Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon84598 | Hacker News Reader

Just to totally nitpick your last point, it's worth noting that the BART cost probably includes the entire infrastructure maintenance cost whereas Uber essentially has infrastructure subsidized (i.e., they don't need to pay for maintenance of the roads their cars drive on etc.) so a true comparison of efficiency would result in Uber "costing" more than that.

View on HN

Uber, Lyft, and taxis don't just use subsidized infrastructure, it puts additional strain on that infrastructure compared to even single-occupancy vehicles. Uber cars circle around already heavily-congested roadways looking for fares (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/nyregion/uber-car-congest... this creates congestion.

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.

The cost of the infrastructure is in capital and operating costs of the drivers. ie the capital in the cars and the taxes in the fuel (and income tax?).

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 ...

Unlike bart that infra is shared and taxes are paid by all users . If uber and its drivers are paying lesser than they should for their usage the govt which needs to fix that, however it cannot be said uber is not paying for the infra they use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com