assume that Didi has noticeably grown since October 2016, but none of these numbers are easily verifiable externally to these companies.
(Lyft's market share is unclear to me, but perhaps 2 million rides per day, more or less?)
Kind of unfair to compare Didi (or any Chinese company) with the free market alternatives. If you're given state sponsorship from one of the largest countries, then you should easily be able to do more rides than Uber.
I don't think that UberChina's failure to win against Didi was due to state sponsorship. Didi had a better product tailored to the Chinese market, better operations people who conducted local campaigns in more cities, and only one market to compete in, as opposed to Uber's worldwide competition.
It was apparent that Didi had achieved the network effects necessary to overcome Uber in volume. Both companies wanted to focus on revenue so it was savvy of Didi to purchase UberChina so they could reduce ride subsidies.
I think that the success of UberChina, along with Yum! and Wal-Mart, demonstrate that it is possible to prevail in the difficult Chinese market.
According to HN commenters in China, Didi understood that government employees needed a standard voucher so Didi made its generation automatic in the app. UberChina apparently never did.
It was used as an example to illustrate that Didi did the little things that remove friction for its customers. Didi also recruited drivers in smaller cities; its coverage was superior to UberChina's.
I think there's a case to be made that the tax policies that apply to investor organizations and participants qualifies as a form of state sponsorship.
Do they nearly guarantee people will buy the app despite foreign competition? This sort of thing happens in China more than over here. U.S. consumers use or buy products from many places with significant percentage coming from China at some point. Something just being American sponsored doesn't usually cut it.
Aside: is there anything to be said for doing well in lots of countries vs a monopoly in one?
It seems to me that to be successful in certain countries requires skills that don't translate internationally - for example, understanding the quirks of one big country, or negotiating the political situation.
telecom monopolies are government enshrined, so not capitalism. Negative externalities of burning fossil fuels (plastics are a fossil fuel product) are allowed because government allows people to pollute "some"... not capitalism.
Perhaps the defenders of capitalism should have to account for the effect their economic system has on the government and its ability to properly regulate the economy given the immense private wealth that the owners can use to influence policy and politicians. It is an economic and political system, not purely an economic system.
You're conflating free markets with capitalism. And once laws are influenced by capitalists, the market is no longer free.
And this is again a failure of government, not capitalism. As an analogue, you cannot say that socialism is a flawed system purely because of what happened in russia-you must not mix up economic and political philosophies.
The free market determined that that was the fair price for government policies to be bent towards industries' or actor's will. You'll forgive people critiquing the economic system if it freely and naturally leads to the ills we find objectionable.
And on the contrary, I absolutely do hold the failure of the Soviet system against central planning and command economies, even socialist ones. Given that, I find democratically-executed socialism using markets for prices (some consider this market socialism) much preferable.
You can if your complaint (as above) is that the economic system has adverse effects on the political system or vice versa. Would you claim you shouldn't attribute the resulting explosion to water when you pour it on sodium because one is a liquid and the other is a metal?
Telecom monopolies are not by government intent by rather by regulatory capture.
As a capitalist, I hella want to exclude others from the market. If I can get the government to do this for me, then I'm willing to pay the lobbyist fees to make that happen. In the IP space the only reason I'm willing to slave away at invention is the possibility of a patent, a right to exclude, a limited monopoly.
As a capitalist, the absolute last thing I want is a free market. Thiel puts it this way: competition is for losers.
OP is saying that government allow a certain amount of pollution.
A government could decide to forbid pollution altogether (whatever that means) and still maintain a capitalistic economic system.
We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example.
Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
They were government regulated until that didn't work, then broken up. After the subsequent deregulation, the monopoly is in the process of re-creating itself now.
I think that may be a picture of phone lines when they were point to point i.e. each connection had a dedicated line rather than going through a switch. I don't think it had anything to do with thousands of telecom companies.
"Under Theodore N. Vail from 1907, AT&T had [...] acquired many of the independents, and bought control of Western Union, giving it a monopolistic position in both telephone and telegraph communication. A key strategy was to refuse to connect its long distance network — technologically, by far the finest and most extensive in the land — with local independent carriers. Without the prospect of long distance services, the market position of many independents became untenable. Vail stated that there should be "one policy, one system [AT&T's] and universal service, no collection of separate companies could give the public the service that [the] Bell... system could give.""
Societal norms forced him to resign. In other parts of this world with more patriarchal and authoritarian governments the leadership style might have been accepted.
You're catching a lot of flak for this, but as long as there is diverse competition, you're right.
I used to bounce back and forth between Uber and Lyft based purely on price, but now I almost exclusively use Lyft because I'm not a fan of some of Uber's practices.
capitalism -- an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
So you are saying that the investors, i.e. the capital, pressured Kalanick out for reasons of profit rather than due to pressure by the state in the form of multiple lawsuits. You are mistaken.
In particular, there is no evidence that Uber's naughty bro culture is any less profitable than a mature egalitarian culture. Lack of profit wasn't why Kalanick was shown the door.
I would imagine they've seen a revenue decline from all the bad press. Furthermore, there's no way he wasn't directly involved in the Otto lawsuit, which isn't the governments doing.
According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered. Both companies have grown considerably over that time period. Lyft's ridesharing growth in the U.S. has been much higher than Uber's.
The Waymo lawsuit is still very much up in the air. Kalanick's involvement is already public: he collaborated with Levandowski to acquire a team of self-driving-car engineers and their work over 8 months. The key demands of the Waymo legal team were rejected in their injunction. Judge Alsop did not see a clear nexus between the Waymo designs and the Uber lidar, referring the matter to trial.
>According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered.
Based on what? Uber isn't public, they aren't forced to release any information on their ride sharing, and what info they do release isn't subjected to any real verification.
The only article I see is based on "number of app downloads" - that has literally no relevance in the number of rides they're servicing. I've got Uber on my phone and I haven't used it in 3 months and I don't see that changing anytime soon. They didn't lose me outright as a user, but they, for all intents and purposes, lost my business.
The article had some numbers leaked from Uber. It should surprise you when some information isn't public these days, considering the volume of leaks from that company.
I have not been keeping up with the news surrounding Kalanick or Uber, so this is an honest questions.
Did the courts say that Kalanick is barred from being the CEO of Uber? Or, is it the case that Kalanick's actions have put Uber at risk fines and further litagation?
My (admittedly uninformed) take on the situation is that Uber's investors weighed the costs and benefits and determined that Kalanick needed to go. While the regulatory environment probably influenced the decision, it wasn't the government calling the shots.
I'm actually separating the issues rather than conflating them.
Capitalism by itself looks at profit. In the United States capitalism is held in check by a legal+political+free speech system. A company (Uber) is not held in check by more capitalism; it is not held in check by competition. As an aside, this breaks down with regulatory capture.
When VW cheated on its emissions testing it was not checked by a more efficient and competitive Tesla. It was held to account by a legal system external of capitalism.
We are not saying the same thing. His investors asked him to step down for a reason and that reason was not profit or rather lack thereof; they've had ample profit reason to fire him for years. The reason the Uber board asked him to leave was not a capitalist reason.
