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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

> I live in Burbank, where Ubers were never more than 5 minutes away. Now, a 30 minute wait is common – and the fare is comparable to the licensed taxi company, which is literally one app away from achieving feature parity with Uber.

I'm not an Uber apologist in the slightest but why is it that apps for the alternatives still suck? In a similar vein a delivery co-op app launched in my area semi-recently and I tried their app and it's absolute garbage. I've done minor app development and while I'm not great at it, I don't think you need millions (or billions in Uber's case) of dollars to create something on-par. Honestly you could pair me with a good designer and for the price of 1 year of pay I have doubt it could be built.

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>why is it that apps for the alternatives still suck

Agreed, here in SF Uber and Lyft have both become considerably slower, more expensive, and less reliable over the last weeks/months.

A friend suggested the YoTaxi SF app, which is an app for ordering local licensed taxis. You can pick your start and endpoint and order a car just like Uber. Great! Except you can't tip the driver via the app, so the reviews are mostly negative where reviewers explain they arrived at their destination only to be shaken down for cash or venmo by the driver, potentially for the full cost of the trip because "that app doesn't work, I won't get paid."

I would love to stop using rideshare. I urgently want to, because several times recently I've nearly been late because of issues - for example on a recent trip after I waited 10 minutes, my driver flew past my exit on the highway and canceled my ride before reporting me for "health and safety violations" so they would not be penalized for the missed trip. But my alternatives are either to utilize multiple intermodal transfers across the bay area public transit system, typically more than doubling the length of the trip, or to deal with the taxi system. I'll use public transit when I can but for example, the trip I took yesterday was 22 minutes by car and 1 hour 5 minutes by public transit - assuming my bus transferred on time. I just don't have 45 +/- 15 extra minutes each way every time.

Honestly, I'm pretty anti-Uber for a variety of reasons, but having experienced the cab services in SF a bunch of times, I completely understand why so many people there like it.

The real problem in SF is that it is just a fairly small city, so a lot of the big city things you'd expect from NYC/LA/Chicago just aren't there.

Additionally, the public transportation infrastructure designed to deal with the topography of the city has become nothing more than a tourist attraction, rather than a way to traverse the city.

I've taken cabs all over the world and I have to say one of the most terrifying experiences I've had was in SF in the 90s. We were absolutely flying up and down those hills with just some measly brake pads to save us (and the pedestrians).

Its so much better than taxis in even smaller cities. In Louisville to get a taxi took at least an hour uber made it minutes. I agree uber was investor subsidized but it was a good thing for a lot of people in smaller cities.

As someone who did a fair amount of traveling Uber/Lyft/Grab (or whatever local app) is by far the best thing that has happened to tourism/travel in the last century and I'm not over exaggerating. The ability to go anywhere you point on the map at any time of the day without the fear of being ripped off _or worse_ changed everything.

Maybe that's where Uber should focus? Become an Airbnb of transportation.

Agreed. Last time I used Uber at SFO there were no cars within 30 minutes except Uber black. The Uber black driver gave me his card and said to call him directly for less than Uber charges.

I suspect the over-capitalization (Ponzi cash) of mainstream tech giants results in a brain-drain of the best talent from more sustainable/ethical alternatives (not just in tech, but also design, product management, etc).

If you're referring to the Driver's Cooperative in New York City, they'll take you up on that offer for $72k: https://drivers.coop/jobs

That salary is joke for what they are looking for and it becomes and even sicker joke when they want the person to be in NY/SF.

> Bachelor’s degree or technical bootcamp preferred

to be fair they're not shooting for Principal FAANG engineers either

I mean I’m not at a FAANG or even close to one but I make /well/ over that and live in a LCoL area as well.

$72K/yr to build an app/website/platform from the ground up is absurd IMHO.

Enjoy the ludicrously high salaries while they last.

Where does this sentiment come from? It feels very bitter and I'm not really clear as to why.

As Ben Thompson of Stratechery explains, Uber is a two-sided market- it has sufficient liquidity of both riders & drivers. Any new app would have to sign up tens of thousands of drivers to be even remotely competitive, and that would cost tens of millions of dollars in promos, marketing, etc. The first time someone tries UberClone and the driver is 30 minutes away, they'll close the app and never use it again. No VC is interested in financing all that for a very low margin business. Uber and Lyft have all the drivers and have all the riders- being unprofitable is actually a moat

You already have taxi companies with drivers. Yellowcab actually makes their own app.

