14 ms·

Ride-hailing’s NYC dominance, and the impact of DeleteUber

66 points by lil_tee 9y ago

lkrubner 9y ago
This is one of the more interesting things that I learned from the article: "Uber’s share of all ride-hailing trips has generally declined since 2015 as more competitors entered the NYC market, even as its total number of trips has increased dramatically." That would have me worried, if I was an investor in Uber.
- godzillabrennus 9y ago
  I think in general investors are aware that Uber will need self driving cars to stay relevant. Transportation is going to become a monthly flat rate like a cable bill for local travel via autonomous vehicles and the winners will be the companies that own the fleets and get to charge the tolls. Owning your own car will be a luxury item. Owning a gasoline powered car will be an extremely niche luxury item. Obviously this won’t happen tomorrow but it’s not hard to see the parallels to the horse and buggy industry in this transition. New players will emerge to be the big names in this new industry and Uber investors hope it will be one of the winners.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    >I think in general investors are aware that Uber will need self driving cars to stay relevant. Uber won't have self-driving cars for many years. There's no reason to be long on Uber with everything that's happened to it. Especially if Lyft goes public.
  - y03a 9y ago
    While it seems inevitable, I really hope there's going to be a way to do all this without having to authenticate and link a name, credit card and cell phone. I really don't like the idea of not being to travel more than a few miles without being tracked, I hope enough people feel the same way.
  - badestrand 9y ago
    > Transportation is going to become a monthly flat rate > Owning your own car will be a luxury item. Sorry, but I hate it when people talk about the future like a certainty. It has yet to unfold and many predictions turn out to be wrong. I definitely would not bet against car ownership, especially in the country side. And maybe there will be an open renting framework where everyone can buy a few cars and put them into the system for anybody to rent for a drive. If Uber does not make the self driving software, what would be their role and strength in 20 years?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    That would seem to be a very urbanite view of the world. A lot of people have good reasons for owning their own personalized vehicle. (Gear, kids, mobile storage locker, etc.) So long as you live somewhere with enough space that storing a vehicle isn't expensive/difficult, given that most of the costs are in mileage, it's hard to see most people giving up ownership. And, in any case, full door to door autonomy, in at least most locations, is likely a long ways off. Certainly outside of the relevant horizon for Uber investors.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Urbanization rates continue to rise, what is true yesterday might not be true tomorrow. Also, in much of the world this doesn’t hold even today. The USA (and to a lesser extent Canada and Australia) are unique in private car oriented culture.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        The United States is indeed near the top of the list in percentage of car ownership, but it's pretty high in most of the developed world. Arguably, there's less of a "private car oriented culture" elsewhere but most adults still own cars nonetheless. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/16/car-bike-or-motorcycle-depends-on-where-you-live/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/16/car-bike-or-...
        seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Yes, and they often pay a lot more for parking as well as for things like tolls; let's also not forget the cost of the cars themselves, which can be much more expensive than the states (e.g. Denmark, Singapore) or have crazy fast depreciation rates (e.g. Japan). The economics of these different markets are very Unamerican.
    - isostatic 9y ago
      Kids is a big thing -- needing specific car seats means taxis are out until your kids are 12. That said the average car costs $34k in the US and lasts say 10 years, that's $3,400 a year. Maintenence, taxes, etc another $1500 at least, that's $5k/yr before you move an inch. While automatic cars may not get rid of everything, many 2 or 3 car families, especially in the suburbs, may drop to 1.
  - sschueller 9y ago
    Uber will still be irrelevant even with self driving cars because the automakers will just run their own services without uber. Uber has an app and a user base, that's it.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Let me guess... you live in a city and don't have kids. Come back and make this comment in 5 years. We have monthly flat rate transportation -- it's called a car or a bus. There's no model where trips will be flat rate, because the economics don't work and the marginal value of a trip at a peak time is much higher. There are few <1,000 mile trips that are less expensive on a common carrier than a private car.
