Suburban Ride-Sharing Is Mathematically Unlikely | Hacker News Reader

Suburban Ride-Sharing Is Mathematically Unlikely

citylab.com

78 pointsbrudgers66 comments

It seems that the conclusion is drawn from specific premises:

+ The measure of a ride sharing app's value is cash on cash returns to Silcon Valley style investors.

+ A ride sharing app's primary market will be in the US.

+ The suburbs served will be affluent, and hence the ride sharing app's user base will tend to have economic flexibility in regards to transportation.

+ The served markets will have poor public transportation infrastructure.

On the one hand these are all reasonable assumptions for the conclusion regarding a ride sharing app's commercial prospects. This is important because ride sharing apps (particularly in a political context like Silicon Valley) are a free lunch: $200,000 spent on software development won't even buy the land for a ten parking space lot in a place where it would be useful.

On the other hand, the numbers in the article suggest that a ride sharing app could readily produce a ten parking space reduction in demand for a city like Palo Alto. And because the marginal costs of adding additional cities to such an application are negligible, reduction in demand for parking spaces across a region like Silicon Valley could be several times that.

In other words even if a ride sharing app is not going to pencil out into a possible unicorn, it still may be good public policy. And perhaps a better alternative to a public policy decision to raise the cash price of parking since it could induce willing social change via better communication infrastructure rather than forcing changes in behavior by pricing out those least able to afford changes in parking policy.

Parking policy is a great area for consultants to consult municipalities. Back in 2002 I was a junior urban planner in St. Pete, the city was "debating" removal of exiting parking meters installed for baseball in 1998. In the department library one day, I saw a study from 1962 that concluded that the parking meters installed in 1957 should be removed. The arguments are always the same: 1. Not enough spaces so install meters, 2. Meters are a hassle for local businesses' customers so take them out.

The numbers in this article are misleading as they're drawn from ridiculously underestimated assumptions. 25 - 33% is a more accurate number.

Pooled ridesharing is cheaper and better than owning a car in many cases (including mine), and the benefits will only increase with the network effect. (Imagine if 50% of the cars on the road are Ubers, and the average ETA to pickup is 30 seconds).

The positive externalities are more than just parking:

+ Less traffic congestion, shorter commutes for everyone

+ Less pollution and emissions, less lung cancer

+ More experienced drivers, less traffic accidents

+ And of course, less parking space.

where do you live?

The numbers in this article are misleading as they're drawn from ridiculously underestimated assumptions. 25 - 33% is a more accurate number.

Why do you think your guess is more accurate?

If a person calls for an Uber and rides alone, there's no less congestion because there is no reduction in commuter-vehicle trips. Just an increase in raw vehicle occupancy. In addition, unless the Uber is already in the commuter's driveway and waits at the curb until the commuter is ready to leave and parks in the commuter's driveway overnight, the use of an Uber increases traffic overall.

The previous person was talking about pooled ridesharing. In my case car pooling was only convenient when going to work. It was much harder to coordinate the afternoon/evening trip home. Services like Uber make it a lot easier for 3-4 people to carpool one way and then use different methods to get home.

Possibly. That effectively assumes that it's far enough (or parking costs are high enough, etc.) for it to be worthwhile to coordinate a carpool in the morning yet it's still viable to take an Uber/cab/etc. home in the evening. That seems like a pretty specific scenario.

>In my case car pooling was only convenient when going to work.

I suspect this is why, anecdotally, I don't hear much about carpooling in my circles any longer. Not that it's ever been all that common. Hours at the end of the day are probably more variable for a lot of people than they used to be.

This is probably about as accurate as the Drake equation.

At the company I work at in the UK, probably 80% of people lift-share. Admittedly that is unusual but still. The article makes several mistakes anyway:

* "8 out of 31000" is one source to one destination - so it is very misleading

* They don't realise that people might be willing to work different hours in order to find a lift share

* 10 percent seems unoptimistic

Yea, as soon as I got to the "8 out of 31000" line, I knew the author wasn't being intellectually honest, and I couldn't trust any of the other assumptions he made.