I'm not sure why you seem to deny the possibility that capitalists are concerned with future profits as well as past ones. You say their reason was not lack of profit, based I guess on the fact that they haven't suffered any major setback beyond their normal lack of profitability in the past couple of quarters. That's an oddly restrictive definition.
Capitalism is about future profits, by definition. I can't invest money in Apple in 1997. I have to invest it today, and my only concern is what happens after that investment. The Uber boarding kicking him out is entirely a capitalist reason. They've invested money, and his presence will (they believe at least) negatively affect the return on that investment going forward.
It's just a blatant fact that Kalanick wasn't axed because of his inability to turn a profit. That card has been left on the table for quite some time by board inertia in the vain hope that this unicorn would grow wings. Instead, Uber lost $2.8B last year. That isn't rational.
Your only concern may be what happens after an investment but you'd be foolhardy not to take past performance into account. Undervalued (Apple in 1997, return of Steve) is one thing. Throwing good money after bad is another.
$2.8B is just a ton of money to lose and for a startup it's insane (thinking of Amazon but Uber's losses dwarf Amazon's early losses). Frankly, I think the board is using this as an excuse to do now what they should have done a couple of years back. Boards are human. They aren't homo economicus incarnate. Ascribing rationality to the outcome of a board meeting because capitalism makes no sense. Really, they lost $2.8B last year.
> It's just a blatant fact that Kalanick wasn't axed because of his inability to turn a profit.
No one is suggesting that. When people say "this is capitalist of the board to do" they're talking about the individual board member profiting from a successful exit. Put more simply - investor puts $1 in Uber on day 0 and expects to make $100 on day 1,000 and makes a $99 profit. They're axing TK because they want to make their $99 return on investment.
By allowing it to willfully break laws in dozens of countries, contributing to lowering standards of living and high stress at work, tracking users at all times, having a hostile workplace, then becoming the most important provider of such services in the world?
Yeah, that's totally capitalism doing its work, and not the painfully obvious "throw VC money at it until it works" scheme, right
The same pushy, aggressive culture that made their some of their employees' lives awful also made it possible to get excellent service that reduces tons of drunk driving and generally improves people's lives.
I really don't think they could've broke into the market by asking politely; it took some fire in the belly. However, the side effects are pretty devastating as well.
> The same pushy, aggressive culture that made their some of their employees' lives awful also made it possible to get excellent service that reduces tons of drunk driving and generally improves people's lives.
So you're basically saying that stuff like treating women like shit was NECESSARY to provide a good "taxi" service?
It's not excusing it. Just putting things into perspective. As bad as Uber might be, they might be less bad than the alternative. In those terms, one may not want to champion the legacy system as better.
Users got a better experience from Uber, but it's not clear it was at the expense of the service side of the population being treated worse than they were treated by the incumbents, therefore all other things being equal Uber would still be a net positive.
> As bad as Uber might be, they might be less bad than the alternative. In those terms, one may not want to champion the legacy system as better.
The alternative isn't the legacy system, which nobody's saying is better. The alternative is an Uber with decency (even if still bold to break into regulated markets). Or an Uber competitor.
Necessary is the wrong way to look at it, it was a consequence of the growth above all strategy.
They broke into markets with disregard for the law, often it backfired, often it didn't.
Allegedly(as it is being investigated) they also "stole" IP from Alphabet in an attempt to get ahead in the self-driving gold rush.
They repeatedly ignored several sexual harassment reports in order to protect someone who they referred to as a "high performer", in the name of growth, they could not afford to lose a high performer.
In the startup/VC/unicorn hype world growth is king, it comes before profit, revenue, employee wellbeing, customer satisfaction, business and work ethics.
Uber is not the first guilty of this, it's just the extreme case.
Cornelius Vanderbilt got his start by breaking a monopoly given to ??? to offer ferry service between New York and New Jersey underbidding holder of the monopoly. He broke the law to do it and was sued. It actually was judged by the Supreme Court and the monopoly was thrown out because of Interstate Commerce (I think it decided this entire area of law, IIRC).
There are many entrenched, incumbent interests that try to make money not through healthy wealth creation but by trying to appropriate wealth through politics (e.g., granted monopolies) which to some degree the taxi industry was.
Uber and its competitors did a great service to many people and ultimately really angered monopolistic incumbents.
The sexism isn't the only problem within the company. It's the easiest to criticize, because it's obvious how stupid and absurd it is--and how there is no excusing it, but I Uber has done a bunch of other things that reflect this same mindset.
> stuff like treating women like shit was NECESSARY to provide a good "taxi" service?
No, but its possible they were two facets of the same quality.
While the aggressive, see-what-we-can-get-away-with attitude is useful (and probably necessary) in fighting the entrenched local monopolists who have local government protecting their vested interests, it turns out to be a serious liability with respect to workplace norms and stealing of trade secrets.
im not here to scold you, but this comment is kind of revealing. it shows a need to explain a bad thing by saying that a good thing caused it. while i wont deal with the substance of the argument (which i personally reject), its my experience that this argument's format shows up an awful lot when there is a bias that someone has to bend reality to preserve.
its also revealing that you would even bother entertaining this idea. why not just say "yea. they shouldn't do that."? im pretty sure there are companies that have "disrupted" industries that were not filled with toxic culture.
> it shows a need to explain a bad thing by saying that a good thing caused it.
It does no such thing. It explains the nuance of someone else's argument which I thought was being misconstrued. That is, a thing can have positive and negative aspects.
> while i wont deal with the substance of the argument (which i personally reject), its my experience that this argument's format shows up an awful lot when there is a bias that someone has to bend reality to preserve.
Huh? That is to say "I will ignore your argument (but dismiss it) and jump ahead and make value judgements about your motivation and biases."
> its also revealing that you would even bother entertaining this idea. why not just say "yea. they shouldn't do that."? im pretty sure there are companies that have "disrupted" industries that were not filled with toxic culture.
What I find revealing (and amusing) is that you admit you are ignoring the plain meaning of my post, but prefer to look for thoughtcrimes in the subtext.
i mean, your not wrong to get annoyed at someone for kind of guessing whats going on in your head. it just struck me as odd that someone would even bother to make the point at all.
That's completely wrong headed. What people think is entirely the reason that something is "pioneering" or not. How businesses comport themselves and treat their various constituencies is part and parcel of their ongoing success.
> if that's the case, you'd have to protest lots of start ups and companies in silicon valley. There's no shortage of toxic workplaces.
What's even the point here? You're aware that no one has to protest a company they don't know or use. And that "you can't protest one if you don't protest all of them" is a fallacy.
This is factually incorrect. You're drawing a direct parallel between medallion taxis and Uber/Lyft rides, when they are not in fact the same at all.
The outer boroughs, and every neighborhood in the city, has had car service options for decades, where you call a phone number (or often walk to a local storefront stand) to get a ride.
This is the exact market segment that Uber has entered. Literally. There wasn't and still isn't a restriction on the number of TLC car service cars on the streets.
This idea that there "were no taxis" in the boroughs and now there are is ridiculous. There weren't many yellow cabs before and there still aren't. There used to be thousands of TLC cars before and there still are. Except now people use an app instead of calling Arecibo or Carmel.
Street hailing was and still is prohibited, both for Uber and for phone style car services.