> Yellowcab actually makes their own app.

I would never use this since i have the uber app first.

I don't know if that's actually a moat. It's fairly common in my experience to have Uber and Lyft downloaded, for example, to compare rates, particularly when surge pricing comes into play.

> being unprofitable is actually a moat

That only works as a business if the moat is a loss-leader for some other product or service.

It's a good question. Not too long into the rideshare explosion I tried a couple of apps that were more or less interfaces for yellow cab services. Definitely a weaker experience: longer wait time and not as much information (real or perceived) about what was actually happening in the dispatch-pickup process. And it cost more too.

I could accept the higher cost as just part of fairly pricing out ride service, but the weaker experience was a hard pill to swallow.

Ya, reading this article makes me think this person has never actually used a taxi (at least not one outside of Manhattan, which has probably the best cab system in the world). This guy certainly hasn’t tried catching a cab at midnight in San Francisco where they’ll reject you if you’re not going the right direction, insist their credit card machine is broken, and otherwise be insanely difficult to use. Every comment in this thread has started “I don’t like Uber, but…” and it’s absolutely true, Uber has problems but the service and the app have been a game changer. And his taking exception with the drunk driving study is a bit infuriating, he insinuated the data is compromised, but doesn’t offer any evidence. I can only speak anecdotally, but within my social circle Uber has absolutely decreased the likelihood of someone driving drunk, and if it even contributed to 1% less driving fatalities, that’s and enormous achievement.

Sounds like a business opportunity...

Because they don’t add value. Uber has a thousand engineers. Joe’s Taxi has zero.

The people who are focused on the app crap use Uber and avoid the cab that is 10 feet away.

The restaurant crap is even more ridiculous. It literally takes the customer 5x more time to order a pizza on an app. I’ll call and say “Hi, I’m Spooky23, two cheese pizza and garlic knots” and I’m done.

> The restaurant crap is even more ridiculous. It literally takes the customer 5x more time to order a pizza on an app. I’ll call and say “Hi, I’m Spooky23, two cheese pizza and garlic knots” and I’m done.

This depends heavily on the restaurant.

(The app potentially wins, too, if have a recurring order saved to your favorites. My family tends to have the same fairly complex sushi order and I can re-order it in a click.)

Agreed. There are def good use cases. The sushi one is a good one. Starbucks is another great example of where it just works.

But I would say many places, esp fast/casual service places are just trying to shave some labor and make it difficult to not buy combo meals, etc.

> This depends heavily on the restaurant.

And on the type of pizza. Cheese pizza is easy enough. :)

Regardless, as an international student with an accent, I’m very sure I’ll never order a pizza over the phone.

> with an accent

Apps can be so much more accessible for people

You can buy white-label 'Uber' apps from software companies all around the world now.

Just google 'white label Uber', there are plenty of results.

The payments can be outsourced too, to Google or Apple pay, including in-app. Since they represent a physical service there's also no app store commission.

>The people who are focused on the app crap use Uber and avoid the cab that is 10 feet away.

Clearly not because of other features like ease of payment, or reviews

>The restaurant crap is even more ridiculous. It literally takes the customer 5x more time to order a pizza on an app.

Clearly not because of discoverability (both in terms of restaurant and the menu), or being able to confirm that the order was correctly placed.

IDK at least with dominoes I hit 1 button.

It remembers the last few orders I made (so I can repeat one), and I don’t need to spell out my delivery address, area code, leave instructions of how to use the apartment buzzer, etc (because it remembers the previously written instructions).

But ordering delivery didn’t need a shakeup like taxis did. If your average taxi driver (at least in my Montreal), wasn’t a scumbag trying to hit every red light or closed road on the way to run up the meter, and feigning that their card scanner (debit/credit/Interac ) was broken at the end to save 50 cents of transaction fee and avoid paying their taxes on the income then they wouldn’t have taken the city by storm.

Even when they were actively banned by the province they were most of the rides I’d see people taking. Of course the government came around to Uber once they realized that drivers wouldn’t be pushing cash to be paid under the table anymore.

Today I would rather take an Uber, even at a 50% premium because the experience is better.

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