1. Uber is actually a higher cost/less efficient producer of urban car services than the taxi companies it has driven out of business
2. Individual Uber drivers with limited capital cannot acquire, finance, maintain and insure vehicles more economically than Yellow Cab
3. Expenses other than drivers, vehicles, and fuel account for 15 percent of traditional taxi costs but Uber charges drivers 25-30 percent without coming close to covering their actual costs
4. Uber’s surge pricing does not improve efficiency, it simply prices those night shift workers out of the market
5. And as Uber has demonstrated, unlimited taxi market entry can lead to ruinous overcapacity and can allow part-timers to cherry-pick the peak revenue that full-time drivers depend on to cover their costs
6. Uber’s investors knew that it needed raw political power to accelerate growth, and to maintain its hoped-for dominance
7. Uber’s major strategic breakthrough was to treat business development as an entirely political process, using techniques that had proven successful in partisan political settings
8. All of Uber’s early popularity and rapid revenue and valuation growth are explained by the billions in predatory investor subsidies needed to drive those more efficient (but poorly capitalized) incumbents into bankruptcy
9. That [early popularity] allowed [Uber] to pursue more stratospheric valuations by exploiting anticompetitive market power and rent-extraction and buying out any potential competitive threats
I don't disagree with your points but let me give you some counterpoints:
1. Taxi services are balkanized;
2. Many tax services don't allow you to order a taxi ahead of time. You have to flag one down (eg NYC). For ordering a car, you need to otherwise deal with an (expensive) car service;
3. Uber made the payment process seamless and I cannot overstate how important this is as a user. I hate dealing with NYC yellow cabs, card readers that don't work (or actually have skimmers) and a stupid touch screen where your minimum tip option is 20%, etc;
4. The ability to rate both drivers and passengers may have its issues but IME it tends to keep passengers on better behaviour and cars in better condition;
5. Taxis have weird edge cases. In NYC, for example, getting a cab at 3-4pm was nigh-on impossible because of the shift change. It also means that drivers near the end of their shift may not take you places too out of the way;
6. Whatever the costs of owning and maintaining a car are, the traditional taxi system has huge taxes in the form of medallion costs and quotas. These costs are directly passed on to consumers;
7. Uber may well have a lot of value in value-added services. They're trying this with Uber Eats, for example. I can't say if these will be successful or not. I've certainly seen cities where I've tried to use Uber Eats only to be told "There are no drivers available". Obviously the drivers haven't signed up because there are plenty on Doordash and Seamless/Grubhub.
8. I see the flexibility for drivers as a huge plus rather than the rigid shift system of being a taxi driver.
9. The barrier to entry as a driver tends to be low because for many people they have a car anyway.
Taxis died because it's a horrible user experience that was propped up by a government-enforced monopoly. Good riddance. I mean I feel bad for NYC taxi drivers who were lured into paying a fortune to buy a medallion before the market crashed, many of whom had limitd English proficiency and were the victims of predatory practices that should be illegal.
I have absolutely no vested interest in defending Uber, but every time one of these threads pops up I feel compelled to throw cold water on it because this website is so damn obsessed with predicting Uber's doom. I have comments that are 6 years old saying "no, uber is not dying", with a thread full of angry pitchforks sure I am wrong.
Nobody cares if Uber as a whole is more "efficient" as measured by some global measure of dollars invested into the service. They care whether -their- individual lived experience is preferable. The obvious takeaway is that urban residents are happy to pay more money overall on car services, so long as those services provide a higher quality experience. People do not like feeling like the end of a cab ride might result in a game of "pretend the card reader doesn't work", people don't like to feel like their destination is an imposition on the driver who will now sit up front fuming about where you've taken him. People don't like having their sense of decency pitted against each other to win a cab in a reasonable amount of time without rudely upstreaming someone. People don't like waiting outside in the cold. People don't like being surprised by how high the meter is when they get out. People don't like having no recourse when they accidentally leave their phone behind besides calling a rude dispatcher. People like cars with nicely maintained interiors that don't smell weird.
How hard is this to understand? The average ride experience you get in an Uber is better. Uber pioneered that improved customer experience by figuring out a solution (some social, some technical) to the biggest friction points. Uber and Lyft are the 700lb gorillas in the rideshare company space, which absolutely DOES have network effects, despite the facile claim otherwise in the article. This is the basis for thinking these companies have a promising future. It's that simple. The size of the circlejerk predicting that it's all going to fall over tomorrow is so embarrassingly, transparently motivated by _hoping_ that it's going to fall over tomorrow.
