8 ms·

The Effects of Uber and Lyft in U.S. Cities

meltyness 4y ago
Their definition of TNC is what the rest of the world calls ridesharing. I find this definition hopelessly inadequate and obfuscatory, and suspect the authors of targeting certain classes of conclusions. Maps, Waze, and any autonomous technology obviously fit this definition, and I cant fathom the reason for their exclusion. Namely "governance, governance, environmental, social."
- gfaster 4y ago
  In the policy brief series linked, they do draw a distinction between TNC and ridesharing: > Ridesharing — Ridesharing involves adding passengers to a private trip in which driver and passengers share a destination. Such an arrangement provides additional transportation options for riders while allowing drivers to fill otherwise empty seats in their vehicles. Traditional forms of ridesharing include carpooling and vanpooling. This term is sometimes used to refer to ridesourcing. > Transportation Network Company (TNC) — A company that provides ridesourcing services.
  - ajkjk 4y ago
    They ought to just define the word the way everybody else does. What possible reason could they have not to?
    - meheleventyone 4y ago
      To differentiate the things like car pooling from things like Uber.
    - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
      They're using the definition of "ridesharing" that everyone used before Uber came along. Uber branded itself a "ridesharing" app in order to avoid regulations on taxicabs, despite the fact that what Uber does has nothing to do with ridesharing.
    - dumpsterlid 4y ago
      I think probably because "ridesharing" is a pleasant word that evokes a nice image of people carpooling together instead of conjuring up exploitative, shit companies like Uber
  - meltyness 4y ago
    In the policy brief, they're - not investigating TNCs, by any reasonable definition, the two companies they target are publicly traded companies - exclusively seeking to criticize ridesharing relative to public transit, or as-yet non-feasible means - not framing things in any conceptual framework, ESG is not a conceptual framework it's a political viewpoint about role of government (in this case literally regulatory recommendations) masquerading as a conceptual framework The structure is not investigative, it's persuasive. This is what market manipulation looks like. CMU is situated in an extremely affluent district in Pittsburgh, and this type of behavior is to be expected. Totally beautiful place though, do recommend a visit if you have the time. To repeat, outside the frame: places that didn't have a robust taxi system to begin with, internal operations and transformation capabilities of a tech company controlling taxi and traffic distribution.
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  Similarly, "ridesharing" is a marketing slogan created by Uber to aid their attempts to not have their operations be classified as taxis/cabs in order to evade regulations. Language often targets conclusions!
  - chrischen 4y ago
    A lot of people parroting this line, but I suspect you guys all did not use or were not in the market for Uber or Lyft. Their main offering pre-pandemic was in fact Uber Pool and Lyft Line, which was indeed shared rides. This was extremely popular and was the default option in the app.
    - i_am_proteus 4y ago
      Your suspicions are not correct (I personally hired many taxis through both Uber and Lyft prior to 2020). I challenge your assertion that shared rides were the "main" offering: Uber Pool was 20% of rides in 2016.zero] Use "ride-hailing" or just call these things what they are: taxis. [zero]https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/uber-says-that-20-of-its-rides-globally-are-now-on-uber-pool/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/uber-says-that-20-of-its-r...
      - Izkata 4y ago
        It may not be what people selected, but at least in Lyft it was the default and cheapest option. Pre-2020 all my Lyft rides were shared.
      - chrischen 4y ago
        Your article was from 2016, a mere 2 years after the launch of POOL. Shared rides became the default option and by 2019 I didn’t know a single person that rented out a whole car just for themselves unless they also had a group of people more than 2.
    - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
      > parroting this line The line is true. "Ridesharing" used to mean something completely different. > Their main offering pre-pandemic was in fact Uber Pool and Lyft Line, which was indeed shared rides. First, this used to be known as "splitting a cab," not "ridesharing." Second, Uber was branding its service as "ridesharing" long before it launched Uber Pool. Uber Pool was only added a few years after Uber spread across the US. This article is an example of how "ridesharing" was used in the pre-Uber days: [0]. A typical passage from the article: > It's not that there's a shortage of rideshare sites on the Internet. One of the largest sites in Canada is Carpool.ca, which thousands of people and hundreds of employers and universities use to organize carpools. 0. https://www.thestar.com/business/small_business/leadership/2008/04/28/buddy_can_you_spare_a_ride.html https://www.thestar.com/business/small_business/leadership/2...
- jeffbee 4y ago
  "Ridesharing" is a loaded word promoted by Uber and Lyft to make their computer-dispatched taxi companies sound like something else. There is no reason to adopt the preferred terminology of one side of an issue. Your characterization of this usage as universal is not accurate.
gfaster 4y ago
