I was in London recently. I took Uber 15 times in 2 weeks. I never had a single issue. The only problem I had is that the culture in London appears to be to give 4s as default instead of 5s. Other than that I felt it was better than SF Bay Area.

I wish the culture was to give an honest star rating everywhere. A 4 is an excellent rating to get and should be treated as such. Instead we’ve set everything up so that if you aren’t getting 5 stars you’re a failure. What’s the point of stars 1 through 4 then? We should just ditch this system for a 0 or 1 star system instead since that’s how it’s treated.

Same problem has infected everything from rating your apartment maintenance guy to the support person at the call center.

A pet peve of mine, surely the average rating should be the average of the scale, and 5 starts ought to be reserved for something truly exceptional

4* = No problem at all 5* = I actually enjoyed it.

If it's indeed so hard to find a good Uber driver, you'd expect them to be driven out of the market by customers themselves.

And if they compensate for that by eg. lower price, then how is it different from any other market. You want premium quality, you pay extra - you're fine with compromising on it, you go for the cheaper option.

The market is skewed as Uber runs huge losses and is operating at a loss, that's how it's different to other markets.

Also, Uber are paying under the minimum wage in the UK, or at least the regional minimum living wage in London. Uber don't pay taxes in the UK like a London minicab company would, then they underpay their drivers and expect our welfare system to pick up the slack on their crummy wages.

Minimum wages should apply to gig type working like Uber/Deliveroo etc as much as it does to everyone else. This is the market failure.

Without a minimum wage, sick pay, materity/paternity leave pay, of course you can make the ride cheaper.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uber-verdic...

If Uber had to buy the vehicles, service them and pay full tax and fines it would be nearly as expensive as black cabs.

I take my fair share of Uber rides but I can see the next dot com bust happening now when this unprofitable business model all washes out. See also WeWork.

see addison lee. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addison_Lee)

This is the reason why I find this "TFL is against innovation" rubbish is so annoying. AL had an app way before uber was in london.

The only difference for the end user is that AL is more expensive. (because whilst the drivers are "independent" they lease the cars from AL, and have an exclusive contract with them)

Yes if a company does something that is not in the core specialisations, they would be expensive. Who guessed?

I'm talking about the gig economy ripping off their workers. I think you've misunderstood and been rude and sarcastic with it.

Did not mean to be rude at all. It just seems you're misunderstanding how differently Uber operates in each market.

There are multiple markets where Uber is not ripping their drivers off in any way, because if they did they would be running to competitors. The problem with gig economy workers nearly always stems from the core issue of lack of legislation in self-employment.

> The market is skewed as Uber runs huge losses and is operating at a loss

According to Q3 financials, I believe that is longer true for ridesharing.

> you'd expect them to be driven out of the market by customers themselves.

Customers will frequently do things that are bad for them and bad for everyone, just because they have received advertising. That's why I think Uber is basically the antivaxx of taxis; they ignore regulations and break laws, putting people at risk and do everything they can in bad faith, but remain incredibly popular in some circles so I expect the law to drive them out, not "customers themselves".

> putting people at risk

Given that this is the only part of your comment that remotely reaches "bad for the customer" [1], can you elaborate on this? I've heard scattered reports of safety concerns but they never seem to add up to much, and I've never seen anyone try to do an apples-to-apples comparison to taxis. There's obviously inherent danger in large numbers of people getting into strangers' cars, and the question is whether Uber is less safe than taxis.

[1] I mean directly, not via "bad for everyone"

>, can you elaborate on this?

Not the person you were replying to but sexual harassment or just creepiness is a common one here in Indianapolis. This year alone:

- one friend had an Uber driver offer her perfume when she took an Uber home which creeped her out

- A co-worker driving Uber on the side had a couple invite her into their home offering her use of their hot tub and telling her that she could borrow clothes or just wear her underwear

- Another female friend had a driver offer her "complimentary earnings".

- Two female friends getting a ride to a bridal bar crawl were repeatedly asked for their phone numbers to 'meet up later tonight'

And I don't think this is abnormal either, a little searching on reddit/facebook/twitter and you can find report after report of such activity on the various ride platforms.

Pretty much everyone I know will not use ride share any more for being responsible while out drinking or when needing a ride to the airport and have gone back to using cabs or friends/family.

I've only used them myself a few times, all last summer when I was in San Francisco for less than 48 hours and none of them left me feeling "yay this is a great service"

- The guy that picked me up at SFO apparently didn't speak a word of English and just kept smile and nodding when I tried to ask him questions. It was Pride weekend and a road between us and my hotel (the Proper) was closed for the parade and he kept trying to find a way around and looking at me panicked, eventually I cancelled the ride and got out to try and find my own way.

