New Yorkers Can Now Get Unlimited UberPool in Manhattan for $200
forbes.com
forbes.com
There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective, especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be 5-10 minutes +/- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn't actually save a worthwhile amount of money.
Also forbes is incredibly spammy so here's the link directly to the promo: https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/
There are however some "subway deserts" -- the upper-east and lower-east sides come to mind -- whose residences would greatly benefit from skipping two long walks a day.
So, you take a ride to work and then you teleport back to your origin?
It's much more comfortable than taking subways (which is also 100$ a month)
But there is the whole: subway = nuclear power = low carbon footprint vs uber = dead dinosaurs.
I recall visiting a coal-mining museum in some state that had a big coal industry, and it was amazing how optimistic and pro-coal the whole thing was. (Note that I said "amazing", not "surprising".)
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/geology/coal.html
It looks like their electricity is absolutely dominated by coal.
Even though not much in mined in state, we're close enough to WV and others that it seems like it would still be the obvious source here. I'm not sure why it's not, although I'm glad!
Indian Point is a liability to the people and the ecosystems of the lower Hudson Valley. New York State / Cuomo recently denied Entergy's certificate to continue using the Hudson River (1), which they are battling in court. Terrorism risks aside, this is not a state of the art nuclear plant. It's over 40 years old, the bolts are (literally) starting to break (2), and there was a recent radioactive leak (3) into the HUDSON RIVER. How can this not be worrying? It's been shown that NY can maintain energy levels at a cost of 20-30% higher without nuclear power (4), a number I hope will decrease as NY improves wind and solar (mind you, this report is from the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that vehemently supports fracking). This comes down to an increase of $76–$112 per residential customer. Personally, I'd be willing to pay twice that if it meant shutting down IP.
1. http://www.riverkeeper.org/news-events/news/stop-polluters/p... 2. http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/baffle-... 3. http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/indian-point/2016/02/0... 4. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/economic-impacts-cl...
I took one into the city once to try it out. Normally a 20 minute drive, we stopped and picked up 2 other fares. They both got dropped off before me (which is insane), and it ended up taking over an hour.
The worst part? The drive told me that if we dropped off one and another came up, he'd have to pick that up too before dropping me off.
I would rather pay the extra for UberX now (or whatever it is called) instead of UberPool
In general transit problems (and thus solutions) don't translate from other cities to New York or vice versa.
Or maybe I'm paranoid because of a bad experience trying to get to a job interview via cab my first time in NYC.
If a car is ahead of me on an avenue, even by half a street, it will send them around the block instead of suggesting I walk forward a bit.
Or, instead of asking me to cross an avenue, it will send the driver down a different avenue for multiple streets to loop back to my position.
It is obsessed with getting on to the expressways. It will happily crawl past relatively free-flowing avenues to squeeze into an expressway full of cars heading to Westchester.
Its estimates of ETA seem to assume that there is no traffic. They are hilariously bad.
Drivers, who have been burnt by customers getting mad at them for not going to an exact location or for "ripping them off", follow the map religiously. No matter what I text or call. They follow an app which was presumably written by people who've never set foot in this city.
Some drivers have both, mostly so they can see the traffic data from Google Maps. I like those drivers.
Edit: I'd actually be surprised if it was Google Maps at fault, given that their Maps team has a large contingent in the NYC office.
And by improved I mean the drivers went from genuinely lost, misdirected, and clueless to merely confused and unaware of their surroundings but traveling vaguely in the right direction.
I don't know how the route is determined in-app, but at least for Uber Pool in Manhattan, they are not using Google Maps as much anymore except for stuff like traffic information.
That, however was only my second worst Pool experience, not nearly as surreal as the driver who spoke nearly no English, and didn't actually understand the basic concept of Uber Pool. So I get in, then it prompts him to pick up another passenger, but he doesn't understand so he drives to the spot and expects me to get out. I try to explain that he just drove by the woman he was supposed to pick up, and after much confusion, she gets in the car. The driver thinks she's a friend of mine, and doesn't understand that we're now going to two different destinations sequentially. Then it prompts him to pick up someone else. It would have been more painful if it wasn't sort of mildly amusing.
Oh wait that might be tied for second with the time that I was headed down Canal leisurely when the app pinged indicating a new passenger, and prompting the driver to take an immediate right, which caught him off guard a little and he veered right into the Holland Tunnel approaches. Thankfully I was paying attention and immediately vocal enough to get him to stop and escape by moving a few traffic cones. Your average tourist would have been blissfully headed for New Jersey in that scenario.
Or, in other words, Uber needs to stop spending so much time fantasizing about valuations and robot cars and actually improve their product.
I have no idea why they're spending so much to theoretically develop a monopoly when ever user in this town at least is developing many reasons to bolt to a credible competitor on moment's notice.
My expectation is that self-driving cars will be promptly disintermediated.
"Google Rides", maybe, or "Amazon Prime for People", scatter-gathering over thousands of small companies owning 1 or 2 cars. Prices will fall to the marginal return.
Uber's investor fountain will run dry and they'll be stuck with the same economics as everyone else. There will be no brand loyalty once price-finding apps enter the fray. They'll still be a major competitor, but the fevered dreams won't pan out.
In any case wouldn't their self driving car implementation be improved by a better mapping and navigation algorithm in dense traffic?
The reason I know the answer is because there is no such thing as a self driving car.
But why would tiny companies win ? big companies still have somewhat better economics(volume discounts, vertically integrated maintenence, a variety of ways to raise capital, maybe a bit of branding(with regards to reliability, cleanliness...), etc).