- cletus 9y ago
  There are plenty of reasons to worry if you're an investor in Uber but (IMHO) this isn't one of them. NYC is big. Really big (like space). It can support a number of wannabes. But you need a certain number of drivers to be able to serve users and the value of Uber is in the areas where you can't support half a dozen wannabes. For example, I was in Australia recently and discovered that not even Lyft works there (in Perth anyway). This is in a city approaching 2M population and is very much a developed nation (well, except for the Internet). Think about that: that's a ton of people who are being trained to use Uber. When they travel do you think they're going to pick up whatever the local ride-hailing wannabe app is for some specific city? No. Uber has a whole bunch of problems but it's clearly a valuable brand at this point.
  - nugget 9y ago
    > Think about that: that's a ton of people who are being trained to use Uber. Well, they're also being trained to use ridesharing generally. It's pretty low friction to move from Uber to Lyft or another competitor. Think of all the other entry points into that market, like Google or Apple Maps (or any other mapping company) for instance. Once autonomous transportation arrives it also moves from an opex to a capex problem, and that changes the barriers to entry, the headwinds to critical mass, and the competitive landscape significantly.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    I don't know, every local market has always supported loads of private hire firms. It's a very price sensitive market. And Uber's support for cities isn't great anyway, from my experience. Like here in Nottingham Uber doesn't support the suburbs 2 years after arrival. You can go there with Uber, just not come back, no-one's around. A local app with better suburb support is ultimately going to win, as if you can only go one way, Uber becomes annoying.
    - specialist 9y ago
      Forgive my ignorance... How can Uber not support an area? If a both a driver and a passenger in Goldsport Wyoming both have their apps installed, they can't transact?
jdlyga 9y ago
In NYC, Juno is cheaper in most circumstances, and you get better drivers. Otherwise, Via or Lyft. There are so many options instead of cludgey old Uber.
- jbob2000 9y ago
  Thankfully, Uber exists. Otherwise I'd have to download and register on all sorts of dinky city-specific apps any time I travel. Uber, for all of its faults, is the only one that works in every city I've traveled to.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I won't say it's vanishingly small but, relatively speaking, there aren't a huge number of people who have a problem with needing taxi services in a bunch of different cities. I travel about 100 days a year and I don't use these services very much and I don't think I've used Uber in a year or two. Worldwide availability of a brand just doesn't seem like a huge deal.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      There are some places where brands like Uber is extremely valuable, like Manila, where taxis are very apt to rip off free-off-the plane foreigners. Heck, most of SE Asia (there are local services also, but I’d rather not track them down before each trip).
      - ghaff 9y ago
        That may be the case but my point was that hopping off-the-plane in SE Asia and grabbing a cab is not such a routine occurrence for most Westerners as to be a viable business model for VC-backed companies.
        isostatic 9y ago
        Outside of america, how many people routinely travel by taxi/rideshare/etc. In my experience, most locals take public transport. The international businessperson (on expenses) is a large market -- look at the size of the market for hotels, airlines, etc. The one place I see taxis in use as mass transit by normal people is Singapore, where they are mostly ubiquitous (in the centre) and cheap. Even then getting a taxi if you're a couple of miles out (say in Hougang, where I spent a month) is hard work - Uber wasn't perfect but it worked well enough.
throwaway_80bf3 9y ago
