UberHop: More people in fewer cars | Hacker News Reader

UberHop: More people in fewer cars

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181 pointsedward105 comments

For the people who are confused (I was) between uberPOOL, uberHOP and uberCOMMUTE:

uberPOOL most will know matches a rider real-time with another one heading in the same direction. The riders split the cost between them.

uberHOP is like a bus service - uses designated pickup locations and matches people going on similar routes. It costs riders a flat fee of $5 for each ride. Difference between uberHOP & uberPOOL - uberPOOL does not require riders to walk to pre-determined locations, instead having drivers pick up passengers at their exact location. The cost is variable and not a flat fee. For uberHOP riders have to walk to a predetermined spot (something like a bus stop).

uberCOMMUTE is less formal than the other two carpooling options and is designed for everyday people (ex. an office goer) that want to share space in their car. In other words, one temporarily becomes an uber driver when they are driving to their office. On their way to office a person can pickup passengers and gets compensated for that. For passengers, it’s Uber as usual. They simply input their destination and then uber matches them with a driver going the same way.

Comparative descriptions like this are a great way to describe products. It's too bad most companies publish new products with a presumption the reader is closely familiar with the existing products/business to make their own comparison.

They really should start with how the new products fits into the greater scheme of the companies offerings, so we can all have a clear mental-model of why it makes sense and when I might want to use it.

Curse-of-knowledge and last-minute rushed blog posts after a product launch is probably why it's so common. Or maybe making the assumption since it's being posted on the company blog that the average blog reader is better informed than the homepage - which is rarely the case.

>Comparative descriptions like this are a great way to describe products. It's too bad most companies publish new products with a presumption the reader is closely familiar with the existing products/business to make their own comparison.

I tend to read this behavior oppositely: they're not assuming you have the knowledge, they're hoping you don't, and obscuring the similarity to existing products that they might seem inferior to when framed as competitors for the same use case.

"Hey, UberHOP is just Lyft Lines + hotspots with an extra requirement that they hit more stops off my route..."

The ride sharing industry is finally offering ride sharing! Seriously though, I never understood why we've been calling them 'ride sharing' apps, when they've essentially been drivers-for-hire.

They claim to be ride sharing apps so that they are not blatantly breaking laws that protect taxi monopolies. Its a backdoor they have been using to try to open up this industry.

Those laws that protect taxi monopolies are also the laws that enforce consumer rights in this space, so let's maybe scale back the editorializing a bit?

While you may be technically correct, where was my right to actually receive the thousands of taxis I've called over the years that never showed up in SF.

I was literally banned from all taxis in 2008 in SF as I would have to call four companies for a cab to my place in the presidio as they would never show up.

I wound up getting the numbers of various private black car drivers whom I could call upon at a moments notice to deliver me anywhere and they always showed up.

If these laws were designed to protect "consumers" I don't know what the fuck they are protecting!

I've used uber since they were born, and I've only ever had nothing short of a wonderful experience with them.

Whilst they may have certain business practices which people can complaint about - uber should be the text book example of how you disrupt an existing service.

The taxi-protecting laws and consumer-protecting laws are separate.

Uber could be regulated as a taxi service, just like pre-existing taxi services are. Consumer rights could be protected by the law.

However, in most places, there is a medallion system for officially-licensed taxis, which basically imposes a very high tax on anyone trying to operate as a taxi service.

Because Uber couldn't function within the medallion system, it was also shut out of consumer protection laws. But that doesn't mean things have to be that way. The problem is that allowing Uber around the medallion system essentially destroys a bunch of value already stored up in medallions.

Also, where else should someone editorialize, if not a comment on a social news site?

Most places don't have medallions, actually.

Uber fought pretty hard against consumer protection laws here in DC. For example, DC requires cabs to carry highr insurance and to get cars inspected more frequently.

The consumers who want the "rights" that taxis are supposedly providing are free to still use taxis. Of course, most consumers I've met think taxis are terrible (go figure, a monopoly leading to a terrible service).

Taxi's are terrible, Uber seems like a pretty lousy company but at least their service is pretty good.

I do wonder about their handling of issues like insurance.

