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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

What I'm interested in out of this information (but not interested enough to look it up myself): These five cities account for 1/4 of their business, but how does the population of these five cities compare to all of the cities they do business in? Is this just a straight-line distribution?

Basically, do these five cities account for 1/4 of the total population of the cities they do business in?

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According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_populat... Tokyo and Seoul (not on the top five Uber list but have Uber presence) are both larger than any city on Uber's top 5 list. Sao Paulo (on Ubers list) is just barely larger than Mexico City (not on the list). Los Angeles (18th largest urban area by population) and London (35th largest urban area by population) are significantly smaller, and the Bay Area is all the way down at 61st, right behind Dallas-Fort Worth (not on Uber's list).

So no, those five cities do not make up a disproportionate amount of the total urban population that Uber covers, just a disproportionate amount of the riders.

I don't know the answer to your question, but some factors that might skew the distribution could be how annoying and expensive it is to keep a car or park in each city, prevalence of recreational activity that encourages or discourages a car or truck, and the like.

These 5 cities are not directly related to Uber. Read again.

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