Ride Sharing by the Numbers | Hacker News Reader

Ride Sharing by the Numbers

blog.whatsthefare.com

105 pointsignatiusjr23 comments

Sort of off topic, but I have to say that WhatsTheFare is the only web app I've got saved to my home screen. A very, very simple but valuable tool. It's now a permanent part of my "workflow". It's like inter-app information arbitrage.

http://forecast.io/ is another good web app worth putting in home screen

Where do you live? I just tried two routes in SF and it says "We don't have any fare data for your area just yet, check back soon!"

NYC

The date range is 9/22 to 10/8. That's two weeks, which means it's only 2 data points for each given day-of-week + time combo, so analysis might not be accurate for DOY charts.

Otherwise, since the sample size is large (2000+ pts in the worst case), this is a good analysis.

How are you making the charts? It's not any JS library I've seen, and looking at the source, the code appears to be custom.

It looks like they're using Google's Visualization API.

Most of the date ranges are Sep 16 - Oct 8, which should give 3 weeks of data including for the Day of Week charts, but for analyses involving ETA the range starts on Sep 22 because it wasn't tracked until a bit later. But we wanted to be explicit about exactly which dates we're using for each chart.

We plan to keep tracking these trends as data rolls in and keep the community updated.

And that's right, we're just using the Google Visualization API: https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery

These are great data, but I'm concerned that the methodology is fatally flawed. Do we have any real reason to believe that whatsthefare requests track closely to actual ride requests?

I don't want to start a flame war but why are we using the phrase "ride-sharing"? If I share a ride with a collegue to work I will pay for petrol used. Any more, my Collegue is a taxi.

Peter Thiel made a similar point saying Google always claims to be in fierce competition with other "high technology companies" as opposed to being a monopoly search provider.

Language has great power ...

It's interesting that you brought this up, when we sat down to write this, we didn't feel there was actually good terminology yet to refer to this space. We chose 'ride-sharing' as the least-bad way to refer to the industry after informally surveying what journalists had been using so far, for consistency. At least for Lyft, Sidecar, and UberX, the 'sharing' part makes some sense to me because you're sharing another person's vehicle that they possibly already owned, while for Uber Black and Lyft Plus, these are professional services so the term is less appropriate. I would definitely welcome a new term to describe the rides space.

Whilst "unlicensed taxi" is probably too perjorative (although more accurate I feel) I would go with something like "Alternative Taxi"?

I suspect that it won't be many years before it's just plain "taxi" again. If Uber and other alternatives are proving the current companies are over charging they will just succeed in becoming licensed in a world of lower charges.

because you're sharing your 'ride' (def. 1) http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ride

Exactly. Long before Uber there was an idea of digitizing carpooling that went something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTn-ev4fjsM

Even then, it's not technically sharing as you are getting paid but the idea was that you are getting money for very minimal effort and in return providing good cheap travel options for people. Not just another taxi service.

I wonder just how how much demand is connected to surge pricing during commute hours. Sure, it would make sense that there is more demand for rides during commute hours, but is the surge pricing _only_ a function of supply/demand or is there more to it?

I would hypothesize that morning commuters taking Lyft or Uber would be willing to pay higher rates even if supply was sufficient. If I ran one of these companies I might try increasing fares even if there were tons of empty cars on the roads. Commuters need to get to work ASAP and will pay premiums to do it.

Fascinating data. I love that they did the "cost of loyalty" analysis. I know several people who only use Uber and don't even have alternative apps on their phones. I'll have to send them this article.

That's a great idea – and a great way to distribute referral codes. Hello, free rides!

Why didn't they produce a time plot of when ride sharing is cheaper than taxis and each other and what percentage of rides are cheaper than taxis? Those seem much more useful than any of the other graphs.

We included something similar to this in the city-specific posts, see for example "Average Cost Above Cheapest Fare by Hour of Day - Weekdays" in http://blog.whatsthefare.com/2014/10/ride-sharing-in-sf.html

Great, thanks. When you say "percent of rides" does that mean actual rides requested by real users?

Technically it means, percent of fare estimate requests by users to whatsthefare.com, with the presumption that those users are indeed looking to take the ride that they searched for.

This sounds easy to game: If I work for X I send many requests when the fares are in my favor.

FYI the x axis labels for the chart "Percent of Rides With Dynamic Pricing - Weekdays" is incorrect. You've accidentally labeled all the AM hours as PM.

Very much appreciate the catch, this is now fixed.

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