Arguably more important than the consumer rights are the rights of the workers. There's no need to pay healthcare if you call your workers contractors, despite failing most of the IRS's tests for what role they fill.

Well taxi drivers are contractors as well and have no healthcare provided.

You don't have to pay healthcare for employees in general in the US, do you?

If they aren't contractors, they do if they work more than 30 hours a week.

Companies with fewer than 50 full-time employees do not have to provide health-insurance (though there are tax incentives and credits to do so).

Do you sincerely believe those laws make a better job in protecting customers than Uber's driver review system? I have caught various bad taxis, not a single good-rated bad Uber driver.

Regulations are, in general, extremely efficient at creating monopolies and utterly inefficient in protecting the customer.

> Regulations are, in general, extremely efficient at creating monopolies and utterly inefficient in protecting the customer.

Regulations are what keeps your food from making you sick on the spot, what keeps the air you breathe from melting your lungs, what lets you buy a new widget in confidence that it won't burn your house down. Regulations are extremely effective at protecting customers from abusive, greedy entrepreneurs. They're not perfect, and yes, with enough private money flowing into the process, they can create monopolies. But generally, they're good at their job.

People usually didn't get sick from food before there was regulation and people still sometimes get sick despite it. What they really do is allow you to trust unfamiliar merchants whose reputation you can't know and so expand the reach of commercial society. But just as the rise of trucking meant that rail travel was no longer a natural monopoly and could set its own prices tools like Uber mean it's now safe to use reputational systems with drivers for hire. If there were some universal registry of restaurants that everybody checked for health ratings before going in to eat then maybe we could worry less about regulating restaurants too. But I don't see that happening soon.

An important difference between this and things like pollution is that in the case of pollution the negative effects of the seller's malfience don't fall upon the purchaser but upon third parties who don't have any say in the matter, what's called an externality. That's another case where we really do need regulation for a good result.

If that's what the laws are for, they're doing a terrible job of it.

Friend, this is the editorial section.

As patio11 said a while ago, "in the battle between laws and software protecting consumer rights, consumers overwhelmingly chose software". The lawmakers are still fighting to roll this back, of course.

To get there, reaching and coordinating demand density was a sufficiently difficult problem.

Because you're sharing the personal car of another person. As opposed to a purpose-built cab. At least that's how I understood it.

The casual carpools in the East Bay save a lot of time going into San Francisco because of the carpool lane. Very few people use them in the reverse direction (people take the bus instead) since there is no time saving. AC Transit hates this since they need to buy more buses for the evening commute. Curious to see if the same asymmetry happens with UberCommute.

Uber can apply some market pricing to this by charging more for the SF commute and less for the return direction.

Wait until uber starts bus services. That will be great.

> Wait until uber starts bus services. That will be great.

lol, but why wouldn't they try? they'll have to set up their own bus stops though. I wonder if it would be "legal".

Someone tried, it didn't go so well: http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/09/san-franciscos-luxur...

Have you EVER relied on Muni to get to work?

> I wonder if it would be "legal"

It would be "legal" just like their "ride sharing" service was "legal".

The nice thing about the eastbay casual carpool (which I use every morning) is it runs on a universal first-come first-serve basis. Uberhop will not have this unless it is universally used.

Uberhop may succeed at creating new carpool routes but it will fail at breaking into established ones because of added friction.

Isn't this pretty similar to Lyft Carpool? https://www.lyft.com/carpool

The Lyft page doesn't make it clear if the route is fixed. That's what's new here, otherwise Carpool would be the same as what Uber has already been running with UberPOOL.

In any event, all these services are converging on the same thing, a kind of replacement for public transportation on a fine-grained scale. Car pooling, fixed routes, and eventually self-driving vehicles are all table stakes for any ride-sharing operation that wants to approximate the economics of a local bus service (but with added convenience and service).

No. This is more similar to a fixed price shuttle that ends up being an SUV instead of a minibus or regular bus. (Fixed starts/stops, route reverses from morning to evening, etc.)

What this means is that Uber doesn't have an efficient enough algorithm for ride sharing and they currently are giving us a solution that will optimize the routes upfront.