This isn't too surprising. If the goal is to reduce car ownership (and trips), then my first thought would be that adding ride sharing services could only help if it fills few remaining trips that a robust public transit system can't easily accommodate. Even if on a per trip basis ridesharing has greater externalities, that might be ok if only a small minority of trips need a car in the first place. Of course, that's obviously not true for already car-dependent cities. Other aspects that the linked policy brief mentions also follows, such as ridesharing displacing transit more among more wealthy populations. To me, the most surprising finding is that ridesharing did not lower car ownership even in cities that aren't car-dependent. If I had to hypothesize about why that might be the case, I would say it would probably be due to ridesharing replacing transit, making it worse in turn. Especially since U.S. transit is so bad in general, making it much worse would render it useless in many if not most U.S. cities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  > If I had to hypothesize about why that might be the case, I would say it would probably be due to ridesharing replacing transit, making it worse in turn. I think it's economics & utility. I begrudgingly own a car (and parking). The few times a month I use my car, it would cost way more to Uber than to own my car and drive myself. Not to mention, I think of myself as a pretty bad driver, but most times my Uber drivers are even worse. It's also useful the once a month or so I drive out of the city to camp or go hiking or see family or whatever (don't need to rent a car). It's also useful for the odd shopping trip here & there (and much cheaper than renting a car or Ubering to 5 or different stores, with bags & boxes, etc). I still use Uber a few times a month - when I need to go somewhere where parking is a nightmare. But I mostly just walk & bike & take the train.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Huh, I’m currently in the opposite boat. The cost of ride-sharing a few times a month is so much cheaper than the total cost of owning a car. Like hell it’s less than just the insurance.
Mistletoe 4y ago
Ah, Silicon Valley “helps” humanity again. I don’t want to make a short flippant comment but that’s all there is to say. It’s just shown to be the same old shell game of move money from point A to point B, which is always VC and founders pockets. The engine for the movement being fake innovation and disruption. The 2000s brought real tech innovation and disruption and the 2010s was just mostly fumes and hop-ons enabled by almost infinite cheap money. I don’t say this to be negative. I say it because I know that people that can change this read HN. Your job and choices matter. Make the 2020s a decade of humanity getting better. Increasing congestion in cities, increasing environmental pollution, and increasing rides to higher income portions of the city wasn’t it.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  The disruption is real, it's just that the thing being disrupted is almost always labor or consumer regulations.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I am not sure how price sensitive Uber riders are. But I use Uber exclusively and I would be willing to pay more if that’s what it took for it to be a viable ongoing concern and pay the drivers more. I spoke to a few Uber drivers and a few have told me how much they make for a ride and I tell them how much I was charged. The discrepancy is ridiculous. I have no idea why Uber is losing so much money.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The prices have drifted up to the point where there's often not much of a difference between taxis and Uber/Lyft. Uber can even be more. But, yeah, I never really understood why the Uber strategy forced them to undercut taxis by so much when they were often a better service--especially after it became obvious to just about anyone that large-scale autonomous driving in the dense cities where the economics work best was at least a ways off.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
taxicabjesus 4y ago
The entire innovation of ridesharing was taxi dispatch, with a smartphone. It was only a slight incremental improvement over the existing state-of-the art. More convenient access to "rides" is a bandaid on the mistake of building communities for cars instead of people, with systems that by their very nature concentrate wealth and encourage poverty. I started driving for the taxi company in 2012 [0]. The company already had a GPS-enabled dispatch system. The whole metropolitan area was split into 2 mile x 2 mile Zones. This was how fare dispatching worked from the drivers' POV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVmm3kECLxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVmm3kECLxw @WrathOfGnon comments on traditional development. Ex: "The organic way of city growth: mature cities, rather than growing like a cancer out of their bounds and limits, send out colonies to form new ones. Léon Krier illustrated it thus: [...]" - https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1149093724137242624 https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1149093724137242624 Most of Phoenix was developed in the post-WWII period. Modern Phoenix is entirely dependent on cars and air conditioning. It's not very human-friendly. If our dear leaders wanted to deal with the "transportation" problem, they'd start with the economic insecurity of those at the bottom, who are living from week to week. At the end of my taxi driving period (when my roommate was no longer paying their half of rent), I was driving for 2 weeks to make rent, then 2 weeks for the rest of my expenses. "What an excellent starting line: 'The problem of poverty must, by its very nature, be one of vital importance to any civilized community.'" https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1599036434765451264 https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1599036434765451264 If housing was built around "cooperatives", people's best financial option would be living in a compact environment where you don't need a car, rather than moving out into the suburbs & commuting 1 hour to work. But housing is an exercise in wealth concentration, where the only way for most of us to achieve stability is to participate in the lunacy of single-family-home ownership. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32059201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32059201 (my earlier comment about deciding driving for "Rideshare" companies didn't make financial sense)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > The entire innovation of ridesharing was taxi dispatch, with a smartphone. It was only a slight incremental improvement over the existing state-of-the art. No, we already had taxi dispatch. The innovation was in giving up on the strict numeric quota for how many taxis were allowed to exist.
