Based on my rides recently I have seen the quality of drivers plummet on both Uber and Lyft. I'd be much more willing to wait (and maybe even pay) for a higher quality driver. Having a driver who cannot follow a GPS and takes you in a circle 3-4 times around the airport or does not speak English well enough to understand your request to stop on the right instead of the left like the GPS shows can be quite frustrating depending on the scenario.
I wonder if this is the first step towards offering a "limit" option. For example, where I live the average price from our house (Jersey City) to the mall is $7, but some days it jumps up to $15 or more. My wife and I usually choose to walk those days, but it would be nice to say "hey we want to go to the mall today, let's set a $7 limit and when that hits we'll go." For the flexible consumer it's easy to wait for a better price and not need to constantly look at the phone to see what the current market price is. The limit price could help create a queue which could provide a driver with a continuous supply of rides during non-peak hours.
Here in Greece, we recently lost Uber. We're back to taxis. It's incredible how bad an experience those are after going back to them.
Cars that smell like cigarette (that's if the driver isn't outright smoking in your face), don't have AC, are old, dirty and with uncomfortable ripped-up seats.
Send your lower-quality drivers my way. I miss not wanting to vomit whenever I take a cab.
I was just in Thessaloniki and got to the airport in the middle of the taxi strike -- leaving lots of us with no other option but the public bus, which was actually not so bad, but next time I'll book a private car in advance.
On my way back I used the Beat app. It's got a slightly wonky UI and the street names are in Greek, which I'm too ignorant to read, but for getting from the apartment to the airport it was great. Taxi was clean, driver was polite, fare was reasonable.
I don't doubt there are bad taxis, just want to point out there are good ones too.
What about Beat? I heard it works different than Uber, you can actually choose your driver based on your desired characteristics (e.g. speaks English, has A/C, ...).
Beat is pretty much the best of both worlds for me. It doesn't have Uber's "let's flaunt all the laws because disruption" attitude, but it still has all the advantages, and every single driver I've booked with Beat has been fantastic. I'm never getting a taxi without using Beat these days.
No problem, you'll love it. The best is that you can pay via credit card so you don't need to fuss with change at the end of the trip, you just get out of the taxi and that's it.
well, as a weekend uber driver that drives only when prices go up I have to tell you that those 7-8 dollar trips pay us only 3 dollars and some change. Driving 7-10 minutes to pick you up and then drive for 7-10 minutes to your destination is not worth it because that comes to $10 per hour minus gas and maintenance and depreciation. Drivers have to pay for lease/finance, maintenance, insurance and still pay rent on the apt and put food on the table.
Expect the quality of service to go down, not up, if you you think $15 is too much for a trip to the mall.
1. If the rider isn't sensitive about when they leave home, then they can happily wait until a driver who happens to have dropped someone off nearby is willing to take them for $7, because they don't need to drive more than 1 minute for the pickup.
2. Lease/finance, insurance, rent and food don't go up with the number of rides or distance. If a driver has the option to take someone right now, without driving far to pick them up, vs. waiting for a higher rate, then in some cases they'd maximise marginal profit by taking the 'low rate' ride.
Right, but in the situation described (going to the mall on the weekend), OP is willing to wait, and willing to walk if nothing available.
(Of course if Uber were to introduce some 'limit price' feature, there would have to be some time-out/expiry (set by the system or by the rider). It doesn't make sense for a driver to pick up a rider days, weeks or months after the request was made.)
Stop with this already. You are basically sending a letter to Uber, saying "hey, I think it's ok for you to pay drivers like crap, because I'm absolutely willing to subsidize them instead! Thanks!"
I've got the same experience in Lisbon. When Uber showed up drivers were great, they could follow directions, they always asked about the radio and the AC, they never complained about the pick-up/drop-off places and didn't have inappropriate conversation, they spoke perfect Portuguese and/or English.
4 years later, we have drivers that can't follow basic directions, that don't speak either English or Portuguese, that leave the turn-by-turn voice on, default to the terrible EDM stations (they used to default to neutral, low-key radio stations) and worst of all, drive very dangerously.
As a cyclist, I cringe every time I see an Uber or Lyft sticker on a car now. These are amateur drivers doing a job that should require at least some professional training, and it shows: blocking bike lanes (and often traffic lanes too!), failing to look for cyclists when merging back into traffic (or turning right, etc.), not signalling turns half the time...
I've narrowly missed getting side-swiped more times than I can count, to the point where I'm seriously considering mounting a handlebar cam just to capture license plates.
So: if you're a Lyft or Uber driver, please please please please learn your obligations with respect to cyclists / pedestrians and associated infrastructure. (For instance: did you know that many jurisdictions have a mandatory minimum passing distance (usually 3ft / 1m), or that cyclists have "take the lane" rights in California? [1]) Otherwise, you shouldn't be on the road, and you definitely shouldn't be driving other people around for money.
> blocking bike lanes (and often traffic lanes too!), failing to look for cyclists when merging back into traffic (or turning right, etc.), not signalling turns half the time...
As a fellow cyclist, I don't think you've described any qualities that are specific to uber or lyft drivers, you've effectively described about 90% of the drivers on the road.
