7 ms·

While I'm not in a position to defend what the culture at Uber is or isn't, it's shortsighted to say that the problem Uber is addressing isn't an important one.

While I'm not in a position to defend what the culture at Uber is or isn't, it's shortsighted to say that the problem Uber is addressing isn't an important one. Giving people mobility can have a drastically positive impact on local economies, housing, the environment, etc.

jonathankoren 10y ago
They solved the Hail A Cab From The Street Problem. The actual ability to be mobile in a city for low cost was already solved with mass transit, and even calling a cab ahead of time. The App For Cabs, is useful compared to the previous world where you stood on the corner waiting for a taxi to stop, but to so say they are solving "mobility" for an great economic good is stretching it. It's a cab company that decided to ditch the cabs and to "contract" with "independent owner-operators" in an effort to circumvent the laws around cabs, and to avoid the hassles of actually having employees and capital expenditures. It's just the Web 2.0 business of plan of "let the users provide the content, and then sell it back to them", applied to physical objects.
- JamesBarney 10y ago
  This is only true of the densest areas of a couple of the most dense cities.
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    You can't get on the phone and call a cab and have it pick you up outside of a large city? That's just not true. My dad worked with a guy that had a suspended license that would commute to work every day in cab, in a rural town of less than 20,000 people.
    - amorphid 10y ago
      Calling a cab in San Francisco is a miserable experience, especially if you're calling from an area that attracts fewer rides. If you can get ahold of a dispatcher, there's no guarantee a cab will even show up. And after making the call, you have no way to assess how long a taxi may take to arrive. With Uber and Lyft, these are not problems. I've never ordered a taxi in a small town, so I can't comment on what that process is like.
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      Of course you can. I've had two jobs where a cab was part of the commute - one short term (2 months) but daily in Chicago, and I scheduled the cab two hours before I needed it and it would wait at the train station for me, and the other only on Sunday mornings at 5am in Baltimore, and I would schedule it the night before. It was neither difficult nor traumatic as the descriptions of the "problem" that Uber is solving that I see in these Uber threads. I've never driven a car in my 40 years of life, and therefore taken 1000 cabs in a dozen cities, but I've clearly only taken the best ones.
      - linkregister 10y ago
        Baltimore. Good one. Baltimore's cab dispatch system is what prompted me to install Uber and Lyft on my phone. Asking for a pickup two hours from now lead me to get a blaring horn (no doubt waking up my hotel neighbors) 30 minutes later. Asking for a taxi as soon as possible left me waiting for over an hour. One time, the taxi service shamelessly said the drivers changed their mind and wouldn't get me from Amtrak at all. Maybe things have changed since the introduction of these ride sharing apps, but reliability of the Baltimore taxi system used to be atrocious outside of the 5 block radius of the Inner Harbor. If you had said "black car service," I would have believed your story could be representative, but that is simply incongruent with every experience I've had in Baltimore. I tried the 3 major cab companies in Baltimore and had similar experiences with each. I'm not alleging any moral shortcoming, it's just that there was no incentive to improve service to an acceptable level until Uber and Lyft arrived.
    - toast0 10y ago
      You can't get on the phone and call a cab, and expect it to arrive in San Jose; even when the dispatcher tells you it's on it's way, and it'll arrive shortly. Uber shows you where the drivers are before you request a ride, and once you request a ride, it shows you which car was picked for you and that the car is making progress towards the pickup location, and provides a price estimate before you request the pickup. I'd guess I've called in for around 10 cab rides, and have had two experiences where a cab was requested, I was told it would come, and had it not come after waiting for much longer than was reasonable.