You might be a little low there. In my direct experience as a driver pre-covid, it was close to 50%, and many drivers in the relevant subreddits have reported it frequently being more than that since. Imagine hearing a passenger complain about their $15 fare when you only see $6 of it (out of which you still have to cover your gas usage). 25-30 percent seems reasonable in comparison.
In some countries, taxis are so often criminal that tourists are warned to avoid them. In some less extreme places, drivers simply never use the meter and the passengers must negotiate every ride. Uber and its competitors have been wonderful for hailing rides in these places.
With this many billion dollars on the line, one can never be too cynical.
One has to wonder if this has been the endgame all along: driving taxi services out of business, replacing them with a monopoly where consumers pay the same price (or higher) and where drivers are paid less.
I will say that services like Uber have been very beneficial for areas that were previously underserved by traditional taxi companies. But that alone probably doesn't justify this multibillion-dollar wealth transfer operation.
These are all interesting points. However, I recently used Uber Premier twice in Miami, after not using any car service for two years, and the experience was excellent. It was fast, friendly, the car was nice, and I was happy with the price. For my use case, I am happy to pay more to get a better service, but it didn’t really seem that expensive. Both drivers had been doing Uber for a long time, which would be surprising if they were getting ripped off. So, as much as these points are interesting, I’m not sure they fully capture the situation.
> Uber charges drivers 25-30 percent without coming close to covering their actual costs
I mean this is it, right? This is the big one. All these "tech" companies that are not actually selling software taking huge cuts off the top line, this can't be sustainable.
You can own the market for a while, but sooner or later someone is going to come along and disrupt you.
> 1. Uber is actually a higher cost/less efficient producer of urban car services than the taxi companies it has driven out of business
This doesn't seem to be true, given that in some countries you have taxi companies providing services through Uber, as well as their own ride hailing platforms.
> 2. Individual Uber drivers with limited capital cannot acquire, finance, maintain and insure vehicles more economically than Yellow Cab
I'm not sure this belief holds any truth as well. I mean, isn't the biggest cost associated with Yellow Cab the taxi medallion, which represents a +$80k additional charge over the vehicle?
Good points, but I would add that what Uber is doing now is just carving out a chunk of the market for what is coming in the next few years. Most of your points revolve around human drivers and the gasoline-powered vehicles they own.
The future of Uber is probably a majority of driverless vehicles that are corporately-owned. That is a vastly different model.
Nice summary. A thought on point #2: (from a total costs perspective) is this still true considering yellow cab drivers still need to acquire, maintain, and insure their personal use vehicle?
My takeaway is that there is a big reason that the "robotaxi" is still on the leaderboard of VC investment plays.
I'm surprised that Uber/Lyft never tried lowtech self driving: basically have drone operators guide the cars when they are not in use, and then just monitor/track the drivers when they use them.
Then a "sweeper crew" can handle the outliers/stranded cars.
> 1. Uber is actually a higher cost/less efficient producer of urban car services than the taxi companies it has driven out of business
How is its cost/efficiency in the areas where there ARE no taxis? I have nothing but "gut" to back this up but I live in one of the areas where aren't (m)any, and uber/lyft is infinitely more efficient here.
I feel this entire thread has quite missed the point of the question
the way a neutrino passes through a solid object and interacts with
nothing but empty space.
People have talked about microeconomics, gig economies, labour
shifting, bad old days, safety, subsidies, licenses.... but we've
gotten no closer to understanding;
"Why Is a Company That Lost Billions Claimed to Be Successful?"
To answer this one must ask "What is financialisation?" The short
answer is; a system in which the success or failure of a company is of
no relevance to its "value". Under financialised logic it is
absolutely immaterial whether Twitter, Uber or whatever make a
penny. Ever. Or whether any of the stakeholders are served. The rules
of traditional business go out the window. All that matters is the
stock price of a tradable financial entity (a company) based on brand
confidence/perception.
Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market
says it is. When it decides it's not successful, it's not. One has to
realise that a total detachment of political economics and power has
taken place.
>Under financialised logic it is absolutely immaterial whether Twitter, Uber or whatever make a penny. Ever. Or whether any of the stakeholders are served. The rules of traditional business go out the window.
What makes you think that shareholders in Twitter or Uber don't care that they'll never make a penny? They're not turning a profit now, but it seems at least somewhat plausible that they'll make money in the future. Under that assumption (ie. future expected earnings), it seems perfectly consistent with "rules of traditional business".
>Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market says it is. When it decides it's not successful, it's not. One has to realise that a total detachment of political economics and power has taken place.
Congratulations. You just discovered "the price of something is what someone is willing to pay for it", not its actual utility.
> To answer this one must ask "What is financialisation?" The short answer is; a system in which the success or failure of a company is of no relevance to its "value".
