8 ms·
Uber is losing billions and their drivers are making peanuts. That sounds sustainable.
by astrodust 9y ago
Uber is losing billions and their drivers are making peanuts. That sounds sustainable.
- nraynaud 9y agoI am a bit curious about the dockless bike shares too, I suspect the same thing.
- teeteetech 9y agoI'm not as certain about that. Potentially optimistic, but I could imagine bikes taking on a larger role as we move to self driving cars. If you read threads about biking[0], people seem to be motivated to bike more than they are motivated to drive. Although these same people are stymied by negative conditions. Self driving cars could improve biking conditions by opening up roadways, making them safer, providing better point to point transit. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420271
- gpm 9y agoI think I agree with the biking in general, self driving cars will probably make biking a lot safer both by reducing the chances of an idiot running into you, and reducing the number of parked cars on roads (riding beside parked cars is scary, because you are never sure when a door is going to open into you). I don't think that I necessarily agree that this means bike shares will succeed though, I think private bike ownership has a lot going for it.
- nraynaud 9y agoI have a bike and there are bike shares around me. I am still trying to figure out a policy, but I lean towards bike share for everything short, because it’s like a taxi, you don’t need to go back to your bike. But bike share are crappy, so for longer distance I need bigger wheels and gears.
- nraynaud 9y agoI was skeptical about the business model, the bikes cost a lot, are rented for cheap, and for some reasons the companies go head to head in the same towns instead of covering different areas. And if they kill each other and the winner raises the price, I suspect Detroit wins.
- teeteetech 9y agoYeah, the biking model seems fairly easy to speculate on, but sort of hard to pin down. Here's some speculation from a per bike perspective. Revenue daily rides*365*$1 Costs $250 per bike + $15 per month for maintenance + 20% chance of catastrophe amortized over the fleet = ~$500 + rebalancers + insurance + overhead? So maybe 2 rides per bike per day gets them in the green?
- bfuller 9y agoMy city recently got them, and we currently have more bikes than NYC. It was rough at first but people are taking them a lot now, and its increased bicycling in general even outside of bike shares.
- peterwwillis 9y agoIt was never designed to be sustainable. Why does nobody get that yet? The only reason Uber and Lyft work is that there are a ton of people with limited job skills, who have time on their hands, are short on cash, and need to spend their extra time trying to make money. Sure, there may be "bored people" who do this because they're retired or whatever, but that's a tiny minority. Most people do not become part-time cab drivers because it's more fun than what they would normally do with their free time. A significant amount of our economy is dependent on people having two or three or four jobs, and a lot of those people live in or very near to cities, and have cars. If wages improve across the board, or people move farther away from cities, or people get rid of their cars, ride-sharing is screwed. Much of the "gig economy" is dependent on similar conditions. If we had better access to jobs and a living wage, a lot fewer people would be "gigging" to get by. Another reason (there's probably dozens) why the gig economy is incentivised today are things like rising health care costs, rising cost of housing, rising cost of education, and lack of availability to retirement or pensions. We all know we're supposed to save, but it's harder and harder to save. So people have to pick up gigs. My partner is a teacher and gets paid well for her position, but she still has to Airbnb out a room in her home because the insurance, taxes, and mortgage are absolutely insane. If she makes it to 25 years or whatever it is without killing herself from stress, maybe she can finally retire. Except, oh wait, the state isn't funding the teachers' pensions and will run out of money in eight years! Fun. Point is, the gig economy is here because almost every strata of people below "upper-middle-class" have been getting slowly screwed for decades. It's not designed to give people a working income. It's designed to fit into the cracks in the system - and the cracks keep getting bigger.
- azernik 9y agoBut it's not even sustainable for the big companies. Even with screwing over their please-don't-call-them-employees, they still need constant infusions of investor cash to stay afloat.
- s0rce 9y agoIt is also basically a loan against your car, which you pay back either in reduced value when you sell or increased maintenance.
- procinct 9y agoThey are basically biding their time until driverless cars take off it seems.
- seibelj 9y agoDriverless cars in urban areas are decades away
- acmustudent 9y agoI see a lot of driverless ubers here in pittsburgh
- staticassertion 9y agoI saw one yesterday. There was a driver but like... come one, decades?
- seibelj 9y agoWhen driverless cars are common on midwestern highways every night, they will start moving into complex urban areas. We are very far from cars navigating downtown NYC, Seattle, SF, Boston, etc.
- woah 9y agoDo you live in NYC, Seattle, SF, or Boston?
- seibelj 9y agoYes, Boston, and when can I order my driverless car to pick me up?
- gpm 9y agoA few months ago if you ignore the safety driver [0]. If cars with safety drivers don't count, nearly a year ago if you move to Pheonix and get lucky [1]. They're apparently planning to launch in more cities "soon" (though I can't find a list or date) [2] and they've recently got permission to start charging passengers and intend to by the end of they year [3]. So I think "decades" is an exaggeration. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16742924/lyft-nutonomy-boston-self-driving-car https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16742924/lyft-nutonomy-bo... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15415840/waymo-self-driving-minivan-early-rider-phoenix https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15415840/waymo-self-drivi... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/waymo-maintains-huge-lead-in-self-driving-car-race/552059/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/waymo... [3] https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-now-a-full-ride-hailing-service/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-now-a-full-ride-hai...
- maxharris 9y agoIt's sustainable because we're on the cusp of the autonomous vehicle revolution. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/technology/driverless-cars-california-rules.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/technology/driverless-car... This is similar to how the huge army of people stuffing DVDs into envelopes at Netflix is going away. It might be slow, but I don't think there will be tons of people watching DVDs from them in 2030... https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/netflix-dvd-business-still-alive-what-is-it-like-to-work-there.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/netflix-dvd-business-still-a...
- astrodust 9y agoI hope you realize that ripping DVDs and putting them up for streaming is pretty easy, everyone was doing it before Netflix was, compared to having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that can safely operate in a multitude of urban environments, something nobody has ever done before. You have to question the leadership of a company that's willing to throw untold billions and counting on a long-shot bet that they'll eventually have these magical cars and everything will be fine. Once Uber can do it, soon afterwards everyone can, and what makes you think Uber will do it better when they've already had to give up so much to invent their own self-driving car solution? Their business model is completely ridiculous.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- felixk42 9y agoSelf driving cars have nothing to do with what Uber has been up to, and having a lot of cash isn't really a competitive advantage when your competitors are Google, Tesla and other car manufactures.
- astrodust 9y agoUber has a lot of cash by taxi standards, but nothing compared to car manufacturer standards.
- 9y ago
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoeventually they will raise prices, and hope everyone is out of business who competes with them.
- astrodust 9y agoThere's so much irony here. The only way they'll be able to maintain a monopoly is with regulation, and they're the first to ignore regulations. If in the future they get their coveted monopoly, won't it be sweet when someone flouts the rules and undercuts them?
- kawsper 9y agoYour comment made me remember that Richard Stallman calls Uber for Guber (Refering to Goober; another word for a peanut), because they pay peanuts to their drivers.