stevietopsiders's comments

stevietopsiders | 6 years ago | on: Uber lays off around 350 more across Eats, self-driving and other departments

I think ORD is for Uber Freight, which is closer to profitability.

stevietopsiders | 6 years ago | on: Uber Lays Off 400

A criticism of this "model" is that building a ridesharing app and cloud backend is now not that hard.

So some developers with VC money can develop an app, launch in a city, and force Uber to cut prices, because people will be happy to install a FastRyde app and get rides for $3 less than Lyft/Uber.

stevietopsiders | 7 years ago | on: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

Sevilla, Spain is the poster-child of rapidly building out a bike network[0], and with the political will, that could be replicated elsewhere (especially somewhere flat and sunny like LA). Another easy way to improve transit is paint dedicated bus lanes for BRT lines. Not as sexy as dropping a few mil on light rail, but quick, cheap, and rapidly scalable.

[0]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/05/07/six-secrets-from-the-...

stevietopsiders | 7 years ago | on: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

Big slap in the face to the other cities filing bids. They also made attractive offers, but Amazon wasn't interested in them, just in wringing tax breaks out of NYC.

stevietopsiders | 7 years ago | on: PG&E Sparked at Least 1,500 California Fires, Now Faces Collapse

Either NYT or WSJ (I forget) had some analysis for this after some of the fires. One of the cited reasons was that municipalities are fine building into sensitive areas, because it increases their tax base while the state shoulders the cost of fire prevention/fighting/etc.