7 years ago you'd have to jump into a yellow cab before telling the rider if you were going from Manhattan to Brooklyn or Brooklyn to Brooklyn. If you told them before you got in, they'd speed off. You used to have to walk to arterial roads in hopes of finding a yellow cab (in the outer boroughs). That is if you lived in neighborhoods that the article points out now skews towards Lyft. Well to do, post gentrification areas. If you didn't live in those neighborhoods, forget finding a yellow cab. If you didn't find a yellow cab, you call a car service like Arecibo or Eastern. You say "73 Atlantic Ave, at Hicks st.", they say "10 minutes" and hang up. 25 minutes later a beat up town car with an illegal tint job pulls up, and you walk to the passenger door and knock on the window, or, if the window no longer works, open the rear passenger door -- but you don't get in. Instead you say the neighborhood you are going and the guy sort of waffles and says... 20. You say, forget it and go to close the door (but you don't), he says 18. You say 12, he says 15. You get in the car. Last week you paid 10 for the same ride. The last time I called an UberT, a few years ago, the green taxi pulled up and someone ran over and threatened to fight me since they'd hailed the cab first. That's the last time I messed around with the old way of doing things and it sounds like a lot of New Yorkers feel the same way.
- x_throwaway80bf 9y ago
  I had to make a throwaway as well just because I couldn't believe this comment. This is so utterly false. You're essentially claiming that the value of these services is all based on the innovation of the _hailing_ functionality, but there are countless apps that recreate this functionality _exactly_ whether for 'regular' taxis or separately licensed cars. If what you want is for a driver to come to your exact location very quickly, you can get that _anywhere_. This, as a business model alone, is like Dennis on 30 Rock with his basement coffee business. It's so easy an ubiquitious that it's not worth mentioning as a differentiator _at all_. Separately from this, it ignores the fact that there are cost-based reasons for these kinds of behaviors. Drivers, for example, have to think about round-trip cost. If you ask me to drive you from Washington Sq. Park to Astoria, I have to think about what fare to charge you such that it covers my expenses on the longer trip _as well as_ the likely problem of not picking up a return fare that takes me back to a high-traffic area. This is all discussed with much greater statistical depth in the Naked Capitalism articles on Uber, but the basic problem is that none of the ride hailing services have found a way to make this any cheaper, except through massive subsidy (to pay drivers to be the ride stock in low-profitability zones they others wouldn't be in). And even with an innovation like self-driving cars, it would only make a difference if it is not a commodity. If it is a commodity (which, IMO, is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome for self-driving cars), then either Ubers completely captures all relevant IP for end-to-end commercial solutions ahead of any competitiors, or else Uber is licensing out the cars just like everyone else, and for whatever cost reduction it buys them for getting rid of drivers, it just creates a new price war race to the bottom on who can charge the least for the self-driving based rides. I'm just so tired of all the mental gymnastics defending them. It really is total ownership of all IP for commercial self-driving cars or bust for this business model. And if it busts, you'll see that all the niceties you describe in this comment are mostly the product of either (a) massive investor subsidy, or (b) easy and cheap-to-copy innovations like a map and location-enabled hailing app.
alexggordon 9y ago
So since this information was so hard to pull out of the article, I've summarized it according to the weekly ride-share dominance chart[0]. Pre #DeleteUber, Uber sat at about ~75% of the weekly rideshare dominance. Currently, Uber sits at about ~68.5% of weekly ride share dominance. While it sounds like there were about half a million people that requested their account be deleted, at least in NYC (remember these charts are JUST NYC ride hailing) the campaign has had a negligible impact. Judging by the demographic of people that protest, and are protesting on twitter, I'd be more curious about judging the impact of #DeleteUber by looking at ride-hailing rides around epicenters of people younger than 30. Fortunately though, he covered this also, touching on Lyft's growth in Brooklyn. I'd also be curious about ride hailing stats around universities too. [0] http://cdn.toddwschneider.com/taxi/update2017/ridehail_market_share.png http://cdn.toddwschneider.com/taxi/update2017/ridehail_marke...
Endy 9y ago
See, I guess I'm funny about cabs. For my lifestyle, I mostly ride the MTA - buses, subway, etc. I plan based on that cost and timing. When I've had an interview and needed to take a direct above ground route, I always take a yellow cab. I also make it very visible to the driver that I'm photographing the driver's number and name before I enter the vehicle. I don't do Uber/Lyft because I don't trust their consumer protections as much as I do those from the City or the T&LC. Of course, I also have a prepaid phone & I have no desire to waste my data on hailing a cab. And I prefer to pay in cash where possible.