- The guy that picked me up to take me to OpenAI had some sort of Alex Jones-esque talk radio on that was talking about 'government sanctioned false flag events' that left me wondering about the mental well being of the driver, he never said one word to me the entire time. No hi, no are you my guy, no we are here, no get the hell out of my car. Nothing. Worse, the dude had total Travis Bickle vibes WITHOUT the radio/podcast. He dropped me off on the wrong side of the street and at the end of the block.

- My first ride from there to YC's San Francisco office was hijacked by someone else. Got in my ride and the app reflected me in the car being charged, I cancelled the ride after a minute while trying to find any sort of way to notify the app or driver I wasn't in the vehicle. Had to request another and wait several minutes, this guy seemed alright, said hi to me, then proceeded to drive like he just stole the car while cutting off a couple of buses/trolleys on the way back to the Proper while letting off strings of 'mother f* this, hole that, can you believe this guy" and had three phones on his dash with some app open that was apparently telling him if he should take a Lyft or Uber fair right then (IIRC it was actually a company from a YC batch, I looked it up on my phone because I thought it was a neat concept). He also was on the wrong side of the street and and said "is his good" after he'd already put the car in park with traffic behind him.

- The guy that took me from the Proper to SFO again, apparently did not speak or understand English, I believe was muttering at traffic in Russian or Serbian, was extremely impatient in traffic getting out of the city with a lot of hard accelerations and abrupt stops trying to get one car advantages by weaving in and out of the lanes. Also had 2 phones on the dash and a dedicated GPS unit and accepted a Lyft ride with me still in the car on an Uber ride as he was maybe 1/4 of a mile from the terminal, jumped out of the car and had the trunk open before I was out and was shoving my suitcase at me and immediately walked up to his apparent next customer to get theirs.

- I think had another ride back to the YC SF offices to meet with another person a little later and the woman that picked me up kept turning around to talk to me face to face while driving, told me how she was raising her son 'free range' and asked if I was in town for Pride. I informed her no and told her about the entirely naked man I'd seen walking down the street with only sandals and a bag [1] at which point she went on to explain that her and her child's father took him to the parade the day before to expose him to as much of the 'exposed male form' as possible because she thinks 5 is old enough for a child to start learning about sexual freedom, again while looking back over her shoulder at me regularly.

- The guy that took me back to the Proper had been (or perhaps a passenger), at some recent point, vaping THC containing vape in his car as there was both a fruity and a immediately recognizable skunky aroma in the car

Prior to this I'd only ever been in one other Uber ride, all of a mile here in Indy that a co-worker and I took just to get out of the rain that we'd been in all day so we could try and figure out where to eat now that an outdoor concert was over and that guy too didn't say as much as boo to us.

Now, I'm a 6'1 330lb male strength athlete and I generally found the rides to be questionable at best. Combine that with my female friends consistently having creepy drivers ('complimentary earrings'!) and I'm honestly surprised at how many people seem to swear by such services.

[1] censored photo here about 1/4 of the way down the page https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2019/3/4/21ad-after...

You came to SF and are now enjoying life post-Uber. You have no idea how bad taxis were before Uber. You would never have gotten a cab pre-Uber.

I once waited 1.5 hrs for a cab to pick me up from a hotel. The idea you would just hop in a taxi and travel places was impossible pre-Uber. If you were downtown, you might be able to flag a taxi but once you arrived at your destination you wouldn’t be able to flag a taxi down depending on where you were. So you would have to call a cab and hope they would show up. At 3X the price.

This is part of the equation that you don’t get. Empty cabs would pass people on the streets because they would pick and choose rides to the airport because those were the most lucrative.

Safety was impossible. Now with Uber safety is better than it ever has been, you just don’t realize it because you don’t know what the taxi stays on safety were before.

If you don’t like the service, give them 1 star and complain. That’s how it works.

This, and worse.

Using a taxi cab in Berkeley before Lyft was a worse nightmare. It's a long story, but Berkeley has a "medallion" system ( because, um, they were afraid of a crush of taxis? ), and one business bought them all, but then went over the limit of something like 3 employees and thus would have to pay benefits. Since they were cheap, they didn't want to pay benefits ( sound familiar? ), and created lots of small sham "taxi companies". Each had a different phone number and dispatch, with the same poor cars and drivers, and the numbers were always busy. The only way to get a taxi was to get somehow to the taxi rank at Berkeley Bart, anything else, forget it. Forget living 5 miles from the train up in the hills or needing a ride to the airport, you simply couldn't do it.