Nonsense. Granted, with meme stocks, the price of a stock has been decoupled from any underlying notion of value, which is disconcerting (but driven by retail investors/gamblers, not by traditional investors).
But with Uber and many others, it seems reasonable to assume that the investors expect to recoup their money by (ultimately) earning dividends from Uber's successful operation, which is good old traditional finance.
There are two problems left:
1. It is conceivable that some early investors see that no sustainable profits might be possible, but still fund and develop the venture in order to sell it (at a higher valuation) to less sophisticated investors later (that don't see the limitations of the business model so clearly).
2. It is plausible that the entire business model is predicated on the idea of a predatory monopoly, ie driving out competition first and raising prices second.
Those are massive problems that need to be addressed with aggressive regulation, but they are not a consequence of "financialisation".
> Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market says it is.
"The financial market" cannot just arbitrarily "say" what a company is worth (and definitely not in the long run) - there are just too many players.
When traveling in India, I foolishly took a cycle rickshaw. It was gross/shameful. A man far less fortunate than I was sweating, working hard, barely getting paid, and breathing horribly polluted New Delhi air while I just sat there.
When Uber started to squeeze its drivers, I again felt just like this. I hated hearing drivers complain about their life problems. I hated doing the math and seeing how little these people were making out of this transaction. I hated feeling like a perpetrator of class division.
The common argument in support of Uber’s poor economics is their superior user experience compared to taxis. However, exploitative industry is a terrible “user experience” for the ethically- or morally-conscious. And that’s just the privileged party’s perspective…
I hear what you're saying. A few months ago, a guy, clearly homeless, rang my doorbell and offered to shovel my driveway in exchange for some small amount, I can't remember. It couldn't have been more than ten bucks. I do not need that. I can get it done in about 45 minutes. It felt posh and exploitative. What I realized later is that he was just asking for some dignity. To earn something, to not be a charity case. He wanted to feel like he was offering something worthwhile in exchange.
I've thought about that incident a lot. I too am disgusted by how society is organized. When confronted by my own relative wealth and privilege, I felt gross. But in that exact moment, you can't re-engineer the economy. You have to choose whether or not to be generous while respecting that person's dignity. I can only speak for myself here, but too often I'd rather just not encounter hardship in others at all. This is a bad impulse. The world is a terrible broken place, and it's right to be generous in whatever way someone will accept in that moment.
This reasoning is often used to justify poverty wage jobs--people want to work, so let them--and that's definitely not my take. I think work can impart dignity, there's a certain amount of shitty work that can't be avoided, but you can't feed your children with dignity, so let's pay people a lot more.
I'm not following this logic -- do you think it would've been better not to take the rickshaw?
You do realise that this man is providing for himself, and perhaps others, by this job?
It seems like your issue was being confronted with the "realities of life" which distressed your sensibilities; and your solution appears to be to hide from these. I dont see this as a moral impulse, but a disgust response.
You think that taxi driver was being paid more fairly? Often they just drove for medallion owners and rented the time. The economics would have been at best same, if not worse since there was probably little oversight since it was a bunch of small cab operators.
I used to live in Latin America and I would avoid hiring shoe-shiner kids in spite of them following me each day. I thought it was sad to see these kids working at such an early age and thought hiring them would be me exploiting them. In hindsight I should’ve just hired them, they need the money. it’s horrible people live in poverty and have to work such jobs, but IMO hiring them helps them more than not hiring them.
I have used Uber a lot in Brazil and you can clearly perceive the deindustrialization of the country and the consolidation of large retail chains from the conversations with the drivers.
You get lots of people who had small businesses, sometimes even engineers and economists.
The last one I talked to had had a small machining shop.
The real magic of Uber is that it allows drivers to convert the depreciation of their car into cash at a time and schedule of their own choosing. For the reasons discussed in the story, this may still technically be a net negative in the long term compared to driving a regular cab fulltime, but a) drivers find it far preferable to/cheaper than alternatives like payday loans, and b) many Uber drivers have multiple jobs and are not in a position to drive regular cab shifts.
Uber as a business is a massive loss, but consumers still _chose_ Uber over taxis because the process of getting and riding in a car is a million times more transparent than a taxi ever was. You can see what car and what driver are picking you up, what route they're going to take, and how much it will cost. Taxis failed because they failed to modernize.
One of the nice things about ridesharing is that, at least in some cities, taxis have started modernizing. I've been using Curb in Philadelphia, and it's significantly cheaper when Uber/Lyft have surge pricing. Otherwise, it's usually a little more expensive, but the drivers are more reliable so it's sometimes worth paying a few extra bucks.
