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Comment by showerst | Hacker News Reader

Showing my age here, heh:

1. Early Ruby on Rails -- Now that MVC/ORM packges are the norm, it's hard to describe how revolutionary the original '15 minute blog' video was. It really felt like a quantum leap for CRUD apps.

2. Uber/Lyft - It has literally remolded the city I live in, by making large areas that are transit-inconvenient more attractive to live in.

3. Linode -- Access to a cheap server that you could spin up/down in a minute with root access was really great, in an era where a server that wasn't just a junk shared host often required months of commitment and started at 100 bucks a month.

4. Google Maps -- Just head and shoulders above mapquest.

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+1 for Uber/Lyft. I remember being SO excited for them to come to my area, as they are so much better than taxis.

+1 for Ruby on Rails, I was developing on ASP.NET back then. It would have taken me at-least a week to develop 'the blog'. Rails had so many great ideas baked in (apart from MVC/ORM) viz. dev/production environments, migrations, default locations for css/js/images.

Re: Age

C with Classes was a very welcome advancement over C.

Watcom C/C++ compiler with DOS/4G extender was a pure fucking miracle. Need 1MB in one chunk? Just call the damn malloc().

Windows NT was a phenomenal leap forward for desktop OSes.

I lived half of my adult life in a major city before Uber/Lyft, and yet it is unimaginable what life was like before them. Did I really get ready for a night out and go out in the rain desperately waving for a cab?

> go out in the rain desperately waving for a cab

That's mind boggling. All my life I've been able to call central dispatch and order a taxi to a pick-up address of my choice.

I have no familiarity with #2 so that's interesting to me-- do you or other people actually use uber/lyft to get to and fro work? Isn't that like $15-20 each way every day, thousands of dollars a year?

It made a big difference for me with occasional trips, I took public transportation to work, but Uber/Lyft meant I could go visit my friends for $10 and 10 minutes instead of $2 and 45 minutes.

Note that a car also costs thousands of dollars a year once you factor in everything, Edmunds estimates the true cost of a corolla at $7k/year: https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2020/cost-to-own/

I have multiple experiences with Toyota’s driven 200k to 300k miles with just standard repairs. A Corolla costs $20k? $25k?

Let’s say $1k for new tires/brakes/oil changes/filters every 45k miles.

That’s $333 per year for maintenance, and the car lasts 13 to 20 years at 15k miles per year for 200k to 300k miles, so let’s say $2k per year on the high end, $1,200 per year on the low end.

Extremely high liability insurance is $50 a month or less.

Fuel is 10 cents per mile if you assume $3 per gallon and 30 miles per gallon, so $1,500 per year in fuel for 15,000 miles.

$1,500+$50*12+$2k+$333 = $5k per year on the high end.

Excluding insurance and fuel costs, you can push a reliable Toyota/Honda’s costs down to 5 cents per mile or less.

Your maintenance cost seems optimistic to me, and you're also omitting parking and the cost of parking tickets (surprise yay), but besides that, I would say that there's a fairly high cost in terms of time and stress when driving a car.

As someone who doesn't own a car, I don't have to worry about parking tickets, or de-snowing my car, car not starting in winter. I also don't have to worry about finding parking, or parking tickets, dealing with repairs and scammy repairmen, paperwork, my car getting stolen or damaged, etc.

I also don't have to worry about driving drunk. It's pretty freeing to go out with friends and just have a car drop you at the door, and another car pick you back up when you want to go, and never having to worry about parking, when your parking timer might run out, or drunk driving.

And all of this being said, as someone living in a big city, between public transit, bike rentals, walking and ridesharing, the total cost I pay is less than your stated 400/month.

Others have commented on other points, but I'll note "Extremely high liability insurance is $50 a month or less." – the cheapest liability only insurance I can find is $120/month, and I'm 32 & married with a clean driving record. $100–$150/month seems to be the norm, talking to my friends.

I should have written "liability only insurance", meaning it protects me from everything except paying for my own vehicle, which I opted not to get since I can afford to replace or repair my vehicle out of pocket. I have $250k/$500k liability insurance incl uninsured and underinsured for ~$40/month from Amica on the west coast right now. I had it for $45/month or so from Geico on the east coast. Both my wife and I have clean driving record for past 15+ years.

I'm also talking about liability only insurance – from some other comments, it seems to vary a lot depending on exactly you're located. I did find much cheaper insurance when I was living in Maryland.

Different sources I find give between $1100 and $1600 as the annual average total auto insurance in the US, with about half of that liability. But there is a lot of regional variation. (state averages seem to vary by a factor greater than 2; and rates vary by ZIP code, not just state, and the range between ZIP codes has to be much greater than that between stats averages.) But, nationally, $120/mo. ($1,440/yr) for liability-only is very high.

AAA does this kind of calculation in more detail and publishes its results regularly for the average cost per mile driven for an average car owner in the US. It's on the order of about a dollar per mile, depending on the kind of car. Average sedan is about half a dollar, so you are still out by a factor of 10. It's obviously going to be higher in certain places too, like in cities, where there are extra and higher costs to car ownership.

Add parking in a major city (the places Uber/Lyft are a viable alternative).

