>the younger generations are less likely to own cars

There's nothing inherent about this. If the promised alternatives to owning cars turn out to be BS, the younger generations will have to own cars whether they want to or not.

A much more durable change is the shift in social norms towards intoxicated driving being unacceptable under any circumstances. Just 40 years ago the DUI threshold was .15 and even then the penalty was light. Today it's .08 with talk of lowering it, penalties have been ramped up multiple times, and nobody sees DUI enforcement as a technicality.

That's a pretty big opportunity for any firm that gets you home from the club at 3 AM.

I don't disagree with that but is the shift in drunk driving norms really enough to shift from owning cars to taking taxis? In my experience, most people don't primarily use cars to go out drinking--including among those in a position to just take Ubers instead.

Personally, I think drunk driving isn't that much of a factor: drinking is a relatively short term kind of planned activity. What I think has a much bigger impact is long term stuff, like the desire to live downtown and/or housing prices (with downtown condos and midtown townhouses being more affordable than big detached homes in burbs)

I know families that are rather against the idea of owning a car and arrange housing around that consideration. They prefer to rely more heavily on public transit and the occasional car rental or cab/rideshare.

I wouldn't say that, no. Other factors might reduce car ownership, of course, but I meant only to address the larger question of Uber's potential market. Another major use case is the airport, because airport parking has become egregiously expensive and cost-cutting favors rideshare infrastructure over parking (which is a good thing land-use-wise). There's also "transit in taxi out" trips because it's cold at night and people are tired and don't want to walk/wait/transfer, which grow as public transit is expanded, another trend that is likely to continue because the reduction in air pollution from electrification makes urban areas more desirable, as well as various secular trends pointing towards urbanization that may or may not continue (some recently reversed by the covid-19 pandemic) -- environmentalism in particular seems like it won't go away.

In any case, plenty of people are enthusiastic about a world where owning cars is less popular, so it's a common refrain.

Sometimes I wonder if people talking about this "inevitable unprofitability" have used ridesharing recently. At least around SF, prices were steadily going up for the past couple of years.

The younger generation is always more likely to go to cities. As they get older they move out. And buy cars.

Are they willing to pay the actual cost, though?

I know that where I live I've started blanching at how much it actually costs to take an Uber, which is now approaching what taxis cost.

cost is fine if you don't take one every day, which in a remote work world is not at all a stretch

but that would effectively limit Uber to a smaller, pre-Uber sized market. Which would probably be news to investors.

> the younger generations are less likely to own cars. Public infrastructure is never going to fill the gap except in certain urban areas.

And Uber/Lyft work reliably only in urban areas. "Younger generations" will inevitably grow older and may want to move out of tiny, expensive city apartments to larger accomodations outside the city. Guess what. Public infrastructure fills the gap much better than Uber/LyfBolt do (at least in Europe).