San Francisco was about as bad. Locals realized ( eventually ) that the only way to get a taxi was to head to one of the major hotels and present yourself as a guest to the doorman. If you didn't live within walking distance of a downtown hotel, you weren't ever going to get a taxi. Dispatchers ( there were only two real companies, Veterans and Luxor ) would simply refuse to service non-business addresses, and if you asked a bar or restaurant to call on behalf, they would simply reject outright half the time.

When I read that people were "made uncomfortable by a comment", I agree the system could and should be better, but what happened in the bay area is we moved from an entirely non-functional system where taxi rides simply can't be had, to a system with some problems but people can get rides. The story above about getting rides and the complaints about being dropped off on the wrong side, um, yeah.

I would say about 10% of the rides I take by Lyft are less than optimal. I wish the app allowed me to select preferences: fast driving over chit-chat, don't bother with my luggage I got it, drop me off somewhere close instead of being precise, because we all have different opinions.

I've had my fair share of bad rides, one where a guy was nodding off and I thought we were going to die, a couple where the "meter" was turned on early or off late. The most recent ride I took wasn't great, the guy kept calling me and his location didn't budge for 5 minutes --- I don't answer anymore, they're trying to figure out where you're going and if they don't like it they cancel the ride. That particular guy picked me up from the wrong bay at the airport ("oh, my app didn't show me", yeah right ) as well, but drove me home quickly and correctly otherwise.

I had this same discussion with a driver in Munich last week, and I argued there are places where the old taxi system works great, and those places aren't at risk for replacement. Germany is one of them, and there's no point in using Lyft there. Japan is another. Some of london is fine, the rest, you have to know the minicab number to call. I was in a London cab a few days ago, it was great --- and they're electric! Manhattan isn't bad, but you get some crazy apples.

You could invent a better system. It's pretty easy. The primary customer issue is hailing and tracking. If you built a hailing and tracking app, and the municipal law simply says "anyone offering rides can do it how they want, but they must ALSO offer rides through the municipal app" with a well defined REST API, and created a bidding-like system to allow prices to fluctuate, _and_ gave the municipality the ability to operate that app instead of a contractor agreement where a for-profit company owns the monopoly part of the transit infrastructure.... that works.

Unfortunately, that would require someone to build such an app and offer it to municipalities without the 1000x investor payoff that is required by investors. And it would require a municipality to operate a 7/24 web service, or contract it out, which we haven't seen municipalities be able to do.

Anecdata: information or evidence that is based on personal experience or observation rather than systematic research or analysis.

>And I don't think this is abnormal either, a little searching on reddit/facebook/twitter and you can find report after report of such activity on the various ride platforms.

This is an unusually ignorant argument. You never hear about the great rides or uneventful rides. There are millions of rides a day. So even if you came across 1000 negative posts, which may look like a lot to you and your “research”, it still would still only be 0.01% of rides for that day, not taking into account the time delta of those posts.

wow, not sure if you just had a lot of bad luck or what... I downloaded both Uber and Lyft, signed up for them just to check them out, but not in this area... but useful if I ever traveled somewhere. Which at some point I'd like to be able to go on a solo trip a year. I heard bad things about Uber though in the news, but not sure how much it differs since i'm sure Taxi drivers do bad things too... but I think since Uber is the new upstart, it's easy to pick on them more.

I have heard of not speaking English too, was watching a cruise vlog someone did from Miami, she commented on that fact. Probably awkward, but I guess if you want to be a world traveler got to figure out the language barrier.

Checked out your blog post. Also interesting about pride, very popular there so not surprised it's mess. "move along, KEEP MOVING", surprised the police didn't want to help with directions, but probably a huge crowd? so trying to control the crowd maybe? hmm. I know there's reports that the police in SF don't even investigate car break ins anymore either, so not sure what their job is anymore. Needles and poop part I hear a lot about sadly though. It seems like the entire west coast is going down hill. In Seattle the local news station KOMO did a special called "Seattle is dying". Also not sure if people running around Naked is normal, but maybe doing it just because of pride? Kinda surprised they tolerate that, I think if I started running around nude here I'd be arrested and probably sent for a mental evaluation.

