Lyft and Uber Won’t Be Happy Until They’re Your One-Stop Transit Guide
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Customer wishes to go from A to B. Ride-sharing app will plan the trip and charge for each leg, because they own them all.
Personally, I don't think it's ever going to work that way, at least not on a single locked-in platform, and I think this is all hot air, fed by hot quantitative-easing cash.
I don't think uber will ever make it's own metro lines, but I can really see how it could be made to work well together.
maybe if they became competitive rapid transit operators as well, the world could become a better place
Germany's national broadcaster Deutsche Welle produced an excellent documentary looking at the exact same scenario you described. [0]
It looked into the possibility of making short-haul transportation (focusing primarily on Hyperloop) virtually free with just one caveat: a precondition that users share all their private data that advertisers might find valuable -- free ride in exchange for ad-targetable data -- scary and intriguing at the same time.
Targeting is about maximizing profits for the advertisers, it's not about maximizing value to you. If they can use targeting to take value from you in order to give it to themselves, they will. For instance, you could be bombarded with targeted ads for product A when you'd really be happier with product B. You can contrive scenarios where ad targeting is a win-win, but those scenarios are misleading because they go against the underlying incentives.
I wouldn't mind a neutral, personalized product recommendation engine, but that's not what ad targeting is.
The point isn't if the companies behave responsibly or not. Google for example has behaved responsibly with user data, exemplary in fact and I'm sure they'll continue to do so. Yet companies like Google are and will continue to be a danger for everything you know and love.
It's not how you use the data that's problematic, although companies like Facebook should suffer for their blunders, but rather that the data exists in the first place.
Are you part of a minority? Do you have some weird sexual preference or an affair? Are you a woman or gay? Are your religious views mainstream? Have you ever traveled to an Arab country or to Israel? All of these, in the right context, can put your life at risk. It's all an issue of place and timing.
You can also imagine more benign usage, like insurance companies raising their rates or banks calculating your credit score based on where you travel or your movie preferences. Heck, that's already happening.
Yes, many companies can behave responsibly. They can do so today, but what happens tomorrow, or how about in 10 years from now? What happens when those companies are being bought by bigger, less responsible ones. It happened before and it will keep happening ;-)
All the information collected in service of figuring out what to advertise to you will ultimately be used for all sorts of things many of which could be to your disadvantage.
In the end you wont even know why you were denied that car loan, that job, that place to live, why you weren't deemed credible by the cops or why you were sentenced to the maximum instead of offered probation. The oracle just told the car company, the employer, the landlord, the cops, and the prosecutor what to do at different junctures based decisions that not even the people running the computer can fully explain.
The process was very controversial at the time, and still is, and its success is hotly debated – with the claimed benefits including a reduced cost to the taxpayer, lower fares, improved customer service, and more investment. Despite opposition from the Labour Party, who gained power in 1997 under Tony Blair, the process has never been reversed wholesale by any later government, and the system remains largely unaltered. A significant change came in 2001 with the collapse of Railtrack, which saw its assets passed to the state-owned Network Rail (NR), with track maintenance also brought in-house under NR in 2004. The regulatory structures have also subsequently changed.
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/07/britains-rai...
Citylab
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/09/why-britains-...
Science Direct
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S015599821...
https://www.ft.com/content/d82848ca-f7ba-11e7-88f7-5465a6ce1...
>There is a growing consensus among both executives and industry experts as well as the public that Britain’s unique attempt to create competition on Britain’s rail network has not delivered.
>While it has led to more services, and encouraged more users to pay higher prices, it has not unleashed the productivity improvement necessary both to upgrade the network and stabilise the network’s finances.
>Over the same period, for instance, London’s state-owned metro network, Transport for London, has grown just as quickly and delivered much more state-of-the-art investment.
Which New York system? The New York MTA is the result of consolidating multiple, unprofitable systems (e.g. LIRR, New Haven, Staten Island). Most were snatched out of the jaws of bankruptcy by the government as commuter service just isn't profitable much of the time. Let's not forget that the private rapid transit (BMT and IRT) didn't work out so well either (bankruptcy and poorly thought out contracts) and eventually was acquired by New York city.
