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I just wanted to drop a note to say I think Uber is doing a good job, all things considered. Many public transit companies have been around for decades and have

I just wanted to drop a note to say I think Uber is doing a good job, all things considered. Many public transit companies have been around for decades and haven't figured out how to scale up to the kind of service Uber is providing. 4B rides in 2017 is pretty amazing. If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares)

Tiktaalik 8y ago
>Many public transit companies have been around for decades and haven't figured out how to scale up to the kind of service Uber is providing This is because these are publicly funded organizations that are starved of funds for political reasons. Public transit works well where it's funded well. It's a political problem, not a technology problem.
- selectodude 8y ago
  Even the best funded public transit services are substantial money losers. Paris covers 70 cents of every dollar, Madrid 60 cents, and even in Berlin and Munich its 30 cents. But that covers 100 percent of their expenses. If Uber had to shell out to fix the streets that they use, I bet it wouldn't be so cheap.
  - Pyxl101 8y ago
    > If Uber had to shell out to fix the streets that they use, I bet it wouldn't be so cheap. Streets are public infrastructure and are paid for by taxes, which Uber and all other companies that do business using roads presumably pay, just like everyone else. So, unless you have a specific reason to believe otherwise, it is fair to assume that yes, Uber is paying for the streets that they use. If streets are not being adequately paid for, then that's a failure of the government that's responsible for them, not the businesses that are using them (streets are there to be used).
    - selectodude 8y ago
      >Uber is paying for the streets that they use. Uber doesn't pay a cent in gas taxes (they're not employees, they're partners, right?), and since they've never made money before, they don't pay a cent in taxes either.
      - woolvalley 8y ago
        The drivers pay gas taxes, and the majority of the revenue goes to the drivers. Therefore car activity that uber induces is also paid for by the customers that use it. Basic induction. What you are doing is like complaining about amazon or the local grocer inducing truck demand and not paying for the roads. It's a bit obvious you have a chip on your shoulder about Uber and ride share companies in general.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Careful about mistaking accounting for economics. If gas taxes were lowered to zero, could Uber increase their share of the ride payment by the current tax amount, without harming their relationship with the drivers? If so, then Uber is paying that tax, not the drivers.
        selectodude 8y ago
        Maybe if gasoline weren't extremely inelastic, your begging the question wouldn't be so ridiculous. I pay $4.00/gal for gas. The gas tax is 18 cents. Under 5 percent. Yes, I suppose Uber could lower their cut by a tenth of a percent and really put some extra change in my pocket!! PS. I have an expensive piece of paper in economics and statistics, but I appreciate you telling me to be careful. Gotta have somebody looking out for me, i suppose.
    - jakecopp 8y ago
      Lets dedicate the same public funding to trains & buses as we do to roads (including accounting for the property value sprawling roads occupy) and then see if public transport is comparable to ride-sharing. There's a reason advanced cities in Europe and Asia invest heavily in mass transit without the expectation of a commercial return, it's simply more space efficient.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    Singapore's public transit system is run as a for profit (two competing companies, in fact), and it's one of the best and cheapest in the world.
    - foepys 8y ago
      Considering that you can't just buy a car in Singapore and need to get a permit to buy one, it better should be the best in the world.
      - megablast 8y ago
        Damn, that is the way it should be in the rest of the world.
    - jpatokal 8y ago
      It's operated by two for-profit companies, but the government paid the massive bill for the construction, sets the fares and even owns the rolling stock (trains) now: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/government-and-smrt-reach-agreement-on-new-rail-financing-framework https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/government-... ...and of course, this being Singapore, the companies in question (SMRT Corp and SBS Transit) are themselves largely owned by various government entities (Temasek etc).
      - dnautics 8y ago
        They are, however, responsible for upkeep and maintenance. Comfortdelgro is not largely owned by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, and I personally like its lines a bit better than the smrt lines.
    - afsina 8y ago
      That is an outlier. Almost all public transportation systems runs on deficit.
      - dnautics 8y ago
  - walterstucco 8y ago
    ATM in Milan rides all the public transport of the area, including buses, trains and trams It also manage the Copenhagen's subway It makes profits
inferiorhuman 8y ago
> If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares) Scaling a mobile app is trivial compared to running a transit company. BART owns/maintains infrastructure (including an underwater tunnel) and vehicles, provides benefits (health, retirement, etc) to their drivers, and operates a multi-jurisdictional police force. Uber meanwhile hired a couple of tech bros (paid largely in stock instead of actual currency), pays their drivers near minimum wage with no benefits (as they're not actually employees), and disregards as many laws as possible (so there's little-to-no cost to enter a new market). It's not surprising they've been able to scale. What's surprising is how expensive their service still is.
- wuunderbar 8y ago
  > tech bros What's your point with this?
  - kevinmgranger 8y ago
    Out of everything in the comment, I think this is the point least worth discussing.