      - rrdharan 10y ago
        > Uber shows you where the drivers are before you request a ride Uber doesn't actually show you where the drivers are before you request the ride. Those little animated icons just represent the density of available drivers, not actual car positions.
        aboodman 10y ago
        Doesn't matter. The animation solves the user problem, which is knowing whether pressing the button is going to result in a cab soon or not soon.
        linkregister 10y ago
        I've heard this many times on HN. Where is the source material for this? (It just sounds really dishonest for the app to do this)
        awongh 10y ago
        http://mashable.com/2015/07/29/uber-app-accuracy/#bsS69hn3pgqy http://mashable.com/2015/07/29/uber-app-accuracy/#bsS69hn3pg...
        linkregister 10y ago
        The TLDR of this article is that vehicle locations are out-of-date due to latency and no more than eight vehicles are shown at a time.
- luca_ing 10y ago
  > They solved the Hail A Cab From The Street Problem. [...] The App For Cabs, is useful compared to the previous world where you stood on the corner waiting for a taxi to stop You could already call taxis by phone (including your mobile), as you say. So you are creating something of a false dichotomy. At least where I live, there are also public devices (only in particular places, of course) you can use to hail a cab, in case you somehow don't own a mobile. And apparently mytaxi was founded the same year as Uber, so Uber's idea wasn't quite that unique. I suppose it was just the right time for such services to spring into existence. Uber appears to be the most successful, probably in no small part due to their ruthlessness.
bduerst 10y ago
Yes and no. It's true that they've increased the cheap, on-demand transportation supply, but only because the price is kept artificially competitive through VC-fueled subsidies. Depending on how they pivot to be profitable, Uber could actually cause disruption by creating mobility and then taking it away once the cash runs out.
- trjordan 10y ago
  No it's not. They report they're profitable in larger markets, including all across the US. There is a real opportunity here to push cabs out of the market. The efficiency of driving a cab around and picking up at random is certainly less than an UberPool-style service that is basically constantly giving rides. I'd believe a 20-50% in efficiency. If you don't believe their reports of profitability, that's fine. I don't know how to convince you otherwise. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-the-us-2016-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-t...
  - bduerst 10y ago
    If you narrowly define a scope and cherry pick statistics, you can make anything look profitable. Uber is only profitable if you only look at SF, and ignore taxes paid, interest expenses, and equity issued. So no, by that definition I don't consider Uber to be profitable for a company that lost $1.2B in the same timeframe. SF is also arguably one of the best public transportation markets, so I'm not sure how much Uber contributed to mobility there either.
    - jfoutz 10y ago
      It would be interesting to see the numbers, but those million dollar medallions in New York make me think there's some inefficiency that could be reduced. The whole surge pricing thing was pretty innovative. A regular cab driver shoots to meet their daily quota. If it's raining, they hit that much sooner, and call it a day. There really are fewer cabs when the weather sucks. Or, more accurately, there are many more riders than drivers available.
Lazare 10y ago
> it's shortsighted to say that the problem Uber is addressing isn't an important one. Giving people mobility can have a drastically positive impact on local economies, housing, the environment, etc. In fact it's such an important problem, that there were already a lot of people addressing it. Before Uber I had to use my phone and call a number and talk to a computer that would dispatch a cab to me. Now I use my phone and use an app to talk to a computer that would dispatch a cab to me. Yes, the app is better, but I'm not being "given mobility", I'm being given the freedom to save a couple seconds of effort. Which is, you know, nice. But no, it doesn't have a drastically positive impact on anyone or anything. (And since Uber launched in my area, some of the local taxi companies have launched very credible apps, so even that advantage turned out to be fleeting.)