The massive innovation, of course, is the use of a smartphone app for hailing, which made it technically possible to create the market that we see today. Uber, Lyft, and the other companies that built internet enabled hailing solutions certainly do deserve credit for building out that innovation, but that change was just an obvious outgrowth of the technological change to everyone having a handheld always connected small computer. It was inevitable.
The dynamic you're describing for NYC just doesn't really fit the facts. Nor does the idea that a lot more people taking a lot more rides in cars is reducing greenhouse emissions, but that's another matter.
I'll attest to the original comment by davidf18. Uber/Lyft have radically changed NYC for the better. Ride sharing services are significantly cheaper on the order of multiples, easier to use (eg. no more hailing, paying), and a hell of a lot more pleasant to ride in than taxis.
Taxis were notoriously bad. They'd intentionally take slower routes to run up the meter, refuse passengers trying to go to locations the drivers don't want to go (despite this being illegal), etc. Not to mention this is all made more attractive due to our failing decrepit subway system.
The smartphone app innovation you speak of was not inevitable. Taxis indeed had a monopoly, and thus had absolutely zero incentive to developing an app. The competition induced by the ride sharing services destroying them is what incentivized them to finally launch an app, but I don't have it on my phone nor do I know anyone who has, and it's probably inferior to that of its competition.
Counterexample: Taxi companies in Stockholm developed hailing apps before Uber. Most of them already had location services for mobile phones so you could call their voice system, and there was an option to get a cab to your current location if you were calling from mobile. I presume there was a cooperation between the mobile carriers and the taxi systems so they could pull that info.
Their first hailing apps was simply an extension of this, but it used the phone's gps, and you would press a button in the app for "a taxi, now, here", but the underlying systems were at least already there.
After Uber entered the market, they made their apps better, and you can now attach a payment method to pay through the app, and there's gps tracking of the car you're waiting on, same as Uber and similar.
But Stockholm never had a medallion system or other caps, and there's no monopoly, but there is some sort of oligopoly where some companies get better access to major taxi destinations such as airports and train stations. As usual, healthy competition is the key. :)
My point, which both of you appear to have missed, is that we're not actually talking about taxis at all. Taxis are things you hail by flagging them down on the street. They're still there, driving around in circles looking for you, just like before. You're just not using them any more.
We're talking about something called livery cars which have existed forever and were also very widely used before Uber as well. You used to arrange for pickup using your phone. You still arrange for pickup using your phone.
The car, the driver, and the laws surrounding both are essentially the same as they were before. What's actually changed is your phone.
This distinction is quite different in cities that aren't New York, where there were taxis and nothing else, and Uber has in fact created a new category of private car transportation service. But here in NYC the non-taxi car service market segment existed already and was vibrant, the parent comment claiming they broke some kind of monopoly is just incorrect.
> Taxis are things you hail by flagging them down on the street. They're still there, driving around in circles looking for you, just like before. You're just not using them any more.
> the parent comment claiming they broke some kind of monopoly is just incorrect.
Are you saying taxis are not a monopoly? Or are you saying ride sharing apps did not break the taxi monopoly? If taxis were a monopoly, and if we are not using taxis now because of ride sharing apps, then it would seem ride sharing apps broke a monopoly.
It's not just that, ride sharing apps allow anyone to turn their own personal vehicle into a taxi, and work their own hours. This massively increased supply, rendering the fixed medallion taxi monopoly irrelevant. Uber Pool and Lyft Line further increased supply and drove down prices.
Add to that the incentives induced by the rating system and fares determined before you hail the ride, and you also get a far superior riding experience.
So no, the innovation here wasn't just that the hailing is done via an app. This alone would not have spurred the dramatic improvements we've seen.
carmel didn't quite have the saturation of drivers as uber and so you don't have to "think ahead" to hitch a ride. Certainly the smart phone allowed animated maps to pacify the client but, also, for foreign travelers, didn't really need to speak a different language to convey source and destination (as well as credit card info). Plus all the tracking of the driver for peace of mind from a safety pov.
Your reply doesn't address anything CPLX said. There were already non-yellow cab options in NYC for car service, and there still are. That's the point they were making.
Decrepit I'll give you, and even a low grade, but failing?
From Wikipedia:
2016 subway ridership: 1.76 billion = 147 million per month
2016 global Uber ridership in October: 40 million
Not the same league.
The subways could improve, but I prefer them (and walking) by far to taxis and cars. I guess I just don't have experience since I take maybe one or two taxi rides a year and have never used car services. You seem to take them much more.
I've lived here for the past 5 years (including a summer before), and the subway has gotten significantly worse every year. Commuting to/from work in the outer boroughs in particular is a nightmare. The month I lived in Astoria for example, it seemed that on over 50% of my rides, the train would stop at some point for an extended period of time due to signal failures, and I'd often have to wait for numerous packed trains to pass before new ones would arrive.
I actively avoid the subways as much as possible, especially in the summer when the stations are uncomfortably hot/humid. I mostly walk, ride Citibike, or take Uber/Lyft. Luckily I'm able to do this because I live reasonably close to my office in Manhattan.
Uber Pool has been a godsend because it's so cheap. I can often Uber to/from the office for about $.50 more than the price of a subway side. Granted traffic in the city is horrible so it's not all sunshine and rainbows - my Uber Pool today from midtown east to west of Penn Station took absurdly long due to standstill traffic, but at $2.03 I'm not complaining, and I'll take any excuse to avoid the subways.
> I actually live there and there are no Yellow Cabs in the outer boroughs.
I am writing this from Brooklyn, where I have lived for about 20 years.
> Before Uber there was no hailable service.
There still isn't. Street hails are only from medallion cabs, plus the green outer borough cabs which came just a little bit before Uber showed up and are still around.
There wasn't street hailing before and there isn't now. This isn't complicated. You used to use a phone to get car services before and you still do now. The laws and the dynamics of that aspect really didn't change much.
The innovation is that now your phone has a computer in it and GPS so you press a button and use an app instead of talking into the thing to a dispatcher guy in an office. It's a technological change that happened.
> I don't take these services much in the outer boroughs
As mentioned, I live in the outer boroughs, Brooklyn specifically. You should come check it out sometime, there are about three million of us here. We got along pretty well before Uber, we just called Arecibo. They were fine, and still are, I use them to get to the airport now since the drivers are way better.
Pricing is honestly pretty similar now to what it was five years ago, with very short trips being a little cheaper on Uber/Lyft than they were in the old system. Plus all the promos and so on.
It's way better now to just press a button on the phone, and have your payment info stored, and all that. No question about that. But those are technical innovations.
Your argument is that their innovation had to do with changing the dynamics of supply and demand in a restricted market. But that didn't really happen, and to the extent it did it was because smartphones made it possible. Steve Jobs probably has more to do with the declining price of medallions than Travis Kalanick.
> Uber pool reduces greenhouse gases because multiple unrelated parties can ride in the same taxi instead of using two different vehicles. Elementary.
Unless they were previously taking the subway, of course. The world isn't quite so facile.
I used to use Arecibo all the time, it was pretty much as easy to get a car as with Uber: they answered immediately and a car was typically at your door in 5 minutes.
