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Uber and Lyft don't save money, time, or the planet

133 点作者 ryan_j_naughton超过 3 年前

24 条评论

bko超过 3 年前
&gt; Sunday night, I flew into LAX from San Francisco and boarded a shuttle to the airport’s newish pickup spot for ground transportation just east of Terminal 1. I found myself standing amid an unhappy crowd of restless travelers who had been waiting as long as 30 minutes to be picked up by their Lyft drivers.<p>Isn&#x27;t this because most cities have ridiculous rules that disadvantage Uber drivers while cabs are allowed to park out in front? They have no convenient very short term parking, instead they&#x27;re sometimes made to wait on the side of the highway, which makes the ride more expensive. They also charge fees. LAX charges $4 per ride [0]<p>Isn&#x27;t the fact that people use Uber proof that they provide some value? I think the point is to have an alternative to cabs that are highly variable as per the author&#x27;s own admission.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;la-fi-airport-uber-parking-revenue-20190301-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;la-fi-airport-uber-parking-...</a>
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danpalmer超过 3 年前
Uber and Lyft are the best examples of the VC cycle:<p>Disruptor comes along to stagnant industry. Pumps cash into growth, discounts get many people on board, crap service is made up for with liberal refunding by customer service. Push for profitability hits discounts, acquisition slows because it&#x27;s no longer cheaper than the thing it was disrupting before, customer service stop refunding things and customers leave because they realise the service has pretty bad flaws. Incumbents have finally met the new table-stakes features to compete, disruptor isn&#x27;t significantly better.<p>See also: takeaway deliveries, meal kits, buying books online, and pretty much anything else.<p>These cycles always look like they&#x27;re going to be a 100% improvement, but always end up being a 10% improvement once everything settles down.
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tristor超过 3 年前
Disagree on at least two of these claims. They definitely save time and money. The only way someone can claim they don&#x27;t is if they&#x27;ve never actually had to travel and use taxis. Taxis are horrible, pretty much universally. The drivers will do everything possible to cheat you, the experience is shit, and availability is basically only good at the airport, downtown in that city, and nowhere else.<p>An Uber (I don&#x27;t really use Lyft since it&#x27;s basically non-existent outside the US and pre-pandemic I traveled internationally a lot) will meet me wherever I happen to be regardless of where it is in the city, at whatever time I need a ride regardless of hour, pick me up, and take me to my destination via the quickest route determined by a GPS app, for a predetermined non-negotiable price, automatically charged to my credit card or business account without needing to reveal anything or expose any money to a stranger, and without me needing to deal with foreign exchange rates.<p>A taxi does literally none of these things. The only similarity between a taxi and an Uber is that they both are a stranger driving me somewhere in a car. After that, an Uber is a better experience that saves me both time and money every step of the way, while being massively more consistent and reliable. Taxis suck, and there is effectively no way to make them better without essentially cloning what Uber does, which gets us right back where we&#x27;re at.<p>I&#x27;m seeing this more and more these days, and I&#x27;m not sure the cause, but a lot of articles in &quot;reputable&quot; newspapers making bold claims that nobody who has had even an inkling of experience with the subject matter would make with a straight face. Uber has many issues, I will grant, but to claim it isn&#x27;t a better experience in every facet than a taxi isn&#x27;t just stupid, it&#x27;s dishonest.
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nine_k超过 3 年前
A Lyft or Uber car can be hailed by an app, to the exact place I&#x27;m at.<p>A city taxi would scan the most lucrative areas, and my never show up where it&#x27;s convenient for me to be picked up.<p>I don&#x27;t understand how this drastic difference goes unnoticed. The fare is <i>not</i> the only factor; availability, convenience, and control are no less important.
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unpolloloco超过 3 年前
The value to Uber is that it broke the taxi monopoly. Especially in second tier cities where calling a taxi meant that they might show up...eventually. This enables people to go out without a car - making more locations accessible and (maybe one of the largest benefits...) discouraging drunk driving. Environmental benefits are...highly overstated...but you can say the same thing for pretty much any innovation outside of the energy industry.
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jsiepkes超过 3 年前
&gt; In 2015, Uber founder Travis Kalanick gave a TED talk in which he vowed the new rideshare business model would get “more people into fewer cars,” dramatically reduce air pollution and, as he put it, “reclaim our cities today.”<p>At the risk of sounding too skeptical but these are the kind of quotes dreamed up by the marketing department. The kind of quotes that have no connection to the actual mission of a company. There is probably no KPI anywhere to be found within Uber that says: &quot;Traffic reduced %&quot;.<p>Even worse these quotes are often all based on &quot;gut feeling&quot; and &quot;well sounds logical&quot; kind of emotions with no factual basis whatsoever. Which probably isn&#x27;t a surprise since it&#x27;s marketings task to handle emotion.