Depending on where you are, that is not an option unfortunately. It is odd, some days uber black is an option, some days we can only choose between uber x and the black suv option.
If you're in a suburb that should never happen. If you are in the NYC area for example, the GPS just really struggles between all the buildings.
What's more frustrating is when you are on the other side of a busy street, you wave to the driver or even call them to let them know you're on the other side of the street, and they just sit there...
At least in the pastUber didn't use the needle GPS coordinates, it picked the nearest street address from the pin. Fun times were had, when trying to get a pick-up from an outdoor event.
I broke my foot a year ago and spent three months on crutches. For a lot of that period, crossing the street or walking down the block was a meaningfully difficult task for me.
Whenever I called a rideshare, I very explicitly set the needle to exactly where I was. It's amazing how frequently I'd have a driver park across the street and a block away, and get angry when I didn't come to them.
Have had MAJOR issues with this internationally (specifically Hong Kong). Wait time fluctuated by 15 minutes at times! Almost caused us to miss our flight.
> If you are in the NYC area for example, the GPS just really struggles between all the buildings.
What phone are you using?
In a decade of living in Manhattan, I've never had any issue like this. The location services on my phone (Pixel 2 XL) and every Android phone I've ever used have been spot on.
Drivers sometimes go to where the live GPS signal tells them you are instead of the pin. Likewise the pin is sometimes required to be in dumb spots (like the airport) even when there's a much more convenient spot 100 feet down the street.
In my experience, the location I choose is often lost in translation between my Uber app and the driver's maps app. Sometimes the difference is egregious.
The Uber native maps app is almost invariably incorrect, at least here in Brooklyn. It does insane stuff like trying to put you on the BQE (interstate) to go like 800 yards or route you from Brooklyn to Brooklyn by transiting Manhattan and two bridges.
Until they figure out how to fix that they pretty much need to let drivers flip over to Waze or something.
I was careful not to say "third-party" maps app. They may have been making excuses for their own mistakes, but drivers have told me that sometimes the built-in Uber maps also get the wrong location.
I have no idea if that's true and have always been confused about whether the driver app even has maps built into it.
I had that problem a lot in South Africa. We'd set a pickup spot exactly where we want it, drivers told me the uber app shows them the last location I was at instead.
> Google and Apple do some tricks based on WiFi to fix GPS in dense urban areas. Raw gps is basically unusable in these areas.
Location Services doesn't just use raw GPS, no, but that's what most drivers (and passengers) are using.
In any case, for several years, I only used the device GPS (instead of the full location services), and I never had any issues like what OP is describing.
For the first time in 11 years I'm thinking of switching off T-Mobile after relocating to Chicago. Much of my day is spent in the loop and despite their best claims buildings are a bane.
Can anyone recommend a carrier with better QOS here or is this just inherent to my new life in a giant city? I'll get over it and adapt, just keeping my options open.
The GP was referring to a problem with GPS, not their cellular connection. In any case, I haven't noticed any issues with T-mobile in San Francisco, so maybe T-mobile has some weaknesses unique to the Chicago area.
I'm fully aware but in the context of GPS reception on cellular devices--prompting me to ask what I thought was a tangential question. Apologies that this was such a severe faux pas to end up downvoted into the negatives.
Verizon, unfortunately. Though a lot of the issue isn't signal but bandwidth. There are just too many people. You'll have five bars and nothing will load. That's what caused me to leave T-Mobile.
This has always been the Uber experience for me in the UK - drivers who cannot speak English, and when the road is closed for repairs(which google maps doesn't know about, because it seems incredibly poor in this country) they have no idea where to go and now suddenly it's up to you to tell them where to go. I've had maybe 1-2 good competent and friendly Uber drivers, but whenever possible I go with any local taxi company instead.
I've had the opposite. Lots of professional Uber drivers in London. They all pretty much use Waze and not Google Maps, which usually knows about road closures.
If the airport in question is Newark, I wouldn't make any assumptions about the driver. Circling around EWR and missing your exit is pretty easy to do in that airport. It's pretty confusing.
You mean, something that even lower middle class people can afford?
Your comment rings sanctimonious to me.
While I agree that major airlines should do better in some areas, they are also just responding to consumer demand.
Should the people who cannot afford higher fares just exist in a lower caste where flying is not achievable? Those people for whom lower fares are the priority, you feel they just shouldn’t be able to attend a family member’s funeral or college graduation?
That is how things are in my extended family in the US. A spare couple hundred dollars for even a routine round-trip fair between major cities is still a very difficult stretch for them.
If grumpy people who can easily afford the flights are annoyed by the lack of frills and the cheapness, yet people who are less well off can possibly afford more flights, that seems like a positive overall for society to me.
The problem is that it's often hard to cleanly separate the cheap vs. comfortable use cases. It works reasonably well for intercity buses in the US which people mostly take because it's the lowest cost option and people with more money mostly don't take.
Unfortunately in the airline industry we've tended toward an overall race to the bottom which explicitly budget airlines and different classes of service only help to a limited degree to separate out people with different preferences.
I’m not sure I agree. With flights, wealthy people would just charter a private flight or travel on a luxury or boutique airline, apart from the traditional option of first-class.
