All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Work 5 days a week = 10 rides. Plus four rides on the weekend, or not. That's why I used 14.
Where do you get 40 rides per week?
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Even if someone did 40 rides per week at your posited average of $25/ride, that's $4,000, not $1,000. Are you letting an LLM do math for you?
If work happens 5 days per week, each workday requires two rides, and there are 4 weeks in a month, then there are 40 rides per month. If each of those rides costs $25, then:
5 × 2 × 4 × $25 = $1,000, per month
Guess you didn't notice that I quoted him.
I especially liked the part where you quoted "1'000$/month" and got yourself all confused about the intended conclusion anyway!
Good chat, my friend!
It was clearly a per month calculation.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…
Waymo's got the legal go ahead to use freeways, but they're working on some of the subtleties of self-driving on the freeway vs city streets before enabling it for everybody. (Specifically, California car culture is you merge left early instead of staying in the right lane until you have to. Apparently the Waymo driver was staying in the right lane.)
In this situation, you absolutely can (and are encouraged to) press the support button in the car to talk to a human agent. They have the ability to tell the car to go somewhere it normally wouldn't go for any situation that humans can reason about.