Busy Parents Uber Kids Around for a Carpool Alternative
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
When networks of self driving cars start appearing, it'll reduce the cost so much that it'll trickle down to the 10%, then 50%, then to the 100% - much like the original car or the fridge did. When I used to work in downtown SF, taking an Uber from my house to work was only 2x as expensive as the bus, even though it was more like 4x-6x a few years ago. Over time and as technology/infrastructure improves this will go down to 1x, and then even below.
It'll be a great future where people don't own cars anymore (except for a select few who will for recreation, much like people still ride horses for fun now), and instead pay a monthly subscription fee for X miles of driving around per month. Much like cellphones, there'll probably be things like family plans and so on. Your kids will get a self driving car to pick them up from school, which will promptly drop them off at home/sports practice/etc. The car will then just drive to its next request, thus completely removing the need for parking (which will have a wonderful impact on American urban areas- larger sidewalks, no more need for giant parking lots everywhere), heavily minimizing traffic (no stop and go when all cars on the road can sync up in real time), heavily reducing lethal road accidents, etc.
Self driving vehicles will do for transport what the fridge did for food or the internet did for communications. It's going to be very, very exciting and I wish more people realized it so we could make it happen as fast as possible (e.g. a really forward thinking city could easily make a subpart of its downtown area open to self driving vehicles exclusively by 2020).
I've no doubt driverless cars will come, but while they are moving forward, so is the realization that we really don't need all that many cars in cities and that they don't do us any good.
Humans Need Not Apply:
Creative destruction, as enabled by captitalism allows everyone to gain access to the luxuries only previously enjoyed by the rich; it takes time, but we all our lives are improving in astonishing and unexpected ways.
ED: Price controls such as is the norm with cab's do distort the market, so Uber's dynamic pricing is probably a good thing as long as it's non discriminatory.
I live in Nob Hill, SF. If I wanted to go to the Mission, it's quite a wait for the Van Ness bus that goes to the Mission, and it takes a long time to go 2 miles because of the numerous stops the bus makes.
If instead, I were to take a UberPool/Sidecar Shared Ride, it might be $1 or so more, but I'd get there in a fraction of the time (no walking to the bus stop, no waiting for the bus, no numerous stops).
Also, I'm wondering if the the capital expenditure of the car vs the bus makes the car the preferred choice. Eg a Muni bus costs $700,000, but a car for UberPool or others is $10,000-$10,000.
I'm certainly not against buses, but for many cases, the technology here can provide smarter, faster transportation. Imagine this: an UberBus/Sidecar Shared Bus or so, that takes just as many people as a full bus would, but without the in-between stops.
Efficiency is a complex topic, buses are often less convenient in large part because there less frequently. In high traffic areas it can actually be faster to take a bus that's showing up every 2-3 minutes than wait for an cab / uber to happen by. The only real downside is it's harder to match demand so you often have large stretches of the day with few riders.
Is I just me, or does that not sound like how a 14-year-old would talk? It seems more like some PR rep wrote that and asked him to sign off.
Source: I was that 14 year old once upon a time.
Why do you think you can tell how old someone is by the way they talk?
This is a brilliant shift of use for these services, even if it's only used sometimes (gets a little pricey). Way better than collect calling my Mom and leaving my name as "I need a pickup from school" so she could refuse the call. Or waiting for an hour for her to be ready.
WoW, not my kid... a driver-less Google or Telsa car thats proven safe sure, but not random strangers.
Uber can vet their drivers all they want, but there are going to be a few or more bad eggs(drivers/sex offenders).
Further I'm wondering if there is only a very small select amount of parents doing this and this more PR then a major reality.
Driving kids to and fro is soul crushing in a way that people who don't have to cannot comprehend.
That aside, do you tip your Uber driver? It's interesting for me to find out that most people don't tip their drivers, and I'd like to know if it's something you do when going to/from work versus, say, a night out.
EDIT TO REPLY TO FIRST TWO REPLIES:
One of you has said you are not a parent, and I'm asked in the other reply about free time being time to decide what you want. I acknowledge that both concerns are valid.
In other words I agree that if my chief rationale for telling my own daughter that she shouldn't sign up for a sports program is that she will be overtired and risk injury besides, that is the reason to lead off with in conversation. (What parents usually find in parenting is that many parenting decisions are overdetermined, being grounded in multiple rationales, but children also think their desires have multiple rationales, and parents and children have conversations with a lot of serve-and-volley about rationales for decisions.) Similarly, if "we can't afford it" is the fact, rather than just an excuse, I would say that. We cherish honesty in our family--and, honestly, sometimes the reason we don't consider other activities for our children is that we would be run ragged driving them around.
Children have desires that go beyond their ability to estimate the costs and benefits of pursuing those desires. (Yeah, adults do too, but this limitation in planning and self-assessment is a big part of the basis for distinguishing between adults and minors.) When my daughter is pursuing her own schedule with her own money, I am sure she will continue to delight in challenging herself and keeping busy. Today, sometimes, as the adult in the room my job is to say, "Remember that time we signed up for [name of activity] and then you found out you were too busy to keep doing that?" We let her try out a lot of things, but sometimes we just have to say, "You need sleep, and you need daytime rest, and for your own development sometimes you need just to sit and think and not do structured things all day." The girls I meet through my daughter's soccer team are all high-ambition girls who push themselves academically (several are in full-time foreign language immersion school programs) and athletically (they are in the top team in our soccer club for their age group) and in other domains. We parents are all proud of them, but we know sometimes we are doing best by our children when we tell them to take a break.