ttul 4y ago
The problem of congestion is addressed most efficiently through road use taxes that affect all drivers - not just ride sharing services. If cities want to encourage transit use, they must make driving a car more costly and using transit relatively less costly.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- glitchc 4y ago
  A carrot works better than a stick every time. If publuc transit is faster from source to destination, some people will flock to it. If faster and cheaper, many will flock to it. Incentivizing people with time, money and/or experience is far more effective than punitive measures.
  - Steltek 4y ago
    The problem is that drivers perceive removing the existing carrots as applying a stick. If private car owners paid the full cost, transit would be a no brainer. How much public land is devoted to cars? How many DOT employees have jobs only to maintain traffic signals and pave roads?
  - gfaster 4y ago
    The problem is that, at least in the U.S., we have been giving carrot after carrot to car owners in every conceivable way. We've frozen gas taxes, built highways into downtowns, mandated parking on all new construction, zoned to create the ideal environment for cars, and created a trillion-dollar nationalized highway network. Now, when people advocate for public transit carrots, those carrots have to compete with a century of driving carrots and the momentum that this status quo has.
  - leetcrew 4y ago
    maybe this is just my american myopia, but this seems like an unrealistic goal, at least outside of the densest urban centers. I lived in northern virginia for a while, literally 100 feet away from a stop on one of the best public transit systems in the US. inside DC sure, the metro was about as fast as an uber, or even faster for some routes / times of day. but starting from across the river, it often took twice as long by metro. I honestly don't see how they could make transit better than uber without running trains so often as to negate the efficiency advantage of bulk transport. as an engineer, it kinda seems like people are expecting the latency of a synchronous request/reply service, but combined with the throughput of a batch job. surprise! you can't (usually) have both. imo both point-to-point and mass transit have their place. but people are always going to prefer point-to-point when it's economic for them. congestion pricing seems like a reasonable way to preserve the low latency characteristics of point-to-point, while nudging people to use the batch job when it's sufficient for their needs.
tinyhouse 4y ago
Love Uber and Lyft. The main annoying thing is their drivers picking up and dropping off passengers in the middle of the street. But of course I still own a car. I want to travel on the weekends. I cannot take a Lyft to drive an hour to the beach or sometimes longer to go hiking etc. (Not to mention other things like a bike rack etc). Also with young kids that need a car seat it's much worse.
dpflan 4y ago
This is a news-bite-size summary of a policy brief, this is the source policy brief: https://www.cmu.edu/traffic21/research-and-policy-papers/cmu-policy-brief---uber-and-lyft-in-us-cities.pdf https://www.cmu.edu/traffic21/research-and-policy-papers/cmu...
jedberg 4y ago
One thing I will say in their favor is that it if someone dives in I'm sure they will find it was a massive economic boom for late night entertainment venues, especially in Los Angeles and other car dependent cities. When I was younger, going out in LA was a huge pain. You had to figure out who would be the DD, how you would carpool, how you'd get all the cars home in the morning, where you'd park them overnight while you were sleeping off the hangover, etc. Now you just call an Uber/Lyft, everyone can have a drink, and you can all sleep in your own beds that night (or someone else's, whatever floats your boat).
- ugjka 4y ago
  No Taxis in L.A?
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
    I heard of taxis, not sure I saw one anywhere other than the airport.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mk_stjames 4y ago
    You could never get a taxi from a warehouse in LA to the south bay cities at 6AM before uber. You'd get laughed at. You pretty much had to have a place to crash or you're out $100 and you were waiting a while for the cab.
  - kristjansson 4y ago
    None competitive with Uber/Lyft. Too much sprawl to for hailing to be viable, so pre-Uber one would have had to call to request a cab, wait as indeterminate amount of time, risk a no show, all without feedback.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    lol, taxis in the US outside of NYC and maybe the core downtown of a few other cities were a joke. You’d call in to get a cab and they would say someone “should be there in 20-40 mins”. Then there was a 70% of them showing up if it wasn’t around bar closing time and maybe 25% if it was. If you wanted to plan a night out you needed a car service if you wanted reliability and that cost a fortune. That doesn’t even begin to scratch at the “my credit card reader is broken” and “should I take route X, it’s faster” scams nearly every cabbie would pull on you.
xyst 4y ago
> However, TNCs are not a reliable way to reduce car ownership. When TNCs entered U.S. cities, car ownership actually increased in car-dependent and slow-growth cities, and TNCs displaced transit ridership most in cities with high income and fewer children. "Overall, Uber and Lyft affect different kinds of cities differently, and that is important to understanding their impact," said Michalek. This is not good. We need less dependency on cars. Not more. TNCs further dig us into the hole of car centric transportation in the US. I fear we will never truly get walkable cities with alternative forms of transportation. The closest we will get is NYC but even that city is plagued by terrible, and inefficient zoning