What it sounds like you are saying is that there is a group of middle class or upper middle class people who won’t choose to spend the amounts required for the luxury option (the equivalent of not taking the bus), and yet feel grumpy that the slightly higher prices they would prefer to pay end up pricing almost all flights out of the market for other middle class or lower middle class travelers.
“Cleanly separate the cheap vs comfortable use cases” seems simple: airline economics just implies that the prices for the comfortable (“not taking the bus”) option are staggeringly high, and that so many customers strongly prefer the cheap (“just treat the airplane like it’s the subway”) option, that airlines must structure the offerings around that fact.
I don't wholly disagree with you. It's partly that the true service upgrades for flying--even if you just talk commercial--are priced at a completely different level from economy even though they maybe cost about 2x more per passenger.
That said, if you have Pre-check, airline status, airline club membership, maybe pay a bit more, etc. in practice you get a bit more legroom, early boarding, (usually) fairly fast security, etc. So, in that sense, there is a mild upgrade option relative to barebones cheapest tickets. (Depending on the airline.)
I would argue that your desired use case is a closer reality as it just requires adding a new option with lower score or similar. Increasing the quality is not as simple.
I just wanted to drop a note to say I think Uber is doing a good job, all things considered. Many public transit companies have been around for decades and haven't figured out how to scale up to the kind of service Uber is providing. 4B rides in 2017 is pretty amazing.
If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares)
Even the best funded public transit services are substantial money losers. Paris covers 70 cents of every dollar, Madrid 60 cents, and even in Berlin and Munich its 30 cents.
But that covers 100 percent of their expenses. If Uber had to shell out to fix the streets that they use, I bet it wouldn't be so cheap.
> If Uber had to shell out to fix the streets that they use, I bet it wouldn't be so cheap.
Streets are public infrastructure and are paid for by taxes, which Uber and all other companies that do business using roads presumably pay, just like everyone else. So, unless you have a specific reason to believe otherwise, it is fair to assume that yes, Uber is paying for the streets that they use.
If streets are not being adequately paid for, then that's a failure of the government that's responsible for them, not the businesses that are using them (streets are there to be used).
Lets dedicate the same public funding to trains & buses as we do to roads (including accounting for the property value sprawling roads occupy) and then see if public transport is comparable to ride-sharing.
There's a reason advanced cities in Europe and Asia invest heavily in mass transit without the expectation of a commercial return, it's simply more space efficient.
Uber doesn't pay a cent in gas taxes (they're not employees, they're partners, right?), and since they've never made money before, they don't pay a cent in taxes either.
The drivers pay gas taxes, and the majority of the revenue goes to the drivers. Therefore car activity that uber induces is also paid for by the customers that use it. Basic induction. What you are doing is like complaining about amazon or the local grocer inducing truck demand and not paying for the roads.
It's a bit obvious you have a chip on your shoulder about Uber and ride share companies in general.
Careful about mistaking accounting for economics. If gas taxes were lowered to zero, could Uber increase their share of the ride payment by the current tax amount, without harming their relationship with the drivers? If so, then Uber is paying that tax, not the drivers.
Maybe if gasoline weren't extremely inelastic, your begging the question wouldn't be so ridiculous. I pay $4.00/gal for gas. The gas tax is 18 cents. Under 5 percent. Yes, I suppose Uber could lower their cut by a tenth of a percent and really put some extra change in my pocket!!
PS. I have an expensive piece of paper in economics and statistics, but I appreciate you telling me to be careful. Gotta have somebody looking out for me, i suppose.
It's operated by two for-profit companies, but the government paid the massive bill for the construction, sets the fares and even owns the rolling stock (trains) now:
...and of course, this being Singapore, the companies in question (SMRT Corp and SBS Transit) are themselves largely owned by various government entities (Temasek etc).
There may be lessons to learn, but profitability in state supported railways-metro (publicly owned or privately operated but government subsidized) is almost impossible. Singapore is a tiny place and property prices are astronomical. Singapore Metro earns money from property rentals (some state coercion helps too). This does not work for most cities in the world.
Just to totally nitpick your last point, it's worth noting that the BART cost probably includes the entire infrastructure maintenance cost whereas Uber essentially has infrastructure subsidized (i.e., they don't need to pay for maintenance of the roads their cars drive on etc.) so a true comparison of efficiency would result in Uber "costing" more than that.
Uber, Lyft, and taxis don't just use subsidized infrastructure, it puts additional strain on that infrastructure compared to even single-occupancy vehicles. Uber cars circle around already heavily-congested roadways looking for fares (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/nyregion/uber-car-congest... this creates congestion.
And of course, anecdotally we've all driven behind an Uber car that suddenly pulls over to the side of a traffic lane to let its fare out.
The cost of the infrastructure is in capital and operating costs of the drivers. ie the capital in the cars and the taxes in the fuel (and income tax?).
So these costs are passed along in the cost of an uber ride.
You did point at something I missed though. Technically every ride is being subsidized by investors (because uber operates at a loss afaik). To whatever extent they're losing money on every ride is a sort of disadvantage to uber ...
