[alteriority]

I don't fully dispute your point, but 42 million divided by 900,000 is 46 dollars per worker per year. And, last I paid attention, my impression was that Uber was already hemorrhaging VC money.

42 million for the CEO strikes me as extravagant, but that alone is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount required to give every driver a noticeable boost in income.

Intuitively, it feels like the only sustainable way to do that is to raise the cost of every ride. Why they don't do that...probably comes down to a spreadsheet that tells them it will lose them money in the long term.

[ericd]

It could be that people aren’t actually interested in paying taxi rates on a regular basis, but that those are what’s necessary to support a reasonable wage for the drivers.

[alteriority]

Agreed. I think the natural level will regress to something in the middle--the price was artificially high before from exorbitant taxi medallion prices and protectionist laws, and now it's artificially low from an influx of VC cash.

One thing of note: I lived in a semi-rural college town in the USA, with very few uber drivers but a fairly active "beeper" group organized on facebook--born of a designated driver system that expanded into general use--where people would manually post that they were available to drive or needed a driver.

The infrastructure wasn't very good, and there's no real reputation system aside from word of mouth, but it stands as a proof of concept. In theory, now that the idea's in the air, just about anyone could just slap a front-end on a routing system and cut Uber's take out entirely, as long as they're willing to deal with the responsibility (or absence) of things like payment processing and liability for things that transpire on their system.