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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't think car sharing will go extinct either, but be careful with your analyses. Uber and Lyft are precariously balanced on a system of (substantial) low-income demand, high-income demand, and subsidy. If prices rise, low-income demand plummets, ending subsidies. High-income pricing could rise significantly higher than you might expect, at which point you no longer have "ride sharing" so much as you have private car services with app hailing instead of phone hailing, and, like NYC in the 1990s, so expensive that most people will only use it to get to the airport.

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There's going to be a point where taking a scooter becomes more attractive for low income people (it's already half the price of a lyft), and then there will be a point where owning your own $400 scooter or $100 bike will make more sense rather than relying on the rental (which is normalizing the idea of riding an electric scooter/bike through a city). I wonder if these companies have dug their own grave.

Owning a bike isn't really that good for commuting. I use Citibike to go to work and pretty much anywhere else they have Citibike docks. People always ask why I don't just buy a bike. I had a bike. It got stolen. If a Citibike gets stolen, that's not my problem. Moreover, I don't have to try to take it on the train, or carry it into a building, or find a place to park it outside where it won't get stolen or vandalized. I've seen people in my neighborhood with giant bolt cutters going after people's bikes. Then there's always flat tires, bent rims, brake pads, etc. maintenance cost. Why bother with that. Cars are really the same way. What's the point of owning a car? So you can drive out to Walmart somewhere and buy ten bags of stuff every two weeks? Just order it and have it delivered to your door instead.

I had a car, it got stolen, so cars are crap for commuting.

Get a cheap bike that is nice to ride, 2 locks, and learn how to lock it up properly.

But those shared bikes are miserable to ride. The frames are heavy and not stiff enough, no suspension, no pedal clips, etc. They're fine to go a few blocks but for anything longer it's an unpleasant experience.

If you live/work in a larger building you will probably have dedicated indoor bike parking, which solves the problem of keeping your bike safe at least at those two endpoints.

I agree, and having bikes stolen in the past know of the pain with this. I now have insurance for my bikes.

It's not hard to make your bike less attractive to steal. Big fat D lock. Shitty looking seat. Locking nuts for your wheels. Parking in a rack amongst more attractive bikes. Taking your bike into your apartment. Not giving a fuck about what your coworkers think about your bike parked in the loading dock.

If you are commuting, I wouldn't pay more than $100 for your bike anyway. Unless you are biking 100 miles a ride, you'd be hard pressed to notice a huge difference between a scratched up steel frame trek you found on craiglist and tuned up vs. some carbon fiber precision instrument imported from Italy. My maintenance costs are taking it to the bike shop once a year for a tune up - $60 and they give me new pads. I haven't had a flat since I bought gatorskins, and even though I suck at changing them, an inner tube is cheap and takes less than 30 mins to change. Those dollar or two rides on bike share really add up if you start relying on it heavily.

I get that it sucks hauling in a bike on a packed subway, but in the u.s. that's only really a concern for commuters in nyc. Even L.A. is a bike utopia once you get comfortable with traffic grazing your elbow and cutting you off all the time; it requires thick skin, and planning your routes a little differently, but you will always be faster than a car in traffic due to filtering.

To your point, I want to know what share of Uber/Lyft customers are converts from public transportation versus taxis (maybe these categories aren’t very distinct). There are so many times when I’ve missed the bus ($2.50) and opted for a $5 shared ride that will deliver me in 10 minutes (same as bus) instead of waiting 15-30 minutes on the next bus. It leads me to wonder how many people almost never took taxis before, but now accept a 2x markup to reclaim their time when public transportation doesn’t fit their schedule constraints.

I never really used public transit or cabs, but I make pretty heavy use of ridesharing. It's insanely convenient when I want to have a few drinks out somewhere, and I also almost exclusively use it to get to / from concerts and sporting events.

It seems pretty reasonable to assume that equilibrium looks like taxis and private cars with app hailing. Personally, it wouldn't affect my usage much; I just use these services when I'm traveling because they're better experiences for the most part than taking a cab.

But, anecdotally, a fair number of urbanites regularly use Uber/Lyft instead of public transit or just because they don't want to drive. Presumably, significantly increasing prices would lose casual users who are using these services because they're a bit more convenient.

I think it's important to remember that a big part of the value prop of these services is that when you open the app to hail a car, you're pretty much assured of getting that car within 15 minutes or so. Change the current equilibrium much and that benefit might go away. I could hail a cab by phone before Uber, but, in Chicago, where we have pretty reasonable cab service (certainly light years better than SFBA's), it would often take multiple attempts and involve a 30+ minute wait. You could reliably get a private car in NYC, but, as I recall from all the times I worked in NYC, you weren't getting that car in 15 minutes.