Things I miss about those pre-Uber days:
- The drivers knew exactly where to go just off of an intersection. If you told them you were going to Tompkins and Hancock, they'd get you there often without needing to ask any clarifying questions. Now drivers have no idea where anything is.
- Music in cars from the driver's collection. Hearing random cumbia or ghazals or hip hop. It made you feel like you were in New York. Now drivers are catering to a generic millennial audience and all I hear is bad top 40.
- Overall just how human the interactions with drivers felt. I once had a driver come up into a house party with us, and ended up having a very weird/memorable night. Now everything is sanitized and rarely do I get a driver from Uber or Lyft that is willing to even have much of a real conversation for fear of getting a bad rating.
I don't miss the need to negotiate price or the need to pay in cash. The apps are also cheaper for the most part. I do miss the gritty New York.
Arecibo! I remember them from my time around Park Slope. My personal go-to was Evelyn Car Service from Prospect Heights.
That said, even Manhattan has had phones for black cars. I've routinely called Dial 7, Carmel, and Skyline on different occasions on demand (primarily when it's raining, when it's really hard to get a yellow cab), and had no issues. I still do so when Uber surge pricing is ridiculous for my tastes.
In the LES where yellow cabs can be scarce, you had Allen Car Service and Delancey Car Service (who I'd call for airport runs).
The reliability of these car services was pretty good. They'd call you if they were delayed or were otherwise late. (Drastically different from San Francisco, where the taxis were pretty much a terrible crapshoot experience)
When Uber started to take off in NYC, some of the feedback I heard was "I get to look like a bigwig", when in reality, anyone can get a black car, and if you think it makes you look more important... it doesn't.
My point is, there's a lot of talk of "Uber was revolutionary" and "before Uber there was nothing!", when the sad truth is these folks never bothered to look?
I mean, anyone who's lived in NYC for some time can tell you the numbers for Carmel or Dial 7 in a heartbeat, and some may even be able to recite the jingles from their ads.
Uber was just yet another dispatch car service, but with an app.
My point is, there's a lot of talk of "Uber was revolutionary" and "before Uber there was nothing!", when the sad truth is these folks never bothered to look?
I mean, anyone who's lived in NYC for some time can tell you the numbers for Carmel or Dial 7 in a heartbeat, and some may even be able to recite the jingles from their ads.
I do think you're understating the importance of discoverability.
I lived in Morningside for three years. (This is in Manhattan, by Columbia University, for you non-New Yorkers.) I'd never heard of the car services you mentioned. Even though I could easily access yellow cabs, after a few awful cab rides to / from the airport, I would have been pretty eager to try out something different.
My point is, maybe I was ignorant, lazy, should have asked around, whatever. Clearly you are a savvier New Yorker than I was. But Uber/Lyft makes the process of getting a reliable, enjoyable experience way easier as a newb, or tourist, or lazy person who doesn't bother to find a Real New Yorker, or whatever. That would have provided real value to me.
Arecibo is awful. They would always tell me "five minutes!" regardless of how long it would take for the car to arrive. Their attitude and customer service were not good.
I am so happy to never have to call Arecibo again. And now that Lyft service is good out here, happy not to use Uber either.
You just didn't know the code. Five minutes meant there was someone pretty close to you and it would be fine. Seven minutes meant there was someone that would head your way but he was a little further away so don't trip out about it. Ten minutes meant we're fucking busy but a guy will pick you up sooner or later. Fifteen minutes meant hopefully we'll be hiring some new drivers soon and when we do we'll definitely send one your way. And a busy signal meant it's time to consider public transit.
Cute but false, in each of those scenarios they would tell me "five minutes" and then when I'd call back 15 minutes later to ask & complain, they'd say "oh there was traffic, now he's five minutes away" and then one time I called back again 20 minutes later and the guy yelled at me and hung up on me.
I think this really depends on which city you are in.
When Uber started in SF, the experience of getting a taxi was very frustrating. There weren't enough cabs, the cab drivers were over the top rude, they refused to take credit cards and were aggressive about tips, if you called a cab they would never show up, and they were (and still are) expensive. It was not necessarily about the app, it was just that it was reliable -- you could get a car when and where you needed it and not having to pay in the car made the experience far superior.
At the very same time, there were all these black cars rolling around the city and picking up passengers somewhat illegally. That experience was not great because you often had to negotiate a high rate, but this was mostly because there were no taxis available. In other words, there was a bunch of supply that could be utilized.
I think those conditions made Uber particularly ripe to work in SF and once it did, that proved that it could work elsewhere as well.
The app was also a huge benefit, but in context, I actually think it could have been just as useful in the beginning if you could have texted your address.
It goes to show that for something to be great, you have to get a lot of things right at once. :-)
I live in Harlem and even in Harlem it is hard to get a Taxi in Harlem. Cab drivers regularly would discriminate against minorities who needed cabs. Uber changed all of that. Now cabs are happy to see me when I flag one down. Car Service is usually pretty horrible. The cars are dirty on the inside and they will typically overcharge you for a trip. I made the mistake of paying 20 bucks for a trip that would've been a $7 cab fare and maybe an even cheaper with an Uber/Lyft.
Are you really comparing car service in the outer boroughs to Uber? I mean I guess I agree with the TLC comparison but experience to the consumer is absolutely different.
Uber entered both markets. I live in Manhattan(UWS) and treat taxis or Ubers as interchangable. When you can pull up an app on your phone and have a car in 2 minutes, that is effectively similar to a street hail. Heck, because I work near Chelsea market(big tourist destination), using Uber gets me a car 5-10 mins quicker than trying to hail a cab and constantly getting sniped by people who appear upstream.
The quasi-firing of TK isn't an indictment of Uber as a product, or an overall social good (although both have been intensely debated). It is an indictment of Uber as a business.
Even if we grant that Uber is a huge overall social good, it is clearly not sustainable at its current pace. Uber's burn rate is the highest in history, and the C-suite is barren. The board clearly felt that TK couldn't get Uber out of this mess. And the board, at the end of the day, only cares about long-term share price.
I downvoted you because this has nothing to do with the article. Whether or not Uber is a good thing is not relevant to Kalanick stepping down or the rotten culture he cultivated.
Uber under TK was criticized for breaking laws, but those laws were in place to protect incumbents from market entry. In NYC, were AirBnB does break NYC and NY State laws, Uber does not. It follows the rules of the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission. Except for the Mayor that tried to restrict Uber/Lyft for political reasons to help the incumbents, we New Yorkers welcome Uber/Lyft.
That's simply not true. Very few people have criticized Uber for breaking absurd incumbent-protecting laws.
The vast majority of people have been criticizing Uber for breaking laws related to fraud, stalking and harassment, and a generally toxic workplace culture.
The product that Uber offers is good (and no one other than taxi medallion owners is really arguing that). But they've gone about delivering it in an unnecessarily bad way.
They made a big deal about an illegal app that was only necessary because unlike NYC, the other city(s) were trying to restrict the market competition. Uber never used that app in NYC because we welcome technology and competition and the special interests did not dominate the politicians.
> Err, the cheaper rates were due to uber subsidising rides with VC money, which was unsustainable. Uber also did start a leasing program for drivers.
The cheaper rates in NYC which are extremely high compared with the rest of the USA were because there was no $125 / 12 hour lease fee because there were no medallions.