- brd529 10y ago
  You were blessed with a healthy cab system then. In San Francisco pre-uber, you could not rely on being able to hail a cab if you were not in the financial district. If you called the cab company you would be on hold for 10-30 minutes before you could talk to dispatch, and then maybe the cab would come, but probably not if they found a fare along the way.
  - jsemrau 10y ago
    Sounds like it might still be largely probably an American problem (?), which would explain the overall struggle that Uber is facing? Japan and Europe in general have well working taxi systems. Thus I would challenge if the valuation is really justified...
    - hueving 10y ago
      Well Uber and Lyft fit well anywhere there is a shitty cab system. The entire reason I use them is because I don't want to call someone on the phone, get a cab 15 mins later (if lucky), have the cab take me on an inefficient route to boost the fare, and then claim the credit card reader is broken. Most places in the US don't have a taxi system, they have scammers driving around in cars willing to gouge you for a ride.
6nf 10y ago
Yup and you can do that working for Lyft.
ericthor 10y ago
I agree it's a very important problem no doubt, but Uber aims to solve it in an exclusive way. Exclusive in that it requires the user to be wealthy and technically proficient enough to own and operate a smartphone. Further Uber, from my understanding, is under no obligation to serve all communities. If an area isn't as profitable as they like they can ignore it. If a person's _primary_ concern is making mobility more accessible and affordable for _everyone_ especially the most needy then doing that by improving public transportation systems(buses and rail) and systems that are regulated by the governments(New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission). Those systems are obligated to serve the entire public.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  > it requires the user to be wealthy and technically proficient enough to own and operate a smartphone FYI, you can call an Uber from the web or SMS. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/06/15/no-smartphone-now-you-can-hail-an-uber-via-text-message-textber/#25806e103df9 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/06/15/no-smartpho...
  - ericthor 10y ago
    The third party service described in the article seems to no longer exist. Though if you look through there support information you can find that you can go to m.uber.com to request a ride. https://help.uber.com/h/b9dc6681-b346-4774-9ab1-ecaa3f22cabe https://help.uber.com/h/b9dc6681-b346-4774-9ab1-ecaa3f22cabe I still think my point that it requires upfront wealth and technical proficiency is still valid when related to public transportation systems.
- seattle_spring 10y ago
  2.32 billion people in the world have a smartphone. More people have smartphones than access to clean, reliable water.
  - ericthor 10y ago
    Source of your information? Are you saying that over 2.32 billion people don't have access to clean drinking water? That seems way off. Even though there may 2.32 billion people with smartphones there are large percentages of people who don't even in developed countries. For U.S.in 2015 folks who make less than $30k a year 50%. Folks older than 65 27%. Folks between 50-64 54%. Even if they own a smartphone that doesn't mean that Uber would be accessible to them. Pew Research Poll from 2015 http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/chapter-one-a-portrait-of-smartphone-ownership/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/chapter-one-a-portrait...
aioprisan 10y ago
There are plenty of other companies without toxic cultures doing the exact same thing.
astronautjones 10y ago
But even at the massively subsidized rates they're providing now, it's at least 3x the cost of public transportation (you can't catch a ride for under $6-7. If you're making even 1.5x minimum wage, that's paying over two hours' wage to get to work! And their goal is quite clearly not to lower those rates.
hueving 10y ago
It's not like Uber is doing something unique. As far as I understand it, Lyft is in the same market and doesn't have managers proposition employees for sex on the first day.
- rahoulb 10y ago
  So Uber is doing something unique then?