Unlike bart that infra is shared and taxes are paid by all users . If uber and its drivers are paying lesser than they should for their usage the govt which needs to fix that, however it cannot be said uber is not paying for the infra they use.
>If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares)
I think a better comparison than total cost is how much money they are losing. The difference between what I'm paying and what I feel like I'm getting with uber feels like... a lot, and that lines up with everything I've read of their financial situation.
If you are willing to lose substantial money on a per-ride basis, sure, you are going to have a pretty nice transit product.
(Personally, I'd be pretty okay with the government losing some of my tax money on public transit projects... though I think if the government is gonna do it, I want them to lose the money up front on expensive, durable, high-capacity infrastructure, then come closer to breaking even on a marginal ride basis)
BART and other big city light rail systems are plagued with billions in deferred maintenance because while politicians love ribbon cutting and pontificating they balk when the bill comes due. Across the US there is about a hundred billion in such deferred maintenance and the vast majority of it is for light rail systems that were built more because they could and sounded good than built where they would be used. Worse, to compensate for the costs bus routes get reduced which just exacerbates problems.
hence why we have taxi services, why all cities across the world have taxi and similar services. transit cannot go everywhere nor can it quickly adapt to changes in public needs. buses are the best bet for adapting but services need both rolling stock, drivers, and usage cases, to move whereas taxi and ride sharing services react on need.
plus in the current meta where "soon" there will be self driving cars and buses all which are EV it will completely transform public transit. I just hope to be there will it does.
> BART and other big city light rail systems are plagued with billions in deferred maintenance because while politicians love ribbon cutting and pontificating they balk when the bill comes due.
Yeah, that is part of why I support systems that lean towards higher up front and lower ongoing costs.
>plus in the current meta where "soon" there will be self driving cars and buses all which are EV it will completely transform public transit. I just hope to be there will it does.
Self-driving won't help with congestion problems. unshared on-demand vehicles (and it doesn't really matter here if the on-demand vehicle is driven by a human gig economy worker or a computer) help with parking, but if anything, they make congestion worse, as they've gotta drive to pick me up in addition to driving to my destination. (of course, shared on-demand vehicles can help with congestion, at least when they are shared.)
The only "game changer" here is that potentially a self-driving uber could be cheaper (either by directly lowering operating costs, or if we get the hang of things, by lowering the number of injuries caused by mistakes.)
The problem is that if you charge less, I'm going to use the non-shared on-demand service more often; I only use the shared service to save a few bucks.
My point here is that we can probably predict what self driving cars will get us by looking at what heavily subsidized ride sharing services get us. self-driving cars might even get us less; if I could get uber-like point to point without having to park service out of a personally-owned car at a price point that isn't much more than a regular personally-owned car? I'd probably share rides a whole lot less than I do now.
> If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares)
Scaling a mobile app is trivial compared to running a transit company.
BART owns/maintains infrastructure (including an underwater tunnel) and vehicles, provides benefits (health, retirement, etc) to their drivers, and operates a multi-jurisdictional police force.
Uber meanwhile hired a couple of tech bros (paid largely in stock instead of actual currency), pays their drivers near minimum wage with no benefits (as they're not actually employees), and disregards as many laws as possible (so there's little-to-no cost to enter a new market). It's not surprising they've been able to scale. What's surprising is how expensive their service still is.
"In the same breath you complain that they don't pay their drivers enough and that their service is too expensive."
You seem to present that as a contradiction, but the obvious conclusion is that the GP believes Uber keeps an unfair share of the ride fees.
Based on my vague internet research, it appears Uber keeps 20-25% plus various fees, like how credit card settlement charges work, which can add up to 40%+ for some rides.
And the amount Uber keeps has to go way up too, if Uber is to cease operating at multi-billon dollar per year losses to become profitable. Currently they only take 20-25% and the rest of the required income to meet operating expenses is subsidized by VC funding.
And the losses are so large that it likely means both raising prices to riders and reducing the net payout to drivers at the same time.
> Drivers aren't going to get more than a few percentage points increase without increasing the price to the end user.
But they should. Perhaps the pay scale is too top heavy. Uber's operational expenses should be trivial (hell, they straight up stole the most expensive bits -- the self-driving car IP). Instead they squeeze the drivers (passing along rate cuts) and riders (surge pricing during shootings, etc) pretty severely.
Probably not. Riders and drivers are both primarily price-driven. They have little or no brand loyalty. It's a low-margin, race-to-the-bottom type of business.
L5 self-driving cars will be a game-changer for a while, assuming Uber gets exclusivity from Waymo (which now owns a stake in Uber).
It seems to me that they are very well known at this point, and don't have significant competition. I don't see why they would be spending so much money for marketing... maybe in the past, maybe in the future. I must not understand the market.
I'm sure there's plenty of analysis of this out there, so I should read some articles.
The point the commenter is making is that Uber is just providing access to it. They aren't training all those drivers, buying and maintaining all those cars, building and maintaining all the roads, etc. BART does all those things for their rail system.
It gets worse. Uber relies on a roadway network built by tax money (BART can't). They also ignore all the externalities of pollution (Bart is minimal in comparison).
The comparison between the two can't be made without adding in more factors.