This will give them enough competitive data to figure out the live on-line algorithm. And of course, lowering the prices still, but it won't work for those of us who want the routes now, not planned upfront.

Way to go free datasets.

Although it's nice to know that researchers at Uber still haven't figured it out, makes the competition a bit happier.

It's quite funny how a company raises so much money, and then, after you have it you go solve the hard problems, or at least that's how Uber works.

What you said doesn't make much sense. Much more important than the algorithm is the market that the algorithm operates in. Uber couldn't unleash a magical algorithm and solve commuting inefficiencies for every user if there isn't a sufficient density of both riders and drivers (i.e. the main inputs to the algorithm in this case).

That doesn't seem to be a problem for the competition. Prices are the problem, and Uber is trying really hard to lower the prices and profit, that's why the algorithm IS most important.

I really do not understand why almost everyone thinks that "network effect" is the best thing Uber has, when it obviously isn't.

It is. I get an uber where I live within 2-3 minutes. And sometimes I've gotten uberPool matches essentially going to the same destination picked up within a block. These are only achievable with considerable penetration into a local market.

For smaller towns this effect is negligible, and there are more smaller towns than big ones.

Anyone notice this statement? "We will be piloting a new program for drivers who want to share their commute and recoup the cost of the trip." (emphasis mine)

If we go with what is implied by this, I don't see how this is much different than using the destination filter, except for possibly paying the driver "costs" instead of the typical fare.

Good catch.

This means the driver is no longer an employee of Uber (not even a freelance one) so he wouldn't be eligible to unionize or receive worker's rights

What would stop the driver starting or joining a union? You can be self employed and still be in a union. You can even be unemployed or a student and still be in a union. (May be UK-speficic)

certain powers of unions are protected by the government -- i.e., by default you can't band together with a bunch of people and set a minimum wage you'll all work for (that's price fixing).

The race to the bottom continues. The bottom for the driver, that is.

If a million people were driving cars twice daily with no passengers, and now they have the option to fill their cars, then I'd say the former situation was "the bottom" for them. So it depends who your archetypal "driver" is -- the /true/ average driver, or the career driver.

Maybe there's no room for a career driver anymore.

fwiw, I don't like Uber the company, but this dynamic will continually resurface, with or without them.

I was thinking from the point of view of a part-time driver who was driving to work already and using features like destination filter, and picking up the full fares that Uber/Lyft currently pay for UberPool/Line.

Now there appears to be a lower tier that Uber is pushing for to drive down payments even more.

From the passenger point of view, it's similar to an UberPool and slightly discounted. Based on previous Uber behavior, it will probably be significantly less pay for what was a career driver, and, as you pointed out, better than nothing for those drivers who had empty seats.

More importantly, are there really any Uber drivers out there who see it as a long-term job for themselves?

I'm curious how many are aware of Uber's plans to automate everything and completely kill the need for drivers. That might be here sooner than we all expect.

Many may not employment options, but I sure as heck wouldn't tie my boat to a company that has stated their strategic mission is to remove the need for my job entirely from their org.

Great idea. It's just like the colectivo system used in Lima, Peru and other Latin American cities since the 60's and earlier. Colectivos are taxis traveling a fixed route and shared by a carful of people. You stand by the side of the road, waive one down and he takes you downtown real cheap.

They have these in the Middle East as well.

Or like becaks and opelets in Indonesia.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oplet

I don't think it's like that , i think uber polans to offer a more dynamic route.

These exist pretty much everywhere, by dozens of names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

Also known as a bus!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/uber-uberh...

Watch out, Chariot (https://www.ridechariot.com/) and Scoop (https://www.takescoop.com/)

And http://bridj.com and http://split.us

Would love for this to hit SF and I can finally have alternatives. I have been dying to try out Chariot and got super excited when they announced a route to Outer Richmond. Lost enthusiasm when the route was only a couple stops on on Geary close to Inner Richmond.

I've been using Magicbus.io

They're still the only commuter service that goes from SF to Palo Alto.

UberCommute sounds like a decent idea, but also something I don't particularly want to give a middle man a cut for.

How else would you do it? Go around asking random people if they would be willing to drive you to work for $10?

Certainly matching you with a commuter going in the same direction is a service worth paying for?