  - andrei_says_ 8y ago
    I imagine a nod at the extremely sexist company culture and the complete absence of a moral compass. This may be related https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
- kemitche 8y ago
  In the same breath you complain that they don't pay their drivers enough and that their service is too expensive. Drivers aren't going to get more than a few percentage points increase without increasing the price to the end user.
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
anon84598 8y ago
Just to totally nitpick your last point, it's worth noting that the BART cost probably includes the entire infrastructure maintenance cost whereas Uber essentially has infrastructure subsidized (i.e., they don't need to pay for maintenance of the roads their cars drive on etc.) so a true comparison of efficiency would result in Uber "costing" more than that.
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  The cost of the infrastructure is in capital and operating costs of the drivers. ie the capital in the cars and the taxes in the fuel (and income tax?). So these costs are passed along in the cost of an uber ride. You did point at something I missed though. Technically every ride is being subsidized by investors (because uber operates at a loss afaik). To whatever extent they're losing money on every ride is a sort of disadvantage to uber ...
- manquer 8y ago
  Unlike bart that infra is shared and taxes are paid by all users . If uber and its drivers are paying lesser than they should for their usage the govt which needs to fix that, however it cannot be said uber is not paying for the infra they use.
- so33 8y ago
  Uber, Lyft, and taxis don't just use subsidized infrastructure, it puts additional strain on that infrastructure compared to even single-occupancy vehicles. Uber cars circle around already heavily-congested roadways looking for fares (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/nyregion/uber-car-congestion-pricing-nyc.html); https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/nyregion/uber-car-congest... this creates congestion. And of course, anecdotally we've all driven behind an Uber car that suddenly pulls over to the side of a traffic lane to let its fare out.
lazyasciiart 8y ago
Public transit companies don't really have the option of scaling up just by adding another city to a dropdown.
duxup 8y ago
>Many public transit companies have been around for decades and haven't figured out how to scale up to the kind of service Uber is providing. Let's see what the long term outcome is for Uber before we give them too many high fives...
lsc 8y ago
>If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares) I think a better comparison than total cost is how much money they are losing. The difference between what I'm paying and what I feel like I'm getting with uber feels like... a lot, and that lines up with everything I've read of their financial situation. If you are willing to lose substantial money on a per-ride basis, sure, you are going to have a pretty nice transit product. (Personally, I'd be pretty okay with the government losing some of my tax money on public transit projects... though I think if the government is gonna do it, I want them to lose the money up front on expensive, durable, high-capacity infrastructure, then come closer to breaking even on a marginal ride basis)
- Shivetya 8y ago
  BART and other big city light rail systems are plagued with billions in deferred maintenance because while politicians love ribbon cutting and pontificating they balk when the bill comes due. Across the US there is about a hundred billion in such deferred maintenance and the vast majority of it is for light rail systems that were built more because they could and sounded good than built where they would be used. Worse, to compensate for the costs bus routes get reduced which just exacerbates problems. hence why we have taxi services, why all cities across the world have taxi and similar services. transit cannot go everywhere nor can it quickly adapt to changes in public needs. buses are the best bet for adapting but services need both rolling stock, drivers, and usage cases, to move whereas taxi and ride sharing services react on need. plus in the current meta where "soon" there will be self driving cars and buses all which are EV it will completely transform public transit. I just hope to be there will it does.
  - lsc 8y ago
    > BART and other big city light rail systems are plagued with billions in deferred maintenance because while politicians love ribbon cutting and pontificating they balk when the bill comes due. Yeah, that is part of why I support systems that lean towards higher up front and lower ongoing costs. >plus in the current meta where "soon" there will be self driving cars and buses all which are EV it will completely transform public transit. I just hope to be there will it does. Self-driving won't help with congestion problems. unshared on-demand vehicles (and it doesn't really matter here if the on-demand vehicle is driven by a human gig economy worker or a computer) help with parking, but if anything, they make congestion worse, as they've gotta drive to pick me up in addition to driving to my destination. (of course, shared on-demand vehicles can help with congestion, at least when they are shared.) The only "game changer" here is that potentially a self-driving uber could be cheaper (either by directly lowering operating costs, or if we get the hang of things, by lowering the number of injuries caused by mistakes.) The problem is that if you charge less, I'm going to use the non-shared on-demand service more often; I only use the shared service to save a few bucks. My point here is that we can probably predict what self driving cars will get us by looking at what heavily subsidized ride sharing services get us. self-driving cars might even get us less; if I could get uber-like point to point without having to park service out of a personally-owned car at a price point that isn't much more than a regular personally-owned car? I'd probably share rides a whole lot less than I do now.