I used to want to go out west because of tech, but I've woken up a lot more about the realities. The housing costs, high crime, high taxes. I kinda change my mind a bunch of where I want to live though, I think working remotely being a digital nomad would be nice or retire early if got lucky from creating something successful... So much to explore around the US and world. Want to do a bit of cruising and international travel, RV around the US, plus I feel like RVing would be cheaper than exploring the globe so more long term. And it's basically a home on wheels. There's parts out west though I think would be nice to vacation, but not a place to live. Like you see Seattle on TV growing up on TV shows and movies so be nice to sightsee. Same with some of the places in California.

Spend summers exploring more north, spend winters in the sunbelt. But if that dream doesn't happen yet, my other goal is to go somewhere warmer and nicer like FL or TX. But it seems like Austin is growing, and starting to have some of the same problems as SF... Austin is warmer too than here but still some days it gets cold it looks. Tech is growing in Miami too. Orlando would be another spot, plus could get an annual pass to Disney! Some people are happy if they get to go once in their life, imagine being able to go almost every day! Some people with passes living near by will just go only for dinner and maybe ride one ride or two. One of my goals with the RV dream is to spend probably at least a month in Orlando during the winters, but there's other spots in FL to explore. Galveston, TX and Quartzsite, AZ are some other winter destinations that seem popular.

>but probably a huge crowd?

The crowd was INSANE. It was effectively crotch to butt for a block or more in some spots with no movement at times and the collective body heat actually making it difficult to breathe on the street that had the barricades, then you'd duck down a street going the opposite direction and it was much more sane. I landed I guess as the parade was starting, by the time I actually got to my room the last few floats were passing by outside it.

Just apically bad timing/bad planning on the assistant that booked my room and flight (to be fare when she asked how my trip was when she saw me before one of my meetings she admitted she hadn't even thought about the parade and apologized for not looking at the parade route and wher the hotel was.

If my plane had landed an hour later I imagine things would have been quite different as far as getting directions on how to get around the barricades (under the street as it happened to be).

>Also not sure if people running around Naked is normal, but maybe doing it just because of pride?

So my boss back here in Indy actually recognized the guy (on description alone, before showing the photo) from when they lived there for a few years before transferring back to our office. I guess it's just his thing and based on research when I returned apparently San Francisco allows public nudity via permit for events.

Not gonna lie, the naked guy made the whole trip. I followed him for several minutes just watching people's reactions and that woman in the photo, catching her looking down at his crotch and that expression was completely an accident, I wasn't even paying attention to the crowd.

Wow, so many typos in that. I was trying to hammer out a reply so I could get out the door and it shows.

>If it's indeed so hard to find a good Uber driver, you'd expect them to be driven out of the market by customers themselves.

I doubt that there are many Uber drivers that do it long term. Eventually at some point they have to realize that they're making peanuts (if not operating at a loss) after they factor in routine AND long-term maintenance costs of their vehicle. Or they simply get 'real' jobs and were using Uber between jobs or to supplement income temporarily.

The people I know that have personally done driving for these services has done it in addition to full-time work, largely hoping to earn decent extra money from tips.

To be honest I’d feel pretty shitty about leaving a bad review for a driver. It would feel like leaving a bad review for your DHL guy: unless they are downright wreckless, I see them as poor souls in bad jobs, that try to squeeze them out.

It is human to not do a shit job perfectly all the time and I won’t make their day any shitier, just because they hurt my sensitive soul by not treating me like a member of the royal family.

I’d rather blame the systems that organize their days.

I give non-fives for cheating ( extending pickup or dropoff ), serious safety issues ( falling asleep and drifting out of lane ), and impersonating ( a different person than registered to drive ). The platform should be able to detect the first cheating problem, the other two are much harder and should have customer input.

I think I can agree with that

of all the jerks i see causing traffic delays, 90% of them are lyft/uber drivers. next time your in SF and you see someone blocking the bus-lane with their hazards on as if its some excuse, you'll see the uber/lyft tag.

They're a blight on the already tight, difficult, and crowded streets of Boston. If you're traveling down Tremont St in the South End, for example, just give up on trying to use the right lane for travel. There'll be multiple ubers/lyfts suddenly stopping for long periods of time on every block.

Cities need to designate pick-up/drop-off spots away from heavily-trafficked streets for these pseudo-taxi services, UX be damned.

Or make it so that people can't drive on major city-center/core roads. Make them pedestrian and bus lanes. Encourage people to take public transportation and away from using their own personal vehicles.

Uber eats is even worse. One neighborhood I fequent will typically have 4 cars lined up blocking the street, cars empty while the drivers go in to pick up someone's food delivery.