Their definition of TNC is what the rest of the world calls ridesharing. I find this definition hopelessly inadequate and obfuscatory, and suspect the authors of targeting certain classes of conclusions. Maps, Waze, and any autonomous technology obviously fit this definition, and I cant fathom the reason for their exclusion. Namely "governance, governance, environmental, social."

gfaster 4y ago
In the policy brief series linked, they do draw a distinction between TNC and ridesharing: > Ridesharing — Ridesharing involves adding passengers to a private trip in which driver and passengers share a destination. Such an arrangement provides additional transportation options for riders while allowing drivers to fill otherwise empty seats in their vehicles. Traditional forms of ridesharing include carpooling and vanpooling. This term is sometimes used to refer to ridesourcing. > Transportation Network Company (TNC) — A company that provides ridesourcing services.
- ajkjk 4y ago
  They ought to just define the word the way everybody else does. What possible reason could they have not to?
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    To differentiate the things like car pooling from things like Uber.
  - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
    They're using the definition of "ridesharing" that everyone used before Uber came along. Uber branded itself a "ridesharing" app in order to avoid regulations on taxicabs, despite the fact that what Uber does has nothing to do with ridesharing.
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    I think probably because "ridesharing" is a pleasant word that evokes a nice image of people carpooling together instead of conjuring up exploitative, shit companies like Uber
- meltyness 4y ago
  In the policy brief, they're - not investigating TNCs, by any reasonable definition, the two companies they target are publicly traded companies - exclusively seeking to criticize ridesharing relative to public transit, or as-yet non-feasible means - not framing things in any conceptual framework, ESG is not a conceptual framework it's a political viewpoint about role of government (in this case literally regulatory recommendations) masquerading as a conceptual framework The structure is not investigative, it's persuasive. This is what market manipulation looks like. CMU is situated in an extremely affluent district in Pittsburgh, and this type of behavior is to be expected. Totally beautiful place though, do recommend a visit if you have the time. To repeat, outside the frame: places that didn't have a robust taxi system to begin with, internal operations and transformation capabilities of a tech company controlling taxi and traffic distribution.
i_am_proteus 4y ago
Similarly, "ridesharing" is a marketing slogan created by Uber to aid their attempts to not have their operations be classified as taxis/cabs in order to evade regulations. Language often targets conclusions!
- chrischen 4y ago
  A lot of people parroting this line, but I suspect you guys all did not use or were not in the market for Uber or Lyft. Their main offering pre-pandemic was in fact Uber Pool and Lyft Line, which was indeed shared rides. This was extremely popular and was the default option in the app.
  - i_am_proteus 4y ago
    Your suspicions are not correct (I personally hired many taxis through both Uber and Lyft prior to 2020). I challenge your assertion that shared rides were the "main" offering: Uber Pool was 20% of rides in 2016.zero] Use "ride-hailing" or just call these things what they are: taxis. [zero]https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/uber-says-that-20-of-its-rides-globally-are-now-on-uber-pool/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/uber-says-that-20-of-its-r...
    - Izkata 4y ago
      It may not be what people selected, but at least in Lyft it was the default and cheapest option. Pre-2020 all my Lyft rides were shared.
    - chrischen 4y ago
      Your article was from 2016, a mere 2 years after the launch of POOL. Shared rides became the default option and by 2019 I didn’t know a single person that rented out a whole car just for themselves unless they also had a group of people more than 2.
  - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
    > parroting this line The line is true. "Ridesharing" used to mean something completely different. > Their main offering pre-pandemic was in fact Uber Pool and Lyft Line, which was indeed shared rides. First, this used to be known as "splitting a cab," not "ridesharing." Second, Uber was branding its service as "ridesharing" long before it launched Uber Pool. Uber Pool was only added a few years after Uber spread across the US. This article is an example of how "ridesharing" was used in the pre-Uber days: [0]. A typical passage from the article: > It's not that there's a shortage of rideshare sites on the Internet. One of the largest sites in Canada is Carpool.ca, which thousands of people and hundreds of employers and universities use to organize carpools. 0. https://www.thestar.com/business/small_business/leadership/2008/04/28/buddy_can_you_spare_a_ride.html https://www.thestar.com/business/small_business/leadership/2...
jeffbee 4y ago
"Ridesharing" is a loaded word promoted by Uber and Lyft to make their computer-dispatched taxi companies sound like something else. There is no reason to adopt the preferred terminology of one side of an issue. Your characterization of this usage as universal is not accurate.

