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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

Comparing rideshare to public transit, this tells me there's clearly a need for easier, faster transit even with higher pricing.

Solution? Try to ruin it.

Instead, maybe we should embrace it and provide incentives for ridesharing vs driving alone? E.g. give uber a lane on the highway for 2+ passengers and tax only single rider transits. Give a few lyft ride coupons with every monthly bus pass. Provide benefits to using busses (which are a terrible experience) by occasional free lyft rides ...

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Can we stop with the "rideshare" junk yet? Uber and Lyft are computer-dispatched taxi services. The overwhelming majority of their trips involve the driver going to someplace they have no need of going, with either zero or one other person in the car.

I have no idea what you are really trying to say. How do you define need? All my Lyft trips have either been to/from an auto mechanic or the airport. Is that "need"? In principle, I could have gotten friends to drive me, given enough incentive. Or I could have parked at the airport, or ridden the bus, or gone to a mechanic that made it convenient to wait for work to be done.

Gp is trying to say that nobody is really "sharing a ride" that they would be driving anyway, as in hitchhiking with compensation. It's virtually all professional drivers going where the client goes exclusively because the client goes there. Hence the term "ridesharing" is misleading. A very successful piece of clever viral marketing, or maybe a fossil of an early strategy.

It's a semantic point, but a valid one. Words matter.

We don’t call them taxis in California because in most California cities they’re different because of:

* no access to red lanes

* only app-based payment

* unique pickup/dropoff locations at airports and other such places

If we called them computer-dispatched taxi we’d confuse that with Flywheel-style stuff which can use red lanes, take cash, and use taxi locations. We could call them Taxi Type 2 but that’s super confusing.

“TNCs” is just an awful name so we use something that sounds intuitive “ridesharing”, since we know that pooling is possible on these services. It’s just a name. No one has proposed an alternative simple enough.

In Transport for London terminology they are called "Private Hire" companies. Separately regulated, you can't flag them down on the street, and no access to taxi lanes.

In the UK we've had this semantic split for decades and it's simply "private hire" vs "taxi".

Well, yeah, that was obvious. But I was focusing on a different semantic point, which apparently you have no interest in discussing.

My impression is that by "the driver going to someplace they have no need of going", they meant "drivers going where the client goes exclusively because the client goes there", contrasting with the hitchhiking-like scenario implied by the word "ridesharing". Possibly, you interpreted that as questioning the client's real need of going?

> The overwhelming majority of their trips involve the driver going to someplace they have no need of going, with either zero or one other person in the car.

Can you cite a source? At least where I am (Seattle) Uber Pool and Express are quite popular - and I rarely see hard numbers.

You say "even with higher pricing", but are also saying that higher pricing (due to taxes) would ruin the services?

Uber and Lyft fares are unsustainably low right now, and at their current prices, they depress public transit interest and ridership. But what happens in 5 years when these ride sharing companies need to turn a profit? Self driving cars is potentially a solution, I suppose, but will it be ready at that scale by then?

Not only that, but in the meantime, they may be causing more environmental harm than good: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/how-uber-and-...

I think the popularity of Uber and Lyft is a direct result of the lack of adequate city transit solutions. If big city transit was robust and at least at the level of NYC or more people would likely opt for it and the big cities could plan their real estate around it better.

Not really. In transit poor cities people own cars and drive their own cars. In transit rich cities you can feasibly live without a car and use rideshare to fill in the occasional gap. Transit and rideshare are complementary. Only rich people and businesses use rideshare as chauffeur rather than necessary transportation.

Not necessarily. When on vacation I used rideshare everywhere I went in Texas as I didnt rent a car. When I lived in Texas I had my own car because ride share isnt an option I could use regularly. In NYC I never needed ride share at all. I used it once in a blue moon. NYC grew in population but number of transit riders has remained steady or declined since 2015. Even the NYT did an article on 8/2018 linking Uber to the decline in transit usage.

Funnily enough, I am one of those people-my partner and I have one car between us (in LA), and I rely pretty heavily on Uber pool (or the Lyft equivalent) to get around on a day to day basis.

However, it feels unsustainable. I can't imagine the fares remaining this low, and because of people like me, transit ridership is declining. I don't think these rideshare companies can sustain such low prices indefinitely, and my guess is it's delaying real improvements to transit infrastructure.

That's just my hunch though.

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