Yes, parking is the big expense that makes Uber/Lyft worth it.

Cars can be a great value, an expensive convenience, or a total burden depending on how these numbers actually work out and where you live and what you do. If you feel like a car is necessary, then the math probably makes sense. If you're at all hesitant, then the numbers would have to be very compelling to be at all compelling. Regardless, they only really work out if you actually have it for a very long time. If I wanted to purchase one for a year, and then resell, I'd lose a lot of money to taxes and depreciation, especially if it's new. Likewise, it's a huge liability that you just don't have if you don't have one.

Not including potential repair costs either

in sf, pre uber, taxis just didn't come. They were extremely unreliable -- call, and they'd come if they felt like it. maybe. and on their own schedule. Also, they were run by utter assholes who knew you had 3-4 companies to choose from, and they all sucked.

uber and lyft later turned it into a service that was highly reliable (came, or at least told you if they weren't coming). It seriously enabled the use of taxis as a reliable part of a transportation solution, or eg to cover the 1-2 days a week you needed a car without having to own a car.

This describes the taxi experience I've had in every city the world over. Not that I've been everywhere, but places in Europe, Asia, North/Central America, that's been my experience. Small towns are generally better because the taxi driver isn't anonymous.

They're fairly polite in Japan and don't try to rip you off, but many taxi drivers are 900 years old and have incomprehensible accents (Japanese ones, not foreign) so it can be a little hard to explain where to go.

I think they're fine in the UK too. But they absolutely aren't in California, Uber was a godsend and far less criminal even considering all the stuff they have done.

Really interesting! Didn't know. In the northeast taxis are generally reliable, although I've never used them with the regularity of someone who uses them to get to work.

Yeah, I think if your baseline is NY or somewhere like that were taxis weren't allowed to screw over the entire city for a couple decades, people don't understand why uber and lyft are loved in california. I'm not a fan of their labor practices, but the situation before was indefensible.

I do use Lyft to get to work most days (or did, in the Before Times). I just checked a few hopefully-representative months (June/July/August 2019) and it looks like I was spending about $400/month. Google tells me that the average TCO of a car is about $700/month, so this would seem like a net win. That average might not be representative of my needs though - it's likely being dragged up by people driving around giant SUVs and such, so take this comparison with a grain of salt.

Depends on where you live. Probably subsidized by employers, just like public transit is sometimes also subsidized by employers. Even when it's not, the mental health benefit you can get from not behind the wheel stuck in traffic is certainly worth thousands of dollars per year.

It's too expensive to take to work, but I live in a city (DC) with a downtown centered transit system, so certain 20 minute drives take an hour or more on transit. Add in a 5-10 minute walk on both sides if your home/destination aren't right on top of a metro, and some trips become super inconvenient.

If you know DC, I'm thinking, say, Van Ness to Eastern Market, H-street, or anywhere off-metro in SE over the river. Cabs here are infamously unreliable, and just don't serve many neighborhoods, to the point of illegally refusing to take you once you're already in the cab.

Before Uber, if you were someone who wanted to go out to eat or visit friends in other neighborhoods a few times a week, you had to live as close as possible to metro/bus hubs on the same lines as your social group. If you couldn't afford that, you got a bike and dealt with it being stolen 3x a year.

Now you can reasonably live a little further from transit and still take those trips. You still want to live somewhere that minimizes commute, but I'm no longer optimizing for commute AND social group AND restaurants AND groceries, which widens things quite a bit price wise.

I used to take UberPool (or the Lyft equivalent) to work every day for more than a year (around 2016). It was on average ~$3-4 one way, slightly more than but still comparable to public transit. The door-to-door time would be 15 minutes as opposed to 40. And I often got discounts which made it cheaper than public transit.

250 days is mon-fri, with three days off. 250 * 2 * $20 is $10,000. That sounds like a lot, but - it depends on what you gain/lose. If you can avoid buying a car (plus insurance and gas), and live a little further away, in a place that's a little bit cheaper - you can easily save more than $10,000 a year. Uber-enabled at the edge of the city for $1200 / month vs walkable in the middle of the city at $2000 / month, and you're pretty close to break even.

I still took the bus for fixed commutes (to and from work) - when I woke up on time. But uber is very convenient if you're in a city - the population density makes rides near instantaneous.

Taxis would be at least twice as expensive, for a service that couldn't rate their drivers and customers and sometimes you'd have to wait in a queue to have your call taken so you could get picked up.

Currently there's only one disadvantage to ride-sharing apps, you can't wave down a car if you see one. You have to open the app first to request a ride, and that car might have driven away by then.

I cannot see in the dark, and I live in a city that is not very walkable. Before Lyft, I just didn't go places at night. So, yeah.

Rails + Heroku circa 2011... I became a professional web developer and launched a startup mainly because of these technologies, so quick and easy.

Yes, with Uber and equivalents around the world, I have zero reason to own a car. My driver's license expired years ago and I can't be bothered to renew it.

+1 for Rails. Also Django (Which came out around the same time).

I owe a lot to DHH and Ruby on Rails. It landed me a job in Silicon Valley 11 years ago. It was a game changer for my life. Glad to see it listed here.

Yeah, Uber/Lyft is 10x better than cabs ever were.

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