It's almost as if there is some sense in limiting the number of taxis that can be on the road at one time.

Maybe some form of limited-supply, transferrable crypto-token[1][2]... Could be used to prevent these sorts of situations.

[1] I am, of course referring to medallions.

[2] I am, of course, fishing for karma, by introducing a blockchain when one is not necessary.

I thought you made a modest proposal.

By far the main advantage that London's black cabs have is the use of dedicated bus lanes. This often has a huge effect in rush-hour and translates in substantial time savings vs uber.

Sounds like Uber provides valuable service to the poor who are more likely to work night shift and also less likely to be able to afford the premium for the nicer black cab service during the day.

Nobody who could reasonably be described as poor is going to commute by black cab or Uber in London. Think about the cost relative to minimum wage or "London living wage". They'll take the night bus and/or walk. It's a big nuisance that the Tube is closed overnight, though.

>It's a big nuisance that the Tube is closed overnight, though.

The Night Tube has been operational since mid-2014 and it has only gathered pace.

https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/what-we-are-do...

>Sounds like Uber provides valuable service to the poor who are more likely to work night shift

On what planet are "the poor" commuting back and forth to work via Uber?

I can't speak for the rest of the planet, but in America it happens quite a lot.

I drove for Uber for almost a year when I was between jobs. The hours I chose were generally 3am-noon (early because I like mornings, but late enough to dodge most of the drunks). The majority of my passengers were people going to and from factory jobs.

A large number of those passengers were people who didn't speak English whose English-speaking children would order the Uber for them. I didn't notice it at first, but after a few pick-up confusions where the passenger handed me a phone to talk to the person who actually ordered the ride, one of them explained it to me.

I live in a transit-sparse city, and a surprising number of poor people use Uber as their main means of getting around. It's simply cheaper than owning a car, especially if you don't have money up front, a steady job, or exceptional credit (Notice how car ads on TV are now disclaiming their advertised interest rates to indicate those rates are only for people with the best credit).

Even for me, now being an office-dwelling developer, if I factor in the cost of just a car payment and fuel, Ubering to work would be cheaper than owning a car. And that's before factoring in insurance, repairs, maintenance, etc... If I didn't enjoy weekend road trips, I'd ditch the car altogether.

So the big difference between your example and London which is how this thread started, is that London (where I live), is a place I can assure you is not transit-sparse. There are many, many public transit options.

For example this map is the night bus map just for the area around the Bank of England, and most of those will run at 15 minute intervals: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/bus-route-maps/city-of-london-nigh...

This is not unusual - other maps exist for other parts of London, and even when I lived in W6 (Zone 2), I could get a bus at all hours of the night from Piccadilly Circus to my home or vice versa. Even now living out in TW1 which is some 11 miles out from central London, I can get a night bus all night, every night to and from Oxford Circus.

Costs are also low: £1.50 a ride, with a second ride taken within 60 minutes of your first ride being free/included.

Realisitically that means you can easily get from one side of London to the other in the middle of the night for £1.50 - £3.00. It might not be the most direct or fastest route, but it's popular, and with good and obvious reason.

Tubes also run all night on some routes a few nights a week, and even when they don't 5am is a typical start time.

Poor people don't tend to use Uber in London as a utility that it sounds like happened in your city - it's a luxury product with luxury prices. Their target market here are those who are drinking and meeting friends off the beaten path from home or work on the tube network.

I don't disagree, and my experience in London has been similar to yours.

However, I was replying to someone who could not grasp that anywhere "on the planet" would poor people use Uber.

I think we Europeans sometimes tend to forget that not every society tries to achieve at least a minimum level of public transportation.

Anecdotally, I've seen this for wait staff;

Most public transit services have reduced service on nights and weekends; so, in a world where you don't have a car; you can take the train/bus to get to a shift in the day, but must take a cab or uber home.

It seems obvious that Ubers or Taxis would serve this purpose wherever vehicle ownership is cost prohibitive and public transit is at all available.

Likely, this isn't "the poor" but inclusive of much of the working class in modern cities.

London has night buses, and trains running up to midnight and starting again around 4:30am, every day.

The working class does not in general commute by Uber in London.

The same planet where Uber is referred to as a "ride-sharing platform", but literally operates as a centrally administered taxi service.

Uber in my city is way more expensive than cabs. A cab ride that I take to get to work is around £5-£6. A black cab will be around £8. An uber the other day was around £12.