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tossaway9000超过 3 年前
&gt; I swore off taxis years ago after I realized that every time I walked out of an LAX terminal toward the taxi line, my neck and shoulders began to tense. I was bracing for a fight.<p>Same thing with the &quot;Grab&quot; app in Asia, its just not worth fighting the cab drivers in Manila or Bangkok, when you can get a Grab driver they will give you zero drama but the cab drivers in those cities will haggle you, not use the meters, try to get you to go to some tourist trap, etc. Its not like that across those entire countries (Davao City notably has absolutely amazing taxi drivers) but the big cities are terrible.<p>South Korea, Japan, and Singapore have such amazing public transpiration options there&#x27;s little need for taxis most of the time (though its worth noting that when I have used them I had zero issues in those countries, even in Seoul and Tokyo.)
jvanderbot超过 3 年前
The promise of sharing rides using an app was a great one. I could just pick someone up heading for a place near my work and make $3.<p>When people used it for employment, not sharing their ride but operating like a cab driver, uber leaned in and the stage was set for the clashes and class action that results in regulation, price increases, etc.<p>If they had stayed niche and stayed smallish, ride sharing could have accomplished what it was supposed to. Greed is powerful, and drivers saw no need to limit to just sharing a trip to the mall, and uber saw no reason to prevent people from using their platform for it.
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Grimm1超过 3 年前
Lyft saves me plenty of time so I&#x27;m not sure I can agree here. The alternative would be relying on regular cabs or the public infrastructure here in NY which has on multiple occasions proven to be less reliable for me. I&#x27;ll gladly pay a little extra to not arrive at my location 40minutes to an hour late because of a service disruption in the subway. If we actually took all the money invested in transportation in the city and made things better, instead of I assume pocketing it, maybe I would have different thoughts, but for now these services make my life significantly easier.
dhosek超过 3 年前
I&#x27;ve always found the cases where people like Uber&#x2F;Lyft to be a bit absurd. I live just outside Chicago. In the city, there were (and still are) abundant taxis. It&#x27;s a simple matter to hail a cab from most parts of the city (when I lived in the city proper, I would occasionally cab to work instead of take the bus if I was running late, or use one to get home from band practice and it was my usual mode of transport for dates since I didn&#x27;t have a car) and the people who will go into an app to schedule an Uber or Lyft always seem absurd because they could be into a taxi in no time just by going to the corner and raising their hand. In the suburbs, it makes more sense because taxi service here is a much worse,¹ but I don&#x27;t see a single defender of ride shares in the current threads talking about a suburban experience.<p>The taxi driver&#x2F;credit card thing varies on city, by the way. L.A. taxi drivers are <i>always</i> grumpy about taking credit cards. Chicago taxi drivers have no problem with it (I think because they&#x27;ve discovered that they tend to get better tips with credit cards than they do with cash which makes up for the processing fees. Fast food places discovered something similar where accepting credit cards increased their average order price enough to make up for the loss in net revenue from CC fees).<p>⸻⸻⸻<p>1. This, admittedly is the case in some cities as well. Los Angeles (used to? I remember there was a proposal to change this but I don&#x27;t know if it passed) banned cabs from picking up passengers who hailed them from a corner and that&#x27;s the case with the suburban taxis in the Chicago area as well—they can only pick up dispatch rides, except at the airport.
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vasilipupkin超过 3 年前
Uber and Lyft literally save lives<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jamasurgery&#x2F;fullarticle&#x2F;2780664" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jamasurgery&#x2F;fullarticle&#x2F;278...</a>
leesec超过 3 年前
Is this a serious thesis? The point is the average car owner can make some money off an existing asset (instead of having to buy a medallion), and the average person needing a ride has more options to choose from. Cab infrastructure simply does not exist at a reasonable scale in most cities. Money, Time and The Planet basically do not come into the equation when the alternative is getting stuck at the airport.
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nottorp超过 3 年前
Hmm where I am Uber and taxis are interchangeable. Except when it&#x27;s a high demand time (event or something) when you&#x27;re more likely to get an Uber because of the demand surcharge.<p>Best feature of Uber vs traditional taxi is you don&#x27;t need to tell the Uber driver where to find you.<p>I suppose the post is actually complaining about airport rules.
MAGZine超过 3 年前
I recently moved to NYC and the taxis have been a godsend--though (somewhat comically) the drivers are aware they&#x27;re operating a lower-cost business.<p>My friend recently got in a taxi and the cabbie immediately asked how much she thought the fare would be. She said &quot;I&#x27;m not sure, maybe $15?&quot;<p>The Cabbie turned off the fare meter and said, sure, $15 it is.<p>The reality is that uber and lyft are just not actually competitive in NYC. And rather than wait around for a lyft coming from god knows where, through manhattan traffic, it really is easier to just walk outside and stick your hand up. It can be much, MUCH cheaper, too. When I was in SF, Lyft wanted $72 to go from SOMA to Lower Haight--not what I would consider acceptable.