I've had Uber drivers accept my ride, then drive away from me, refuse calls, and not cancel the ride (expecting me to do it, so they avoid getting dinged, I guess) on multiple occasions. One time I ended up walking to my destination and saw the driver cancelled it after 2 hours. Uber, of course, doesn't have a way to report this behavior.
The UI still isn't as perfect as Uber's, but it's good enough for me. Pretty similar to Uber without any bells or whistles. It wouldn't be convenient for me to hail taxis without an app.
I have to tell the taxi driver to turn the damn meter on every time without fail. It's ridiculous. I don't know how someone more vulnerable could possibly use taxis since it's basically attempted robbery every time you enter one. Hopefully Uber/Lift win and Taxis die. For the sake of the disabled, women and children at least. I wouldn't even mind if Uber cost more.
100%. Will never catch cabs in NYC because they never comply with any local regulation (e.g. none of them were wearing masks at the height of the pandemic), they always overcharge, they often discriminate against you as a customer based on what you look like/where you're going/etc, they always expect 20-25% tip, even if they've done a terrible service, etc.
And you have nothing you can do to fight any of this, other than to just... not use them.
Do people actually claim Uber is a successful business?
In the UK, none of the original companies that built the railroads still exist. Many of the railway companies were never particularly profitable and the railway boom was a stock market bubble. Lots of them were fraudulent or poorly run. Eventually they all either went out of business, or amalgamated and ultimately got nationalised.
Nevertheless, they proved the railway as a viable technology and built infrastructure that still exists and is used today (Ship of Theseus caveat). Were they successful as profit making businesses? Ultimately no. However society benefited greatly in the long run from their existence, even though we've all forgotten their names.
I can't see Uber as a company surviving the next few decades, but without them the taxi experience would likely still be as horrific as it was in the 90s.
> Oracle founder Larry Ellison noted that Uber’s app was less sophisticated than something his cat could have developed.
That is the equivalent of "I could build that in a weekend" that you often hear from inexperienced devs that have no idea what they're talking about.
In fact, we had the perfect experiment in Austin, TX, where a couple years ago the city essentially voted to kick out Uber and Lyft (required fingerprinting of drivers) before the state legislature passed a law overruling the city. There were lots of competitors that flooded in to fill the vacuum. They ranged from "barely if even functional" to "OK". I was even a big fan of Ride Austin because it was a nonprofit, but I'm not going to pretend its apps were anywhere close to Uber and Lyft's.
By the measure of growth and market penetration, Uber has been successful.
By the measure of establishing a globally operating business that employs thousands of people, Uber has been successful (mostly).
By the measure of establishing a profitable business we might argue that they likely will never achieve that.
If you look at their SEA competitors who already earlier on introduced financial debt as a tool to create merchant stickiness (to phrase it kindly), their fall from grace was much harsher.
>> Uber was not pursuing more liberal entry and pricing rules but working to effectively nullify any form of governmental oversight. This meant eliminating the public’s right to establish standards for market competition, safety, insurance, driver licensing, vehicle maintenance, or obligations to provide services to all people and neighborhoods in a city.
Former cab driver here. I was astonished and disgusted by exactly this set of issues when Uber emerged. Taxi drivers had to take tests, undergo frequent safety checks, random stops. We had to take calls in all neighborhoods while on shift. And driving was a full time job. There was no surge pricing. Meanwhile, when Uber came out, I remember everyone in the general public hating on taxis as being too expensive, or dirty or old fashioned or something. People didn't understand what they were trading away, or that they were only temporarily getting something for nothing.
Pre-Uber, (and pre smart phone) I had the idea of building an SMS based service that would distribute pickup requests to drivers who paid a small fee for it. The trouble was, that would have been illegal, because it ran afoul of decades of regulation around how calls were fairly dispatched and who could dispatch them. Uber just came and broke all the laws for consumer protection and got away with it, through a combination of threats and bribery of local officials.
Only in hacker news do you find people who think the taxi industry is some bastion of freedom and some poor victim of Uber.
Does no one know how the taxi industry works and the insane levels of corruption involved? Most taxi drivers start their shift IN DEBT, every single shift. They owe the taxi company $100 at the beginning of their shift to rent the taxi and then have to work to pay off this debt every shift. Once they have earned it they can keep whatever money they earn. If they need to stop working in the middle of the shift, they are net negative.
They need to pay for their own gas, they need to clean the taxi, and if someone pukes in their car they have to clean it themselves.
There is no vacation pay, they have no freedom at all.
Most Uber drivers are happy. That’s a fact. I dare you to ask your next driver. I just took 2 Ubers today and they were happy. My second driver told me he felt lucky because he had Uber to fall back on during the pandemic. You get a small number of professional drivers who want to destroy uber and journalists that want to as well so you get completely slanted articles like this. Somehow Lyft is the hero and Uber is the bad guy, when both do exactly the same things.