Takeaway: Maybe London should spend some effort becoming more naviagatable, instead of demanding professional drivers acquire a PhD level education (the Knowledge) to find their way.

No offence, and I can see that you've been downvoted but how do you actually propose solving this "unnavigable" problem? By bulldozing existing property that is owned by multitudes of private landowners and building new roads or something else??

Honestly, what's your solution?

I doubt there is a good solution to the problem in general but having ridden a motorcycle aimlessly around central London on my own little sight-seeing trips I can certainly get on board with the idea that London has been designed to be minimally navigable without knowing exactly where you are going (or having a GPS which does the same). This is at least partially due to one way streets, turning restrictions, traffic restrictions (bus / cycle only routes), no entries etc.

It's the same for most cities and even towns, I'd imagine, eg. Sheffield (baffling one-way system to visitors), Birmingham (one way streets, central road by New Street actually leads to an underground car park if you're not a bus), Coventry (roads that go nowhere in the city centre, bus lanes that appear and then disappear after only a few hundred metres, cut across roundabouts etc). Try Redditch with its unnavigable ring road system - how do you actually get to the Vue cinema in the central shopping centre, even with a GPS??? Even towns with a grid layout (eg. Leamington) have no right or left turns across the grid so you have to follow a certain route around the town.

I think it's just symptomatic of hundreds of years of town growth.

Probably because its been "designed" over a couple thousand years and they don't have cars for the majority of that.

I doubt many donkey and cart owners encountered the no right turn onto Piccadilly! All of the things I mentioned are very much 20th century additions.

I don't have a solution. I don't even live in London.

I do think that if the city tried to make navigation more user friendly, a few simple ideas could improve things. I suspect no such effort has ever been made.

I know this is very hard even in companies that live or die by their their products being user friendly, so for a city that don't have those incentives, it probably will never happen.

Not sure how bulldozing would help. It doesn't seem like a charitable interpretation of my post :)

I know they have tried signs to help drivers but having driven there, sometimes you have about 6 signs on one post and 6 on another pointing the opposite direction, and at 40mph (which nobody around you does - they're all in a rush or seem to be living in a high-speed time warp with a distortion of how long a second is...) it is nigh-on impossible to read all of the signs and make a sensible decision without changing lanes at the last minute to the anger of your fellow drivers and peril of your own life and safety.

If they introduced one-way systems to reduce the number of signs in a given area, it'd still lead to having to have "knowledge" to know about the one-way system and how to get on/off it at the appopriate place so that wouldn't be an improvement.

If they reduced signs, it'd require knowledge of the area.

If they added more signs to help make it more navigable, it'd be impossible to read at speed (like it currently is).

There is honestly no solution. At some point you will have to actually learn something of the locality. We wouldn't apply the same logic to writing software - "people shouldn't have to learn a programming language! It's not fair!" - no we have to have knowledge of the machine we are writing for and an understanding of the language we are using.

And I say this having driven there before GPS and driving into the (new at the time) congestion zone accidentally and getting a fine.

Making navigation more user friendly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map

If this was a real thing, I'd say building bridges/roads above the city would be the only viable (yet extremely difficult) solution. Maybe underground in some places. Would look pretty dystopian probably

Underground is not possible there due to the amount of underground infrastructure dating back hundreds of years. Look at the upheaval at adding a new tube station and the cost and mayhem that caused (can't remember where the last station added was but I seem to recall a new one on the Central Line last time I was in London a long long long time ago).

Underground road tunnels are certainly possible. London's clay is over 400 feet (120m) deep (deeper as you go east, shallower as you go west) leaving plenty of easily-tunneled space if you go below most of the existing infrastructure.

There is currently a "super sewer" tunnelling project (Thames Tideway Tunnel) which goes down to a depth of about 75m, below other infrastructure.

The Elizabeth line and other tube lines are shallower, for access reasons and because building stations at a great depth is more expensive. But a road tunnel could go deeper, especially if it only permitted zero-emissions vehicles so that ventilation is easier.

Of course, it'd all be very expensive. And there is an argument that building more road relief capacity is not a desirable thing as it just encourages traffic elsewhere.

This was tried with varying levels of success over the past 150 years and is known as the tube.

Ah yeah, the sky tube. Funny how you all focused on the "maybe underground" part.

Okay mate, let's put nice straight roads and wide junctions through middle of London just to make it easier for cars?

Cars are an extremely modern invention for London - the city is almost 2000 years old, and has some really fancy, really old, really precious stuff in the way.

Or perhaps we should use this as a reason to swap more to public transport and walking?