66 points by lil_tee 9y ago

This is one of the more interesting things that I learned from the article: "Uber’s share of all ride-hailing trips has generally declined since 2015 as more competitors entered the NYC market, even as its total number of trips has increased dramatically." That would have me worried, if I was an investor in Uber.

godzillabrennus 9y ago
I think in general investors are aware that Uber will need self driving cars to stay relevant. Transportation is going to become a monthly flat rate like a cable bill for local travel via autonomous vehicles and the winners will be the companies that own the fleets and get to charge the tolls. Owning your own car will be a luxury item. Owning a gasoline powered car will be an extremely niche luxury item. Obviously this won’t happen tomorrow but it’s not hard to see the parallels to the horse and buggy industry in this transition. New players will emerge to be the big names in this new industry and Uber investors hope it will be one of the winners.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >I think in general investors are aware that Uber will need self driving cars to stay relevant. Uber won't have self-driving cars for many years. There's no reason to be long on Uber with everything that's happened to it. Especially if Lyft goes public.
- y03a 9y ago
  While it seems inevitable, I really hope there's going to be a way to do all this without having to authenticate and link a name, credit card and cell phone. I really don't like the idea of not being to travel more than a few miles without being tracked, I hope enough people feel the same way.
- badestrand 9y ago
  > Transportation is going to become a monthly flat rate > Owning your own car will be a luxury item. Sorry, but I hate it when people talk about the future like a certainty. It has yet to unfold and many predictions turn out to be wrong. I definitely would not bet against car ownership, especially in the country side. And maybe there will be an open renting framework where everyone can buy a few cars and put them into the system for anybody to rent for a drive. If Uber does not make the self driving software, what would be their role and strength in 20 years?
- ghaff 9y ago
  That would seem to be a very urbanite view of the world. A lot of people have good reasons for owning their own personalized vehicle. (Gear, kids, mobile storage locker, etc.) So long as you live somewhere with enough space that storing a vehicle isn't expensive/difficult, given that most of the costs are in mileage, it's hard to see most people giving up ownership. And, in any case, full door to door autonomy, in at least most locations, is likely a long ways off. Certainly outside of the relevant horizon for Uber investors.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Urbanization rates continue to rise, what is true yesterday might not be true tomorrow. Also, in much of the world this doesn’t hold even today. The USA (and to a lesser extent Canada and Australia) are unique in private car oriented culture.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      The United States is indeed near the top of the list in percentage of car ownership, but it's pretty high in most of the developed world. Arguably, there's less of a "private car oriented culture" elsewhere but most adults still own cars nonetheless. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/16/car-bike-or-motorcycle-depends-on-where-you-live/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/16/car-bike-or-...
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Yes, and they often pay a lot more for parking as well as for things like tolls; let's also not forget the cost of the cars themselves, which can be much more expensive than the states (e.g. Denmark, Singapore) or have crazy fast depreciation rates (e.g. Japan). The economics of these different markets are very Unamerican.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    Kids is a big thing -- needing specific car seats means taxis are out until your kids are 12. That said the average car costs $34k in the US and lasts say 10 years, that's $3,400 a year. Maintenence, taxes, etc another $1500 at least, that's $5k/yr before you move an inch. While automatic cars may not get rid of everything, many 2 or 3 car families, especially in the suburbs, may drop to 1.
- sschueller 9y ago
  Uber will still be irrelevant even with self driving cars because the automakers will just run their own services without uber. Uber has an app and a user base, that's it.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Let me guess... you live in a city and don't have kids. Come back and make this comment in 5 years. We have monthly flat rate transportation -- it's called a car or a bus. There's no model where trips will be flat rate, because the economics don't work and the marginal value of a trip at a peak time is much higher. There are few <1,000 mile trips that are less expensive on a common carrier than a private car.
cletus 9y ago
There are plenty of reasons to worry if you're an investor in Uber but (IMHO) this isn't one of them. NYC is big. Really big (like space). It can support a number of wannabes. But you need a certain number of drivers to be able to serve users and the value of Uber is in the areas where you can't support half a dozen wannabes. For example, I was in Australia recently and discovered that not even Lyft works there (in Perth anyway). This is in a city approaching 2M population and is very much a developed nation (well, except for the Internet). Think about that: that's a ton of people who are being trained to use Uber. When they travel do you think they're going to pick up whatever the local ride-hailing wannabe app is for some specific city? No. Uber has a whole bunch of problems but it's clearly a valuable brand at this point.
- nugget 9y ago
  > Think about that: that's a ton of people who are being trained to use Uber. Well, they're also being trained to use ridesharing generally. It's pretty low friction to move from Uber to Lyft or another competitor. Think of all the other entry points into that market, like Google or Apple Maps (or any other mapping company) for instance. Once autonomous transportation arrives it also moves from an opex to a capex problem, and that changes the barriers to entry, the headwinds to critical mass, and the competitive landscape significantly.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  I don't know, every local market has always supported loads of private hire firms. It's a very price sensitive market. And Uber's support for cities isn't great anyway, from my experience. Like here in Nottingham Uber doesn't support the suburbs 2 years after arrival. You can go there with Uber, just not come back, no-one's around. A local app with better suburb support is ultimately going to win, as if you can only go one way, Uber becomes annoying.
  - specialist 9y ago
    Forgive my ignorance... How can Uber not support an area? If a both a driver and a passenger in Goldsport Wyoming both have their apps installed, they can't transact?

