How Uber Is Changing Night Life in Los Angeles

Taxis have historically sucked in Los Angeles. Drinking and driving is a huge problem. Submarine article or not, a disruption of LA's cab business is a welcome change.

Americans subsidize parking by imposing fees on developers who don't include "enough" of it, and by reserving large portions of cities' streets for car storage. Multi-billion dollar highways enable sprawl and cheaper commercial parking lots. Driving & parking personal vehicles is incredibly wasteful from a broad economic perspective (but it was the correct path -- a necessary evil in the absence of density to enable effective mass transit).

Even with the government subsidies, Uber is an economically competitive alternative to driving & parking personal vehicles. That's the amazing part. Public policy favors the incumbent behavior, yet "ride-sharing" has still been able to expose market inefficiencies. Imagine if we killed all the parking subsidies, or better yet: used economic incentives to discourage driving & parking personal vehicles, and encourage the behavior that had a lower total cost.

I believe the future of personal transportation is computer-driven computer-dispatched vehicles, a game Uber and Google are leading. We can't get there soon enough.

These days you go to boomberg, nytimes, any blog I know of and say "we'll pay you X amount of dollars to write an article about Uber changing something." The "news" outfit gets to write whatever they want but the underlying message of "uber changing something" has to be there to get paid. The splitting hairs part is how people think they retain credibility as a "news" outfit because they use their own words. I think a lot of people would say otherwise if they saw the whole process from beginning to end.

If that all sounds like unfettered mass manipulation, thats because it is. You can be in the news all year round if you have the money to burn out fishing. Pick an source, they all have their price these days.

IME this is true of all reporting, regardless of the source or subject.

The more removed we are, the more we tend to believe what's reported is true.

The traffic is even worse than most people can imagine, if you're driving across several neighborhoods and/or on the freeways. Most other cities don't come close, DC being a notable exception. But even then, the traffic here lasts longer and stretches further. Angelenos don't measure distances in miles, we measure it in how long we expect it to take.

Parking can be a hassle in specific places, but for the most part you can find space near where you're going at rates that are reasonable. Although there is less free parking than many other cities.

But at the same time, LA is a city of neighborhoods all mashed together, and some of those neighborhoods are quite walkable. I live within a block or two of a ton of restaurants and shops, and within a short 5-10 minute drive of 90% of my needs.

It's sucked when I've had jobs that required cross-town commutes, but otherwise it can be quite pleasant.

Lot of taxis here. Lot of Uber/Lyft. Lot of Town Car services for the entertainment industry (when you see that town car heading in the neighborhood for a 4:30 AM pickup, you might not envy the actor's life too much).

As an aside, I'm actually impressed at how fast the subway system is currently growing. Unlike some cities, projects here are getting completed in years as opposed to decades. The subway/light rail is very different from 10 years ago, and will be very different again in 10 more years. It's still a huge, spread out city, but Metro is tying it together relatively quickly.

They tend to send reporters in to live here for a couple of years, so they regard a Manhattan life style as the baseline and any deviation from that is, at best, quirky, and going down from there towards crazy at a fast clip.

I was hoping there would be reader comments for this article, because the only thing better is to read Alfonse from Staten Island writing in that he visited his cousin in 2002 and the traffic was horrible, and Sydney from the UWS testifying that he lived there for two years in the 1990s and it really is as bad as all that, probably worse, and how do they live that way.

Maybe I've hit middle age, but it sure looks like evangelising uber is a desire to carve some bohemian fashion for ones self by simply making a materialistic change to a brand of taxi, it's only skin deep really, fashion.

Either that or there was a genuine gap in the market.. again any sort of taxi company with OK service would have succeeded.