It's mind boggling how most people think it's a simple matching FIFO matching algorithm, instead of how mind bogglingly complex making ride-sharing happen at scale is
I would know.
I would know.
The app says there are rides within 10 minutes, shows me a cheap rate and I hit yes. In 10 minutes no matches have been found. In 10 more minutes it finds someone 20 minutes away. 15 minutes later the driver cancels and I’m back to square one.
Now the thing is the cost of the ride is a pittance and I would gladly pay double the cost just to get to my destination in a reasonable timeframe. Instead I just call a cab now, request a pickup at a certain hour and they send a driver.
FWIW I’m 20 minutes drive from downtown Montreal, so this is not like I’m out in the sticks or anything, and couple years ago it was much easier to find a ride. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s even another ride sharing company taking the drivers, it’s just a lot of drivers pivoted to doing Uber eats instead.
Uber's app was still hands down the best to use, and I had so many issues with the others, like credit card registration being flakky, or the app straight crashing on specific screens. It looked a lot like they paid a dev company a lump sum to make the app and would proceed to pay for some more fixes every six months instead of keeping an ongoing maintenance contract.
I kinda wish that now that the legal frameworks and service viability has been explored, Uber dies completely, and the gap is filled with local startups working closely with the local market to maintain ride services from there.
This is a weird forum. An argument that a company is big and successful so must have some process for making decisions that works well, so criticisms of those decisions by internet randos are necessarily badly informed and egotistically presumptuous because they can't have the understanding of the people directly involved yadda yadda yadda i.e. a standard status quo argument, generalizable to dismiss any criticism independently of the specific facts of any situation or the institution being defended - when you're making that argument, you could be making it to someone very highly placed or otherwise knowledgeable about the institution that you're defending.
But does that really justify 30 thousand employees?
Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain.
Why can my ISP string up fiber optic all over my city and put routers and switches or whatever in boxes that can survive all kinds of inclement weather and end up charging me $100 a month for gigabit internet? Isn't that a much harder business than Uber?
The term rent-seeking gets thrown around a lot more lately, mostly from the web3 crowd. Most times its not used right.
It's only rent seeking if the middleman isn't providing any value. Otherwise they're just getting paid for providing a service that people value....
Think about what you're saying. You don't "care how complex it is". Well that complexity determines whether or not it is rent seeking. You say ideally a transaction between two individuals. The major problem being solved here is finding the two best matched individuals based on their current location and destination over time. You need some system to aid this discovery no matter what.
Here's the definition of rent-seeking:
Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline
Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace[0]
>reduced wealth creation
Uber and Lyft are pushing drivers into poverty[1]
> lost government revenue
How Uber dodges paying tax in Canada[2]
I don't care about the complexity of the the black box algorithm that Uber implements because I know what purpose it serves. The whole purpose of Uber is to make people entirely dependent on it by driving out alternatives like local cab companies and public transit through low prices subsidizes by Saudi money.
I think it's great that Uber has forced cab companies to modernize and make their services more convenient but we both know what will happen if Uber gets a stranglehold on this market. You'll see jacked up prices for the captive market and declining service.
This is how it always goes.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152512/uber-lyft-climat...
[1] https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/03/uber-and-lyft-are-pushing...
[2] https://troymedia.com/technology/how-uber-dodges-paying-taxe...
Their skill lies entirely in breaking laws in a way that allows them to make more money than the fines they pay.
In addition to their legal entrepreneurism their next skill lies in hiding externalities. They push costs to everyone else (drivers, riders, cities by massively increasing traffic, everyone who lives in those cities who have to deal with the noise and pollution of the additional traffic, etc) without having to bear any of it themselves.
Almost like AirBnB's model.
Why do I need to involve a middle man from another country to facilitate a trip across town?
For better or worse I think that Uber destroyed the cab industry in my city.
Either way, I still think that we could have some sort of decentralized ride sharing platform that doesn't suck so much money out of local communities.
I think that this would be better for communities and therefore society a a whole.
So the real benefit of Uber was enabling mums to drop off children at school and then work until time to pick them up again (one example), casual self determining work not available to many in other ways.
I live fairly central, guy around the corner from me is retired, hangs at home picking up the odd job as he feels like, great for him, plus he can control his income relative to impacts to benefits.
In other words, benefits abuse?
For someone that has worked all their life and paid a shitload of tax I find that a little offensive and have no problem with them optimising their returns in their golden years.
But there is a grey area where you partially qualify, the ideal retirement strategy can be to spend your savings at a rate to allow a comfortable life then at a certain point you drop down into pension eligibility and then you supplement your own savings with the pension.
Unfortunately, in the parts of the zone of grey the way it works out is if you earn too much the combined impact of income tax and reduced payments is equivalent to a tax rate of 70 or 80%, so it sort of makes it an incentive not to work in those cases unless you really like it for some reason, but there is every chance you are 75 or 80 by then so I think you've probably done your bit by then and entitled to take it a little easy.