Of course, to get those benefits the supply of self-driving cars has to outpace the large companies' ability to expand. The fact your dispatch software can scale to 100 cities in a day is irrelevant if Google, Amazon and Uber are buying all the self-driving cars as soon as they come off the production line.
And there will be people who bought a self-driving car et voila, someone pitches "AirBNB for self-driving cars!" and they decide to undercut Uber to make a few easy bucks.
There will be constant downward pressure on price and no structural way to build a moat against it.
They might be assuming that their customers don't want to have to walk around to make it more convenient for the driver. (And what if, in fact, you're not bipedal, but use a wheelchair and might not be able to cross any arbitrary street to get to your driver?)
I only care that it is self-evidently dumb. It wastes 5 minutes to achieve what can be done in 5 seconds.
If I'm in a wheelchair I can tap "no thanks" or set a setting or whatnot. If it's discriminatory (it might been seen as such), invert the setting so that's opt-out by default.
Edit: Incidentally, this is the reason Lyft Line is so terrible commuting in Manhattan. Pickup and dropoff locations are completely arbitrary, which slows everything down for everyone when compared to arranging pickups/dropoffs on easily reachable corners.
Instead, it kept him on the parallel street one block over and then had him loop over three blocks, one of which was a major street, all to save me from taking those five steps.
I asked the driver about it and he said he was planning to just take the short route, but a) most people aren't ready, and b) it's safer from a rating perspective to follow the given route.
Every other American city I've visited, cabs are impossible to hail and twice the price, but in NYC there are options.
I haven't used it during rush hour myself, but I know some people who have. The short answer is: it doesn't work during rush hour.
All of the issues you've highlighted are issues, but even without some exceptional traffic just picking up and dropping off multiple people makes the whole thing interminably slow.
Not to mention that Manhattan below 125th St is subway central - I can see the value for people in Brooklyn and Queens who live in subway deserts, but Manhattan? Even regular non-pool Uber is already slower than taking the train during rush hour.
I can appreciate that uberpool is a great thing for people in other cities, but the product market fit for Manhattan is exceptionally poor. I wonder why Uber is bothering with this market when there are many others (see: SF) where this "unlimited pass" would be actually useful.
Which, I guess, is a use case.
I don't know that I would take UberPool however.
This doesn't scale when everyone is trying to use the service and the street capacity for cars is fixed.
This is a terrible assumption. The deal being offered is Manhattan -> Manhattan, and only below 125th street. That's a population of ~1m people[0], which doesn't even factor in age demographics. There are 1.6m commuters into manhattan each day and only 225k cars registered in manhattan[1]. Only 30% of employees in manhattan live in manhattan[2]. Basically, the share of people using uberpool will almost exclusively come from pre-existing public transportation.
[0] https://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2015reginforce-web.pdf
[1] https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendi...
[2] http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/commuting/index...
Also you are using figures of user who live "outside" Manhattan which do not at all benefit from Uber POOL.
I've lived in NY for 30 years. I've lived below 125th street in manhattan for a decade of that. The wealth of statistics available to defend your point is at your fingertips. And... you went with "nuh-uh". That doesn't really convince me of much.
For some anecdata, I've only known 1 person to take a cab in both directions every day. The only reason was because they got a new job. 3 months later their lease was up and they moved to a more convenient spot. I know plenty of people who take cabs several times a week, but that's also not a demographic it will be taking from.
> Also you are using figures of user who live "outside" Manhattan which do not at all benefit from Uber POOL.
That was my point. I'm pointing out that the majority of the traffic comes from elsewhere or non-commuter traffic, meaning that the impact of this would be insignificant in the big picture.
Sure, there's still a limit to what the road can carry, but it would be much higher.
Maybe the biggest gains for this concept would be on the highway, but in a city with pedestrians and cyclists, where there certainly does need to be stop lights, and much, much more cautious automated drivers, I'm skeptical the effect would be large.
[1] http://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8a...
I regularly take UberPool in London, and I have company maybe 30-40% of the times. I don't know whether this is a general thing in London, or my experience is an outlier.
Is this one of those 'nobody uses this, it's too crowded' situations?
Business idea! Sign up for unlimited uber rides and resell them for cash. Just stand on a corner where people are waiting for cabs, charge them $5 in cash to go where they want, and then call an uber pool for them.
At least I assume the headline on HN represents the Forbes headline accurately, but I don't know, because they won't let me read their content.
I think that Forbes should be blacklisted on HN.
As one of the 80% of New Yorkers who live in the other 4 boroughs, this is useless to me.
http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/07/29/uber-dc-monthly-pass-...
Very reasonable price (I suspect, in fact, they lose money on it). Service is OK. I prefer to take a bus but not everyone has a convenient bus line.
It will be interesting to see how Uber shakes out in the long term. They can't keep this up forever.
Interesting to see Uber attempting to compete at a slightly-more than public transit price, but it still seems unsustainable when it comes to paying drivers a fair wage.
Of course, they do so to make money, and I don't begrudge them that. But it goes some way to highlight the fact that Uber is mostly certainly not a tide that raises all ships.
(as an entirely different aside, the roads in Manhattan are already terrible, and the subway is already quicker for a lot of journeys. Once you add in the fact that the Pool takes you far out of your way... eh.)
[1]: http://www.inc.com/damon-brown/in-the-ultimate-coup-uber-tak...
Unlimited uberPOOL in Manhattan/2 weeks ($100 fee)
Unlimited uberPOOL in Manhattan/4 weeks ($200 fee)