I was wondering why he would pick Redwood and Palo Alto as an example. To me that doesn't seem like a typical commute in the US. The distance is only 12.5km, you could almost travel by bike. Anyway I think VLM's first comment is a much more intuitive explanation why ride-sharing is not attractive.

In fact, from where I live in Redwood City, it's more like 4 miles by bicycle.

It's not really a typical commute, but I think the point is more than fair -- if the author picked 2 far-flung locations, the probability of a match is typically going to be even lower.

That said, yes, there are common commute routes -- for example, more distance suburbs, which will have a number of commuters going to the same urban core(s).

But statistically speaking, the longer the journey, the less likely the commute match, given a general tendency to live closer to work rather than, say, 5 states away. Even in the US!

How is that misleading? A commute typically has one source and one destination. Some folks in Redwood City are going to Belmont. Some folks in Belmont are going to Palo Alto. It seems to me his model scales just fine. Unless you're proposing that the driver drop her passenger at a different location than she is traveling to. But this increases the commute time by a fair bit, which makes ride sharing less attractive. In particular, you start losing any time you gained by being able to use a high-occupancy vehicle lane.

If everyone spontaneously agreed to ride-share, the traffic on the roadways would go down, commute times would go down, vehicle miles would go down, all kinds of great things would happen. But this proposal suffers from a game theory issue.

The article has two insights, which are kinda related in an surprising way.

One is tangentially mentioning that car poolers almost always know each other and will not go with random strangers; I thought to myself, yes, I am not young and I cannot remember ever hearing or seeing first hand a "hitchhiker" style car pool although coworkers helping each other out (critically, without a dedicated app/service middleman) is almost normal. The insightful part is the successful ride sharing services actual business model is psychologically tricking users into pretending to be taxi drivers and taxi customers rather than some random dude picking up anonymous hitchhikers which is what they really are.

The second semi-related insight is when the free market numbers won't work, just demand the government socially engineer a private profit. Specifically the part of the article where the government should artificially manipulate parking prices to make him the billionaire he is entitled to be because he is so much more deserving of a billion than everyone else. As the article implies, the concept of suburban ride sharing IS mathematically impossible as defined and the only hope for that sector is winning some kind of "dictator for a day" lotto to basically oppress and dominate the inhuman locals.

What ties them together is the concept of LARPing, live action role play. In the first insight from the article, you can successfully run a middleman transport business, basically an online semi-illegal unlicensed gypsy cab dispatcher service, by convincing both participants to LARP that they're taxi drivers and passengers. In the second insight from the article, aside from all this complicated mathy stuff which is none the less true, you can tell a business sector is dead when the only serious business plan first involves LARPing like becoming dictator for life or mass social engineering or whatever other wish fulfillment.

The esoteric message of the article, as opposed to the mathy exoteric message, is the sector is dead because the only participants are the business hustler equivalent of joining the SCA and mistakenly thinking that means you're actually the municipal government, rather than the reality of getting drunk with friends in costume. Which is fun, but don't confuse it with actual political rule.

Hitchhiker-style carpooling is alive and well in DC. http://www.slug-lines.com/

All the major arteries into DC from Virginia have HOV lanes. At many major interchanges, there are parking lots. If you want a ride that doesn't take 2+ hours, you park at the interchange and hop in a stranger's car.

Yes, but its a context switch. You can't build unicorn for a billion people if the maximum possible market size is actually 10K people, or to be extremely generous, we'll say a couple million absolute tops.

That is an interesting sized market for a lifestyle business or maybe a government sponsored non-profit to target. Startup with VC money? Not really.

I agree there's a context switch. But the original article makes one as well. It goes from the conclusion that a ride sharing app can't become a unicorn to suggesting a public policy that raises the costs of parking.

So the context of public policy is in the article and I suspect that the conclusion to raise parking prices "in Palo Alto" intends to make all four of its audiences - capital investors, parking consultants, municipal managers, and believers in the new urbanism - happy.

Sure. I was simply replying to your point about getting in a stranger's car.