Medallion owners would get mortgages (like houses) for the $1.2 million medallions and the high lease fee paid for the medallion mortgage. In fact the other special interests besides Yellow Cab medallion owners were credit unions who financed these mortgages.
A $125 / 12 hour lease fee comes to over $90,000 per year.
By not having to pay these excessive expensive leases, drivers could be paid less money and still make a profit. Drivers who leased the Yellow Cabs still have to pay for gas. Lower costs for taxi service means more time with customers in cabs. Everyone wins except medallion owners and credit unions with the mortgages and politicians bought off by these special interests.
> The cheaper rates in NYC which are extremely high compared with the rest of the USA were because there was no $125 / 12 hour lease fee because there were no medallions.
As explained elsewhere in the thread, Uber does not and has not ever competed with medallion taxis for their main product (Uber X/Uber Black) in New York City. Uber's direct counterpart would be the for-hire cabs which are also regulated by the TLC, and are not required to have medallions.
Uber is already subject to the exact same requirements of the TLC that their predecessors were - Uber drivers in NYC have to have a valid TLC license. So there is literally no difference in supply-side regulatory cost there.
You clearly don't live in NYC. Uber absolutely changed how people in NYC get around.
Whether or not they fill the same requirements, they made it so easy to get a car that it was easier than standing on a street corner and hailing a yellow cab.
And aside from that, they added accountability. Yellow cab drivers were rude, the cars were moderately clean at best, and generally took opportunities to rip people off. I remember leaving my phone in a cab around 2008, I immediately called it and the dude picked up, said he was around the corner and to meet him outside. He was more than willing to give me my phone back- for $60 and had a shit eating grin on his face. I had the same thing happen in an Uber about 5 years later- the guy dropped the phone off at my house free of charge with a smile.
There is a reason that NYC taxi medallions have pretty much halved in cost since Uber started here- because they are directly competing with yellow cabs!
Rather than respond to the anecdotes, I'll point out that I was rebutting the original claim: that Uber was cheaper because it (unlike medallion cabs) does not have to pay for licensing fees. Uber does pay for licensing fees, just under a different classification. More importantly, that's exactly who Uber's competition is on the drivers' side, which is exactly what OP was talking about. Uber drivers are generally people who have driven livery cabs for years and either split their time between Uber and other livery cab services, or have switched over to Uber for livery cab driving.
When talking about the price, it's more accurate to compare Uber to other livery cabs, and to say that Uber has caused the share of livery cabs in the overall cab market in NYC to increase, rather than to look narrowly at the medallion market, and ignore the regulatory field that they are in, ignore the costs of that regulation, and ignore all of the direct competition on the supplier side.
> Rather than respond to the anecdotes, I'll point out that I was rebutting the original claim: that Uber was cheaper because it (unlike medallion cabs) does not have to pay for licensing fees.
It is not about licensing fees, it is about that because of the medallions, taxi drivers had to pay $125 / 12 hours for the lease. Before Uber/Lyft those medallions which were restricted to 13,000 for a city of 8.5 million (as well as many visiting tourists, business people, and in a city where many don't own cars), the price of a medallion was $1.2 million. After Uber/Lyft the price decreased to $700,000 and many Yellow Cabs are idle. Prices are lower, service is far better.
If your point is 'Taxis can't compete with Uber because of the medallion system', then you're probably right.
But if your point is 'Uber was primarily successful because they found a way to get around the medallion system', then I don't think so.
The reason being, livery cars were around long before Uber, are much more comparable, and they also did not have to deal with medallions. So, why didn't livery cars put the taxis out of business a long time ago?
I think the real reasons for Uber's success are:
1. Livery cars were a hassle to arrange. Uber solved this by using smartphones with GPS.
2. Livery cars were slower to pick you up. Probably because there weren't enough drivers on the road. Which is probably because there weren't enough riders. Uber solved that catch-22 by subsidizing the rides to jumpstart a positive network effect.
Also-
Clear transparent pricing. No getting to the destination and the dude suddenly asking for $30 more than you previously agreed to or arguing over a tip (I live outside Manhattan- nearly every time I took a trip home in a cab, there would be some kind of hassle- the guy wanted cash-often claiming his credit card machine was broken, more $ because traffic was heavier than expected, was just pissed about a $20 tip not being enough... there was something nearly every time.
Accountability and a feedback loop- if the guy did try to rip you off somehow, prior to Uber, you really had very little recourse. There is a process to lodge a complaint in NYC, but it involved paperwork, showing up to a hearing (which you will have to take time off of work for), and then maybe something might be done.
You kind of touched on it, but also just some kind of visibility into when exactly your car will arrive. When Uber was new in NYC, wait times were much longer, generally 10-15 minutes, which I didn't mind much because that's probably about how long it would have taken me to find a cab, and I could finish my drink inside the bar/restaurant and finish as the driver pulled up. This has actually gone downhill a bit over time- So many times I pull up the app to see a half dozen cars within 4 blocks of me, and then when I actually try to reserve, its a 7-8 minute wait. Or they accept the trip but then I guess got a better offer on Lyft or something and is just heading in the wrong direction- meaning you have to cancel and then fight with Uber over being charged a cancellation fee, which usually isn't too hard to do, but its just a hassle and a way drivers can currently beat the system.
The share of taxi rides in Manhattan has decreased by almost the same amount Lyft and Uber rides have increased [1]. The overall number of rides has increased in the other boroughs due to Lyft and Uber ridership.
Maybe, it is very likely that NYC rides need to be propped up with incentives by ridesharing companies. We won't know the economics until somebody tries to IPO or shutters their company.
Actually, the normal Yellow Cab rates are so high in NYC that Uber can still charge rates twice that of Chicago Uber and come out ahead (NYC $1.75 per mile, Chicago $0.90 -- twice the amount).
i don't follow your math. can you expand on the increase. $125 / 12 hour means it is around 12 bucks an hour. if you have 3 rides an hour (don't know if doable), it would increase a single ride by 4 bucks. that doesn't seem the end of the world
~10 minutes avg ride time in SF. You also need to take into account the extra 4-5 avg minutes it takes for a driver to pick up the person. So I would assume a driver in SF can make 4 rides an hour.
People keep saying that, and yet prices still haven't risen.
I feel like a decade from now people are going to still be repeating this same old line.
It also seems awesome. Why wouldn't I want VCs to give away a bunch of money to its customers?
No, it is not going to run taxis permanently out of business. All you need is a car to do that. If this is really true, as soon as prices rise, another taxi company can start back up again and take market share.
> People keep saying that, and yet prices still haven't risen.
Uber is still losing money hand over fist. It has to come to an end at some point, either when they finally raise prices or they just go bankrupt.
> It also seems awesome. Why wouldn't I want VCs to give away a bunch of money to its customers?
A couple reasons:
1. VCs don't "give away money". They invest, with the expectation that their investment will be returned many times over. Given that it is explicitly Uber's goal to have a monopoly on transportation, you can extrapolate what that means for their intended pricing strategy if they ever manage to take over.