The simple fact is Uber provides a great service and most drivers are happy. In terms of investment, post-IPO it has been largely dead money but the idea is never going away.
Taxi companies are not the heros here. They were even more predatory than anything claimed here about Uber which are mostly twists or flat out lies.
Having existed pre and post Uber, in my country (Australia), here are my thoughts:
Ordering an Uber is far, far quicker and easier than getting a taxi.
Getting an Uber is still far cheaper. In the old days, if you were traveling after 10pm, you’d very often be charged up to $10 from before you’d even closed the door.
That lead to taxis feeling like luxury vehicles. Catching an Uber seems so mundane by comparison.
Like many people here, I share the negative sentiment towards yellow taxis. It's simply a sordid experience. Arguing with the drivers to not get figuratively (and actually on one occasion in NYC) robbed, trying to convince drivers that where you're going is worth their time, the rudeness you endure, the list is just endless...
As long as taxi drivers resist any improvements to their behavior, companies like Uber will pop up to serve those who can pay for it. I, for one, am fortunate enough that I can pay for it and would continue to use Uber over taxis even if it costs 2x. I cannot overstate how much I hate taxis.
The biggest success of Uber, for me, has been that they raised the bar and showed everyone that this experience can be better.
I can't disagree with most of that, but honestly in non-major cities the experience of getting an Uber is just like 10x nicer than the experience of getting a cab. If nothing else they made things way more convenient.
Forget the economics for a minute . Uber Lyft changed the way we pay for rides and rate drivers. Uber used online payment and GPS to create a simple app that works. I no longer have to worry about payment since I prepay. Cars are owned by the individual so they are cleaner inside. I can summon one from a distance and I can pinpoint the exact pickup Spot. I once called a taxi dispatcher and I felt berated. It's the user experience, probably something mr. Oracle should look into.
The main driver for the ascension of Uber is that everybody hates taxis and taxi drivers. I don't care if it's more expensive or not, I don't want to deal ever again with taxi drivers that are not accountable for their bad service.
I always thought Uber Pool was their main advantage over traditional cabs that couldnt coordinate sharing rides with multiple users. It was an actual productivity gain, like the article complains about them not having.
I remember getting across SF for 3 bucks. I think it only shut down because of covid, so if they restart the program it could make them more interesting than paying for the whole route.
[+] [-] westcort|4 years ago|reply
1. Uber is actually a higher cost/less efficient producer of urban car services than the taxi companies it has driven out of business
2. Individual Uber drivers with limited capital cannot acquire, finance, maintain and insure vehicles more economically than Yellow Cab
3. Expenses other than drivers, vehicles, and fuel account for 15 percent of traditional taxi costs but Uber charges drivers 25-30 percent without coming close to covering their actual costs
4. Uber’s surge pricing does not improve efficiency, it simply prices those night shift workers out of the market
5. And as Uber has demonstrated, unlimited taxi market entry can lead to ruinous overcapacity and can allow part-timers to cherry-pick the peak revenue that full-time drivers depend on to cover their costs
6. Uber’s investors knew that it needed raw political power to accelerate growth, and to maintain its hoped-for dominance
7. Uber’s major strategic breakthrough was to treat business development as an entirely political process, using techniques that had proven successful in partisan political settings
8. All of Uber’s early popularity and rapid revenue and valuation growth are explained by the billions in predatory investor subsidies needed to drive those more efficient (but poorly capitalized) incumbents into bankruptcy
9. That [early popularity] allowed [Uber] to pursue more stratospheric valuations by exploiting anticompetitive market power and rent-extraction and buying out any potential competitive threats
[+] [-] jmyeet|4 years ago|reply
1. Taxi services are balkanized;
2. Many tax services don't allow you to order a taxi ahead of time. You have to flag one down (eg NYC). For ordering a car, you need to otherwise deal with an (expensive) car service;
3. Uber made the payment process seamless and I cannot overstate how important this is as a user. I hate dealing with NYC yellow cabs, card readers that don't work (or actually have skimmers) and a stupid touch screen where your minimum tip option is 20%, etc;
4. The ability to rate both drivers and passengers may have its issues but IME it tends to keep passengers on better behaviour and cars in better condition;
5. Taxis have weird edge cases. In NYC, for example, getting a cab at 3-4pm was nigh-on impossible because of the shift change. It also means that drivers near the end of their shift may not take you places too out of the way;
6. Whatever the costs of owning and maintaining a car are, the traditional taxi system has huge taxes in the form of medallion costs and quotas. These costs are directly passed on to consumers;
7. Uber may well have a lot of value in value-added services. They're trying this with Uber Eats, for example. I can't say if these will be successful or not. I've certainly seen cities where I've tried to use Uber Eats only to be told "There are no drivers available". Obviously the drivers haven't signed up because there are plenty on Doordash and Seamless/Grubhub.