Tiktaalik 8y ago

>Many public transit companies have been around for decades and haven't figured out how to scale up to the kind of service Uber is providing This is because these are publicly funded organizations that are starved of funds for political reasons. Public transit works well where it's funded well. It's a political problem, not a technology problem.

selectodude 8y ago
Even the best funded public transit services are substantial money losers. Paris covers 70 cents of every dollar, Madrid 60 cents, and even in Berlin and Munich its 30 cents. But that covers 100 percent of their expenses. If Uber had to shell out to fix the streets that they use, I bet it wouldn't be so cheap.
- Pyxl101 8y ago
  > If Uber had to shell out to fix the streets that they use, I bet it wouldn't be so cheap. Streets are public infrastructure and are paid for by taxes, which Uber and all other companies that do business using roads presumably pay, just like everyone else. So, unless you have a specific reason to believe otherwise, it is fair to assume that yes, Uber is paying for the streets that they use. If streets are not being adequately paid for, then that's a failure of the government that's responsible for them, not the businesses that are using them (streets are there to be used).
  - selectodude 8y ago
    >Uber is paying for the streets that they use. Uber doesn't pay a cent in gas taxes (they're not employees, they're partners, right?), and since they've never made money before, they don't pay a cent in taxes either.
    - woolvalley 8y ago
      The drivers pay gas taxes, and the majority of the revenue goes to the drivers. Therefore car activity that uber induces is also paid for by the customers that use it. Basic induction. What you are doing is like complaining about amazon or the local grocer inducing truck demand and not paying for the roads. It's a bit obvious you have a chip on your shoulder about Uber and ride share companies in general.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Careful about mistaking accounting for economics. If gas taxes were lowered to zero, could Uber increase their share of the ride payment by the current tax amount, without harming their relationship with the drivers? If so, then Uber is paying that tax, not the drivers.
      - selectodude 8y ago
        Maybe if gasoline weren't extremely inelastic, your begging the question wouldn't be so ridiculous. I pay $4.00/gal for gas. The gas tax is 18 cents. Under 5 percent. Yes, I suppose Uber could lower their cut by a tenth of a percent and really put some extra change in my pocket!! PS. I have an expensive piece of paper in economics and statistics, but I appreciate you telling me to be careful. Gotta have somebody looking out for me, i suppose.
  - jakecopp 8y ago
    Lets dedicate the same public funding to trains & buses as we do to roads (including accounting for the property value sprawling roads occupy) and then see if public transport is comparable to ride-sharing. There's a reason advanced cities in Europe and Asia invest heavily in mass transit without the expectation of a commercial return, it's simply more space efficient.
- dnautics 8y ago
  Singapore's public transit system is run as a for profit (two competing companies, in fact), and it's one of the best and cheapest in the world.
  - foepys 8y ago
    Considering that you can't just buy a car in Singapore and need to get a permit to buy one, it better should be the best in the world.
    - megablast 8y ago
      Damn, that is the way it should be in the rest of the world.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    It's operated by two for-profit companies, but the government paid the massive bill for the construction, sets the fares and even owns the rolling stock (trains) now: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/government-and-smrt-reach-agreement-on-new-rail-financing-framework https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/government-... ...and of course, this being Singapore, the companies in question (SMRT Corp and SBS Transit) are themselves largely owned by various government entities (Temasek etc).
    - dnautics 8y ago
      They are, however, responsible for upkeep and maintenance. Comfortdelgro is not largely owned by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, and I personally like its lines a bit better than the smrt lines.
  - afsina 8y ago
    That is an outlier. Almost all public transportation systems runs on deficit.
    - dnautics 8y ago
- walterstucco 8y ago
  ATM in Milan rides all the public transport of the area, including buses, trains and trams It also manage the Copenhagen's subway It makes profits

inferiorhuman 8y ago

> If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares) Scaling a mobile app is trivial compared to running a transit company. BART owns/maintains infrastructure (including an underwater tunnel) and vehicles, provides benefits (health, retirement, etc) to their drivers, and operates a multi-jurisdictional police force. Uber meanwhile hired a couple of tech bros (paid largely in stock instead of actual currency), pays their drivers near minimum wage with no benefits (as they're not actually employees), and disregards as many laws as possible (so there's little-to-no cost to enter a new market). It's not surprising they've been able to scale. What's surprising is how expensive their service still is.