It's rare that I see anyone bring up the pollution induced by Uber's (and Lyft's) business models. Now there's something I'd like to see studied more intensely.
I don't remember where but I heard that just manufacturing a car cause more pollution than it's entire lifetime on the road. If Uber prevents people from buying cars then Uber may actually be environmentally friendly.
Well then you'd need to balance that against all the new cars that Uber and Lyft drivers lease to support themselves. Cars that might have sat rusting on the lot while reasonable consumers chose to buy more affordable pre-owned vehicles.
Creating a market for new cars only ensures that new cars will continue to be produced in high volume.
Consistent with the 'smart car' idea, where they manufacture cars with a low-environmental impact, yet the cars have poor gas mileage. To be a win, what you said would have to be true.
I don't have a source but I assume that the driver:rider ratio of cars owned times pollution of manufacturing is greater than the rider:driver ratio of time driven time pollution of driving.
The commenter almost certainly has no idea (or more likely, chooses to ignore) the operational infrastructure and excellence it takes to scale a marketplace like Uber's to 4 billion rides, as fast as Uber did it.
Any hot-take that centers around "It's just an app that a couple of guys wrote in an afternoon with some underpaid drivers doing all the work" is someone arguing in bad faith (and I suspect the person is well aware of it). There is a ton that goes into scaling a marketplace in general - let alone an on-demand one with thousands of corner cases, real time demand forecasting, real time fare calculations, real time capacity planning, customer support operations, etc.
- a police force with 206 legally sworn-in law enforcement officers and 90 other staff members
- a wireless network that supplies cell phone service to riders underground
BART isn't even that good - I live in Sydney and we are always complaining about our double-decker dead-silent very clean commuter and city rail. Buzzfeed [2] even thinks our train system is from the future!
I love software - I want to make a career out of it, but we can't forget "real" engineering fields and the effort that goes into them.
Structural engineering is the art of solving the known knowns, which basically reduces the complexity to budgeting/resource planning. Startups need to solve the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, which is inherently more challenging and difficult.
Please. They drive around on roads that they don't pay for, in cars that they don't own, using drivers that they don't pay. The routing engine is Google's (they all use Maps). The rest of the stuff is impressive, and not something that you can put together in a day, or even a year. But I don't think it should be as difficult as it is for them to make a profit. I genuinely don't know what their expenses are other than giving away shit for free.
You know Uber builds it's own mapping services right? And in fact, the guy who helped lead those efforts is the guy responsible for creating Google Earth which later formed the basis for Google's entire mapping efforts (which he led).
He's a great guy by the way, in addition to being super smart.
Your others points are not well thought through at all - I urge you to spend some time really thinking deeply about them if this is a topic you care about.
Every company drives around on roads they don't pay for. Roads are a benefit to society - part of the reason we value them is because they enable commerce. Do you complain that GrubHub doesn't use their own roads when they deliver your food? Do you complain that Pizza Hut doesn't own it's own cars when their delivery drivers bring you pizza? Does United help pay for the airports that enable them to exist?
Look, the fact of the matter is that consumers LOVE ride sharing services. They're fast, they're cheap, they're clean, they're safe, and the customer support is incredible. Ride sharing today is simply 10x better than any alternative in most cities. If you're going to argue for cabs being superior, then you either do not live in America or you've never taken a cab before. Not only that, but many drivers love ride-sharing too. Whole classes of people that couldn't find work before can now easily find work with Uber or Lyft (including the deaf, mute, retired, students etc). They can work when they want to, as much as they want to (or as little) and set their own schedule. This is simply not possible with any other low-wage work.
Having said all of this, I don't mean to imply that we should absolve Uber of responsibility for their business practices or their culture problems. We should absolutely push them, and the industry to be better. But this isn't just about Uber. This is about ride-sharing in general, which completely changed what transportation in cities means. It is absolutely innovative in every sense of the word.
> But this isn't just about Uber. This is about ride-sharing in general, which completely changed what transportation in cities means. It is absolutely innovative in every sense of the word.
I think you are overstating it somewhat. Ride Sharing is just a doublespeak name for owner-driver minicabs, which have been around for ages.
On the one hand creating GPS-enabled autodispatching minicabs did allow for a difference in scale that makes it a genuinely different service from what was there previously.
But when all these services end up doubling in price, as they're going to inevitably have to do (and the autonomous vehicle cavalry isn't going to charge in to save the day), it will be interesting to see what happens. My own experiences suggest there are a lot of people who don't want to get sweaty walking 3 blocks or to mingle with the masses on mass transit.
>You know Uber builds it's own mapping services right? And in fact, the guy who helped lead those efforts is the guy responsible for creating Google Earth which later formed the basis for Google's entire mapping efforts (which he led).
Yeah, but when I get into a car it's not Uber Maps on the phone, it's Google Maps. So I'm not very concerned about a guy who worked at Uber for less than two years.
>He's a great guy by the way, in addition to being super smart.
I'm sure he is, which is why he got the hell out of there.
>Do you complain that GrubHub doesn't use their own roads when they deliver your food?
Yes, I would like for them to pay their fair share in road taxes.
>Do you complain that Pizza Hut doesn't own it's own cars when their delivery drivers bring you pizza?