That is not to say you can't have private systems that work (Tokyo, Hong Kong). New York just isn't a particularly good example.
The real problem is putting operations and verification in the same hat - public or private. Private transit systems work well when government regulators have the power to set and enforce a strict SLA. They fail without oversight. Same with public systems. When the operational and regulatory agency are the same, it becomes hard to penalize failures.
Tokyo Metro is owned by... the national and local government.
From Wikipedia: [1]
The Japan Railways Group, more commonly known as JR Group (JRグループ Jeiāru Gurūpu), consists of seven for-profit companies that took over most of the assets and operations of the government-owned Japanese National Railways on April 1, 1987. Most of the liability of the JNR was assumed by the JNR Settlement Corporation.
Granted, that not every experience is abyssimal, but in my experience most train riding experiences in the UK are pretty terrible.
Filthy trains with partially massive undercapacity at sky high prices. Delays, cancelled trains and you - the passenger - is just left out to dry.
Infrastructure is also problematic, like an underabundance of ticket machines, let alone ticket selling staff at stations, etc.
It's also interesting to note that Japan rail companies can keep prices reasonable by making major parts of their income via real estate.
Citymapper is starting to run it's own transport in London. It has/had a smart bus and now operates a smaller version
The convergence is fascinating.
Case-in-point: in SF, Ford GoBike (by Motivate, soon to be part of Lyft) costs $15/month. A monthly bus (MUNI) pass runs at $73, clearly more expensive even if you use pre-tax money to pay it.
Walk 5 min to BART Station --> Ride to Montgomery Station --> Catch a timed transfer via Uber Pool to work
with all of the details figured out at the time of booking, I'd consider replacing the last leg of my journey with Uber rather than waiting for a MUNI bus or train like I currently do. The draw for me would be in the convenience of solving the variables of my commute for me.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/nyregion/uber-disabili...
https://www.transit.dot.gov/regulations-and-guidance/civil-r...
The relevant requirements are that the following must be equivalent for everyone regardless of disability.
(2) Response time (if the system is demand responsive);
(f) Reservations capability (if the system is demand responsive); (g) Any constraints on capacity or service availability; (h) Restrictions priorities based on trip purpose (if the system is demand responsive).
At any rate, the ADA is a popular topic to sue over (see California drive by ADA lawsuits, for example). You can do everything right but still expect a few lawsuits at least. A lawsuit itself doesn’t prove anything until judgement has happened.
In my experience, only about 5% of the rides I've had end up being on vehicles large enough to stow a motorized chair, so equivalent response time could mean a major shift in the type of vehicles used.
IMO, ADA is a great example of overbearing government regulation. It doesn't leave much room for "reasonable" accommodations and dictates solutions. (Case in point, my condo building can't use a portion of trash rooms as recycle storage, which gives large environmental benefits, because of wheelchair accessibility rules.. but why does this matter on floors where wheelchair bound residents don't live?)
> why does this matter on floors where wheelchair bound residents don't live?
Because residents aren't the only people who could be using that trash room. Because a resident could be injured while living there.
I think it's weird how the default experience is apparently to be exclusionary.
My building was built before recycles and computer became a huge thing. Trash room only has a trash shoot. To dispose compost, I need to take an elevator 30 floors down to dispose compost, which takes a lot of time.
If the building could allocate a third of trash rooms to store recycles, rotate them if a resident became disabled, we'd be in a situation where able bodied people are better off and disabled people are no worse off. Instead ADA is too restrictive, so we're in a suboptimal spot
Regarding your condo building: separate is never equal. Requiring people with disabilities to only live on certain floors is discriminatory. Disability is perhaps the only minority that anyone can enter into at any time, through no action of their own. You can't say that you don't need to worry about accessibility of floors where there are no wheelchair users, because you can't predict who could need one in the future, when or why they will need one.
Of course, it's obvious that's working as intended - providing disability services is often treated by businesses as nothing but a cost center. Never-mind the fact that the elderly would be the perfect early users for comparable services + autonomous vehicles.