Someone who looked at the size of the existing taxi and carpool market would have missed how Lyft and Uber significantly increased the number of people willing to take rides with strangers (whether drivers or co-travelers).

Also alive and well in Alameda, CA, heading in to San Francisco (or at least it was last I visited in 2010). Because drivers get a reduced (free?) fare when crossing the bridge passengers queue at random corners that have been established over time, hop into strangers’ cars, and head in to the city. I thought it was one of the coolest things ever.

Every morning I ride my bike to a corner in my suburb, lock it up for the day, and usually there are a few cars waiting for people. I jump in the first one, usually the driver is a stranger. The casual carpool has been going on in the east bay for 40 years:

http://sfcasualcarpool.com/

Enough with the fancy vans and apps. Russia has already solved this problem: http://www.st-petersburg-essentialguide.com/marshrutka.html

They're private, cheap and ubiquitous and make getting around anywhere in Russian cities easy. Without these, buses from the burbs can't work.

We have those in NYC too, they are called dollar vans and they are ubiquitous, albeit apparently invisible to the upwardly mobile urban white people that are typically noticed by startups and the media.

Also illegal, no?

Not necessarily. There are many legitimate TLC licensed dollar van companies, though there are many more that are not registered/legal as well.

And car-pooling has a long history although my sense is that it's perhaps less common than it used to be--probably because work hours tend to be more variable than in the past. While apps and so forth can reduce transaction friction enough to create markets where they didn't previously exist, I reserve the right to be suspicious of claims that an app suddenly makes a service viable that wasn't before.

There is also a huge cultural element to this. The element of trust is a huge problem in most countries and in my opinion this will make it hard for carpooling to scale as a business idea.

Marshrutki don't really run in the suburbs. Even if they do, these "suburbs" are high-rise developments with 10+ story apartment buildings. Not comparable to American one family/house low-density suburb at all.

To clarify, I've taken the metro from Moscow city center, and from the metro station exit - taken the Marshrutka to a "suburban" high-rise on the south-side.

In the US, I propose basically the opposite. You drive to a parking area from your home, get on a bus (or metro if available) that delivers you to the city. But after departing the bus/train is the problem. From that departure point, there's few options to move you to disparate parts of the city (i.e., your actual office location) without hailing an expensive taxi/uber or walking an hour through the city. If something like Marshrutki were available at that point in the city, it would be a game-changer and make the suburban <--> city buses much more feasible.

I believe these & comparable services are ubiquitous all over the middle east, latin america & africa.

This 'paper' relies on some very flawed assumptions and hence have no basis in reality.

Ridesharing services like Uber aim to be cheaper than car ownership, while being as reliable as running water. Many people are finding that once they add up all their vehicle costs (maintenance, depreciation, parking, registration, fuel), uberPOOL or even uberX is cheaper than owning a car. Plus, you get to work or relax on the ride instead of focusing on the road. How much is your time worth?

Assuming that only 10% is willing to pay less for a superior experience is absurd. Once you change it to a more realistic figure of a third to a quarter, the conclusions fall apart.

I think the author is using "ride sharing" more in the sense of car pooling for commuting rather than as a substitute for taxi cab and similar services where the rider hires the driver.

'Ridesharing apps' is a commute option.

I use Uber + public transport for commuting and getting around everywhere. I don't have a car, and I know many people in the same boat.

The reason that I think the author is not using "ride sharing app" in your sense is that the author concludes that such apps will not pencil out to cash on cash returns attractive to Valley Venture Capital. If we assume that the author has at least half a clue, then the author could not reasonably be assumed to include Uber or Lyft type apps in their definition of "ride sharing app".

If the author is without a clue, then probably the article should be flagged.

Besides all the great points others have made, the origin and destination of the shared riders don't need to be the same, they just have to share some common segment. Furthermore, although there is time lost waiting for the other rider to be picked up or dropped off, there is also time gained by not having to find parking and then walk from the car to your destination, since the shared car can drop you off right out front.

Hush. You're ruining my discount with math the companies should have done already. (=

I'm getting discounts on all my rides from home by using the carpool feature. In the last 3 months, I have had 0 people opt to share a ride with me from my house to downtown Austin. I'm 8 miles away from the city center.