jonathankoren 10y ago

They solved the Hail A Cab From The Street Problem. The actual ability to be mobile in a city for low cost was already solved with mass transit, and even calling a cab ahead of time. The App For Cabs, is useful compared to the previous world where you stood on the corner waiting for a taxi to stop, but to so say they are solving "mobility" for an great economic good is stretching it. It's a cab company that decided to ditch the cabs and to "contract" with "independent owner-operators" in an effort to circumvent the laws around cabs, and to avoid the hassles of actually having employees and capital expenditures. It's just the Web 2.0 business of plan of "let the users provide the content, and then sell it back to them", applied to physical objects.

JamesBarney 10y ago
This is only true of the densest areas of a couple of the most dense cities.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  You can't get on the phone and call a cab and have it pick you up outside of a large city? That's just not true. My dad worked with a guy that had a suspended license that would commute to work every day in cab, in a rural town of less than 20,000 people.
  - amorphid 10y ago
    Calling a cab in San Francisco is a miserable experience, especially if you're calling from an area that attracts fewer rides. If you can get ahold of a dispatcher, there's no guarantee a cab will even show up. And after making the call, you have no way to assess how long a taxi may take to arrive. With Uber and Lyft, these are not problems. I've never ordered a taxi in a small town, so I can't comment on what that process is like.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Of course you can. I've had two jobs where a cab was part of the commute - one short term (2 months) but daily in Chicago, and I scheduled the cab two hours before I needed it and it would wait at the train station for me, and the other only on Sunday mornings at 5am in Baltimore, and I would schedule it the night before. It was neither difficult nor traumatic as the descriptions of the "problem" that Uber is solving that I see in these Uber threads. I've never driven a car in my 40 years of life, and therefore taken 1000 cabs in a dozen cities, but I've clearly only taken the best ones.
    - linkregister 10y ago
      Baltimore. Good one. Baltimore's cab dispatch system is what prompted me to install Uber and Lyft on my phone. Asking for a pickup two hours from now lead me to get a blaring horn (no doubt waking up my hotel neighbors) 30 minutes later. Asking for a taxi as soon as possible left me waiting for over an hour. One time, the taxi service shamelessly said the drivers changed their mind and wouldn't get me from Amtrak at all. Maybe things have changed since the introduction of these ride sharing apps, but reliability of the Baltimore taxi system used to be atrocious outside of the 5 block radius of the Inner Harbor. If you had said "black car service," I would have believed your story could be representative, but that is simply incongruent with every experience I've had in Baltimore. I tried the 3 major cab companies in Baltimore and had similar experiences with each. I'm not alleging any moral shortcoming, it's just that there was no incentive to improve service to an acceptable level until Uber and Lyft arrived.
  - toast0 10y ago
    You can't get on the phone and call a cab, and expect it to arrive in San Jose; even when the dispatcher tells you it's on it's way, and it'll arrive shortly. Uber shows you where the drivers are before you request a ride, and once you request a ride, it shows you which car was picked for you and that the car is making progress towards the pickup location, and provides a price estimate before you request the pickup. I'd guess I've called in for around 10 cab rides, and have had two experiences where a cab was requested, I was told it would come, and had it not come after waiting for much longer than was reasonable.
    - rrdharan 10y ago
      > Uber shows you where the drivers are before you request a ride Uber doesn't actually show you where the drivers are before you request the ride. Those little animated icons just represent the density of available drivers, not actual car positions.
      - aboodman 10y ago
        Doesn't matter. The animation solves the user problem, which is knowing whether pressing the button is going to result in a cab soon or not soon.
      - linkregister 10y ago
        I've heard this many times on HN. Where is the source material for this? (It just sounds really dishonest for the app to do this)
        awongh 10y ago
        http://mashable.com/2015/07/29/uber-app-accuracy/#bsS69hn3pgqy http://mashable.com/2015/07/29/uber-app-accuracy/#bsS69hn3pg...
        linkregister 10y ago
        The TLDR of this article is that vehicle locations are out-of-date due to latency and no more than eight vehicles are shown at a time.
luca_ing 10y ago
> They solved the Hail A Cab From The Street Problem. [...] The App For Cabs, is useful compared to the previous world where you stood on the corner waiting for a taxi to stop You could already call taxis by phone (including your mobile), as you say. So you are creating something of a false dichotomy. At least where I live, there are also public devices (only in particular places, of course) you can use to hail a cab, in case you somehow don't own a mobile. And apparently mytaxi was founded the same year as Uber, so Uber's idea wasn't quite that unique. I suppose it was just the right time for such services to spring into existence. Uber appears to be the most successful, probably in no small part due to their ruthlessness.

bduerst 10y ago

Yes and no. It's true that they've increased the cheap, on-demand transportation supply, but only because the price is kept artificially competitive through VC-fueled subsidies. Depending on how they pivot to be profitable, Uber could actually cause disruption by creating mobility and then taking it away once the cash runs out.

trjordan 10y ago
No it's not. They report they're profitable in larger markets, including all across the US. There is a real opportunity here to push cabs out of the market. The efficiency of driving a cab around and picking up at random is certainly less than an UberPool-style service that is basically constantly giving rides. I'd believe a 20-50% in efficiency. If you don't believe their reports of profitability, that's fine. I don't know how to convince you otherwise. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-the-us-2016-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-t...
- bduerst 10y ago
  If you narrowly define a scope and cherry pick statistics, you can make anything look profitable. Uber is only profitable if you only look at SF, and ignore taxes paid, interest expenses, and equity issued. So no, by that definition I don't consider Uber to be profitable for a company that lost $1.2B in the same timeframe. SF is also arguably one of the best public transportation markets, so I'm not sure how much Uber contributed to mobility there either.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    It would be interesting to see the numbers, but those million dollar medallions in New York make me think there's some inefficiency that could be reduced. The whole surge pricing thing was pretty innovative. A regular cab driver shoots to meet their daily quota. If it's raining, they hit that much sooner, and call it a day. There really are fewer cabs when the weather sucks. Or, more accurately, there are many more riders than drivers available.