...yes, but now we're being redundant.
>Does United help pay for the airports that enable them to exist?
Now this is just ignorant. Yes, large airports charge millions in landing fees. Train companies pay absolutely egregious property tax rates. It's just cars and trucks that get away with paying 18.4 cents per gallon. Oh, and me who has to pay taxes to fix the roads here while congestion and air pollution here in Chicago have absolutely skyrocketed.
>which completely changed what transportation in cities means.
Uber's success is basically because they were able to push all of the legacy costs of public transit onto taxpayers and claiming that they're more efficient. It's VC-funded bus routes but using a phone. DISRUPTION.
> Yeah, but when I get into a car it's not Uber Maps on the phone, it's Google Maps. So I'm not very concerned about a guy who worked at Uber for less than two years.
Navigation might be Google Maps or Waze, but everything else is Uber. My point is that Uber is 100% serious about mapping and they are investing a ton of resources into it. They're likely one of the few players who are doing this at scale, internationally.
> I'm sure he is, which is why he got the hell out of there.
Now you're projecting. He left Uber so that he can run for office in his hometown of Kansas City. I think he has a lot to contribute outside of technology. I got to know him because I went to a talk he gave once. And no I don't work for any of these companies.
> Taxes & Roads
Ultimately, everyone pays for roads. Not just drivers. And we pay for them because they're for the benefit of everyone. They enable services like GrubHub/Uber/UPS/Dominoes as well as commerce more generally - which in turn makes our lives better. It's a complex system, and I suspect that the tax revenue the government gets for roads is higher after the introduction of Uber/Lyft. With that being said, if you feel a tax is necessary then I respect that opinion. Even with a tax like you're suggesting, it won't change the demand curve meaningfully or affect Uber's profitability. It's likely serve to further entrench them if anything at this point.
With respect to your point about Airports, they're not even close to being paid for by the airlines in any meaningfully fair way. First of all, the government subsidizes it up front with billions of dollars, expensive zoning, planning resources etc. That's a huge capital risk that society takes on for the long-term benefit of everyone (you can't opt-out if you don't fly on planes). Yes, airlines pay usage taxes and some other fees that help pay for the airport but it stands to reason that the government won't recoup that kind of money in even a single decade. The government props up the airlines industry in large part because we demand it and it makes our lives better.
> Uber's success is basically because they were able to push all of the legacy costs of public transit onto taxpayers and claiming that they're more efficient. It's VC-funded bus routes but using a phone. DISRUPTION.
Absolutely wrong. I use Uber/Lyft every day. I don't have a car. Uber/Lyft are nothing like a bus route - not even close. To even suggest that they're similar to a traditional bus service route is to reveal that you haven't used the services in any meaningful way.
They are absolutely 100% disruptive (even more so if you're a woman and safety is important to you). I'm telling you, ride sharing has changed how I get around in cities, period. There's a reason drivers drive for these services. Ride sharing is creating a whole class of jobs that have a very important role to play in society. Stay-at-home moms that use Uber/Lyft to supplement their income while being able to have flexible work. Students that are just getting started in their career and are using Uber/Lyft to sustain themselves in the interim. Retired veterans who don't have any other way to earn a steady income. Deaf people who can't find jobs otherwise. Immigrants who are trying to build up a support base for themselves. The list goes on. Talk to the drivers, this kind of work is a big boon to a lot of people.
Now, should these be the only career options for people? Obviously not. I think that's where most people's concerns are valid. We can't create a society where this is the only type of work available. But can this type of work exist alongside other meaningful options? Of course!
> Navigation might be Google Maps or Waze, but everything else is Uber. My point is that Uber is 100% serious about mapping and they are investing a ton of resources into it. They're likely one of the few players who are doing this at scale, internationally.
So you're comparing scaling out a mapping back end to building and running massive transit infrastructure?
> With respect to your point about Airports, they're not even close to being paid for by the airlines in any meaningfully fair way.
Take a look at JFK. Airlines absolutely do pay significant amounts into airports.
> Absolutely wrong. I use Uber/Lyft every day. I don't have a car. Uber/Lyft are nothing like a bus route - not even close. To even suggest that they're similar to a traditional bus service route is to reveal that you haven't used the services in any meaningful way.
FWIW, BART doesn't run buses.
> Ride sharing is creating a whole class of jobs that have a very important role to play in society.
Minimum wage jobs with no benefits (thus externalizing the cost of providing the jobs)? That's not much of a win in my book.
> Now, should these be the only career options for people? Obviously not. I think that's where most people's concerns are valid. We can't create a society where this is the only type of work available. But can this type of work exist alongside other meaningful options? Of course!
And absolutely none of that means Uber is doing something more challenging than running a transit agency like BART or NYMTA. Uber's externalized most of their costs, disregarded most laws, and is scaling a very specific part of their software stack. It's not surprising to see growth under those circumstances.
> They are absolutely 100% disruptive (even more so if you're a woman and safety is important to you).
Ah, I thought things like "God mode", Boobr, and doxxing critics felt creepy and unsafe. But that's just me, and I'm not a woman.
> There's a reason drivers drive for these services.
