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.
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.
Uber is the pace car and the police pulled him over, Lyft saw this and applied their brakes.
And no, we don't use horses anymore.
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.
*Smokey (as in the bear) being CB slang for highway police due to the hats.
See: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/uber-economists-dream/ or http://www.nber.org/papers/w22627.
> 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.
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].
[1] http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/uber-s-ne...
If Uber raised their prices, the average real value would drop from its current real value of $2/hr, to...
Hell if I know, but it could well be negative.
Yesterday, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp wrote "Uber has become a global service providing roughly 15 million rides per day across 500 cities" at https://medium.com/@gc/ubers-path-forward-b59ec9bd4ef6
The most recent estimate I could find on Didi Chuxing is 20 million rides per day as of October, 2016 as stated at https://www.techinasia.com/china-didi-chuxing-20-million-dai...
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?)
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.
What were the differences?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand, software patents.
We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example.
Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
http://www.sandman.com/images/oldpolewires1sm.jpg
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And Travis was not held accountable by a legal system - his investors (i.e. capital) asked him to step down.
I think we're all saying the same thing, it's just your conclusion is incorrect.
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.
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.
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.
Which reason would that be? Which reason is there for a investor to ask a CEO to step other than to protect his/her 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
As a previous comment pointed out, Uber created a consumer surplus of almost $7 billion in 2015 alone.
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.
So you're basically saying that stuff like treating women like shit was NECESSARY to provide a good "taxi" service?
None the less, let's not pretend yellow cab other taxi livery companies never mistreated any of their employees (male, female, lgbtq, etc.)
Mistreatment is not an uber only specialty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In other words you're here to scold me.
> 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 think it's a good think to break down monopolies and open up competition.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/12/nyregion/subway-complaint...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/nyregion/subway-delays.ht...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/nyregion/why-is-subway-se...
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-challenges-m...
The few times I tried to take those services the service was horrible, horrible.
Now, thankfully, Uber is available and they have much better service and they have a single identifiable reliable brand and they take credit cards.
Uber pool where unrelated riders ride in the same car are going to have less greenhouse gas than riders taking separate cars. This is logical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And a map confirming your pickup & destination, and a payment system. Yeah, not much different than talking to a dispatcher with your phone /s
Nope. No innovation here... /s
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. :-)
In practice, it has replaced lots of Yellow cab journeys too.
Straightforward evidence: the large drop in the value of a medallion in NYC.
But just talk to New Yorkers. Lots of people use Uber instead of Yellow Cabs.
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.
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.
> not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles.
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.
This comes out as 8640 hours per year, which is 360 days.
So we're talking about the income a taxi owner can get from a medallion.
What an individual taxi driver had to pay to work is a much lower number. Typically a full time job is around 2000h/year.
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.
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!
I very clearly do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-ta...
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.
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.
That's insane.
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.
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]
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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
Though they also have apps now.
Reducing greenhouse? Relative to what?
This is all one needs to read http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/02/27/its-settled-uber-is-ma...
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).
The uber/lyft traffic increase issue is throughout the world.. not just in a specific part of NYC.
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.
4. Proliferation of bike lanes.
5. Charging market rate for all street parking.
Uber and Lyft have have increased car traffic in New York: http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/02/27/its-settled-uber-is-ma...
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.
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.).
An estimated 160.000 cars driving for Uber in the US, many of which doing so as a full time job will pollute less. Right. Riiiiight.
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)
Uber's great in that they give competition to an entrenched monopoly of Yellow Cab.
But put Uber in a monopoly position anywhere and you'll see the rates skyrocket.
There needs to be a number of forces in the ride sharing market to keep prices down.
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.
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 required.
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.
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.
1. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
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 tailpipe emissions 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.
> cars used for ride services will be replaced
> more often.
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity#Statistics
2. https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do-in-i...
There is absolutely no proof whatsoever, that people sharing a vehicle increases greenhouse gas. Citation is required that it would.
Public transportation better serves: the poor, those without smartphones, people with small children, people in trafficked areas, the handicapped...
Uber/Lyft fails on all of the above in most areas it serves, and potentially decreases overall public transit use (which hurts funding overall).
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.
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
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?
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.
But it's MORE greenhouse gas generated than if all passengers took the subway.
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.
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.
"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.
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/business/media/uber-emil-...
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.
Those positives will be brought about regardless of who it is, so lets make sure it isn't a company who acts as egregiously bad as Uber.
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.