2. While taxis may or may not be an example of this, it's important to realize that VC-backed dumpi^H^H^H^H^Hpromotional pricing can destroy existing businesses even if those businesses were competitive and sustainable. For example: wash.io, which I commented about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376#13608798. They shuttered a whole bunch of laundromats in SF, which was all for nothing since they went out of business anyway. That's not a healthy dynamic.
A lot of that money is going toward Uber/Lyft growing market share. But a lot of the overhead could disappear because so much of it is run by computers.
The previous market making mechanism for this industry was for a buyer to stand on a street corner, hold their hand up, and hope that a vendor who sold that service drove by.
I'm going to wager that wearing a suit and/or other indicators of being of a higher social class are far more important than race. I've never seen a rich minority person discriminated against...
Do you believe that the fact that you, personally, have never "seen a rich minority person discriminated against" effectively support your argument? Do you think there are any studies that have been done to try and see if there is racial discrimination in the taxi business? If you haven't tried to look for such studies, why not? Or if you did, why don't you cite them instead of your own personal experience in not seeing rich minorities being discriminated against?
If I wear shorts, flip-flops and a t-shirt I get passed by all the time by cabs. If I wear a suit, almost never. Also, both those articles suggest something more to the story than outright racism. Most cabbies aren't comfortable with me riding in the front seat, and I wouldn't really blame them either.
I disagree. When I was in college (09-12 in Baltimore) it was impossible to get a cab unless it was a weekend night (in which case they’d all line up outside the dorms). I remember calling cab companies, being told “we put out a call on the radio, someone will probably be there in the next half hour.” And then nobody showing up. The ability to rate drivers and the ability of the system to punish drivers who won’t pick up mildly inconvenient fares has vastly improved this industry (at least from my POV).
You must not live in SF. In SF you would call a cab, and then hope that the cab would come. After 30 mins you would call again asking where the cab was, and they would send another cab. After another 30 mins you gave up and drove.
Same goes for trying to hail a cab from the streets. Empty cabs would drive past you because they wanted to only drive passengers to the airport. I'm glad they are all going out of business.
They do now in San Francisco. But only because they lost so much business to Uber. This was an industry that was effectively a monopoly -- not one company, but one type of provider. And none of the players was improving the experience for the customer.
Calling for a cab was extremely unreliable here. You could easily wait for an hour (because any driver coming to pick you up could, without ill effect for him/herself, stop to pick somebody up on the street). Some cabs took credit cards, some didn't. Some claimed to take credit cards but then "the machine was broken" so you had to pay cash.
Uber improved on every single aspect of the customer experience. And they did it while offering lower prices for the consumer.
However: to me, they haven't proven it's a viable, long term model. I highly doubt that they are paying their drivers enough to cover the cost of wear and tear on the cars (many/most of the drivers I see with Uber and Lyft are doing it full time, so they are crazy if they aren't factoring in the cost of the car and maintenance as part of their cost). And AFAIK neither company has proven they can make money.
So: this industry was due for a shakeup.
But it needs to be done by a company without rampant management problems, and it still needs to prove that there is a viable, long term business model that works for the company, the drivers and the consumers.
[edit: and, yes -- long term, there won't be drivers in these cars. But Uber has to find a way to survive until then, and I don't believe they can burn cash that long]
> Some cabs took credit cards, some didn't. Some claimed to take credit cards but then "the machine was broken" so you had to pay cash.
This type of thing sounds like the usual American "let the market sort it out" that other western countries don't have. Taxis are already government controlled (via taxi licensing) so why aren't they required to accept credit cards, as they are in Australia?
America has that regulation; that doesn't and didn't stop cabbies from taking advantage of those who lack the gumption or encyclopedic knowledge of regs to challenge the driver on the spot.
Paris also probably has laws against longhauling, doesn't mean Parisian cabbies don't do it to naive tourists.
Edit: And yes, some people (including me) do take the position that the market should be left to decide which payment mechanisms to accept (just like most people do in every other context -- who wants a law saying bakers have to accept credit cards?), so long as they're declared before the transaction, and there's (legally) free entry/exit into the profession. It's a strawman to characterize someone as being okay with changing the accepted payment methods after the fact.
Bakers and taxis are inherently different - no one gets stuck in a location they don't want to be because of a lack of wholewheat.
I'm not saying peopl are ok with changing it after the fact: I'm saying the government should do what government is supposed to do and serve its citizens, in this case forcing taxi companies to accept credit cards.
Market/self regulation generally trends to work in two ways: the well off get to crow about how government regulation isn't needed, and the less fortunate don't get to use that service because they're never the prime market for business, but they don't have a soap box so the other side keeps barking on about how good it all is.
>Bakers and taxis are inherently different - no one gets stuck in a location they don't want to be because of a lack of wholewheat.
And no one gets stuck in an unfamiliar area while low on blood sugar?
>I'm not saying peopl are ok with changing it after the fact
Yes, you were! You brought it up specifically in the context of cabbies who refused CC after taking on a fare with signs and machine saying they could pay that way. If your point was just that "being able to pay with CC is nice so it should be mandated", then you shouldn't have pointed to the after-the-fact case as a danger.
>I'm saying the government should do what government is supposed to do and serve its citizens, in this case forcing taxi companies to accept credit cards.
And you're failing to ground it in any way that doesn't generalize to forcing arbitrary merchants to accept arbitrary payments, while focusing the majority of your rhetoric on grandstanding about "hey, I just think governments should help the people" instead of a concrete justification for how this helps the people, or any recognition of any downside of such a mandate (which you were able to see in the case of bakers and CCs).
>Market/self regulation generally trends to work in two ways: the well off get to crow about how government regulation isn't needed, and the less fortunate don't get to use that service because they're never the prime market for business, but they don't have a soap box so the other side keeps barking on about how good it all is.
Again, you're assuming your policy helps the poor and anyone who opposes it just doesn't understand it, instead of actually elaborating on the substantive mechanisms. Tomorrow you'll be right back lecturing us that credit card acceptance hurts the poor because merchants have to distribute the fees over all customers, including the poor unbanked who can't get one, and I'm just too privileged to see that.
How about confining your remarks to the pros and cons of various policies without dragging motives and demagoguery into it?
Was in England last week. Many cabs still don't take CC. I used one cab, for the experience and then went back to Uber. Cabs just aren't that great, and the experience is not reliable, predictable, or easy.
> This type of thing sounds like the usual American "let the market sort it out" that other western countries don't have.
Well, to be fair, it's "let the market sort it out while severely restricting the market through regulation" which while I wouldn't say is the usual, isn't as uncommon as it should be. Either one has it's place, but together they generally don't work well...
> I highly doubt that they are paying their drivers enough to cover the cost of wear and tear on the cars
Since Uber/Lyft has no problem attracting drivers at the rates they pay, this argument rests on drivers being financially ignorant enough that they don't notice they're losing money doing it.
Maybe they are not losing money, but perhaps many might be surprised how much less they are really making after factoring in cost and upkeep of a vehicle.
In the Chicago suburbs, calling the dispatch center was and still is how it's done. There are a few "posts" scattered here and there where cabs will queue up, but in general, you have to contact dispatch.
In NYC, there is one app called Arro that responded to the competition of Uber/Lyft, but was not available beforehand. I believe there is a 2nd app now as well.
It didn't work when I wanted to take a cab from Logan Square to work. Called the dispatcher. The cab showed up somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes later.