Consider the MoPac toll lane that's supposed to open in a year or so. It's priced based on demand to keep the lane free-flowing at all times (barring an accident in the lane itself). You'll be able to shave significant time off your commute by paying extra, or you can pay less by sharing a ride with other people.

Demand pricing will make shared rides take off even in low density cities.

I used to work with Steve, he's a great guy and it's good to see he's still working on this stuff.

There's a nice archive of papers plus some simulation models we put together at http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/about-us/library/

Wait, what? The article actually derives the conclusion that 8 people live in the same zip code, are going to the same destination, in the 10% technophile bracket, and leaving in the same 20 minute window -- and this makes it impossible? Doesn't that show the exact opposite, that even with really pessimistic assumptions, matches are still likely?

Where I live, commuter trains are packed, though (Europe). How can that be? The same logic should apply to commuter trains as to cars?

I think people are significantly more likely to choose to live near a train than they are to choose to live near someone who works near where they work. Among other things, it's a much more concrete consideration when house hunting.

It's because Europe doesn't do suburbs and parking lots the same way that America does. Densified development around transit services will result in more people taking those services. Less and/or more costly parking in the city centre will result in fewer people driving. This is how Europe does things.

Basically, the mix of vehicles (cars, trains, driverless cars, whatever) is far less deterministic than the urban development patterns. Build suburbs with homogeneous lot sizes and city centres with a lot of free parking, and the mode choice is more or less a foregone conclusion.

>This is how Europe does things.

This is also how America did things up until about the 1950s. From about that time period onward we didn't just build suburbs, we made them mandatory legally.

For instance, in your typical American suburb, you can't legally build a modern equivalent of a rowhouse; it might be too small to fit in the minimum lot size, its floor area ratio might exceed the ludicrously small allowed ratio, and it wouldn't have required side yards. Multistory apartments are mostly banned or, if they aren't, are required to sit on large lots so as to minimize their density. Then we tack on single-use zoning to ensure that nothing is within walking distance.

This would be bad, but manageable, if we could still build in our cities. Unfortunately our great cities have decided that their state at X point in time is the best humanity can achieve, so they have made it difficult to build new buildings. Our large cities in some cases have less housing than they used to due to urban freeways, misguided urban renewal, and the fires and riots of the tumultuous Civil Rights era.

>Basically, the mix of vehicles (cars, trains, driverless cars, whatever) is far less deterministic than the urban development patterns.

Yep. Many people fail to understand this; land use and transportation go hand in hand. Build sprawl, and you'll end up in traffic hell with no possible transit relief. Build dense development and, though congestion may be high, actual trip times can be shorter and alternative modes can flourish. It just so happens to also be vastly better for the environment.

In Europe, the number of people willing to use public transit is much greater than 10%, for one thing. Another thing is that you don't really need to get matched with someone going the same direction as you: people generally value living close to public transit (which is completely opposite to people living in California, who try to avoid it), and public transit generally gets you where you want to be, possibly with one or rarely two transfers.

The prices in the Mission or downtown Palo Alto, for example, don't really reflect your contention that people in California don't want to live near public transit. The real issue is that California isn't building much new transit, and it's essentially impossible to build much new housing or corporate headquarters nearby— so it's mathematically impossible for many people to live near public transit.

In general, rail projects are considered to increase property values. In fact, I've read the argument that light rail isn't really cost effective vs. dedicated bus lanes but the commitment associated with a rail line makes often makes it preferable for planning purposes. (In that buses, in addition to having a lower-class image, can always have their routes altered so--the argument goes--people won't make property decisions based on bus lines.)

I believe that people in the USA would be just as willing to use public transit as people in Europe, if we had public transit systems that were actually worth using. Just look at New York, Boston, or Chicago: they have real transit systems, and people use them.

Commuter trains have dedicated tracks so they don't suffer from the same congestion issues as carpools and buses (if we ignore the benefit of commuter lanes on the roadways).