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bananamerica超过 3 年前
Wow, taxi drivers in LA are assholes. I&#x27;ve taken taxis in many Brazilian cities, and, while they&#x27;re certainly not as nice as Uber drivers, they&#x27;re not even remotely as bad as the ones in the article.
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karaterobot超过 3 年前
One thing about this article: their argument that it doesn&#x27;t save time or money is taken from a very specific use case in which it doesn&#x27;t save time or money: traveling from LAX to the author&#x27;s house in Venice. As noted elsewhere in the thread, this is true because of specific usage and pricing restrictions at LAX, which are not true in most other cases.<p>Calling a cab to pick you up at your home and take you somewhere else in the city would be a more common use case to compare to, but likely would not support the author&#x27;s claims, which is probably why they don&#x27;t mention it.<p>The pollution claim may be more valid: I have no thoughts on that other than the speculation that, if rideshare vehicles are spending 40% of their time driving without passengers, I bet they&#x27;re returning to places where they&#x27;re expecting to get more lucrative calls. This seems like something Uber and Lyft could somewhat mitigate with their pricing or compensation structure, if they wanted to. So, a problem for sure, but not one that&#x27;s inherent to ridesharing.<p>I also wonder why taxis wouldn&#x27;t have the same problems. I recall reading that buses drive without passengers about 25% of the time, so it&#x27;s not like this phenomenon is unique to rideshare. Based on common sense and observation, I would assume taxis are deadheading about as much as Lyft and Uber, but can find no citation for it.<p>Lastly, the fact that this article has links to supporting resources, but those links are disguised to look like unstyled body text, is really frustrating.
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seibelj超过 3 年前
Uber and Lyft are private companies. They have to constantly improve their service, and if they aren&#x27;t providing value to their customers, they can ultimately fail. They also have tons of headwinds from regulations and hatred from politicians &#x2F; journalists.<p>You know what I don&#x27;t have a choice on? My tax dollars that pay for inefficient, unprofitable, and terrible service from public transportation.<p>Washington DC spent hundreds of millions of dollars on brand new subway cars that were supposed last 40 years, now they all need to be replaced after 3 years. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;over-half-washington-d-c-metro-rail-cars-pulled-after-n1281814" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;over-half-washington-d-...</a><p>Without the market test of profitable &#x2F; unprofitable, politicians keep shoveling dollars at boondoggles that don&#x27;t make any sense. I like Uber and Lyft because they respond to the needs of their customers. Government transportation is - at best - decent. It never blows you away, and is usually behind schedule, dirty, broken, and full of employees who don&#x27;t care.
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locallost超过 3 年前
The business model never made sense except in the way it played out - the taxi industry getting hammered and uber and lyft eventually jacking up the prices. Worse, the model is always going to be more expensive because every driver is on their own. It&#x27;s a lot more expensive to buy and maintain a car if you&#x27;re one person than it is if you do it for hundreds of cars.<p>The tech was good since it works well at scale. The better way would&#x27;ve been to rent the tech to actual taxis around the world so that you have one app a user can use. But it was a lot more lucrative to sell the pipe dream that we&#x27;re not a cab because we have an app, or that we improve congestion.
aghastnj超过 3 年前
I always enjoy an article that starts by insulting my intelligence - especially if it can do it right in the headline. I enjoy it so much that I won&#x27;t even bother to read it.
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kbsspl超过 3 年前
Absolutely true. And it&#x27;s worse. But that isn&#x27;t Uber&#x27;s job.<p>Other than a bit of convenience, Uber is a technocracy push.
tharne超过 3 年前
&gt; Uber and Lyft don&#x27;t save money, time, or the planet<p>And yet people enjoy their services enough to voluntarily pay for them :)
a_imho超过 3 年前
What is the difference between a taxi service and Uber?
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adminscoffee超过 3 年前
it saves lives, drunk driving crashes have gone wayyyyy down since uber and lyft came into the market. let&#x27;s not downplay that please.
bongoman37超过 3 年前
In India, Uber (and Ola, Lyft isn&#x27;t available here) certainly save money and time. I know lots of young people who haven&#x27;t gotten cars because Uber&#x2F;Ola is the default. I have a car but often used to take one of those when going to places where parking could be an issue. They eliminate haggling with cabbies, cabbies taking roundabout routes and are far safer for women compared to traditional rickshaws or cabs.