"Pretty well". We just tried to get an Uber in the French Quarter and had to cancel 2 different drivers because they couldn't figure out how to route around the barricades.
In a couple urban cores where both customers and providers were extremely dense so that that simple method could work, surez that a mechanism in play; everywhere else (and often also available on those same areas) it was “customer calls dispatch agency on the phone, dispatch agency routes to service provider via radio (or mobile phone)”; Uber replaces the dispatch agency and changes the communication mechanism on both sides from a phone to an app on the phone.
"Most of the upsurge is occurring outside the city’s Central Business District (Manhattan below 60th Street), Schaller reports."
Also, the overall increase was 3 to 4% according to the report. In NYC we keep hearing how subway ridership has been increasing every year. At any rate, a decrease of 10 million trips per year out of 1.7 billion is hardly significant.
Also, this simply states that perhaps we should be regulating private vehicular traffic in these areas, not restrict traffic that helps the public (and provides employment for low-skilled people).
Uber might improve "customer value", but as someone that takes a cab once every three months or so, cars with TLC license plates constantly failing to yield to my attempts to use a crosswalk have not improved my experience.
I've decided to solve this by 1-starring and no-tipping any driver that fails to yield to a pedestrian, drives in a bike lane, or exceeds the 25mph speed limit at any point in the ride (so, like, all of them), but of course, I take a cab once every three months, so that won't do much.
If we really want to reduce greenhouse gases, a better approach might be:
1. Properly funding the MTA (congestion charging)
2. Widening sidewalks, especially in Midtown
3. Grade-separated and camera-enforced BRT lanes and/or surface rail with signal priority.
"driver that fails to yield to a pedestrian, drives in a bike lane"
At least in Uber/Lyft you can rate a driver, there are many taxi drivers in NYC who drive rashly and don't do those things you listed and yet if you don't tip they will explicitly ask you to.
To me, the following are the most important things to use a ridesharing app:
Not paying any tip (In Yellow cab, many drivers demand for tip if you don't tip them)
Rating the drivers (It's a positive thing depending on how you view it)
Booking when you are drunk (While there are some apps that let you book yellow cabs we all know how bad those apps are)
Uber as a company or Lyft as a company may be disliked for some of the things they do, but ride sharing is a positive outcome. If the above three points are there for yellow cab, I will happily use them anytime. The way a driver drives is not something specific to uber or lyft.
Uber provides certain value to customers. It would not exist in the first place if it does not. Riders get cheaper and faster rides than old taxi cabs. Drivers get jobs which would be harder otherwise. However, does that justify Uber's unethical behaviors? Does that justify sexually harassing female employees? Does that justify evading regulations with a Greyball tool? Does that justify stealing your competitor's technologies (think of Waymo here)?
The regulations by and large were simply there to protect incumbents that wanted to keep out competition which offered higher customer value (by offering lower cost, more responsive, less greenhouse gas) service.
Unlike AirBnB which does break NY City and NY State laws, Uber has been following regulations that are imposed by the NYC Taxi & Limousine commission (e.g., screening drivers, etc.).
I see this "incumbents" narrative touted a lot, but it just ain't so. Non-medallion livery companies (black cabs) have been in NYC for a looooong time.
But because of stupid laws protecting Yellow Cab monopoly, it is against the law to street hail them, having to call instead. Also, not a reliable single brand, also they don't take credit cards, unlike Yellow Cabs.
iPhone hailing to me and many others at least, is effectively street hailing. Not certain what your beef is with Uber. Service and costs have dramatically improved since they and Uber/Via/Gett/Juno came, even in Manhattan.
It's against the law to street hail an Uber as well. Uber works because hailing one with your phone is legally equivalent to calling a cab company, not sticking out your hand.
Uber Pool has 2 or more unrelated passengers using the same car for transit hence less greenhouse gas compared with using separate vehicles. Elementary!
> At least where I live in NYC, Uber was dramatically improving customer value while providing innovations that reduced greenhouse gas.
There is a lot of potential for such reductions to happen in urban areas. Shameless plug - the potential for pooling using Uber data is shown in Figure 8 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06635)
I completely agree and as things are, Uber's prices are far higher in NYC than say, compared with Chicago because the Yellow Cabs here are so expensive compared with those from Chicago.
And this actually gave Uber cover to do a lot of stupid stuff.
For one thing, because cabs were so bad, Uber was able to do a lot of stupid and scummy things yet still be way better than cabs.
Also, it had an interesting effect PR-wise. For a long time, whenever I heard something negative about Uber, I just assumed it was taxi industry shills making up ridiculous lies. Because there definitely were taxi industry shills going around (online, newspapers, etc.) and making up ridiculous lies about Uber. Later I understood that some of the negative stuff I was hearing about Uber was a huge lie and some of it was totally true.
So? They disrupted a bad system and drove some innovation into it, what does that justify?
Let's look at the flip side here. They "disrupted" an industry by repeatedly violating the law and undercutting the competition by subsidizing nearly 2/3 of the cost of fares using investment funds. Is that innovative? I'd argue that nearly anyone could disrupt any industry with such a model, regardless of the actual merits of anything else they'd built.
Add on to that their horrible corporate culture, their seeming support of industrial espionage, and the underhand tactics they use to take advantage of their drivers.
It was smart of them to take on a corrupt, broken, and outdated system, because it allowed people, like you, to whitewash so many of their flaws and transgressions.
Citation doubly required because if the net miles driven actually increases due to increased use of cars over public transit (very likely), and increased availability of transportation services overall, the greenhouse gas emissions would go _up_ if anything.
There are situations where ride services would encourage public transit utilization (last mile services), but I'd guess those are far from the dominant use case.
There's plenty of people, myself included, who don't have a car but would otherwise probably get one if effortless car services on-demand like Uber didn't exist. You need to take that into account.
According to some estimates I've seen just constructing a car is equivalent to 3-4 years of carbon footprint of driving it[1][2].
You might say "buy used!". I would, but over the entire economy it would add up to the same amount, the net demand for new cars would increase.
That EPA link says nothing about the embodied carbon footprint of manufacturing vehicles.
The Guardian article is very deceptive:
"... the emissions from the manufacture of a top-of-the-range Land Rover Discovery ... may be as much as four times higher than the tailpipe emissions of a Citroen C1."
Did you see the trick they pulled there?
They took carbon emissions from manufacture of a large vehicle (Land Rover Discovery), and divided it by the tailpipeemissions of a very efficient small vehicle (Citroen C1) in order to concoct a large-sounding, but ultimately meaningless comparison "4 times higher". You may as well compare the manufacturing emissions of the Land Rover to the tailpipe emissions of a cow.
But even assuming your point about manufacturing emissions, while you don't buy a new vehicle yourself because of your use of ride services, the cars used for ride services will be replaced more often, because they are more heavily utilized, and hence will have to be replaced more often.
On second look, yes that Guardian source is pretty shitty. I couldn't find some authoritative source for the CO^2 emissions required to produce a new car. My point was that you had to consider it.
> cars used for ride services will be replaced
> more often.
It's not meaningful to consider how often they're replaced, but what mileage they tend to get if we're going to look at how the CO^2 cost of producing the car is amortized over its lifetime.
