This is gold...<p>"So, yeah, it’s great: you hit the app, and the car shows up now in 10 minutes instead of a 35-minute wait. But now the traffic congestion is so bad that you’re sitting in that car for 20 minutes longer to get anywhere... cities now are starting to discuss and deal with: traffic congestion. The traffic congestion is so much worse.<p>Now, is it all because of Uber? Not it’s not...you suddenly have a new service that’s committed to just flooding the streets with cars, putting thousands of more cars on the street. Is it any surprise that now the streets are more congested?"<p>This is total stream of consciousness. Is Uber multiplying the taxi fleet? How can one put so many competing statements together like that and think it's coherent?
Should we revert to poor taxi experience? Will that bring down traffic congestion? What's the point?
As a legally blind person living in the urban sprawl of LA, I rely on Uber and Lyft heavily to be able to commute and run errands. There is a lot about these companies that remains ethically and economically questionable, but until the public transportation options in the area are as quick and accessible as these services I will continue to use them. The pricing is the most unnerving thing for me. In some cases, I am now able to get an Uber for less than the bus. I am not sure how profitable that pricing is, but it is amazingly helpful that I can now go almost anywhere a sighted and licensed person can go and not have to carve out huge chunks of my day, plan for walking with potentially heavy loads or paying too much for this service.<p>Recently, I took a trip to Africa. It was interesting to me that even though they do not have a fancy app, you can walk out the door and find someone to take you almost anywhere you want to go. Part of our current situation is due to societal and cultural factors that don't necessarily exist everywhere. But, if we don't have Uber, I think there's still a market for affordable, on-demand rides.
The "labor-exploiting" argument seems a bit disingenious to me. It's not like someone sees an ad for Uber and tells their boss to shove it, as they're quitting their full-time job, forfeiting all the benefits and 401(k) matching to start a brand new career as an Uber driver.<p>The alternative for many drivers is simply unemployment. While there's zero possibility of labor exploitation, it reminds me of Flight of the Conchords quote "There is no more unethical treatment of the elephants. - Well, there's no more elephants, so..."
I don't understand the point he's making about traffic congestion. He's claiming that "Uber is putting more cars on the street". More compared to what? Compared to everyone driving themselves?<p>If Uber wasn't around, the alternative would not be people taking public transport. The alternative wouldn't be people waiting 35 minutes for taxis. The alternative would be people driving in themselves, causing greater congestion, because they'd rather sit in traffic for an hour rather than stand out in the rain.
One of my Uber drivers in the SF Bay Area told me that she went from making about $30/hr working in IT at a Fortune 500 company to making $40/hr driving for Uber. She has been driving for over a year, and quit her job about 9 months ago and had been driving full time, during the day. She knew how to work the incentives and the surge so that she maximized her earnings, and instead of working 8+ hrs a day, she opted to work 5-6 hrs a day and maintain the same life style. I asked her about the costs, and she has that all accounted for, including gas and depreciation. She wishes she had known about the Uber lease plan because she said that was superior because it gave free maintenance and the ability to change cars once a year. I don't know enough about it to comment, but she seemed to be pretty happy about it and 90% of the drivers I've talked to are more than happy.
From the title I hoped it the article would make an interesting argument, but most of it was the same complaints about Uber that we have heard for years including that Uber evades livery laws. Well, livery laws are terrible and unjust, as are taxi medallions. Complaining about Iner drivers not being professional also misses the mark because they are much better than regular taxi drivers in my experience. Has this guy actually tried Uber?
The quality of the article isn't that great. But it made me think about this anyway. If Uber can achieve Kalanick's stated end game goal of driverless cars, it will absolutely last. A lot of Uber's pressures come with having to deal with drivers. I don't know what percentage, but it's significant. Variable costs, legal issues, ride quality, and so on. If all of that disappears, Uber is playing an entirely different game that it is much better poised to stick around for long-term.<p>That the OP criticizes Uber's Pittsburgh efforts is disingenuous because it's only a beta-phase pilot. Of course, it's that simple right now. You'd want them to go through this careful pilot phase because the concept released on the streets without full testing is so dangerous. It's an extremely tough nut to crack. But IF they crack it, they're in for the long haul. "Big Taxi" as he calls it doesn't have the desire, technical expertise, freedom, or guts to achieve the self-driving car vision. For one thing, the business is structured too much around drivers paying franchise fees. In the meantime, Uber has already multiple times shown a willingness to throw a big FU at its own drivers, so it's not actually that hard to see them one day discarding their drivers for self-driving cars and keeping all of the profit rent.