gfaster 4y ago

This isn't too surprising. If the goal is to reduce car ownership (and trips), then my first thought would be that adding ride sharing services could only help if it fills few remaining trips that a robust public transit system can't easily accommodate. Even if on a per trip basis ridesharing has greater externalities, that might be ok if only a small minority of trips need a car in the first place. Of course, that's obviously not true for already car-dependent cities. Other aspects that the linked policy brief mentions also follows, such as ridesharing displacing transit more among more wealthy populations. To me, the most surprising finding is that ridesharing did not lower car ownership even in cities that aren't car-dependent. If I had to hypothesize about why that might be the case, I would say it would probably be due to ridesharing replacing transit, making it worse in turn. Especially since U.S. transit is so bad in general, making it much worse would render it useless in many if not most U.S. cities.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> If I had to hypothesize about why that might be the case, I would say it would probably be due to ridesharing replacing transit, making it worse in turn. I think it's economics & utility. I begrudgingly own a car (and parking). The few times a month I use my car, it would cost way more to Uber than to own my car and drive myself. Not to mention, I think of myself as a pretty bad driver, but most times my Uber drivers are even worse. It's also useful the once a month or so I drive out of the city to camp or go hiking or see family or whatever (don't need to rent a car). It's also useful for the odd shopping trip here & there (and much cheaper than renting a car or Ubering to 5 or different stores, with bags & boxes, etc). I still use Uber a few times a month - when I need to go somewhere where parking is a nightmare. But I mostly just walk & bike & take the train.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Huh, I’m currently in the opposite boat. The cost of ride-sharing a few times a month is so much cheaper than the total cost of owning a car. Like hell it’s less than just the insurance.