jdlyga 9y ago

In NYC, Juno is cheaper in most circumstances, and you get better drivers. Otherwise, Via or Lyft. There are so many options instead of cludgey old Uber.

jbob2000 9y ago
Thankfully, Uber exists. Otherwise I'd have to download and register on all sorts of dinky city-specific apps any time I travel. Uber, for all of its faults, is the only one that works in every city I've traveled to.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I won't say it's vanishingly small but, relatively speaking, there aren't a huge number of people who have a problem with needing taxi services in a bunch of different cities. I travel about 100 days a year and I don't use these services very much and I don't think I've used Uber in a year or two. Worldwide availability of a brand just doesn't seem like a huge deal.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    There are some places where brands like Uber is extremely valuable, like Manila, where taxis are very apt to rip off free-off-the plane foreigners. Heck, most of SE Asia (there are local services also, but I’d rather not track them down before each trip).
    - ghaff 9y ago
      That may be the case but my point was that hopping off-the-plane in SE Asia and grabbing a cab is not such a routine occurrence for most Westerners as to be a viable business model for VC-backed companies.
      - isostatic 9y ago
        Outside of america, how many people routinely travel by taxi/rideshare/etc. In my experience, most locals take public transport. The international businessperson (on expenses) is a large market -- look at the size of the market for hotels, airlines, etc. The one place I see taxis in use as mass transit by normal people is Singapore, where they are mostly ubiquitous (in the centre) and cheap. Even then getting a taxi if you're a couple of miles out (say in Hougang, where I spent a month) is hard work - Uber wasn't perfect but it worked well enough.

throwaway_80bf3 9y ago

7 years ago you'd have to jump into a yellow cab before telling the rider if you were going from Manhattan to Brooklyn or Brooklyn to Brooklyn. If you told them before you got in, they'd speed off. You used to have to walk to arterial roads in hopes of finding a yellow cab (in the outer boroughs). That is if you lived in neighborhoods that the article points out now skews towards Lyft. Well to do, post gentrification areas. If you didn't live in those neighborhoods, forget finding a yellow cab. If you didn't find a yellow cab, you call a car service like Arecibo or Eastern. You say "73 Atlantic Ave, at Hicks st.", they say "10 minutes" and hang up. 25 minutes later a beat up town car with an illegal tint job pulls up, and you walk to the passenger door and knock on the window, or, if the window no longer works, open the rear passenger door -- but you don't get in. Instead you say the neighborhood you are going and the guy sort of waffles and says... 20. You say, forget it and go to close the door (but you don't), he says 18. You say 12, he says 15. You get in the car. Last week you paid 10 for the same ride. The last time I called an UberT, a few years ago, the green taxi pulled up and someone ran over and threatened to fight me since they'd hailed the cab first. That's the last time I messed around with the old way of doing things and it sounds like a lot of New Yorkers feel the same way.

