Uber's New CEO
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
The reason why I don't use taxis in Australia is partly because the experience is far better with Uber and the cost is cheaper, but also because Uber is the most reliable. Without drivers and such reliability, I can't use Uber even if I want to.
Does demand drive supply? Yes. But does supply drive demand? Yes too. With a two sided marketplace, you can't just focus on one.
My demand for travel is somewhat elastic, not completely set before I know the cost of travel.
In the Bay Area and New York City, for me, this is untrue. Distances feel smaller when you can cross them with the press of a button. That, in turn, makes peripatetic schedules realistic.
Case in point: I took a Lyft Line from Berkeley to Mountain View yesterday. If that wasn't an option, I would have (a) taken the train or (b) not gone that far.
In the past I've helped tourists by directing them to these locations which aren't noted anywhere. So it can be really confusing plus inconvenient.
That's one of the reasons I like Uber and the like: I don't have to know what to do.
If getting from A to B is time consuming and expensive then I might not bother unless it's really important. By lowering the costs of getting from A to B I might do it more often than I would otherwise.
Actually, I absolutely do. I've gone on many trips that I simply wouldn't have gone on pre-Uber. On a regular basis I'll decide to go somewhere (ex. a party in Brooklyn) which I wouldn't have bothered with if it meant a slow and unreliable taxi (or an even slower subway ride).
However, if you go from Manhattan to Queens you'll find they sometimes suddenly "forget" how to get there despite 90% of them living in Queens because they won't reliably get a return fare. Same in the rest of the boroughs.
Also they often have "broken" credit card readers that magically get repaired after fighting with them.
The cars are not always in the best condition. The other day I rode in a cab that had no suspension it seemed. Every bump in the road would send you flying. It was a nauseating experience, let me tell you.
I still take taxis from time to time, especially when there's no real price difference or when I don't want to wait. A late night flight I might take an Uber to the airport and a taxi back if the wait time is too long.
With Uber and Lyft I generally get clean cars with suspensions and don't have to worry about paying them (Already handled!), refusing service, etc.
Although you get bad service from time to time in all transportation providers, Uber and Lyft tend to be much more consistent.
The only time I felt unsafe inside the car was when my driver drove with his elbows, with the Uber app in one hand and his wife on a different phone in the other hand. He just honked and cut across 3 lanes of traffic on El Camino on Mountain View. He told me later that he used to drive a taxi for years. I chalked it down as a cool story to tell people.later.
OP was talking about a destination you would go to in an Uber, but not a taxi.
> wouldn't have gone on pre-Uber ... I wouldn't have bothered with if it meant a slow and unreliable taxi
They would go to that destination in an Uber, but wouldn't bother in a taxi.
Personally, I just don't have many situations where I would make a trip but my available alternatives are just a bit too costly/inconvenient--while Uber wouldn't be. But I understand they exist.
Often, when I'm in public, I'll choose an auto-rickshaw instead of an Uber because the rickshaw is right there. I don't have to wait for it, don't have to give it directions to find me.
The service is worse - I have to haggle about prices, endure bumpy rides and dangerous driving - but the easy availability makes me choose them.
Uber, in these cases, is a breath of fresh air. Upfront pricing, reasonably friendly drivers, decent customer service in case of issues etc. is very welcome, even if it involves waiting for 2-5 mins. I'd rather wait for a cab than have insults hurled at me for not wanting to get ripped off. :/
Incredibly opinionated. It's a pretty disputed claim that more single passenger traffic improves a city.
Not only that, but Pool encourages better transport resource utilization.
Driving, or taking car trips has a high price elasticity. Lowering the cost of a car trip even a litte increases demand a lot. So Uber's subsidy of trips should increase demand a lot, which it does. Additionally the convenience of the app, and not having to find parking, or maintain a car also increase demand. If all of that outweighs the individuals cost of sitting in increased traffic, demand will continue to rise.
Because the costs are socialized, they affect people who don't drive or take car trips, i.e. bus trips take longer, transportation spending gets soaked up by road repairs due to extra maintenance costs incurred by increased traffic, etc.
It's exactly for people who take very few car trips, like me, since they use mostly public transport, that Uber is actually more attractive than car ownership, since it avoids the fixed costs.
As for road repair costs, that's usually paid off from gas taxes, which Uber pays linearly according to their used miles, so it's not "socialized" in any meaningful way.
Furthermore, Ubers like cabs drive around waiting for fares so they create traffic while not providing rides. Similarly with recent cases of Uber driver brigading to drive up surge prices, they also create surges of traffic.
Gas taxes only pay for up to 40% of road maintenance and that's in states with the highest gas taxes. The rest of the cost is made up from general funds and transportation budgets. There was a high profile case recently in Maryland where the governor redirected light rail funds to highway maintenance and construction. In fact gas taxes have never fully covered road construction and maintenance costs anywhere in the US, ever.
No, because, like I said at the beginning, if I didn't have Uber I'd get my own car, and so my marginal cost per car trip would be much lower, and so I'd use it more than the couple of quarterly rides I take nowadays.
Furthermore, Ubers like cabs drive around waiting for fares so they create traffic while not providing rides.
On the other hand, if I need to go some place after work, I'd need to take my car to work during the morning commute, creating extra traffic. Also, there's driving around looking for parking. Finally, there's UberPOOL.
Gas taxes only pay for up to 40% of road maintenance and that's in states with the highest gas taxes.
Fair enough. Sounds like states need to raise their gas taxes. But at least here Uber also pays 23% VAT. Don't they pay sales tax over there?
What I'm getting at is there are costs other than just gas, car payments, maintenance when taking car trips. Things like needing to be alert to drive, parking, and navigating that Uber lowers and creates demand for trips where people otherwise wouldn't drive/take a car and may have foregone altogether.
In general major cities are trying to reduce automobile traffic and are giving more space to pedestrians and cyclists.
In the future as cities consider mobility pricing to control congestion and further limit car use, it's quite likely that ride hailing services like Uber will have caps placed on them much like how taxis do now.
While congestion is not optimal I wonder if parking drops if space can be reclaimed to make other improvements.
http://untappedcities.com/2015/02/05/today-in-nyc-history-th...
>The worse things look, the easier it is for it to get better
And i think Uber has been dealing with their own version of an incident pit lately.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-28/tender-of...
Some of them are VCs. If you are raising funding, don't tell them anything confidential.
When he was 9, he fled the Iranian Revolution, and became a refugee in the U.S.
I have more respect for Uber today.
There are millions of people like this in the U.S. This kind of thing is nothing special, unless you are living in a hole somewhere.
For instance, his brother Kaveh Khosrowshahi is a managing director at Allen & Co., the investment bank best known for its ultra exclusive Sun Valley conference. A few cousins are Google execs. His cousin Amir Khosrowshahi is at Intel after Intel bought the AI company he co-founded, Nervana, last year for $400 million. His twin cousins Ali and Hadi Partovi sold their startup to MySpace back in 2009 for $20 million and went on to become power angels backing Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, and Facebook and cofounding Code.org.
Uber's success has been about evolving a core product in an emerging category whereas Expedia is all about maximizing revenue from the existing mess of travel product categories.
If uber starts to retain customers with miles or try to diversify revenue sources, I think it'd be a bad sign. But, who knows.
Also he's 48. Travis Kalanick is 41. Would you have preferred they got someone in their 20s or 30s? Why?