I think the only place in the US where the experience was remotely good was New York, but even then wait times were closer to 20 minutes instead of 2 minutes as they would be for able-bodied people.
The only other thing I can say about this is that Uber/Lyft drivers are required to store a foldable wheelchair upon request. And unlike taxi drivers, they can't just drive by you when they see your chair. In that respect, the experience is better. But there are too many situations when a foldable wheelchair is not possible/desirable, and a true WAV is required.
"Uber located a WAV in 27 of 49 different attempts (a 55% “success” rate). Lyft Access Mode located a WAV for only 3 of 65 attempts (a 5% “success” rate) rendering the app non-functional for wheelchair users."
http://www.nylpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Left-Behind-...
Never used Uber but I have on occasion hailed a taxi or taken a local ride share alternative in a pinch.
Now to be fair, they claim to feed 68 million people each day right now, so they are on their way.
But there is a reason that in a free market, they are unlikely to ever create the pseudo-monopoly they desire.
And with public transport, Uber and Lyft have even more of a hurdle to clamber over.
Firstly, in many parts of the World the public transport system is government-owned in some capacity. You can buy Citibike, sure, but it's not actually possible to buy the London equivalent: it's operated by the Mayor through the public sector entity Transport for London (TfL).
And this is in in the UK where there is extensive privatisation in the bus and train markets, so you'd think there would be opportunity there. Maybe now: the free market experiment on these quasi-monopolies has been widely considered at least a partial failure and the appetite for nationalisation of the train network has never been higher.
Developing cycle networks is reasonable. I despise the "leave anywhere" bikes, because they are already cluttering up London in reaction to the government owned scheme. However, I can see how this is super attractive for some classes of customer, and the cost base is low enough it wouldn't surprise me to see the mayor follow suit and mimicking their platforms.
But a wholly integrated stack? I'm sceptical.
A system where I could book a point-to-point journey from say my home to my girlfriend's mothers (180 miles away) that incorporated car from my home to the train station, the train itself and then a car at the other end would appeal, but only if it was significantly price competitive with me doing that myself right now, which ideally requires advance booking, a model that Uber is specifically uninterested in.
It's also not obvious Uber/Lyft needs to own or operate most of that stack, and owning it may actually make it less attractive.
Given an Uber or Lyft app that did this, and a third-party app that used APIs to integrate and give me wider options and more competitive pricing, I'm not likely to go with Uber or Lyft.
Uber's & Lyft's only option then is to try and eliminate in its entirety any sense of competition. This rarely ends well.
So you then end up with a race to the bottom on price, and that's unlikely to lead to profitable businesses, unless they try and borrow budget airline business models, which again, models itself on advance booking price/yield management, a model Uber and Lyft seem to be trying to avoid.
I don't quite see the big picture here. CityMapper might be the people to watch in this space...
The minute they either pay drivers less, charge riders more, or reduce supply, it’s an immediate opportunity for another entrant. Diversifying into e-bikes won’t change that. It’s just an inherent property of the entire concept of a regional taxi service.
Self-driving cars won’t change anything either, as they will just be yet another commodity device that all those would-be entrants can lease and use all the same. The extreme sensitivity to price competition would remain.
The real reason for these auxiliary transportation acquisitions by Lyft or Uber and all the fluff about being “the Amazon of transportation” is simple: they don’t have anything close to a profitable business model. It’s wholly reliant on keeping ride supply artificially high in outlying areas and prices artificially low, through VC subsidy.
In the meantime, they need splashy new stories to tell to keep the hype train going. First it was going to be Uber Eats and other gig economy extensions. Not profitable either? OK, let’s do something with bikes or city travel guides.
But regardless, nobody would question if a taxi operation is profitable in a small region with correctly calibrated ride supply in outlying areas.
Even if a single company banded together a few such profitable regions around the world, it wouldn’t be surprising.
However, it would be surprising if you claimed that company had a valuation of tens of billions of dollars while operating on annual losses of ~7 billion dollars.
That would make no sense at all.