If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares)
This is because these are publicly funded organizations that are starved of funds for political reasons.
Public transit works well where it's funded well. It's a political problem, not a technology problem.
But that covers 100 percent of their expenses. If Uber had to shell out to fix the streets that they use, I bet it wouldn't be so cheap.
Streets are public infrastructure and are paid for by taxes, which Uber and all other companies that do business using roads presumably pay, just like everyone else. So, unless you have a specific reason to believe otherwise, it is fair to assume that yes, Uber is paying for the streets that they use.
If streets are not being adequately paid for, then that's a failure of the government that's responsible for them, not the businesses that are using them (streets are there to be used).
Uber doesn't pay a cent in gas taxes (they're not employees, they're partners, right?), and since they've never made money before, they don't pay a cent in taxes either.
It's a bit obvious you have a chip on your shoulder about Uber and ride share companies in general.
PS. I have an expensive piece of paper in economics and statistics, but I appreciate you telling me to be careful. Gotta have somebody looking out for me, i suppose.
There's a reason advanced cities in Europe and Asia invest heavily in mass transit without the expectation of a commercial return, it's simply more space efficient.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/government-...
...and of course, this being Singapore, the companies in question (SMRT Corp and SBS Transit) are themselves largely owned by various government entities (Temasek etc).
Comfortdelgro is not largely owned by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, and I personally like its lines a bit better than the smrt lines.
It also manage the Copenhagen's subway
It makes profits
So these costs are passed along in the cost of an uber ride.
You did point at something I missed though. Technically every ride is being subsidized by investors (because uber operates at a loss afaik). To whatever extent they're losing money on every ride is a sort of disadvantage to uber ...
And of course, anecdotally we've all driven behind an Uber car that suddenly pulls over to the side of a traffic lane to let its fare out.
I think a better comparison than total cost is how much money they are losing. The difference between what I'm paying and what I feel like I'm getting with uber feels like... a lot, and that lines up with everything I've read of their financial situation.
If you are willing to lose substantial money on a per-ride basis, sure, you are going to have a pretty nice transit product.
(Personally, I'd be pretty okay with the government losing some of my tax money on public transit projects... though I think if the government is gonna do it, I want them to lose the money up front on expensive, durable, high-capacity infrastructure, then come closer to breaking even on a marginal ride basis)
hence why we have taxi services, why all cities across the world have taxi and similar services. transit cannot go everywhere nor can it quickly adapt to changes in public needs. buses are the best bet for adapting but services need both rolling stock, drivers, and usage cases, to move whereas taxi and ride sharing services react on need.
plus in the current meta where "soon" there will be self driving cars and buses all which are EV it will completely transform public transit. I just hope to be there will it does.
Yeah, that is part of why I support systems that lean towards higher up front and lower ongoing costs.
>plus in the current meta where "soon" there will be self driving cars and buses all which are EV it will completely transform public transit. I just hope to be there will it does.
Self-driving won't help with congestion problems. unshared on-demand vehicles (and it doesn't really matter here if the on-demand vehicle is driven by a human gig economy worker or a computer) help with parking, but if anything, they make congestion worse, as they've gotta drive to pick me up in addition to driving to my destination. (of course, shared on-demand vehicles can help with congestion, at least when they are shared.)
The only "game changer" here is that potentially a self-driving uber could be cheaper (either by directly lowering operating costs, or if we get the hang of things, by lowering the number of injuries caused by mistakes.)
The problem is that if you charge less, I'm going to use the non-shared on-demand service more often; I only use the shared service to save a few bucks.
My point here is that we can probably predict what self driving cars will get us by looking at what heavily subsidized ride sharing services get us. self-driving cars might even get us less; if I could get uber-like point to point without having to park service out of a personally-owned car at a price point that isn't much more than a regular personally-owned car? I'd probably share rides a whole lot less than I do now.
Scaling a mobile app is trivial compared to running a transit company.
BART owns/maintains infrastructure (including an underwater tunnel) and vehicles, provides benefits (health, retirement, etc) to their drivers, and operates a multi-jurisdictional police force.
Uber meanwhile hired a couple of tech bros (paid largely in stock instead of actual currency), pays their drivers near minimum wage with no benefits (as they're not actually employees), and disregards as many laws as possible (so there's little-to-no cost to enter a new market). It's not surprising they've been able to scale. What's surprising is how expensive their service still is.
