Uber - not a great experience at peak times (eg: New Year's Eve)
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
The reason Uber is as expensive as it is is that it there are too few cars. On New Years eve more people want to take a cap but there is no way to increase supply, because there are too few medallions.
In Brisbane city on NYE, the public bus service was free after 9pm. There were a lot of road closures and people who wanted to travel to the city used public transport. I had my first bus trip of 2011 on NYE, and it was quick, because there weren't many cars on the road.
In fact in Uber's unregulated market there were still too few cars on the road and it lead to artificially high prices it seems like this article is arguing for regulation.
But in general these people didn't pay to drive a mile but to drive a mile on the busiest day of the year. That costs.
The alternative -- and the reason people didn't use regular cabs -- is that there aren't enough of them. So either you get shortages or you get higher prices (which are good, since they incentivice those who don't value the transportation as much to walk).
In two years time Uber and everyone else will have a public API to communicate their permanent variable pricing, and they'll be a ton of smartphone apps that talk to all of the APIs from all of the providers and suggest which one to take based on the current supply/demand curve and other factors.
The anger came because Uber didn't do a good job of setting expectations. Their customers expected that they could get a ride anytime, even NYE, if they were willing to pay a certain premium over what a cab would cost. But the premium on NYE was much larger than the customers (rightly or not) expected. If Uber had done a better job of managing expectations, they wouldn't have angry customers.
This feature alone would have solved this NYE public relations drama.
I imagine this will attract some replies which say that it's still their fault no matter how unreasonable one might consider the price change to be. If you're planning to write one, then before you do, please consider this question: do you study a taxi's rates from top to bottom before accepting the ride every time you take a taxi?
Even the person in the article mentions seeing the warning but quickly dismissing it. Think how often you see an alert pop up and dismiss it without really reading it.
I think even if Uber did a better job of notifying people, you'd still see an outcry.
It's one thing to create UX for the optimal user to notify them of the price surge, but people celebrating New Year's Eve?
If there's no reasonable way to accomplish that, then perhaps that's a sign that the surcharge is inherently unreasonable.
Even if everybody was completely aware of what they were getting into, there would probably still be an outcry. But it would be a completely different outcry, along the lines of "you're charging too much and taking advantage of people" instead of "you completely ripped me off".
I have used it once for personal use - to go to a wedding at a church 1 mile from my house; $23.00
I spend ~400 a month on Uber Cab right now...
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The service is fantastic but the prices are rather ridiculous.
I would NEVER have used them on NYE - and the prices people were paying just shows that either all those people are really rich, or really stupid.
I am pissed that I can buy a single leg from SFO to Seattle on Virgin for $59 -- but to take a cab from my house to SFO is $65.00
We can talk about supply/demand market etc all day - but there is just something wrong with the cost of transportation in SF. Period.
Honestly, the reasons I'm happy to pay a premium are the phone app and the reliability: I'm fed up of booking a cab that turns up 30+ minutes late.
If any of the three/four big taxi firms in Seattle put together an app like Uber's (basically with the 'pick me up from this spot ASAP and keep me up to date with how far away you are' feature) - they would be my go-to ride every time, and would be incredibly popular.
Have never taken a cab in SF; the crazy shortage of medallions in the city sounds almost criminal.
I live in an area that is really hard to get a taxi (Twin Peaks) and I used to live in the Presidio where it was simply impossible.
I love the service Uber provides, I just think that the whole taxi system is over priced by about double.
Your public transportation cost to SFO is about $10.
(I fly to Seattle once a month on the Sunday 7:35AM virgin flight)
Yes, you can say public is cheaper because it is shared transport, but what i am saying is that the cost for non-shared transport is ridiculous:
Lets look at the cost/value of a trip to SFO from my house - $65.00
During the times I go to SFO and from SFO, there is no traffic - so i wont factor that in.
The cabby picks me up and it takes 25 minutes to get to SFO. It is 13.7 miles from my house.
This means that the cabby is making the equivalent of ~$4.75 per mile - OR ~$156 per hour.
Gas costs the cabby $3.50 per gallon, he also needs to pay 20% to Uber. (I know independant Uber drivers, so Ill assume he is not sharing that remaining 80% with a parent company, for ease at this point)
The car gets ~19 MPG, so at 13.7 miles, lets just round up and assume it costs one gallon to SFO, and 1 gallon back to wherever he was before my fare.
The last Uber Driver I had had just bought 3 new towncars. He said the cars were $25K a piece and last to 300K miles. Lets assume one driver with one car:
If he has a car that costs 25K over 60 months, that works out to .57 cents per hour for the car, we will round up to $1.00 to cover insurance.
So, for 50 minutes of work (lets go ahead and assume he doesn't get a customer back from SFO), with $7 gas, $1 car cost and 20% of the fare to uber, that leaves the driver $44.
SO, what I am saying is that at $44 to the driver, after expenses - that is the equivalent of $88,000 per year, assuming he were to have a fare 100% of the time. Which obviously he doesn't -- but for the time that I am in his car, I am paying him the equivalent salary of $88K for the use of his services.
This, to me, is WAY too much money to pay someone who is simply driving me to the airport.
So what you're really paying for with uber is to get someone who isn't an asshole or a moron who will actually come when they say they will. Alternately, you could get up 3 hours earlier and take a taxi, praying they'd actually come, stressed out the whole time about missing your flight, to save $30.