Commuter trains take advantage of their dedicated tracks to make many stops without impacting travel speed too hugely. (Imagine if your vanpool exited the freeway and slogged through surface streets for 10-20mins for each passenger it deposited).

Commuter trains travel routes that go to where people work, and people choose to live near the train routes as a lifestyle choice. You're not going to know where your carpool buddy might live before you choose a house.

In addition to the other comments, a lot of people also drive (or get dropped off) at commuter rail stations. And, in many cases, they take transit upon arrival in the city to get to their destination. So commuter rail is really a modified point-to-point for most people in the US.

Commuter rail also usually doesn't work for suburban-to-suburban commutes. It's almost entirely a hub and spoke model with the hub being an urban core.

Only one comment in here about slugline... shocked.

Here's a super depressing mathematical proof of why the services fail in the burbs:

First the assumption is a car is necessary for living in general. I am very happy for the 0.1% of the population who live in an urban hugbox where they don't need a car, but this is a general argument for 99% of the population or a unicorn sized middleman app.

My garage costs perhaps $50K lifetime, including land, maint, all added together. An online mortgage calculator spat out $290/mo for my garage. I suppose as a fraction of the cost of the house its not ridiculous. Or at 20 working days per month, simply having the possibility to drive my own car costs $20 to park it at home. Use it or not, I'm out $20 per day.

I bought the cheapest toyota out there for my commute. Many people will insist on the largest SUV they can afford, but whatever. Many people will replace their car every two years to show off conspicuous consumption whereas I drive my cars into the ground because I'm super arrogant and rebellious about not impressing other people. Anyway simple straight line capex depreciation of $20K vs 250 commutes per year vs maybe a decade life of the car means each working day the car drops in value $8 no matter if I drive it to work or not.

Being a commuter car instead of a SUV I am kinda cheating on gas expense when I actually drive to work. Figure 40 miles round trip at 80 MPH (I don't live in CA LOL, and flex time a lot) and 40 / 30 mpg = 1.3 gallons burned per commute and we'll pessimistically call the average price of gas over a decade $3 (LOL) so it costs me $4 to actually drive instead of car pool.

Now there are two ways the math argument kills suburban car pooling. The first is I'm out $28/day to commute no matter if I actually commute, car pool, or call in sick. The variable cost is a menial minimal $4 to actually do it. So I do NOT save 100% of the cost of my commute, I only save about 10% of my commute cost by not commuting. Why bother? If I wanted to save 10% I'd be infinitely more likely to get an even smaller car or live in a cheaper area than to give up the convenience of my car for a mere 10% savings. This argument is like people who pay $4000 mortgage and then shiver in the dark because they can't afford the heating bill, its not that turning down the thermostat is a great idea, but its that they obviously demonstrate incredibly bad economic management to end up in a scenario like that.

The other killer is car pooling takes a lot of time, and regardless of how high or low an employer values his feudal servant's time, outside work people seem pretty happy to drop $20+/hr to get drunk or watch theater movies or whatever. So I feel $20/hr is a reasonable valuation of time for the general public. Now lets say car pooling costs 15 minutes extra wasted time at each of four endpoints, for a total of an hour. If you insist on matching up strangers online, they probably don't live or work nearby each other. Now an hour of free time is worth $20, and car pooling will cost me an hour, but save me $4... So car pooling puts me $16 in the lifestyle hole.

So mathematically I don't save much money by occasionally car pooling, and the standard of living is dramatically lower.

I tried to calculate a math model for reliability and dropped it... its hard to compare a nearly 100% reliable toyota vs a very hypothetical service that may or may not match you up after hours and may or may not match you up with weirdo axe murderers or maybe not. Basically you have one system that although expensive is nearly perfectly reliable and nearly perfectly safe, vs a pile of question marks that might ... might ... turn out as good. Maybe. But you can't build a math model off that so I gave up.

Point to point transport may be necessary for living in general, but a personal car certainly isn't. A more realistic comparison would be selling your car, cancelling your insurance, repurposing your garage, and comparing it with pooled ridesharing.