What's your point with this?
This may be related
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
Drivers aren't going to get more than a few percentage points increase without increasing the price to the end user.
But they should. Perhaps the pay scale is too top heavy. Uber's operational expenses should be trivial (hell, they straight up stole the most expensive bits -- the self-driving car IP). Instead they squeeze the drivers (passing along rate cuts) and riders (surge pricing during shootings, etc) pretty severely.
They can't easily scale these efforts back because the value of the service plummets for all parties if they lose their economy of scale.
L5 self-driving cars will be a game-changer for a while, assuming Uber gets exclusivity from Waymo (which now owns a stake in Uber).
I'm sure there's plenty of analysis of this out there, so I should read some articles.
Which is hilarious to me. Uber is spending a ton of money, and very little of it trickles down to the people that make Uber possible (the drivers).
(Not saying I agree or disagree.)
You seem to present that as a contradiction, but the obvious conclusion is that the GP believes Uber keeps an unfair share of the ride fees.
Based on my vague internet research, it appears Uber keeps 20-25% plus various fees, like how credit card settlement charges work, which can add up to 40%+ for some rides.
And the losses are so large that it likely means both raising prices to riders and reducing the net payout to drivers at the same time.
Any hot-take that centers around "It's just an app that a couple of guys wrote in an afternoon with some underpaid drivers doing all the work" is someone arguing in bad faith (and I suspect the person is well aware of it). There is a ton that goes into scaling a marketplace in general - let alone an on-demand one with thousands of corner cases, real time demand forecasting, real time fare calculations, real time capacity planning, customer support operations, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_McClendon
He's a great guy by the way, in addition to being super smart.
Your others points are not well thought through at all - I urge you to spend some time really thinking deeply about them if this is a topic you care about.
Every company drives around on roads they don't pay for. Roads are a benefit to society - part of the reason we value them is because they enable commerce. Do you complain that GrubHub doesn't use their own roads when they deliver your food? Do you complain that Pizza Hut doesn't own it's own cars when their delivery drivers bring you pizza? Does United help pay for the airports that enable them to exist?
Look, the fact of the matter is that consumers LOVE ride sharing services. They're fast, they're cheap, they're clean, they're safe, and the customer support is incredible. Ride sharing today is simply 10x better than any alternative in most cities. If you're going to argue for cabs being superior, then you either do not live in America or you've never taken a cab before. Not only that, but many drivers love ride-sharing too. Whole classes of people that couldn't find work before can now easily find work with Uber or Lyft (including the deaf, mute, retired, students etc). They can work when they want to, as much as they want to (or as little) and set their own schedule. This is simply not possible with any other low-wage work.
Having said all of this, I don't mean to imply that we should absolve Uber of responsibility for their business practices or their culture problems. We should absolutely push them, and the industry to be better. But this isn't just about Uber. This is about ride-sharing in general, which completely changed what transportation in cities means. It is absolutely innovative in every sense of the word.
Yeah, but when I get into a car it's not Uber Maps on the phone, it's Google Maps. So I'm not very concerned about a guy who worked at Uber for less than two years.
>He's a great guy by the way, in addition to being super smart.
I'm sure he is, which is why he got the hell out of there.
>Do you complain that GrubHub doesn't use their own roads when they deliver your food?
Yes, I would like for them to pay their fair share in road taxes.
>Do you complain that Pizza Hut doesn't own it's own cars when their delivery drivers bring you pizza?
...yes, but now we're being redundant.
>Does United help pay for the airports that enable them to exist?
Now this is just ignorant. Yes, large airports charge millions in landing fees. Train companies pay absolutely egregious property tax rates. It's just cars and trucks that get away with paying 18.4 cents per gallon. Oh, and me who has to pay taxes to fix the roads here while congestion and air pollution here in Chicago have absolutely skyrocketed.
>which completely changed what transportation in cities means.
Uber's success is basically because they were able to push all of the legacy costs of public transit onto taxpayers and claiming that they're more efficient. It's VC-funded bus routes but using a phone. DISRUPTION.
