Bad for taxi drivers, good for tourism.<p>I've done business in both Tokyo and Hong Kong. Historically, a taxi in Tokyo has been ~3x that of the same distance in Hong Kong. When considering where to Holiday, that significant additional expense is a consideration.<p>I'd also be interested, if there is enough sensitivity in the data, to see a correlation between taxi cost and DUIs.
Chicago taxis are roughly double the cost of an Uber/Lyft w/o surge pricing IF you're not crossing the city boundary. In my experience, the only time a taxi end up cheaper is if you need a flat rate to the airport during a time when waiting in traffic would get you destroyed by Uber.
Pardon my ignorance, but is there something in the cabbie's contract that restricts her from also being a driver for Uber/Lyft? I assume so; in Japan, this is not the case, because every time I hailed an Uber, at traditional cab driver appeared.
Funny, I just started doing similar work with the data a few days ago. It's definitely an interesting dataset that's been fun to play with.<p>From the privacy side of things, and to prove a point, I've been working on de-anonmyizing the data for the past few days by comparing the data against a few other datasets from FOIA and data.cityofchicago.org. It's so far been surprisingly easy to find the plate and driver info. The sort of myopic privacy with these large datasets is pretty shocking. (I don't plan on making the code/results public except to maybe Chicago's own data folk.)
So, given that the stated goals of ride-sharing startups are to automate their workforce (with Uber basically saying "automation or bust"), I think there's a need to build economic analysis of what this means.<p>In theory, you could correlate data between <a href="https://movement.uber.com/cities" rel="nofollow">https://movement.uber.com/cities</a> and this analysis and start building a picture of what it means when a model with less variable costs starts impacting the market.
Purely from taking the data from this article, I see it next to impossible that ride sharing has anything to do with this when you look at the comparison with New York.<p>It seems to me that there was an upward spike in 2015 and now it's declines back to pre-2013 levels.<p>But there are also unknown factors at play here...
- what has the economy been like in the last 5 years for the suburbs?
- what are the tourism levels over time
- the u.s has had a slight economic growth in the last 5 years; what are the car sales in the same areas? Rising?<p>It seems more like Chicago had a number of downtown events or draw over the course of 1 year, and has now declined. However, the article is basically using the highest spike as the baseline.
One thing I hate about Taxis is the meter. I want a flat price before they get in, but in many countries they kick up a huge fuss or refuse to take you.
form my experience, taxis in Chicago are ~1.5x more expensive vs uber.<p>in nyc its the opposite, ubers are ~1.5x more expensive.<p>could partially explain the difference in decline.