Lazare 10y ago

> it's shortsighted to say that the problem Uber is addressing isn't an important one. Giving people mobility can have a drastically positive impact on local economies, housing, the environment, etc. In fact it's such an important problem, that there were already a lot of people addressing it. Before Uber I had to use my phone and call a number and talk to a computer that would dispatch a cab to me. Now I use my phone and use an app to talk to a computer that would dispatch a cab to me. Yes, the app is better, but I'm not being "given mobility", I'm being given the freedom to save a couple seconds of effort. Which is, you know, nice. But no, it doesn't have a drastically positive impact on anyone or anything. (And since Uber launched in my area, some of the local taxi companies have launched very credible apps, so even that advantage turned out to be fleeting.)

brd529 10y ago
You were blessed with a healthy cab system then. In San Francisco pre-uber, you could not rely on being able to hail a cab if you were not in the financial district. If you called the cab company you would be on hold for 10-30 minutes before you could talk to dispatch, and then maybe the cab would come, but probably not if they found a fare along the way.
- jsemrau 10y ago
  Sounds like it might still be largely probably an American problem (?), which would explain the overall struggle that Uber is facing? Japan and Europe in general have well working taxi systems. Thus I would challenge if the valuation is really justified...
  - hueving 10y ago
    Well Uber and Lyft fit well anywhere there is a shitty cab system. The entire reason I use them is because I don't want to call someone on the phone, get a cab 15 mins later (if lucky), have the cab take me on an inefficient route to boost the fare, and then claim the credit card reader is broken. Most places in the US don't have a taxi system, they have scammers driving around in cars willing to gouge you for a ride.

6nf 10y ago

Yup and you can do that working for Lyft.

ericthor 10y ago

I agree it's a very important problem no doubt, but Uber aims to solve it in an exclusive way. Exclusive in that it requires the user to be wealthy and technically proficient enough to own and operate a smartphone. Further Uber, from my understanding, is under no obligation to serve all communities. If an area isn't as profitable as they like they can ignore it. If a person's _primary_ concern is making mobility more accessible and affordable for _everyone_ especially the most needy then doing that by improving public transportation systems(buses and rail) and systems that are regulated by the governments(New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission). Those systems are obligated to serve the entire public.

dllthomas 10y ago
> it requires the user to be wealthy and technically proficient enough to own and operate a smartphone FYI, you can call an Uber from the web or SMS. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/06/15/no-smartphone-now-you-can-hail-an-uber-via-text-message-textber/#25806e103df9 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/06/15/no-smartpho...
- ericthor 10y ago
  The third party service described in the article seems to no longer exist. Though if you look through there support information you can find that you can go to m.uber.com to request a ride. https://help.uber.com/h/b9dc6681-b346-4774-9ab1-ecaa3f22cabe https://help.uber.com/h/b9dc6681-b346-4774-9ab1-ecaa3f22cabe I still think my point that it requires upfront wealth and technical proficiency is still valid when related to public transportation systems.
seattle_spring 10y ago
2.32 billion people in the world have a smartphone. More people have smartphones than access to clean, reliable water.
- ericthor 10y ago
  Source of your information? Are you saying that over 2.32 billion people don't have access to clean drinking water? That seems way off. Even though there may 2.32 billion people with smartphones there are large percentages of people who don't even in developed countries. For U.S.in 2015 folks who make less than $30k a year 50%. Folks older than 65 27%. Folks between 50-64 54%. Even if they own a smartphone that doesn't mean that Uber would be accessible to them. Pew Research Poll from 2015 http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/chapter-one-a-portrait-of-smartphone-ownership/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/chapter-one-a-portrait...

aioprisan 10y ago

There are plenty of other companies without toxic cultures doing the exact same thing.

astronautjones 10y ago

But even at the massively subsidized rates they're providing now, it's at least 3x the cost of public transportation (you can't catch a ride for under $6-7. If you're making even 1.5x minimum wage, that's paying over two hours' wage to get to work! And their goal is quite clearly not to lower those rates.

hueving 10y ago

It's not like Uber is doing something unique. As far as I understand it, Lyft is in the same market and doesn't have managers proposition employees for sex on the first day.

rahoulb 10y ago
So Uber is doing something unique then?