Navigation might be Google Maps or Waze, but everything else is Uber. My point is that Uber is 100% serious about mapping and they are investing a ton of resources into it. They're likely one of the few players who are doing this at scale, internationally.
> I'm sure he is, which is why he got the hell out of there.
Now you're projecting. He left Uber so that he can run for office in his hometown of Kansas City. I think he has a lot to contribute outside of technology. I got to know him because I went to a talk he gave once. And no I don't work for any of these companies.
> Taxes & Roads
Ultimately, everyone pays for roads. Not just drivers. And we pay for them because they're for the benefit of everyone. They enable services like GrubHub/Uber/UPS/Dominoes as well as commerce more generally - which in turn makes our lives better. It's a complex system, and I suspect that the tax revenue the government gets for roads is higher after the introduction of Uber/Lyft. With that being said, if you feel a tax is necessary then I respect that opinion. Even with a tax like you're suggesting, it won't change the demand curve meaningfully or affect Uber's profitability. It's likely serve to further entrench them if anything at this point.
With respect to your point about Airports, they're not even close to being paid for by the airlines in any meaningfully fair way. First of all, the government subsidizes it up front with billions of dollars, expensive zoning, planning resources etc. That's a huge capital risk that society takes on for the long-term benefit of everyone (you can't opt-out if you don't fly on planes). Yes, airlines pay usage taxes and some other fees that help pay for the airport but it stands to reason that the government won't recoup that kind of money in even a single decade. The government props up the airlines industry in large part because we demand it and it makes our lives better.
> Uber's success is basically because they were able to push all of the legacy costs of public transit onto taxpayers and claiming that they're more efficient. It's VC-funded bus routes but using a phone. DISRUPTION.
Absolutely wrong. I use Uber/Lyft every day. I don't have a car. Uber/Lyft are nothing like a bus route - not even close. To even suggest that they're similar to a traditional bus service route is to reveal that you haven't used the services in any meaningful way.
They are absolutely 100% disruptive (even more so if you're a woman and safety is important to you). I'm telling you, ride sharing has changed how I get around in cities, period. There's a reason drivers drive for these services. Ride sharing is creating a whole class of jobs that have a very important role to play in society. Stay-at-home moms that use Uber/Lyft to supplement their income while being able to have flexible work. Students that are just getting started in their career and are using Uber/Lyft to sustain themselves in the interim. Retired veterans who don't have any other way to earn a steady income. Deaf people who can't find jobs otherwise. Immigrants who are trying to build up a support base for themselves. The list goes on. Talk to the drivers, this kind of work is a big boon to a lot of people.
Now, should these be the only career options for people? Obviously not. I think that's where most people's concerns are valid. We can't create a society where this is the only type of work available. But can this type of work exist alongside other meaningful options? Of course!
So you're comparing scaling out a mapping back end to building and running massive transit infrastructure?
> With respect to your point about Airports, they're not even close to being paid for by the airlines in any meaningfully fair way.
Take a look at JFK. Airlines absolutely do pay significant amounts into airports.
> Absolutely wrong. I use Uber/Lyft every day. I don't have a car. Uber/Lyft are nothing like a bus route - not even close. To even suggest that they're similar to a traditional bus service route is to reveal that you haven't used the services in any meaningful way.
FWIW, BART doesn't run buses.
> Ride sharing is creating a whole class of jobs that have a very important role to play in society.
Minimum wage jobs with no benefits (thus externalizing the cost of providing the jobs)? That's not much of a win in my book.
> Now, should these be the only career options for people? Obviously not. I think that's where most people's concerns are valid. We can't create a society where this is the only type of work available. But can this type of work exist alongside other meaningful options? Of course!
And absolutely none of that means Uber is doing something more challenging than running a transit agency like BART or NYMTA. Uber's externalized most of their costs, disregarded most laws, and is scaling a very specific part of their software stack. It's not surprising to see growth under those circumstances.
Ah, I thought things like "God mode", Boobr, and doxxing critics felt creepy and unsafe. But that's just me, and I'm not a woman.
> There's a reason drivers drive for these services.
Sure. We like to call those predatory financing and exaggerated claims about compensation. Your buzzword laden defense of Uber misses the point though: scaling Uber is significantly easier than scaling a transit agency like an airline or BART.