I'm not sure why you think car pooling has to take a lot of time. Services like uberPOOL guarantee you will only be matched with someone going a very similar route -- otherwise, you get a solo ride (for the pool price). It typically doesn't add more than 2-3 minutes.

Your time cost calculation is also invalid. When you're riding instead of driving, you can use your time for other things. It may be checking up on your email, working on your latest project, or reading hacker news. You can't do that if you drive. Ridesharing actually gives you more hours while saving you money.

There is no question that it's more economical to have one driver for 3 riders, than having everyone driving. Traditional carpooling suck because of the low level of technology, network effect and optimization - but ridesharing achieves all of these and can be superior to driving.

I do not have a car. I never intend on getting a car. I don't even have a driver's license, and I know many people in a similar boat. How do I get around? I Uber + public transport everywhere. My standard of living is far better. I get to do things I want to do (or chat to strangers if I'm bored). I save money. I reduce road congestion and emissions. And I'm not the only one.

I have to confess that while I absolutely understand not owning a car as an adult under some circumstances--and in some cities especially--the concept of never learning to drive and get a driver's license somewhat astounds me. There are so many places I go both locally and when I travel that would be effectively inaccessible without a car. And even leaving my regular commute aside, there are plenty of times when I need a rental car while on business trips to get to a customer site or other location and a taxi doesn't really fit the bill.

Certainly, you can work around some of this for a time by carpooling with friends or making other types of arrangements but I'd think it would be very hard (and just personally limiting) over the longterm.

It's not that difficult— if such a person travels travel, they go to major cities or resorts or places where driving isn't necessary, and if they want to go hiking, etc., they take public transit or go with friends.

Downtown-oriented companies (e.g. startups or banks) often do business with other urban companies, too. Versus oft-suburban companies (e.g hardware companies.) often do business with other oft-suburban companies. The license-free urbanite will generally get a job at the first type of company.

Beyond that, in much Europe, driver's licenses are often appropriately difficult to get (a 6-month course at age 18 and a test that's usually failed, rather than a quick lap around a parking lot as in Florida), and rural transit is often at least adequate.

Not having a car or driver's license is very limiting in suburban sprawl, which are designed exclusively around cars— but urban places (or even villages), where walking is the default mode of transport, it isn't. So it just depends where one spends one's time.

Sure. Someone just out of school working for some urban startup with a circle of friends (at least some of whom own cars) who also live in a relatively dense city with decent public transportation can often get away without driving for a while. They're probably not going on a lot of sales calls, they can carpool with their urban friends to go hiking or to help them move, and they can just choose not to vacation in areas that require a car (the vast bulk of the US) unless they're going with someone who can drive.

However, some of those friends will probably move out to the suburbs or exurbs, there may be interesting job offers that aren't conveniently reached by public transit, or it may just get tiresome to always be depending on others to go skiing or to the beach.

It's obviously a lifestyle choice people can make--and it's more practical in a handful of very dense cities--but it is something that they're likely to find very limiting over time.

This is simply not the case in a lot of places. My wife & I are 31 and 32 years old respectively and neither of us has a driver's license. My mother in law (68 years old) has a driver's license and haven't driven even once since taking the exam.

Of all my friends in Berlin & Vienna I can think of only a couple that own a car & I'm pretty sure most don't have a driver's license either.

This is not unusual for a large % of the population of western europe and the east asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc).

Just curious as to which suburb you live in that supports uber? As I live in a suburb of Philly, and uber doesn't exist around here.

Really? Interesting. Which direction from Philly is your suburb? I've been to a decent number of cities and their suburbs and usually found Uber or Lyft to be available in the past year.

Locally, living in either Jersey or Connecticut, Uber/Lyft have been available for a while now wherever Ive been in those states. I do remember when taking an Uber or Lyft from a suburb 40 minutes outside of NYC in NJ, the driver complained that he had two tickets from Philly airport.

Are Philly and perhaps the surrounding areas in PA just more strict still with laws? I know Uber made a big push a year or two ago to be available in all of Jersey. And since Philly or say, Hershey Park, can be pretty close to a portion of NJ, I assumed it was available there in mass too.