According to EPA statistics a typical car gets used for 100-200K miles[1], for taxis that number seems to be easily 2x or 3x larger[2]. So for the same amount of moving people from A to B taxis are mor CO^2 efficient.
Of course there are all sorts of secondary effects you're not taking into account. Once people don't own a car because they have something like Uber available to them, they're more likely to use a bike or public transport for a trip they'd otherwise take by car. Just compare somewhere like NYC to LA in terms of how much CO^2 a typical person emits while going about their day.
I don't know what the exact numbers are, but this is a lot more complex than what you're making it out to be.
This is too short-sighted. In my city a lot of people use Uber INSTEAD of readily available public transit (anecdotal observation). That's kind of a bad deal if it's a widespread truth. This would continue to hurt public transportation funding over time.
With Uber Pool you can have both. People can choose to use Uber pool and in exchange for a bit of additional time for transit, save both money and save the environment. Win Win (lose as far as time).
Still a net loss against public transportation, the current savings are also largely driven by artificially low fares that Uber subsidizes with driver bonuses (to undercut the market).
Buses and trains carry a lot more people per trip so the use of Uber pool does not negate the greenhouse gas argument. Uber pool will pollute more than other forms of mass transportation. Uber pool is only a subset of Uber users too.
Uber pool takes two or more unrelated passengers and puts them in the same vehicle. This is clearly less greenhouse gas generated than if all passengers take independent cars. Therefore, Uber pool reduces greenhouse gasses.
By your argument, because Uber/Lyft provides better customer service overall compared with Taxi service which is why they are commanding such a large market share, that is a bad thing because people are taking more cars over mass transit as a result.
You're missing the point. The comparison isn't everyone taking a single car vs using Uber pool, the comparison is people using Uber (pool or not) vs using public transit.
Uber pool might lower the amount of greenhouse gases compared to everyone using individual Ubers, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the increase from people using Uber instead of public transit
I have to flag you because you are not discussing this in good faith. You are constantly dodging questions, and trying to put words in people's mouths.
What I have said is logical and true: Uber Pool saves greenhouse greenhouse gas because instead of having separate vehicles people are sharing the same vehicle. What people seem to be arguing is that because taxi (or taxi equivalent rates) are more affordable for low-income people and are no longer taking inconvenient mass transit, then that is some sort of negative, which is terribly elitist.
Why not argue for doubling taxi fares and banning Uber, equivalents altogether and force anyone without a private vehicle (which is the majority of people in Manhattan and perhaps even NYC) to take mass transit? It is a silly argument. Because Uber is provider better customer service at a lower cost, that is a bad thing? Really?
Not only is what you’ve said not logical or true, you keep putting your irrelevant Uber love in threads where we’re discussing Uber’s toxic office culture. Whatever you feel about the NYC taxi industry is irrelevant when discussing a culture that fosters sexual harassment.
And even more in bad faith is your constant assertion that people who are not fans of Uber are somehow against poor people. Your entire second paragraph is filled with this. Based on that, I could easily say that, because of your comments of Uber love, you’re a huge fan of the kind of office culture that Susan Fowler wrote about. Would it be accurate? Probably as accurate as your assertion that those who are against Uber is against poor people.
Where I've used Uber, buses, subways, and trains have simply not been an option most of the time. You can't throw a subway at every transportation problem.
I read that Uber/Lyft usage corresponds with lower drunk driving fatalities. This sounds like a more effective and humane method than the ever-more-draconian penalties imposed on drunk drivers.
Absolutely true, but does this justify Uber's workspace culture, Waymo secrets, or sidestepping law enforcement (main reasons for Kalanick's resignation according to article)?
The law enforcement cited was mostly to keep Uber out of the market to protect incumbents from competition.
Unlike AirBnB which breaks NY City and NY State regulations, Uber does follow NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission rules imposed on them and Lyft and other services. But in NYC, the Mayor's unsuccessful efforts withstanding, we aren't trying to restrict market entry and basically asking that Uber drivers undergo the same screening as Yellow Taxi drivers.
It doesn't. That is the point. Uber follows the law.
Read this part of the article:
"Uber made a particular effort to deploy the tool in cities where it faced opposition from local regulators or rival taxi and transportation companies. One of those cities was Portland."
NYC did not bow to pressure from rival taxi companies and they did follow the law cooperating with NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission (again, unlike AirBnB which directly broke NY City and NY State laws and was sued by the NY State Attorney General). Uber was never in trouble with the law in NYC nor NYS and the only time it has trouble are with entities that try to block competition from the regulated monopoly.
Uber/Lyft have NOT reduced greenhouse gas. Not a bit. Those rides are still being taken, and inbetween rides, those cars are driving around.
"while not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles."
In the same way someone who owed money to the company store didn't have to start doing that, but due to predatory terms, once they did, things get pretty out of hand. And since Uber/Lyft are the ones who dictate those terms, they are to blame.
I've taken several rides in Uber cars, and, as it happens, always as one of 2 or 3 passengers. Some of them have been Priuses. I wouldn't doubt that, for those specific rides, emissions have been less than other options I had. I'd be curious to see the actual data before jumping to conclusions one way or another.
Exactly the same scenario in Hong Kong. And Government still dont realize what is wrong with the current Taxi system.
It is not fair to the consumers, because they are not getting any decent services out of it. It is not fair to the taxi drivers, because their earning only barely manage to lease the car.
And it is only what called the Medallions owner that actually profits.
Everyone already knows what the upsides are, that's why people supported the growth of Uber in the first place when it was just a San Francisco startup. Nobody has ever argued in good faith that the firm wasn't solving a problem, of course they were.
But focusing only on the benefits and avoiding discussion of the costs or new problems that something creates is sales talk; internalizing sales talk leads to cognitive bias.
I am opposed to the taxi industry collusion entirely, but Uber/Lyft are creating customer value by subsidizing their transportation costs via investor dollars. While I would love to see the taxi companies forced to reform, Uber will never make a penny.
Uber has better quality service from my experience. I still remember, Sat AM in NYC, and Lyft wanted to charge surge pricing when the city is far quieter than during a weekday. Uber did not charge surge pricing on a Saturday morning!
Not certain why downvoted and no explanation provided for providing a fact. I think most would agree that Lyft charging surge pricing during a non-surge time is ridiculous. Uber to their credit did not try to rip me and other customers off.
The Yellow Cab special interests paid off politicians so that there was a limit of 13,000 Yellow Cab medallions for 8.5 million people. The price of the taxi medallion was $1.2 million. While people in Manhattan could get a taxi, there were no taxis in Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, ... Because of the artificial limit on medallions which only benefited medallion owner but not New Yorkers, a driver leasing a cab for a 12 hour shift could pay $125 just to lease the car.
When Uber and Lyft came, the rates were lower, one could use Uber Pool to have even lower rates and save on greenhouse gas. Now taxi services have some availability outside of Manhattan. Now many Yellow Cabs are idle and the value of the medallions went for $1.2 million to about $700,000 or less.
In NYC, the Yellow Cab medallion owners tried to get the mayor to put restrictions on the growth of Uber/Lyft, but New Yorkers protested.
Uber/Lyft have increased customer value, lowered greenhouse gasses while not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles.