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Comment by ohadron | Hacker News Reader

This comparison is very flawed as it fails to recognise a major difference: the two companies work in very different markets.

Lyft is only active in the US while Uber is spread in many different countries. Unit economics look totally different in NYC, Cairo, and Rio.

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Agree and the analysis being done by what I believe is a 'numbers guy'(from his CV) indicates that he will try to draw conclusions from numbers and that's a big if that assumes the numbers are equal or even accurate in how or who at each company is doing the measuring.[1] In fact that the numbers are different in the ways they are seems to be on it's face an indication that they can't be used to compare.

[1] A very small example might be 0 to 60 acceleration in cars. If done by the manufacturing what is the weight of the 'jockey'(driver)? We never know that or I have never seen it (maybe a magazine when testing uses the same driver but I am not talking about that). Yet the weight of the driver does matter. I know that when I drive my high powered but small 'sports car' the car definitely accelerates slower when my wife is in the passenger seat. So an extra X pounds would make a difference in the comparison stats.

It's weird because he calls it out in the comparison as a potential explanation for the gap in average booking per ride:

"This gap is likely also due to Uber’s heavier international presence (where they now generate 52% of their bookings). It would be interesting to see this data on a country-by-country basis (or, more importantly, a market-by-market one as well)."

yet still proceeds to draw this questionable conclusion: "Lyft has made impressive progress at increasing the value of rides on its platform and increasing the share of transactions it gets."

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, the baseline numbers will be very different, but the economics of ride share are pretty much the same anywhere: there's an existing market price for taxis, which is more or less inflated everywhere due to regulation and inefficiency, and Uber/Lyft/whoever can provide a similar or better service at a profit... except that there's competition fueled by a bonfire of VC money pushing the margin deep into the red.

Think about factors such as: cost of vehicle ownership, cost of fuel, minimum wage, social policies, unemployment, public transport infrastructure, population density, specific ride sharing regulation, traffic congestion.

All of these directly effect the unit economics of ride sharing.

You're missing my point. All those factors are real, but they set the unit economics of taxi service, which in turn sets the baseline for Uber/Lyft pricing.

So if the market price for taxi service in a city is X, already accounting for all those factors, Uber/Lyft should be able to deliver the same or better service for (say) 0.9X, again accounting for the factors but adding in efficiency gains from bypassing parasitical taxi medallion owners, not needing dedicated vehicles, having much easier ordering, etc. There will be some variance in how big that factor is (eg. NYC's $1 million medallions gave Uber a really juicy margin to exploit), but overall, if a city can sustain taxi service, it should be able to sustain Uber/Lyft too.

overall, if a city can sustain taxi service, it should be able to sustain Uber/Lyft too

So if a city wants to kill Uber/Lyft, all they need to do is to attack the rideshare margins directly. (Not that they really should. Uber/Lyft is probably a civic good.)

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