Sure. We like to call those predatory financing and exaggerated claims about compensation. Your buzzword laden defense of Uber misses the point though: scaling Uber is significantly easier than scaling a transit agency like an airline or BART.
> Ah, I thought things like "God mode", Boobr, and doxxing critics felt creepy and unsafe. But that's just me, and I'm not a woman.
Have you talked to actual women? Ask them if they feel safer in an Uber, in a Taxi or in BART. Seriously go try this experiment. Assuming you're in the Bay Area, ask 10 of your closest female friends.
Also remember that Uber is just one ride sharing company.
> Sure. We like to call those predatory financing and exaggerated claims about compensation. Your buzzword laden defense of Uber misses the point though: scaling Uber is significantly easier than scaling a transit agency like an airline or BART.
People are not stupid. If it was a raw deal for them then they'll jump ship (there are huge communities of drivers that constantly crunch numbers, share spreadsheets, etc). You can drop in and drop out at any time. That's one of the benefits of doing Uber. Work at McDonald's? Now you have to fight to get enough work hours for pay, you can be overworked, you can be shortchanged, you can have grueling schedules, you can't take vacations easily, the actual work is stressful....have you sincerely ever worked a job like that?
> Your buzzword laden defense of Uber misses the point though: scaling Uber is significantly easier than scaling a transit agency like an airline or BART.
I think you forget that the OP that prompted my response said "I genuinely don't know what their expenses are other than giving away shit for free", which is what I was responding to.
If you genuinely agree with the OP and you've made up your mind, then I don't think there's anything I can say to convince either of you that scaling Uber isn't a matter of giving away shit for free and building an app in a weekend.
> Have you talked to actual women? Ask them if they feel safer in an Uber, in a Taxi or in BART. Seriously go try this experiment. Assuming you're in the Bay Area, ask 10 of your closest female friends.
I am in the Bay Area, and the biggest proponent of taxis over Uber that I know is female. The only woman I know that uses Uber does so because her boyfriend is a code monkey at Uber and so they'd get a few rides for free each month.
Of my friends that use "ride sharing" apps, they almost all use Lyft exclusively because they find Uber so reprehensible. I also see plenty of vehicles signed for Lyft alone or Lyft + Uber, but almost never see Uber only vehicles.
As a woman how do you feel about Uber fighting background checks tooth and nail?
So this guy is an idiot then? How exactly do you get out of an auto loan that you're now underwater on because Uber decided to turn the screws on you?
> I think you forget that the OP that prompted my response
I am the author of the comment you replied to. I'm happy to be convinced but marketing doublespeak like "engineering excellence" isn't convincing in any manner. Uber develops an app and spends a ton on marketing. Beyond that Uber externalizes almost all of its costs. That's trivial to scale compared to actually scaling a transit company that has to invest in infrastructure.
Hypothetically, if a company is able to provide the same service as BART without building and maintaining all that infrastructure, isn't that a huge point in favor of that company?
Capitalize the gains, socialize the losses. The infrastructure has to be built, if the company doesn't do it, the state does, which means society pays. More individual rides mean more traffic congestion which means a worse experience for everybody.
I think that Uber from an investment perspective is looking good but from a social perspective it's looking bad.
Lyft used to do something similar couple of years ago (at least in Bay Area) in Lyft Line. I believe they had 10 min wait option wherein when you request and wait for 10 mins you'll get cheaper fare. I remember getting 10-20% cheaper fares consistently using that option. I'd regularly take 10 min wait option especially going to east bay or peninsula from SF.
Uber also has "express pool" option (again in bay area), wherein you have to wait for 2 mins to get matched.
As a rider, these options are great. However, not sure if it's profitable for these companies. I guess with higher rider/driver density, they can make it work?
The longer the rider is willing to wait, the more the service can optimize the allocation of drivers. (Less distance driven without a passenger, more distance driven with multiple passengers in a car pool, more direct carpools.) This is a real elimination of waste whose value can be split between the service and the passenger, although it's not clear whether the size of that value is really at the 10-20% level.
If they can pair you up with a drop-off already on the way to your exact location by having you wait a couple minutes, I would estimate this is easily worth 20% to the driver, assuming average trip time is on the order of 10-20 minutes.
Express Pool and Pool include an up to 2 minute wait to give other riders a chance to make a request in the same area or along the route. Express Pool often feels much faster than Pool because they ask the rider to walk towards main streets and I notice it helps the driver avoid having to drive around city blocks unnecessarily. I think Lyft Line is the same offering as Uber Pool and doesn’t require a 10 min wait (but the wait could be that long if there aren’t drivers nearby or it’s totally possible that they used to add a 10min wait). Perhaps the thing you’re thinking of is called Lyft Shuttle now?
F.D. I work for Uber, but not in the rides business.
IMO, the worst thing about Uber's pricing 'experiments' are silently gouging frequent riders with higher upfront fares, hiking up return fares (since it knows you didn't drive to the location) as well as hidden surges (that aren't passed on to the driver) during night.
This is pretty much what express pool does already. You sit on your thumbs for 2 minutes while the app pretends to do a search and then the car comes right to you anyway, and you pay less.