wuunderbar 8y ago
> tech bros What's your point with this?
- kevinmgranger 8y ago
  Out of everything in the comment, I think this is the point least worth discussing.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  I imagine a nod at the extremely sexist company culture and the complete absence of a moral compass. This may be related https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
kemitche 8y ago
In the same breath you complain that they don't pay their drivers enough and that their service is too expensive. Drivers aren't going to get more than a few percentage points increase without increasing the price to the end user.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago

anon84598 8y ago

Just to totally nitpick your last point, it's worth noting that the BART cost probably includes the entire infrastructure maintenance cost whereas Uber essentially has infrastructure subsidized (i.e., they don't need to pay for maintenance of the roads their cars drive on etc.) so a true comparison of efficiency would result in Uber "costing" more than that.

maerF0x0 8y ago
The cost of the infrastructure is in capital and operating costs of the drivers. ie the capital in the cars and the taxes in the fuel (and income tax?). So these costs are passed along in the cost of an uber ride. You did point at something I missed though. Technically every ride is being subsidized by investors (because uber operates at a loss afaik). To whatever extent they're losing money on every ride is a sort of disadvantage to uber ...
manquer 8y ago
Unlike bart that infra is shared and taxes are paid by all users . If uber and its drivers are paying lesser than they should for their usage the govt which needs to fix that, however it cannot be said uber is not paying for the infra they use.
so33 8y ago
Uber, Lyft, and taxis don't just use subsidized infrastructure, it puts additional strain on that infrastructure compared to even single-occupancy vehicles. Uber cars circle around already heavily-congested roadways looking for fares (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/nyregion/uber-car-congestion-pricing-nyc.html); https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/nyregion/uber-car-congest... this creates congestion. And of course, anecdotally we've all driven behind an Uber car that suddenly pulls over to the side of a traffic lane to let its fare out.

lazyasciiart 8y ago

Public transit companies don't really have the option of scaling up just by adding another city to a dropdown.

duxup 8y ago

>Many public transit companies have been around for decades and haven't figured out how to scale up to the kind of service Uber is providing. Let's see what the long term outcome is for Uber before we give them too many high fives...

lsc 8y ago

>If I understand the math correctly, BART claims about 126 million rides (2015) and cost $906M (~$7 a ride, comparable to some uber pool fares) I think a better comparison than total cost is how much money they are losing. The difference between what I'm paying and what I feel like I'm getting with uber feels like... a lot, and that lines up with everything I've read of their financial situation. If you are willing to lose substantial money on a per-ride basis, sure, you are going to have a pretty nice transit product. (Personally, I'd be pretty okay with the government losing some of my tax money on public transit projects... though I think if the government is gonna do it, I want them to lose the money up front on expensive, durable, high-capacity infrastructure, then come closer to breaking even on a marginal ride basis)

Shivetya 8y ago
BART and other big city light rail systems are plagued with billions in deferred maintenance because while politicians love ribbon cutting and pontificating they balk when the bill comes due. Across the US there is about a hundred billion in such deferred maintenance and the vast majority of it is for light rail systems that were built more because they could and sounded good than built where they would be used. Worse, to compensate for the costs bus routes get reduced which just exacerbates problems. hence why we have taxi services, why all cities across the world have taxi and similar services. transit cannot go everywhere nor can it quickly adapt to changes in public needs. buses are the best bet for adapting but services need both rolling stock, drivers, and usage cases, to move whereas taxi and ride sharing services react on need. plus in the current meta where "soon" there will be self driving cars and buses all which are EV it will completely transform public transit. I just hope to be there will it does.
- lsc 8y ago
  > BART and other big city light rail systems are plagued with billions in deferred maintenance because while politicians love ribbon cutting and pontificating they balk when the bill comes due. Yeah, that is part of why I support systems that lean towards higher up front and lower ongoing costs. >plus in the current meta where "soon" there will be self driving cars and buses all which are EV it will completely transform public transit. I just hope to be there will it does. Self-driving won't help with congestion problems. unshared on-demand vehicles (and it doesn't really matter here if the on-demand vehicle is driven by a human gig economy worker or a computer) help with parking, but if anything, they make congestion worse, as they've gotta drive to pick me up in addition to driving to my destination. (of course, shared on-demand vehicles can help with congestion, at least when they are shared.) The only "game changer" here is that potentially a self-driving uber could be cheaper (either by directly lowering operating costs, or if we get the hang of things, by lowering the number of injuries caused by mistakes.) The problem is that if you charge less, I'm going to use the non-shared on-demand service more often; I only use the shared service to save a few bucks. My point here is that we can probably predict what self driving cars will get us by looking at what heavily subsidized ride sharing services get us. self-driving cars might even get us less; if I could get uber-like point to point without having to park service out of a personally-owned car at a price point that isn't much more than a regular personally-owned car? I'd probably share rides a whole lot less than I do now.