Mistletoe 4y ago

Ah, Silicon Valley “helps” humanity again. I don’t want to make a short flippant comment but that’s all there is to say. It’s just shown to be the same old shell game of move money from point A to point B, which is always VC and founders pockets. The engine for the movement being fake innovation and disruption. The 2000s brought real tech innovation and disruption and the 2010s was just mostly fumes and hop-ons enabled by almost infinite cheap money. I don’t say this to be negative. I say it because I know that people that can change this read HN. Your job and choices matter. Make the 2020s a decade of humanity getting better. Increasing congestion in cities, increasing environmental pollution, and increasing rides to higher income portions of the city wasn’t it.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
The disruption is real, it's just that the thing being disrupted is almost always labor or consumer regulations.
scarface74 4y ago
I am not sure how price sensitive Uber riders are. But I use Uber exclusively and I would be willing to pay more if that’s what it took for it to be a viable ongoing concern and pay the drivers more. I spoke to a few Uber drivers and a few have told me how much they make for a ride and I tell them how much I was charged. The discrepancy is ridiculous. I have no idea why Uber is losing so much money.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The prices have drifted up to the point where there's often not much of a difference between taxis and Uber/Lyft. Uber can even be more. But, yeah, I never really understood why the Uber strategy forced them to undercut taxis by so much when they were often a better service--especially after it became obvious to just about anyone that large-scale autonomous driving in the dense cities where the economics work best was at least a ways off.
  - sokoloff 4y ago

taxicabjesus 4y ago

The entire innovation of ridesharing was taxi dispatch, with a smartphone. It was only a slight incremental improvement over the existing state-of-the art. More convenient access to "rides" is a bandaid on the mistake of building communities for cars instead of people, with systems that by their very nature concentrate wealth and encourage poverty. I started driving for the taxi company in 2012 [0]. The company already had a GPS-enabled dispatch system. The whole metropolitan area was split into 2 mile x 2 mile Zones. This was how fare dispatching worked from the drivers' POV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVmm3kECLxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVmm3kECLxw @WrathOfGnon comments on traditional development. Ex: "The organic way of city growth: mature cities, rather than growing like a cancer out of their bounds and limits, send out colonies to form new ones. Léon Krier illustrated it thus: [...]" - https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1149093724137242624 https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1149093724137242624 Most of Phoenix was developed in the post-WWII period. Modern Phoenix is entirely dependent on cars and air conditioning. It's not very human-friendly. If our dear leaders wanted to deal with the "transportation" problem, they'd start with the economic insecurity of those at the bottom, who are living from week to week. At the end of my taxi driving period (when my roommate was no longer paying their half of rent), I was driving for 2 weeks to make rent, then 2 weeks for the rest of my expenses. "What an excellent starting line: 'The problem of poverty must, by its very nature, be one of vital importance to any civilized community.'" https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1599036434765451264 https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1599036434765451264 If housing was built around "cooperatives", people's best financial option would be living in a compact environment where you don't need a car, rather than moving out into the suburbs & commuting 1 hour to work. But housing is an exercise in wealth concentration, where the only way for most of us to achieve stability is to participate in the lunacy of single-family-home ownership. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32059201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32059201 (my earlier comment about deciding driving for "Rideshare" companies didn't make financial sense)

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> The entire innovation of ridesharing was taxi dispatch, with a smartphone. It was only a slight incremental improvement over the existing state-of-the art. No, we already had taxi dispatch. The innovation was in giving up on the strict numeric quota for how many taxis were allowed to exist.