Plus integrating payments, trust, safety, and all the other things you get with the uber app.

Might as well collect as much interchange as possible between now and the Alphabet self-driving service.

Do uberCOMMUTE drivers get 1099s?

Assuming so, I'm not sure the hassle of doing more taxes and actually paying those taxes would be worth it to me.

If they get paid more than $600, I assume they do. I imagine a big chunk of them won't hit the $600 threshold though.

Doing taxes on a 1099-MISC is pretty painless. I include several on my returns each year from various side projects.

This seems interesting as a commute option but I would still like to see Uber adopt a stance where they get rid of rider route history after X months or at least give people the option to opt out.

> It’s estimated that the average American commuter spends 42 hours a year stuck in traffic.

I'm reading this as Indian (specifically Bangalore) and it brings a smile on my face.

Congratulations, Uber, you just reinvented the bus.

But the vehicle's route is chosen by exactly-known demand rather than following a centrally-set and inflexible schedule and route. It's not much like a bus at all in actual practice.

The blog post cites the prior practice of informal carpooling with strangers; it is somewhat dishonest to insinuate that they claimed to invent anything.

I've never seen a bus that dynamically picks a point-to-point route based on the needs of the passengers on it at the moment.

Most private buses in the third world will do this.

It's exactly how taxis work in St. Thomas.

For the passengers who are onboard, sure, but what about pickups?

Call their cell. It's written on the bus.

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

They're very popular in a lot of places that aren't the USA (and even exist in NYC):

Dolmuş in Turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmu%C5%9F

NYC "Shadow Transit": http://projects.newyorker.com/story/nyc-dollar-vans/

More broadly, "Share Taxis": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

The idea isn't anything new, but being able to pay and ride from the convenience of Uber is nice.

It's worth noting that the ones in NYC are illegal. With that said I'm all for moving mass transit in this direction.

They are illegal to street-hail— but this is unenforced. The city is working on normalizing them, including adding taxi-like branding: http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/industry/vans.shtml

I think it becomes something different and much more efficient with enough data and good algorithms.

Hmm yeah, this kind of technology combined with vehicles that can carry large numbers of people could be very effective. Not quite the same as a bus, significantly better in fact.

Not quite. More like the shared taxi stops that operate in poorer countries. I saw many of these in Cuba. Not like a bus in that it was:

  1. Faster
  2. Carried fewer people
  3. Had route flexibility. You could pay extra to go off the route, negotiated with the driver and checking it didn't inconvenience the other passengers.

This is radically different from how we run transport in North America.

With self driving cars, I could see Uber running shuttles around the city that decided optimal multi-user routes taking into consideration all the various route requests users had entered.

I always figured this was their end game as far as consumer transport was concerned.

So how does Uber benefit from pairing you with another commuter? Will you negotiate a price and then Uber takes a cut?

I believe Uber will charge you for the trip (but less than the cost of a normal ride), and give a chunk of the money to the driver (just as they do normally).

Are there any restrictions on the model year of the car for UberHop / UberCommute?

huzzah! Another step closer to the dream of fully autonomous automobiles! Though human uber drivers must know that they are, at max, 5 years away from obsolescence?

"human uber drivers must know that they are, at max, 5 years away from obsolescence"

Care to place a friendly wager on that? I'll even forgive the "uber drivers must know" part of your crazy statement since that obviously isn't correct.

Ubiquitous driverless cars are coming. 5 years is an incredibly aggressive time frame.

It's a ridiculous timeframe if you consider that there are no driverless cars for sale right now. Even if Tesla or Ford or any other vendor started selling them tomorrow, the driverless cars would be too expensive and the factories could hardly pump out enough of them to put every Uber driver out of a job in just 5 years.

I'm looking forward to being able to order a driverless car from my phone, but in just 5 years, these cars might still be scarce, illegal in most places and they might suffer from limitations in their driving ability that prove problematic.

You're thinking about it wrong. No consumer is going to buy a driverless car. Instead you'll call an Uber or GoogleTaxi and there won't be a human behind the wheel. Just like Musk said, owning s car is going to become like owning a horse. People do it as a hobby but not as a necessity.

