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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

While we don't have perfect information for either Lyft, or Uber, a while ago it was reported that Uber at least was profitable within the San Francisco market, along with some other major urban areas.

A large part of their losses are down to expansion. The markets they've become established in are profitable.

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This sounds like a fairly strong buy argument, so it must be reflected somewhere in the IPO documentation. Could anyone who read deeply into it share a link to more details?

how many cities have the density of san francisco and new york?

Good question. Of the top 100 urban areas in the world by population, sorted by density, the San Francisco bay area is number 88 and New York City is number 90.

In addition, Los Angeles is number 87. The only other entry in North America is Toronto-Hamilton (#83).

The top 90 cities (i.e. up to and including New York City) have a combined population of 965 million.

Also note that smallest in the top 100 is 4.3 million, so this probably misses a lot of smaller but more dense cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_populat...

City density is a really tough metric. Most of NYC's land area is Staten Island which is essentially suburban. The transit situation is much different for NYC as a whole than it is for Manhattan.

You run into the same sorts of things with most cities. Urban density is at least somewhat a function of fairly arbitrary political boundaries.

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