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Isn't this article about suburban ride-sharing? Car ownership in the suburbs is 100%. I don't think anyone disputes that a lot of people live in cities and do

Isn't this article about suburban ride-sharing? Car ownership in the suburbs is 100%. I don't think anyone disputes that a lot of people live in cities and don't own cars.

criddell 11y ago
I live in a suburb of Austin and I would wager the ratio of cars to adults is pretty much 1. There are quite a few homes with two adults and three or more vehicles. My home is like this (I have a car and a motorcycle).
VLM 11y ago
More specifically the article is proposing that an uber-for-suburbs is a mathematical non-starter and the comments against that conclusion are primarily non sequiturs along the lines of "I live in an urban area and uber and mass transit work great for me". Cool. Rock on. But that has nothing at all to do with the article's business plan, or the research in the article or my own mathematical model that came to the same conclusion as the author via a different path. This is also a live example of survivorship bias. Nobody who tries to live in a mass-transit-less uber-less suburb in the current year will last very long. Nobody who can't afford a car can afford a house in the burbs either. Therefore there is a natural self selection such that roughly 0% of potential uber-for-the-burbs startup can physically live at this time in the burbs. If uber-for-the-burbs already existed such that potential customers could be found in the burbs, then a startup could in fact sell to them, although starting up into entrenched competition isn't as much fun as a wide open field. But the geography has self selected such that all potential customers cannot currently live there. It is possibly one of the least possibly fertile areas to sell a service idea. It is like the proverbial trying to sell ice to eskimos. The burbs are multiply mathematically provably possibly the worst place on the entire planet to try an uber-for- startup. Perhaps the business model for uber-for-the-burbs should bootstrap off little kids and suburban nursing home residents (I mean, who else is left there, to sell to, who isn't already a car owner?). Although little kids have safety issues and nursing homes have privately owned bus routes and taxis are already pretty entrenched in the market. And the little kids and old people might not be the wealthiest residents of suburbia (demand doesn't matter without the cash revenue to back it up). I would guess the best bootstrap would be physically disabled / handicapped but then you run into wheelchair issues and drivers being medically qualified? And how many little kids / disabled / retired / nursing home residents are commuting into the big city to desk jobs anyway? I edited this post to emphasize that the "startup lesson" of this whole topic is you can't just look at where to sell, you need to think up who to sell. Finding a giant underserved geographic area with plenty of money is utterly useless if by the inherent existence of the area they have no use for it. Hawaii is dramatically underserved with respect to snowshoes, but I would strongly recommend against a startup trying to sell snowshoes in the Hawaiian islands.
- ghaff 11y ago
  I'd just add that Uber being fairly successful in a lot of areas in spite of the fact that taxis were already a thing has probably led a lot of people to take away a (somewhat) incorrect lesson--namely that app-ing the taxi experience fundamentally changes the economics. In fact, Uber has, for example, had a lot less relative impact in Manhattan which already has lots of taxis than in other locales. So the more correct lesson is that taxis were and are pretty broken in a lot of places and that those markets would actually have supported a more functional taxicab system. Now, one can assume that low-density suburbs and exurbs are also underserved markets but I don't see a lot of evidence that's the case.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    Yes! Here in Seattle, so far as I can tell, Uber succeeded mightily not because people particularly loved Uber, but because everybody hated the taxicab system.

Isn't this article about suburban ride-sharing? Car ownership in the suburbs is 100%. I don't think anyone disputes that a lot of people live in cities and don't own cars.

criddell 11y ago

I live in a suburb of Austin and I would wager the ratio of cars to adults is pretty much 1. There are quite a few homes with two adults and three or more vehicles. My home is like this (I have a car and a motorcycle).

VLM 11y ago

More specifically the article is proposing that an uber-for-suburbs is a mathematical non-starter and the comments against that conclusion are primarily non sequiturs along the lines of "I live in an urban area and uber and mass transit work great for me". Cool. Rock on. But that has nothing at all to do with the article's business plan, or the research in the article or my own mathematical model that came to the same conclusion as the author via a different path. This is also a live example of survivorship bias. Nobody who tries to live in a mass-transit-less uber-less suburb in the current year will last very long. Nobody who can't afford a car can afford a house in the burbs either. Therefore there is a natural self selection such that roughly 0% of potential uber-for-the-burbs startup can physically live at this time in the burbs. If uber-for-the-burbs already existed such that potential customers could be found in the burbs, then a startup could in fact sell to them, although starting up into entrenched competition isn't as much fun as a wide open field. But the geography has self selected such that all potential customers cannot currently live there. It is possibly one of the least possibly fertile areas to sell a service idea. It is like the proverbial trying to sell ice to eskimos. The burbs are multiply mathematically provably possibly the worst place on the entire planet to try an uber-for- startup. Perhaps the business model for uber-for-the-burbs should bootstrap off little kids and suburban nursing home residents (I mean, who else is left there, to sell to, who isn't already a car owner?). Although little kids have safety issues and nursing homes have privately owned bus routes and taxis are already pretty entrenched in the market. And the little kids and old people might not be the wealthiest residents of suburbia (demand doesn't matter without the cash revenue to back it up). I would guess the best bootstrap would be physically disabled / handicapped but then you run into wheelchair issues and drivers being medically qualified? And how many little kids / disabled / retired / nursing home residents are commuting into the big city to desk jobs anyway? I edited this post to emphasize that the "startup lesson" of this whole topic is you can't just look at where to sell, you need to think up who to sell. Finding a giant underserved geographic area with plenty of money is utterly useless if by the inherent existence of the area they have no use for it. Hawaii is dramatically underserved with respect to snowshoes, but I would strongly recommend against a startup trying to sell snowshoes in the Hawaiian islands.

ghaff 11y ago
I'd just add that Uber being fairly successful in a lot of areas in spite of the fact that taxis were already a thing has probably led a lot of people to take away a (somewhat) incorrect lesson--namely that app-ing the taxi experience fundamentally changes the economics. In fact, Uber has, for example, had a lot less relative impact in Manhattan which already has lots of taxis than in other locales. So the more correct lesson is that taxis were and are pretty broken in a lot of places and that those markets would actually have supported a more functional taxicab system. Now, one can assume that low-density suburbs and exurbs are also underserved markets but I don't see a lot of evidence that's the case.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Yes! Here in Seattle, so far as I can tell, Uber succeeded mightily not because people particularly loved Uber, but because everybody hated the taxicab system.