8. I see the flexibility for drivers as a huge plus rather than the rigid shift system of being a taxi driver.
9. The barrier to entry as a driver tends to be low because for many people they have a car anyway.
Taxis died because it's a horrible user experience that was propped up by a government-enforced monopoly. Good riddance. I mean I feel bad for NYC taxi drivers who were lured into paying a fortune to buy a medallion before the market crashed, many of whom had limitd English proficiency and were the victims of predatory practices that should be illegal.
[+] [-] sebastos|4 years ago|reply
Nobody cares if Uber as a whole is more "efficient" as measured by some global measure of dollars invested into the service. They care whether -their- individual lived experience is preferable. The obvious takeaway is that urban residents are happy to pay more money overall on car services, so long as those services provide a higher quality experience. People do not like feeling like the end of a cab ride might result in a game of "pretend the card reader doesn't work", people don't like to feel like their destination is an imposition on the driver who will now sit up front fuming about where you've taken him. People don't like having their sense of decency pitted against each other to win a cab in a reasonable amount of time without rudely upstreaming someone. People don't like waiting outside in the cold. People don't like being surprised by how high the meter is when they get out. People don't like having no recourse when they accidentally leave their phone behind besides calling a rude dispatcher. People like cars with nicely maintained interiors that don't smell weird.
How hard is this to understand? The average ride experience you get in an Uber is better. Uber pioneered that improved customer experience by figuring out a solution (some social, some technical) to the biggest friction points. Uber and Lyft are the 700lb gorillas in the rideshare company space, which absolutely DOES have network effects, despite the facile claim otherwise in the article. This is the basis for thinking these companies have a promising future. It's that simple. The size of the circlejerk predicting that it's all going to fall over tomorrow is so embarrassingly, transparently motivated by _hoping_ that it's going to fall over tomorrow.
[+] [-] slfnflctd|4 years ago|reply
You might be a little low there. In my direct experience as a driver pre-covid, it was close to 50%, and many drivers in the relevant subreddits have reported it frequently being more than that since. Imagine hearing a passenger complain about their $15 fare when you only see $6 of it (out of which you still have to cover your gas usage). 25-30 percent seems reasonable in comparison.
[+] [-] xapata|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdponx|4 years ago|reply
One has to wonder if this has been the endgame all along: driving taxi services out of business, replacing them with a monopoly where consumers pay the same price (or higher) and where drivers are paid less.
I will say that services like Uber have been very beneficial for areas that were previously underserved by traditional taxi companies. But that alone probably doesn't justify this multibillion-dollar wealth transfer operation.
[+] [-] ttcbj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hatchnyc|4 years ago|reply
I mean this is it, right? This is the big one. All these "tech" companies that are not actually selling software taking huge cuts off the top line, this can't be sustainable.
You can own the market for a while, but sooner or later someone is going to come along and disrupt you.
[+] [-] faller|4 years ago|reply
This doesn't seem to be true, given that in some countries you have taxi companies providing services through Uber, as well as their own ride hailing platforms.
> 2. Individual Uber drivers with limited capital cannot acquire, finance, maintain and insure vehicles more economically than Yellow Cab
I'm not sure this belief holds any truth as well. I mean, isn't the biggest cost associated with Yellow Cab the taxi medallion, which represents a +$80k additional charge over the vehicle?
[+] [-] kingcharles|4 years ago|reply
The future of Uber is probably a majority of driverless vehicles that are corporately-owned. That is a vastly different model.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] subroutine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|4 years ago|reply
I'm surprised that Uber/Lyft never tried lowtech self driving: basically have drone operators guide the cars when they are not in use, and then just monitor/track the drivers when they use them.
Then a "sweeper crew" can handle the outliers/stranded cars.
Basically the scooter model but with cars.
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|4 years ago|reply
How is its cost/efficiency in the areas where there ARE no taxis? I have nothing but "gut" to back this up but I live in one of the areas where aren't (m)any, and uber/lyft is infinitely more efficient here.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|4 years ago|reply
People have talked about microeconomics, gig economies, labour shifting, bad old days, safety, subsidies, licenses.... but we've gotten no closer to understanding;
"Why Is a Company That Lost Billions Claimed to Be Successful?"