Fair point. Around where I live, they seem pretty scarce the few times I've looked at the app out of curiosity. I don't know how long a typical pickup would take. But there's certainly some density level of drivers/passengers below which the market doesn't work. In fact, any percentage decrease presumably decreases service everywhere to some degree and shrinks the areas where Uber/Lyft can effectively operate at all.

I do use private cars but pretty much to get back and forth to the airport.

Yes, this is absolutely key for me. Effectively never needing to worry about being able to get a ride to and from wherever I need at any time removes a huge amount of stress and overhead from my life. The minute that stops being reliable, I have to start planning my travel and movements around transportation methods that ARE reliable (e.g. rental cars, or driving my own car). Once I've rented a car or driven my own car, the chances that I will use an Uber or Lyft for any part of that trip drop to near zero.

You’re overestimating how good the cab systems are outside of Chicago and the coasts. There is a lot of value in just having a reliable hailing system with a review system and tracking of where your pickup is, even if there is a 30 min delay.

The state of the art of cabs in smaller cities is getting hung up on, ghosted, or massively delayed when given a different ETA if you don’t book the cab hours in advance.

I think I'm doing the opposite, and saying that on-demand hailing of cabs without subsidy was and, when subsidies collapse, likely will be a lot worse than people think they'll be.

I for one have already switched from Uber to Jump (which Uber now owns anyway) for casual use where I’m not in a hurry. A bicycle is more pleasant to use, I don’t have to wait for pickup, it’s way cheaper, and I get a little exercise. The electric motor helps me not get sweaty.

During rush-ish hour it’s also faster than a car due to lane splitting and such.

The math goes like this: $15 for a car that takes 15min + 5min of waiting, or $3 for a bike that takes 10min + some pedaling? Is easy decision

This is downtown SF so we’re talking lots of traffic and short distances.

I think it's important to point out though the number of cities where biking is impractical (and can even be unsafe). In many parts of Europe, this is probably a good model. In San Francisco, this could work. In Seattle, where now live, I've seen an uptick in rented bikes (though plenty of regular bikers too) -- but it really depends on what type of commute you're making. In New York, it depends on area -- but if you're really concerned about time/money you'll take the subway. But in Atlanta or Los Angeles, this isn't going to be a solution for most people that use Uber now.

I think your point downthread about how this could impact the truly "on-demand" nature of the services is apt. As you said, the value prop is you get a guaranteed car in about 15 minutes (and often it is much less), whereas the old systems required calling, being routed to a nearby car service and having someone dispatched or a on-the-road driver routed to you.

In heavily urban areas, the average user might not see much of a difference (with few exceptions for weather, getting a cab in Manhattan pre and post Uber was basically the same and I've frequently canceled an Uber when I was able to hail a cab faster), but if you expand that just a smudge, say Brooklyn, which doesn't have yellow cabs unless they happen to be on the way back from a drop-off -- (and don't get me started on the uselessness of the green cabs) and as such was one of Uber's first really strong markets (I signed up for Uber the month it launched in NYC, back when it was livery only -- and used it almost exclusively in Brooklyn). The subsidized price (even though it has only decreased for drivers) has allowed cars to circle neighborhoods in Brooklyn -- but if that goes away and prices increase, drivers aren't necessarily going to sit or drive around each of those neighborhoods and will instead migrate to the most dense parts of town.

This is even worse for cities with historically little or no cab ecosystems (Atlanta -- and Atlanta is at an even worse advantage because of the terrible stage of its public transit, which only exists in the city proper), where Uber/Lyft effectively have become the cab system. I certainly don't think that market will leave those cities, but it costs rise (which seems likely), that will impact demand and will also in turn, impact how long it takes someone to get a ride.

(That said, I do not expect us to return to a pre-Uber in Atlanta world where it would cost $100 to get a cab from the airport to Dunwoody)

I do think the combination of increased demand (or at least awareness/ease of access to call a car) and logistical improvements (to me, this has always been Uber's greatest strength) will prevent things from turning into NYC in the 90s in most larger cities. But it is an open question in smaller cities that didn't have that infrastructure to begin with or are much more spread out.

Car sharing? There is no sharing involved, all transactions are done with money. They're taxi dispatch services that live in a grey area of employee/contractor.

UberPool involves sharing a car with one or more customers.

Taxis managed to exist before. Why do you assume Uber and Lyft can’t still displace that market like they do now but at the same fares as taxis?

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