I agree. We'll buy into car share networks. There will be super primo services where you can ride in a limo, business class networks that allow you to ride in privacy and maybe even economy class networks where busses and vans carpool like uber's new hop feature. Crucially, this allows the number of overall cars to slashed. 1 auto-auto can do the work of 10 non-auto-autos, and the cost will be spread out among subscribers and expensive electric cars will finally be cheap enough for everyone.

Driverless cars don't have to be custom-built: you can add a kit to an existing car that contains a Linux box, LIDAR, cameras, and appropriate machinery to drive the car's controls. Most of the existing Google prototypes have been Priuses or Lexuses with the kit. IIRC, all the components are pretty inexpensive; by far the biggest cost is the LIDAR, but that's because they're not produced in volume and so you have to pay custom-built prices.

Ok, maybe it's too optimistic but I'd totally make a wager. I say it will take 5 years for the Bay, 10 for major cities and highways, 15 for the rest of the country and by 2050, human driving will be illegal on public roads.

any takers?

To be clear: you want to bet that in 5 years human driving will be illegal on public roads in "the Bay"?

no, I don't think we'll outlaw human driving for several decades. It will take a while for the old holdouts to die off- those individuals who'll stop driving when you pry the steering wheel from their "cold dead hands."

But I do think that the legalization of auto-automobiles will start in San Fransisco and the surrounding area.

Probably fewer and fewer people will go to the effort of learning to drive and passing the test, particularly in places where it's difficult and expensive.

I don't think so. Rather, by 2050, driving will have been made illegal except on closed courses.

Personally I don't think it will ever have to be illegal. It's more likely that people will stop driving of their own volition and the laws allowing driving will remain in place, just be unused.

I'm actually in agreement that autonomous transportation will become "a thing" in roughly five years, somewhere in the world, in some capacity. This will prove the model and eliminate most of the rational arguments for its prohibition, which will lead to it becoming commonplace but probably over the course of several decades.

If I had any money, I'd probably take you up on that. I think the technology might be ready in that time frame, but bureaucracy and safety concerns will push it back. We don't know how well the vision/detection methods of driver-less cars will handle certain scenarios, like a solar flare, or direct subversion from other humans. Would someone be able to disable my car from moving and rob me with a few small devices?

I agree that bureaucracy is the main hurdle. The technology is so close but I'm not sure that the populace or the government is ready.

But malicious agents can disable your car today. A solar flare would fry you current car's electronics just as easily as an auto-auto. And a gun qualifies as a "small device" too, so I'm not sure why that makes in difference.

"Self driving" cars which require a human to be ready to take over are totally plausible in that time frame...

But are you suggesting that in 5 years a person can summon an autonomous taxi in the Bay area? By autonomous car I mean the client (passenger) will not need to be ready to take control nor will there be any other human in the vehicle for that purpose, and the vehicle will transport the client from one place in the Bay to another over the public road system, mixing with other non-autonomous traffic of various types.

If so, I'm in for USD $100. I say that in 5 years (12/17/2020 or before) it will NOT be the case that a user can expect to summon an autonomous (as defined above) taxi for transport anywhere in the United States.

Ok, consider that wager taken.

I think the key parts of the wager are 1) that the car drives itself, without a human present 2) it's in the Bay area and 3) it's legal.

I'll see you in 5 years.

This might be a ridiculous question.

But, why don't we have self flying pilotless airplanes yet? I'd imagine problem set is much more limited and tons of research has already been done.

> But, why don't we have self flying pilotless airplanes yet? I'd imagine problem set is much more limited and tons of research has already been done.

We do, but they're mainly used to surveil people instead of move them around.

I think for the most part, we do. The pilots are part of the "theater of security"- the computer does most the work. Many people wouldn't ride in planes without a human behind the wheel. And this fear of machines is the biggest hurdle to auto-autos.

why do autopilots keep turning off every time the planes run into problems? like the air france and the air asia indonesia crash turning control over to pilots is a recipe for disaster.

They do eg when there is a mismatch between the numbers they getting from 2 different sensors.

But the fact that many more people will work for uber will make shifting to autonomous cars even more difficult.

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