To answer this one must ask "What is financialisation?" The short answer is; a system in which the success or failure of a company is of no relevance to its "value". Under financialised logic it is absolutely immaterial whether Twitter, Uber or whatever make a penny. Ever. Or whether any of the stakeholders are served. The rules of traditional business go out the window. All that matters is the stock price of a tradable financial entity (a company) based on brand confidence/perception.
Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market says it is. When it decides it's not successful, it's not. One has to realise that a total detachment of political economics and power has taken place.
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
What makes you think that shareholders in Twitter or Uber don't care that they'll never make a penny? They're not turning a profit now, but it seems at least somewhat plausible that they'll make money in the future. Under that assumption (ie. future expected earnings), it seems perfectly consistent with "rules of traditional business".
>Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market says it is. When it decides it's not successful, it's not. One has to realise that a total detachment of political economics and power has taken place.
Congratulations. You just discovered "the price of something is what someone is willing to pay for it", not its actual utility.
[+] [-] jimbokun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tharne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FabHK|4 years ago|reply
Nonsense. Granted, with meme stocks, the price of a stock has been decoupled from any underlying notion of value, which is disconcerting (but driven by retail investors/gamblers, not by traditional investors).
But with Uber and many others, it seems reasonable to assume that the investors expect to recoup their money by (ultimately) earning dividends from Uber's successful operation, which is good old traditional finance.
There are two problems left:
1. It is conceivable that some early investors see that no sustainable profits might be possible, but still fund and develop the venture in order to sell it (at a higher valuation) to less sophisticated investors later (that don't see the limitations of the business model so clearly).
2. It is plausible that the entire business model is predicated on the idea of a predatory monopoly, ie driving out competition first and raising prices second.
Those are massive problems that need to be addressed with aggressive regulation, but they are not a consequence of "financialisation".
> Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market says it is.
"The financial market" cannot just arbitrarily "say" what a company is worth (and definitely not in the long run) - there are just too many players.
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurofbabylon|4 years ago|reply
When Uber started to squeeze its drivers, I again felt just like this. I hated hearing drivers complain about their life problems. I hated doing the math and seeing how little these people were making out of this transaction. I hated feeling like a perpetrator of class division.
The common argument in support of Uber’s poor economics is their superior user experience compared to taxis. However, exploitative industry is a terrible “user experience” for the ethically- or morally-conscious. And that’s just the privileged party’s perspective…
[+] [-] overthemoon|4 years ago|reply
I've thought about that incident a lot. I too am disgusted by how society is organized. When confronted by my own relative wealth and privilege, I felt gross. But in that exact moment, you can't re-engineer the economy. You have to choose whether or not to be generous while respecting that person's dignity. I can only speak for myself here, but too often I'd rather just not encounter hardship in others at all. This is a bad impulse. The world is a terrible broken place, and it's right to be generous in whatever way someone will accept in that moment.
This reasoning is often used to justify poverty wage jobs--people want to work, so let them--and that's definitely not my take. I think work can impart dignity, there's a certain amount of shitty work that can't be avoided, but you can't feed your children with dignity, so let's pay people a lot more.
[+] [-] mjburgess|4 years ago|reply
You do realise that this man is providing for himself, and perhaps others, by this job?
It seems like your issue was being confronted with the "realities of life" which distressed your sensibilities; and your solution appears to be to hide from these. I dont see this as a moral impulse, but a disgust response.
If you wished to do anything, tip.
[+] [-] chrischen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meowtimemania|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forinti|4 years ago|reply
You get lots of people who had small businesses, sometimes even engineers and economists.
The last one I talked to had had a small machining shop.
[+] [-] whitepaint|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thematrixturtle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inamberclad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlund-molfese|4 years ago|reply
I've had Uber drivers accept my ride, then drive away from me, refuse calls, and not cancel the ride (expecting me to do it, so they avoid getting dinged, I guess) on multiple occasions. One time I ended up walking to my destination and saw the driver cancelled it after 2 hours. Uber, of course, doesn't have a way to report this behavior.
The UI still isn't as perfect as Uber's, but it's good enough for me. Pretty similar to Uber without any bells or whistles. It wouldn't be convenient for me to hail taxis without an app.
[+] [-] AnotherGoodName|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janejeon|4 years ago|reply
And you have nothing you can do to fight any of this, other than to just... not use them.
So that's what I do, and instead use an Uber.
[+] [-] cameronh90|4 years ago|reply
In the UK, none of the original companies that built the railroads still exist. Many of the railway companies were never particularly profitable and the railway boom was a stock market bubble. Lots of them were fraudulent or poorly run. Eventually they all either went out of business, or amalgamated and ultimately got nationalised.
