Lyft and Uber suspending California rides at midnight | Hacker News Reader

Lyft and Uber suspending California rides at midnight

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34 pointssmohnot21 comments

I wonder how thankful Lyft/Uber drivers are now that California lawmakers helped them to increase their earnings and benefits.

This is going to have knock on effects on other small businesses.

For example, now that it is out of warranty I get my car serviced at an independent garage and use Lyft when I drop it off and pick it up.

Public transport would turn the 30 minutes that takes into into 2.5 hours.

The alternative is to use the dealership, who charge more and I don’t want to support, but provide a courtesy car so I don’t waste much of a day on the process.

There must be thousands of routine interactions like this where people bake the availability of ride share into their decision making.

Not rideshare per se, but cheap, quality taxis. We'll see if competitors flourish in the absence of giant incumbents.

You can't be a "taxi" without buying a medallion. They used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars since they were scarce enough. Again, bad government policy creating unnecessary hurdles.

Did it flourish before Uber/Lyft existed? It's not like human history started in 2010...

I’d expect the opposite. Taxis are just as regulated as they always were, and new rideshare services have the same higher barrier to entry as Lyft and Uber.

How can a cheap Taxi service arise?

easy to see a startup with an app and employee drivers eating Lyft and Uber's lunch there.

It's shocking how shortsighted and out of touch with reality the CA government is.

Isnt the alternative for most people to get a ride from a friend, family member, or coworker? I get not everyone has someone they can rely on for that, but most people do.

Another discussion on the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24224882

Does anyone know if Uber/Lyft is actually profitable in California currently due to Covid? That is to say, is there a minimum volume threshold, such that below which ride-share is not profitable?

This is a giant transfer of wealth, LA, SF, SJ will all see their housing prices tank, as people who can't afford cars are expected to move to suburbs where they can park a car.

In SJ pretty much everyone who can afford it has a car now. Maybe not literally everyone but vast majority. It's very hard to live in SJ without a car. Public transportation exists but is next to useless unless you go between select very small number of points, and SJ is pretty big, especially the residential part. So I don't foresee much effect on SJ prices-wise - SJ is already suburbs anyway (there's downtown but it's tiny).

SF OTOH has been pretty navigable with public transport plus Uber/Lyft. I try not to go there lately, for obvious reasons, but when I did I could get around there without a car without too much trouble. Having no flexible option (and taxis sucked before Uber rose and I'm sure will continue to suck after) would make it much worse, but I expect SF prices to drop anyway - people are finally realizing they don't have to pay 3.5K/month for a studio just to work remotely anyway. Golden Gate park is nice but not that nice.

Uber and Lyft didn't exist before, and folks managed fine without owning cars.

Also wait and see what they do post election. The outcome of Prop 22 will decide what their true response is, until then this is just grandstanding to force voters to vote yes.

Because before people owned cars. SF especially can no longer support the level of per-capita car ownership it had pre-uber/lyft.

LA already mandates 1.5 parking spots per unit of housing or something along those lines.

And anyone that can afford a car probably has one, and anyone who can afford to move to the suburbs and live with the hellish commutes already has.

I don't think this changes anything about transit in LA.

Since the old, crufty, established incumbents aren’t agile enough to meet the new requirements, seems like there’s a hole in the market for a disrupter.

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