Have you talked to actual women? Ask them if they feel safer in an Uber, in a Taxi or in BART. Seriously go try this experiment. Assuming you're in the Bay Area, ask 10 of your closest female friends.
Also remember that Uber is just one ride sharing company.
> Sure. We like to call those predatory financing and exaggerated claims about compensation. Your buzzword laden defense of Uber misses the point though: scaling Uber is significantly easier than scaling a transit agency like an airline or BART.
People are not stupid. If it was a raw deal for them then they'll jump ship (there are huge communities of drivers that constantly crunch numbers, share spreadsheets, etc). You can drop in and drop out at any time. That's one of the benefits of doing Uber. Work at McDonald's? Now you have to fight to get enough work hours for pay, you can be overworked, you can be shortchanged, you can have grueling schedules, you can't take vacations easily, the actual work is stressful....have you sincerely ever worked a job like that?
> Your buzzword laden defense of Uber misses the point though: scaling Uber is significantly easier than scaling a transit agency like an airline or BART.
I think you forget that the OP that prompted my response said "I genuinely don't know what their expenses are other than giving away shit for free", which is what I was responding to.
If you genuinely agree with the OP and you've made up your mind, then I don't think there's anything I can say to convince either of you that scaling Uber isn't a matter of giving away shit for free and building an app in a weekend.
You're welcome to believe what you want.
I am in the Bay Area, and the biggest proponent of taxis over Uber that I know is female. The only woman I know that uses Uber does so because her boyfriend is a code monkey at Uber and so they'd get a few rides for free each month.
Of my friends that use "ride sharing" apps, they almost all use Lyft exclusively because they find Uber so reprehensible. I also see plenty of vehicles signed for Lyft alone or Lyft + Uber, but almost never see Uber only vehicles.
As a woman how do you feel about Uber fighting background checks tooth and nail?
Or how about this?
http://time.com/5023287/uber-threatened-journalist-sarah-lac...
Or this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/technology/uber-india-rap...
Or this?
http://www.newsweek.com/uber-and-lyft-drivers-accused-more-1...
And, really, Kalanick using Uber for sex (a.k.a. Boober) doesn't bother you in the slightest? Good for you then.
> People are not stupid. If it was a raw deal for them then they'll jump ship
https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14766964/video-uber-travis-...
So this guy is an idiot then? How exactly do you get out of an auto loan that you're now underwater on because Uber decided to turn the screws on you?
> I think you forget that the OP that prompted my response
I am the author of the comment you replied to. I'm happy to be convinced but marketing doublespeak like "engineering excellence" isn't convincing in any manner. Uber develops an app and spends a ton on marketing. Beyond that Uber externalizes almost all of its costs. That's trivial to scale compared to actually scaling a transit company that has to invest in infrastructure.
I think you are overstating it somewhat. Ride Sharing is just a doublespeak name for owner-driver minicabs, which have been around for ages.
But when all these services end up doubling in price, as they're going to inevitably have to do (and the autonomous vehicle cavalry isn't going to charge in to save the day), it will be interesting to see what happens. My own experiences suggest there are a lot of people who don't want to get sweaty walking 3 blocks or to mingle with the masses on mass transit.
Nope! In the grand scheme of things, building an app, and some backend software while maintaining bunch of servers doesn't compare to building:
[1]
- 46 BART stations: 17 surface, 14 elevated and 15 subway stations.
- 669 revenue vehicles
- 112 miles of railway track
- a police force with 206 legally sworn-in law enforcement officers and 90 other staff members
- a wireless network that supplies cell phone service to riders underground
BART isn't even that good - I live in Sydney and we are always complaining about our double-decker dead-silent very clean commuter and city rail. Buzzfeed [2] even thinks our train system is from the future!
I love software - I want to make a career out of it, but we can't forget "real" engineering fields and the effort that goes into them.
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/04/us/san-francisco-bay-area...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/8rulvn/mfw_american...
The comparison between the two can't be made without adding in more factors.
I've wondered about that for some time.
How about the new cars that Uber is encouraging their drivers to buy with tantalizing financing?
Creating a market for new cars only ensures that new cars will continue to be produced in high volume.
I think that Uber from an investment perspective is looking good but from a social perspective it's looking bad.
operates a joke of a police force.
Let's see what the long term outcome is for Uber before we give them too many high fives...