As others have already noted, uber is not about replacing human drivers with human drivers, but about going driverless.<p>To me a more interesting question is the whole sharing economy and it's relation to traditional regulation.<p>Restaurants, hotels, taxies, etc have long been heavily regulated to ensure that so you don't get salmonellosis, don't have to deal with cockroaches or die in a car crash because of an incompetent driver.<p>As the whole "sharing economy thing" is about information - the question is - can better movement of information replace the need for traditional government regulation in those fields (in the form of ratings, web of trust, etc)?
Bizarre answer to this question. How is he shorting Uber? In his own mind?<p>Q: Do you really think Uber is going to collapse or be bought up by another company?<p>A: Look , I don’t have the internal numbers to – I’m not like . . . the hedge fund guy, Jim Chanos, who shorted Enron. He had lots of research and researched this stuff. . . . Let’s put it this way: I’m shorting Uber.
As criticism of Uber goes, this is kind of weak.<p>Uber's big problem is simply that they lose money. They still have to use investor capital to buy market share. That shouldn't be necessary at their present size.<p>Also, Uber has run out of investor financing and is now using leveraged loans.[1] Those have to be paid back. Their 2015 financing was a six year convertible bond. The bondholders get the right to participate in any future IPO at 20%-30% below the IPO price. Their 2016 financing is similar.<p>Uber may be Webvan 2.0. Anyone remember when Webvan had their little trucks running around everywhere in major cities?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-raises-1-15-billion-from-first-leveraged-loan-1467934151" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-raises-1-15-billion-from-fi...</a>
Certainly, sooner or later the liliputians will come in and tie Uber down, but it's a giant now. It's a little too late to be proselytizing about the company's imminent demise.<p>And in spite of supposedly losing in China, Uber managed to negotiate some pretty favorable terms. Uber now has a board seat and a 20% stake in Didi, a 30 billion dollar company growing about as fast as Uber was when it was that size.
GM invested $500 million in Lyft earlier this year. I guess, they have a different view on where the market is headed.<p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-lyft-investment-idUSKBN0UI1A820160105" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-lyft-investment-idUSKBN...</a>
People can say all they want: That self-driving cars will take over, that Uber is over-valued, that Uber shouldn't have bet on China, that the industry won't last, that people don't want xyz.<p>Things aren't so black and white - and the market is different in different parts of the world, for better or worse.<p>I've been living in Indonesia (I'm an American citizen) for the past year and GO-Jek is the big runner here. It's huge, all of my friends use it, and it's damn well the most convenient thing I've used in a while - and it offers even more than Uber: Motorbike rides, car rides, cleaning services, massages, food delivery, item shipment, etc. It definitely has some kinks - but it's growing, and fast.<p>Now Uber came in last year and I've watched it's growth - they're subsidizing drivers by 50%; what would cost me normally $20 from a taxi driver on the street costs me $8-10 with Uber, and the drivers get paid the same. But there are also issues they have to deal with - such as restricted zones for pickups.<p>The idea as a whole is here to stay; it will be improved on continuously, features will be added and removed, run-ins with governments and failed investments will be a part of the process - but peer-to-peer transportation and delivery will increase 10-fold.
Headline grabber, but not much more. That the 'sharing economy' will not continue as today should be obvious though. Governments have to react to avoid a breakdown of regular services like taxis, assuming that they want to save them. More importantly, governments won't tolerate the tax evasion and externalisation of costs - like unemployment benefits, health care, etc. That's the main reason uber is cheaper, and it's simply not sustainable - all taxis replaced with 'volunteer' drivers makes the streets not just a bit less safer, but also will cause huge costs on welfare budgets that are not paid through the regular cut taken from salaries.
Uber's biggest problem is the rate at which they burn cash and their $70B valuation which imo will be very hard to justify in the next 5 years. If that hype train stops getting funded, it might crash badly.
I have welcomed Uber to Europe with open hands but I really don't understand why they consider they should not apply to same laws as it has been put to Taxi drivers?