0.1% really?

I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 25% of households here have no car, and we don't have the world's best transit system.

Per http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/01/21/vital-signs-more-h... it's over 9% of households that don't have a car- and of course the average size of a household is above 1, so your fake statistic is two orders of magnitude off from reality.

You're welcome to be hyperbolic, but especially among engineers making up probabilities that have no bearing on reality feels more like intellectual dishonesty than hyperbole.

I think a lot of the HN demographic is completely out of touch with the fact that a lot of people simply can't afford a car.

And, don't call your proofs "mathematical" if you're happy citing numbers with no citation two orders of magnitude off from reality.

Huh. I was very surprised to learn that there are 809 road vehicles per 1000 people in the US. I expected it to be in excess of 1000. Of course, this includes all kinds of commercial vehicles but also includes those who are not of driving age.

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

Isn't this article about suburban ride-sharing? Car ownership in the suburbs is 100%.

I don't think anyone disputes that a lot of people live in cities and don't own cars.

I live in a suburb of Austin and I would wager the ratio of cars to adults is pretty much 1. There are quite a few homes with two adults and three or more vehicles. My home is like this (I have a car and a motorcycle).

More specifically the article is proposing that an uber-for-suburbs is a mathematical non-starter and the comments against that conclusion are primarily non sequiturs along the lines of "I live in an urban area and uber and mass transit work great for me". Cool. Rock on. But that has nothing at all to do with the article's business plan, or the research in the article or my own mathematical model that came to the same conclusion as the author via a different path.

This is also a live example of survivorship bias. Nobody who tries to live in a mass-transit-less uber-less suburb in the current year will last very long. Nobody who can't afford a car can afford a house in the burbs either. Therefore there is a natural self selection such that roughly 0% of potential uber-for-the-burbs startup can physically live at this time in the burbs. If uber-for-the-burbs already existed such that potential customers could be found in the burbs, then a startup could in fact sell to them, although starting up into entrenched competition isn't as much fun as a wide open field. But the geography has self selected such that all potential customers cannot currently live there. It is possibly one of the least possibly fertile areas to sell a service idea. It is like the proverbial trying to sell ice to eskimos. The burbs are multiply mathematically provably possibly the worst place on the entire planet to try an uber-for- startup.

Perhaps the business model for uber-for-the-burbs should bootstrap off little kids and suburban nursing home residents (I mean, who else is left there, to sell to, who isn't already a car owner?). Although little kids have safety issues and nursing homes have privately owned bus routes and taxis are already pretty entrenched in the market. And the little kids and old people might not be the wealthiest residents of suburbia (demand doesn't matter without the cash revenue to back it up). I would guess the best bootstrap would be physically disabled / handicapped but then you run into wheelchair issues and drivers being medically qualified? And how many little kids / disabled / retired / nursing home residents are commuting into the big city to desk jobs anyway?

I edited this post to emphasize that the "startup lesson" of this whole topic is you can't just look at where to sell, you need to think up who to sell. Finding a giant underserved geographic area with plenty of money is utterly useless if by the inherent existence of the area they have no use for it. Hawaii is dramatically underserved with respect to snowshoes, but I would strongly recommend against a startup trying to sell snowshoes in the Hawaiian islands.

I'd just add that Uber being fairly successful in a lot of areas in spite of the fact that taxis were already a thing has probably led a lot of people to take away a (somewhat) incorrect lesson--namely that app-ing the taxi experience fundamentally changes the economics.

In fact, Uber has, for example, had a lot less relative impact in Manhattan which already has lots of taxis than in other locales. So the more correct lesson is that taxis were and are pretty broken in a lot of places and that those markets would actually have supported a more functional taxicab system.

Now, one can assume that low-density suburbs and exurbs are also underserved markets but I don't see a lot of evidence that's the case.

Yes! Here in Seattle, so far as I can tell, Uber succeeded mightily not because people particularly loved Uber, but because everybody hated the taxicab system.

The 30,000+ dead and 2 million injured a year in the US alone question your contention that car commuting is 'nearly perfectly safe'.

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