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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

The author takes pickups as a measure of congestion, but as they (sort of) admit much later on in the article, this is a bad measure.

The argument of regulators is that, in the absence of proper congestion pricing for cars on the road, the market equilibrium for number of taxis per inhabitant will be higher than is efficient. That's how they justify a cap on the number of cabs. (It increases wait times but, they argue, it is worth it for the fewer number of cars on the road causing congestion).

So the question isn't "are there more Manhattan pick-ups after Uber entered the market?", it's "are there more cars on Manhattan street?" or "Have average trip times in Manhattan increased?".

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It's more than that. There's a finite number of people seeking a ride, it's a zero sum market where the supply of rides will crash, and Uber will jack up the rates.

Uber ultimately will have enormous leverage to submarine any meaningful competition and even to displace public transit. Their national scope will make them a force to be reckoned with.

The idea that uber will replace public transit in NYC is laughable. Sure, there is a group of rich yuppies (and their parents) that will gladly give uber their business, but NYC's transit system serves a much, much broader demographic of customers that cannot and/or will not to pay ten dollars or more every time they want to get around the city.

I can't imagine everyone who gets on the L every morning getting to Manhattan via Uber.

Public transit is a system. Uber will never put the subway out of business, but an Uber bus or other uber services could well nip at peripheral bus lines and make them uneconomic to operate.

This ultimately results in less feeder traffic for the subway, higher subsidy requirements and is overall a bad thing for the system.

Über's valuation is all about the market clout they are building. The fantasies of robot cabs are just a veneer.

What is the unsubsidized price of an NYC transit ride? For example, the unsubsidized price of a MUNI ride in SF is $10. So there is an edge case where a subsidized uber-like service would be cheaper than MUNI for the state.

Laughable? Check out the theory of disruptive innovation. From http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/ec...:

"The theory of disruptive innovation was invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School, in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Mr Christensen used the term to describe innovations that create new markets by discovering new categories of customers. They do this partly by harnessing new technologies but also by developing new business models and exploiting old technologies in new ways. He contrasted disruptive innovation with sustaining innovation, which simply improves existing products. Personal computers, for example, were disruptive innovations because they created a new mass market for computers; previously, expensive mainframe computers had been sold only to big companies and research universities."

Have you ever been to NYC? Do you have any idea how much extra vehicle capacity would be necessary for Uber to supplant the subways? A subway track has capacity of roughly 25000 people/hour (112 people per car, 10 cars per train, 20 trains per hour) in each direction; that's as much as 10 freeway lanes. Manhattan has 20 subway tracks across its width (5 lines, each with express and local, in 2 directions), so that's at least 200 extra lanes of cars for Uber's disruption to innovate out of nowhere.

Just got back from a trip last month, amazing city and I had an absolute blast. Took subway and Uber while I was there (no medallion cabs this time, but plenty in past trips). No doubt that the world-class subway system imposes substantial competitive pressure on cars in general.

I'd arguing that Uber has the potential to pose a disruptive threat to taxis, not subways. And to lots of transportation systems in plenty of other cities around the world.

Okay, but Uber literally cannot put enough cars into the city to move five million people around every day, and they're sure as shit not going to dig their own tunnels.

They raised just North of a billion dollars [0] in September, the 2nd Ave Subway is expected to cost $4.5b [1] for 1.5m of track, three new stops, and a new entrance at an old stop. So yea, you can be sure as shit they're not building their own tunnels. At least not here.

[0] - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding-rounds [1] - http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/31/news/economy/nyc-subway-cons...

Obviously building a subway is not just having the money to build the subway. Anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway

They could easily offer premium priced bus service. You could probably really hurt MTA with 250k-500k displaced trips.

Uber replacing public transit is not a case of disruption as defined by Christiansen, though, since Uber is more expensive. It's not even disrupting street hails per se. Uber is disrupting taxi dispatch, and in doing so displacing street hails by making them less relevant.

Check out a critique of the theory of disruptive innovation: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-...

I agree that this is something honest, intelligent people can disagree about. As such, it's unfair to characterize it as "laughable."

How onerous would it be for competition to enter the market, via Flywheel or some other white-label app?

Uber decided to hold off entering Spain, which let a bunch of similar services (Cabify, Hailo, MyTaxi) operate in that market. Same in Denmark - almost every cab passing by advertises a URL for their specific app.

Well, hopefully anti-trust law keeps them from acquiring lyft. I think we'll probably be ok.

Why would Uber survive though? What key purpose do they fulfill? To absorb all the liabilities and lawsuits?

Why do I need to trust Uber for reputation management? Is there really any other piece of Uber that couldn't be replicated overnight by a knowledgeable enough team?

>There's a finite number of people seeking a ride...

Is that really true? More people might ride cabs if the experience was less annoying.

> in the absence of proper congestion pricing for cars on the road

So, when do we institute congestion pricing?

I doubt the numbers are accurate. It seems like that's a tough thing to measure accurately.

TFA addresses that: "The average number of Uber cars in Manhattan’s central business district between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays is 2,000, Mohrer said in a telephone interview."

But that doesn't address whether those 2000 cars displace 2000 personal cars that would be on the road, or whether they just add 2000 extra cars, or whether it's somewhere in between.

Have the taxi services in New York seen a drop in ridership? I'd guess that a decent number of Uber rides would have been taxi rides. Many people claim to prefer Uber over taxis anyway.

How likely is it that Uber cars have actually replaced taxi cars on New York streets? In the minds of many consumers, this replacement has already happened.

That doesnt address it. See also:

> Precise data on congestion is hard to come by — that was part of the fight — but we were able to estimate that Uber vehicles contribute to about 10 percent of traffic in Manhattan, south of Central Park, during the evening rush hour.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/upshot/blame-uber-for-cong...

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