ttul 4y ago

The problem of congestion is addressed most efficiently through road use taxes that affect all drivers - not just ride sharing services. If cities want to encourage transit use, they must make driving a car more costly and using transit relatively less costly.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
glitchc 4y ago
A carrot works better than a stick every time. If publuc transit is faster from source to destination, some people will flock to it. If faster and cheaper, many will flock to it. Incentivizing people with time, money and/or experience is far more effective than punitive measures.
- Steltek 4y ago
  The problem is that drivers perceive removing the existing carrots as applying a stick. If private car owners paid the full cost, transit would be a no brainer. How much public land is devoted to cars? How many DOT employees have jobs only to maintain traffic signals and pave roads?
- gfaster 4y ago
  The problem is that, at least in the U.S., we have been giving carrot after carrot to car owners in every conceivable way. We've frozen gas taxes, built highways into downtowns, mandated parking on all new construction, zoned to create the ideal environment for cars, and created a trillion-dollar nationalized highway network. Now, when people advocate for public transit carrots, those carrots have to compete with a century of driving carrots and the momentum that this status quo has.
- leetcrew 4y ago
  maybe this is just my american myopia, but this seems like an unrealistic goal, at least outside of the densest urban centers. I lived in northern virginia for a while, literally 100 feet away from a stop on one of the best public transit systems in the US. inside DC sure, the metro was about as fast as an uber, or even faster for some routes / times of day. but starting from across the river, it often took twice as long by metro. I honestly don't see how they could make transit better than uber without running trains so often as to negate the efficiency advantage of bulk transport. as an engineer, it kinda seems like people are expecting the latency of a synchronous request/reply service, but combined with the throughput of a batch job. surprise! you can't (usually) have both. imo both point-to-point and mass transit have their place. but people are always going to prefer point-to-point when it's economic for them. congestion pricing seems like a reasonable way to preserve the low latency characteristics of point-to-point, while nudging people to use the batch job when it's sufficient for their needs.

tinyhouse 4y ago

Love Uber and Lyft. The main annoying thing is their drivers picking up and dropping off passengers in the middle of the street. But of course I still own a car. I want to travel on the weekends. I cannot take a Lyft to drive an hour to the beach or sometimes longer to go hiking etc. (Not to mention other things like a bike rack etc). Also with young kids that need a car seat it's much worse.

dpflan 4y ago

This is a news-bite-size summary of a policy brief, this is the source policy brief: https://www.cmu.edu/traffic21/research-and-policy-papers/cmu-policy-brief---uber-and-lyft-in-us-cities.pdf https://www.cmu.edu/traffic21/research-and-policy-papers/cmu...

jedberg 4y ago

One thing I will say in their favor is that it if someone dives in I'm sure they will find it was a massive economic boom for late night entertainment venues, especially in Los Angeles and other car dependent cities. When I was younger, going out in LA was a huge pain. You had to figure out who would be the DD, how you would carpool, how you'd get all the cars home in the morning, where you'd park them overnight while you were sleeping off the hangover, etc. Now you just call an Uber/Lyft, everyone can have a drink, and you can all sleep in your own beds that night (or someone else's, whatever floats your boat).

ugjka 4y ago
No Taxis in L.A?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  I heard of taxis, not sure I saw one anywhere other than the airport.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mk_stjames 4y ago
  You could never get a taxi from a warehouse in LA to the south bay cities at 6AM before uber. You'd get laughed at. You pretty much had to have a place to crash or you're out $100 and you were waiting a while for the cab.
- kristjansson 4y ago
  None competitive with Uber/Lyft. Too much sprawl to for hailing to be viable, so pre-Uber one would have had to call to request a cab, wait as indeterminate amount of time, risk a no show, all without feedback.
- kortilla 4y ago
  lol, taxis in the US outside of NYC and maybe the core downtown of a few other cities were a joke. You’d call in to get a cab and they would say someone “should be there in 20-40 mins”. Then there was a 70% of them showing up if it wasn’t around bar closing time and maybe 25% if it was. If you wanted to plan a night out you needed a car service if you wanted reliability and that cost a fortune. That doesn’t even begin to scratch at the “my credit card reader is broken” and “should I take route X, it’s faster” scams nearly every cabbie would pull on you.

xyst 4y ago

> However, TNCs are not a reliable way to reduce car ownership. When TNCs entered U.S. cities, car ownership actually increased in car-dependent and slow-growth cities, and TNCs displaced transit ridership most in cities with high income and fewer children. "Overall, Uber and Lyft affect different kinds of cities differently, and that is important to understanding their impact," said Michalek. This is not good. We need less dependency on cars. Not more. TNCs further dig us into the hole of car centric transportation in the US. I fear we will never truly get walkable cities with alternative forms of transportation. The closest we will get is NYC but even that city is plagued by terrible, and inefficient zoning