x_throwaway80bf 9y ago
I had to make a throwaway as well just because I couldn't believe this comment. This is so utterly false. You're essentially claiming that the value of these services is all based on the innovation of the _hailing_ functionality, but there are countless apps that recreate this functionality _exactly_ whether for 'regular' taxis or separately licensed cars. If what you want is for a driver to come to your exact location very quickly, you can get that _anywhere_. This, as a business model alone, is like Dennis on 30 Rock with his basement coffee business. It's so easy an ubiquitious that it's not worth mentioning as a differentiator _at all_. Separately from this, it ignores the fact that there are cost-based reasons for these kinds of behaviors. Drivers, for example, have to think about round-trip cost. If you ask me to drive you from Washington Sq. Park to Astoria, I have to think about what fare to charge you such that it covers my expenses on the longer trip _as well as_ the likely problem of not picking up a return fare that takes me back to a high-traffic area. This is all discussed with much greater statistical depth in the Naked Capitalism articles on Uber, but the basic problem is that none of the ride hailing services have found a way to make this any cheaper, except through massive subsidy (to pay drivers to be the ride stock in low-profitability zones they others wouldn't be in). And even with an innovation like self-driving cars, it would only make a difference if it is not a commodity. If it is a commodity (which, IMO, is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome for self-driving cars), then either Ubers completely captures all relevant IP for end-to-end commercial solutions ahead of any competitiors, or else Uber is licensing out the cars just like everyone else, and for whatever cost reduction it buys them for getting rid of drivers, it just creates a new price war race to the bottom on who can charge the least for the self-driving based rides. I'm just so tired of all the mental gymnastics defending them. It really is total ownership of all IP for commercial self-driving cars or bust for this business model. And if it busts, you'll see that all the niceties you describe in this comment are mostly the product of either (a) massive investor subsidy, or (b) easy and cheap-to-copy innovations like a map and location-enabled hailing app.

alexggordon 9y ago

So since this information was so hard to pull out of the article, I've summarized it according to the weekly ride-share dominance chart[0]. Pre #DeleteUber, Uber sat at about ~75% of the weekly rideshare dominance. Currently, Uber sits at about ~68.5% of weekly ride share dominance. While it sounds like there were about half a million people that requested their account be deleted, at least in NYC (remember these charts are JUST NYC ride hailing) the campaign has had a negligible impact. Judging by the demographic of people that protest, and are protesting on twitter, I'd be more curious about judging the impact of #DeleteUber by looking at ride-hailing rides around epicenters of people younger than 30. Fortunately though, he covered this also, touching on Lyft's growth in Brooklyn. I'd also be curious about ride hailing stats around universities too. [0] http://cdn.toddwschneider.com/taxi/update2017/ridehail_market_share.png http://cdn.toddwschneider.com/taxi/update2017/ridehail_marke...

Endy 9y ago

See, I guess I'm funny about cabs. For my lifestyle, I mostly ride the MTA - buses, subway, etc. I plan based on that cost and timing. When I've had an interview and needed to take a direct above ground route, I always take a yellow cab. I also make it very visible to the driver that I'm photographing the driver's number and name before I enter the vehicle. I don't do Uber/Lyft because I don't trust their consumer protections as much as I do those from the City or the T&LC. Of course, I also have a prepaid phone & I have no desire to waste my data on hailing a cab. And I prefer to pay in cash where possible.