With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down on Fake Profit Metrics
nakedcapitalism.com
nakedcapitalism.com
There are a lot of statements like this, which make one doubt any bit of objectivity in the reporting - it’s schadenfreude about Uber’s uber-problems with a blind eye to what consumers really value about Uber.
That said the criticism about the fundamentals seems about right. They have billions in cash though, so there’s some runway to dial things in yet.
The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.
And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).
> Several major cities in the US use these in their taxi licensing systems, including New York City, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.
I think you might have misinterpreted the sentence here: these are cited as examples, not at the only cities in the US to have such a system in place.
"Denver taxi medallions" seems to return nothing indicating they have one.
Los Angeles doesn't seem to have one either
Besides getting cheap taxis in college and as a young grad, its great to know its easier to call a taxi.
At their current rate of progress, they're gonna need a runway longer than the one at the end of Fast and the Furious 6.
But it seems increasingly obvious that won't happen now. I doubt we're transitioning into a 100% permanent work-from-home future, but I suspect demand for vehicular travel will remain permanently depressed and all the major office construction projects will look increasingly stupid. I remember a Uber building going up just a few blocks from me for years originally promised something like 70,000 jobs to Dallas and I don't think they're delivering any at this point.
I agree with both the positive and negative takes expressed here. This was great as a consumer. It was fun while it lasted. App-enabled rideshare proved that consumer products can be wonderful for consumers when they don't need to make money. On the other hand, the part they played in promoting the gig economy and eroding labor rights, all while depressing demand for green public transit projects in an era where we may only be a decade from common mass-death events thanks to heat waves, is not going to be looked upon kindly by history.
We as technologists don't want to be held accountable for the negative social impacts of our technology. We don't want the prevailing memory of us forever to be a blank thousand-yard stare talking about how we've become death, the destroyer of worlds. But we play our part.
Then again, so do these accountants, except they actually regularly get sent to prison.
Thanks for providing this! Good to know this is a reliable source!