Nevertheless, they proved the railway as a viable technology and built infrastructure that still exists and is used today (Ship of Theseus caveat). Were they successful as profit making businesses? Ultimately no. However society benefited greatly in the long run from their existence, even though we've all forgotten their names.
I can't see Uber as a company surviving the next few decades, but without them the taxi experience would likely still be as horrific as it was in the 90s.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
That is the equivalent of "I could build that in a weekend" that you often hear from inexperienced devs that have no idea what they're talking about.
In fact, we had the perfect experiment in Austin, TX, where a couple years ago the city essentially voted to kick out Uber and Lyft (required fingerprinting of drivers) before the state legislature passed a law overruling the city. There were lots of competitors that flooded in to fill the vacuum. They ranged from "barely if even functional" to "OK". I was even a big fan of Ride Austin because it was a nonprofit, but I'm not going to pretend its apps were anywhere close to Uber and Lyft's.
[+] [-] jsemrau|4 years ago|reply
By the measure of establishing a globally operating business that employs thousands of people, Uber has been successful (mostly).
By the measure of establishing a profitable business we might argue that they likely will never achieve that.
If you look at their SEA competitors who already earlier on introduced financial debt as a tool to create merchant stickiness (to phrase it kindly), their fall from grace was much harsher.
[+] [-] criddell|4 years ago|reply
You made me wonder how many people are actually employed by Uber. I thought thousands sounded like a lot for what they do.
First Google result - 29,000 employees. That blows me away. It sounds like Uber itself is ready for disruption.
[+] [-] oblio|4 years ago|reply
A "profitable business" was what we'd call a business, back in the day. Companies weren't able to last 5-10 years of losses.
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
Former cab driver here. I was astonished and disgusted by exactly this set of issues when Uber emerged. Taxi drivers had to take tests, undergo frequent safety checks, random stops. We had to take calls in all neighborhoods while on shift. And driving was a full time job. There was no surge pricing. Meanwhile, when Uber came out, I remember everyone in the general public hating on taxis as being too expensive, or dirty or old fashioned or something. People didn't understand what they were trading away, or that they were only temporarily getting something for nothing.
Pre-Uber, (and pre smart phone) I had the idea of building an SMS based service that would distribute pickup requests to drivers who paid a small fee for it. The trouble was, that would have been illegal, because it ran afoul of decades of regulation around how calls were fairly dispatched and who could dispatch them. Uber just came and broke all the laws for consumer protection and got away with it, through a combination of threats and bribery of local officials.
[+] [-] farmerstan|4 years ago|reply
Does no one know how the taxi industry works and the insane levels of corruption involved? Most taxi drivers start their shift IN DEBT, every single shift. They owe the taxi company $100 at the beginning of their shift to rent the taxi and then have to work to pay off this debt every shift. Once they have earned it they can keep whatever money they earn. If they need to stop working in the middle of the shift, they are net negative.
They need to pay for their own gas, they need to clean the taxi, and if someone pukes in their car they have to clean it themselves.
There is no vacation pay, they have no freedom at all.
Most Uber drivers are happy. That’s a fact. I dare you to ask your next driver. I just took 2 Ubers today and they were happy. My second driver told me he felt lucky because he had Uber to fall back on during the pandemic. You get a small number of professional drivers who want to destroy uber and journalists that want to as well so you get completely slanted articles like this. Somehow Lyft is the hero and Uber is the bad guy, when both do exactly the same things.
The simple fact is Uber provides a great service and most drivers are happy. In terms of investment, post-IPO it has been largely dead money but the idea is never going away.
Taxi companies are not the heros here. They were even more predatory than anything claimed here about Uber which are mostly twists or flat out lies.
[+] [-] encoderer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvl102|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SixDouble5321|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway73838|4 years ago|reply
Ordering an Uber is far, far quicker and easier than getting a taxi.
Getting an Uber is still far cheaper. In the old days, if you were traveling after 10pm, you’d very often be charged up to $10 from before you’d even closed the door.
That lead to taxis feeling like luxury vehicles. Catching an Uber seems so mundane by comparison.
[+] [-] yesenadam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aemreunal|4 years ago|reply
As long as taxi drivers resist any improvements to their behavior, companies like Uber will pop up to serve those who can pay for it. I, for one, am fortunate enough that I can pay for it and would continue to use Uber over taxis even if it costs 2x. I cannot overstate how much I hate taxis.
The biggest success of Uber, for me, has been that they raised the bar and showed everyone that this experience can be better.
[+] [-] overgard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgbcia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frr149|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] escot|4 years ago|reply
I remember getting across SF for 3 bucks. I think it only shut down because of covid, so if they restart the program it could make them more interesting than paying for the whole route.
[+] [-] rsanek|4 years ago|reply