I've frequently used Uber Pool, and have noticed that it's started forcing a waiting period of a minute to "find the best match". I've also noticed that I'm getting matched with drivers further and further away from me, frequently waiting up to ten minutes. The matching algorithms sure don't seem improved, so maybe they're just covering up a decreasing number of drivers in my area.
Uber most likely thinks you're a habitual user, so it gives priority for newer riders. Uber dynamically prices rides based on the person and your ride history[1], as well as factors like your battery percentage.
See the second source. I've only anecdotally confirmed that this actually happens, but when your battery is low and you're requesting an Uber, I encourage you to get an upfront fare and then compare that versus Lyft.
Before ordering a ride, Uber always shows ~2 mins wait time. After placing an order, it goes up to 6-9 mins. Their GPS is also bad quality. I live in the downtown of a big city. Lyft drivers come right away, consistently. Lately, for the same reason, I have started using them. Whereas, Uber's drivers keep on circling around until I call them and give them directions. Their reason - it's these big buildings. I respond by saying: these big buildings also exist for Lyft.
In a nutshell, this Uber feature is already there for me. I will admit - Uber's prices are mostly lower than Lyft.
Turn off "Live Location Sharing" when you are around tall buildings especially on iOS.
I commute via Uber/Lyft every day and this happens to me often and I've found that relying on the actual address instead of using location sharing gets me the best results. In most open places Live Location Sharing can be great especially in crowds or when dealing with intersections but it is too sensitive in areas with congested Wi-Fi signals or tall buildings.
Hah! I remember this was an interview question for one of my PMs that was looking to join Uber.
Without breaking NDA, it was something along the lines of "Why would Uber let customers wait longer?"
It's an interesting product problem but I felt that it would be more relevant for an economist to analyze, given that it's more of a supply/demand equilibrium challenge.
The cost is also far less than transit. If we judged Uber by the same standards that we judged local transit costs, they would be ahead by quite a bit and fairly profitable. You could even increase the take home that drivers took and still come out ahead.
Maybe in the bay area, where investment in public transit is abysmal. When I've visited cities with good public transit I've never felt the need for Uber/Lyft.
Frequently, the actual time-to-pick-up does not match the predicted time-to-pick-up. It's effectively the proposed system -- you have to wait longer. Now they want to make you wait even longer.
Why not offer better service for higher prices (instead of the reverse)? Getting service from a "super" tier of drivers, ones that have:
* a history of ON TIME pick-ups
* fluent spoken English
* straightforward following of GPS directions
* GUARANTEED air-conditioning
* non-smoking
* quiet not talking loudly on the phone
* not a POS car with destroyed vehicle suspension/shock absorbers and trashed seating
Less stops yes, but in Uber pools the stops can be incredibly inconvenient and made worse with poor drivers or riders, resulting in long rides. At least with a bus I get a well trained professional who is prepared for almost all scenarios. I also can estimate how long s bus will take, pools can be unpredictability long.
> At least with a bus I get a well trained professional who is prepared for almost all scenarios
Your city clearly has different bus drivers to every city I've ever lived in. The best moment I've ever had on a bus was when the bus driver stopped on a level crossing while a train was coming. I've also had bus drivers clip signs and parked cars, crash into other cars and busses, brake and accelerate like they were trying to dodge a heat seeking missile, and just generally bad drivers. And in my current city, the bus drivers (and tram drivers) won't do anything about bad passengers, they sit in their little perspex box and ignore the passengers.
I was on a tram the other day while an ex con was screaming obscenities at old Asian lady. The lady complained to the tram driver, who did literally nothing. She had to get off the tram because he was getting so abusive I swear he was about to hit her.
I've stopped taking buses and trams at night for this exact reason.
Trains seem to be mostly OK, maybe because they're bigger I can just avoid them. But I've felt seriously unsafe on trams and buses before at night, and I don't scare easily. There's nothing quite so unsettling as a junkie having a psychotic episode in the back of the bus. You don't want to look at them in case they engage you, but you want to keep your eyes on them in case they feel like jabbing you.
Why doesn't Uber/Lyft support actual carpooling so that if I know I need to go somewhere I can offers other people a ride to/from nearby locations. Given the traffic in large cities and the number of single cars going the same direction at rush hour it would make a lot of sense. Adding the option for a longer wait like this would make it easier to manage for the commuting driver. I guess the issue is it'll annoy the more professional drivers but for users it would be good.
I do wonder how you get drivers to accept rates for them that flow from lower prices. I visit Accra reasonably often and frequently get drivers dropping me on price grounds - this would make the areas covered by this behaviour bigger, I think.
Uber is great in the suburbs (sydney, AU), and I'd be fine waiting 5-10 mins more and being put on a low priority so I can get it cheap. It'd also be pretty good during peak periods.
I wonder if this is the first step towards offering a "limit" option. For example, where I live the average price from our house (Jersey City) to the mall is $7, but some days it jumps up to $15 or more. My wife and I usually choose to walk those days, but it would be nice to say "hey we want to go to the mall today, let's set a $7 limit and when that hits we'll go." For the flexible consumer it's easy to wait for a better price and not need to constantly look at the phone to see what the current market price is. The limit price could help create a queue which could provide a driver with a continuous supply of rides during non-peak hours.