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People who make economic arguments about how Uber/Lyft are so much more efficient than car ownership don't understand the fact that most car owners care a lot a

People who make economic arguments about how Uber/Lyft are so much more efficient than car ownership don't understand the fact that most car owners care a lot about availability. When I need a car, I want to have it, no questions asked, and no "surge" pricing. Personally, I have lived in big cities both with and without a car, and I would absolutely choose to keep my car and pay for parking if I moved back.

redox99 4y ago
Yep. Owning a car is about availability. You want to go to X place at any time, any place? You can walk to your car and do so immediately. The same happens with private jets. Yes, some first class seats are insanely luxurious. But you will never have the same experience as owning your own jet that you can hop on at a moments notice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I have flown first class and private a few times. IMO international first class is the best flying experience you can get, and beats flying private by a lot (aside from the security...). By the way, I think this is also true of the "luxury" ubers - it's a much better experience than driving.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >By the way, I think this is also true of the "luxury" ubers - it's a much better experience than driving. Well, sure. In general, being driven is better than driving. If money were no object, I would absolutely book a car service for a night in town rather than driving myself. But that would add about $300 to the evening--which I can afford but wouldn't pay just so I didn't need to drive.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      I should have specified that it's much better than even driving luxury cars. In NYC, it can be cheaper too - owning a luxury car in that city is VERY expensive.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        For the most part, I'll take getting driven in a Prius over driving a nice BMW. (And this is especially true in NYC where it's not like I'm zipping along mountain roads.)
- pfortuny 4y ago
  Not only that. Once you are at place X, lots of times you want to do something requiring a car…
standardUser 4y ago
If you live in an area with readily available rideshares, it's even better. It may be 5 minutes instead of "instant", but you'll save some of that 5 minutes by getting dropped off directly at your destination - no parking/walking required. And you don't have to worry about gas. And you can drink if you choose!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The problem with this is that it often isn't only 5 minutes and cheap - I used to live in NYC which had very high uber/lyft/cab density. They still "surged" to 3-4x the normal price almost every weekend evening, and it was often still hard to get a car during peak hours. Edit: Also, valet parking is readily available in NYC, and very convenient.
ghaff 4y ago
I couldn't remotely get by without a car where I live. But even if I lived in a city with good transit I'd [in most cases] still own a car so I could head out of the city for a weekend without a lot of planning, have the car setup the way I like it, etc. I know a couple who live in a city without a car and I hear of their hassles with Zipcar, regular rentals, Uber, etc.--and it really doesn't sound worth it. Maybe right out of school where you do a lot of activities with friends some of whom have cars. (Basically how things worked when I was an undergrad.)
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Having lived in a European city without a car, I would never own a car in a city again. Getting to anywhere within the city was much quicker walking, biking or public transport. If we needed a car for e.g transporting things there were about 10 cars from carsharing services within 5min walk of all sorts of sizes, which could be booked instantly using a mobile app. I would even use these for longer weekend trips, even though you could save some money by using a rental car, but that was typically more hassle. Between the cost of car ownership, parking, petrol and lost time for finding a parking spot we likely saved thousands in the 6 years we lived in the city. And had much better quality of live.
gfaster 4y ago
I'm unsure if anyone is seriously making arguments that dropping in Uber/Lyft into a city like Phoenix, AZ would be much more efficient. Rather, it would hopefully help as an intermediate transportation mode for cities that have a somewhat useful transit system. For those cities, mass transit is the highly available mode. To state the obvious, people can want all the availability in the world, but they don't often get that because of the costs associated with it. Cars are expensive[1], and so is parking[2]. The costs of congestion are also typically only paid for by drivers with time (although many cities are toying with congestion pricing). Of course, the cost calculation for residents changes for different cities; the costs in Manhattan vs in Atlanta are very different. So while you in particular may be able to afford the private cost burdens of car ownership, I believe the convenience of owning a car is a woefully inadequate metric to make policy decisions on. This is all mostly moot anyway as at least according to the original post, ridesharing does not positively impact car ownership. [1]: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/64-billion-massachusetts-vehicle-economy https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/64-billion-massachu... [2]: The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup (ISBN: 1884829988)
- Izkata 4y ago
  Yep, I live in Chicago and it's a cost/convenience scale with Lyft in the middle. Trains/buses are cheapest but take the longest, Lyft costs more but is faster, and driving is even more convenient (say, for groceries) but costs the most, especially if you don't need it very often. Taxis should fit in there somewhere, but I've never used one because public transport was good enough, then when Uber/Lyft came about they hadn't yet come up with anything as convenient (or at least as well publicized).
- kortilla 4y ago
  > For those cities, mass transit is the highly available mode. But what cities are you talking about? In the Bay Area mass transit is absolutely not “highly available”. Nor in LA, nor in Atlanta, etc. There is, to a rough approximation, one city in the US where you can get by without a car and not feel like you are severely restricted on schedule and destinations - NYC.
  - 4y ago
shalmanese 4y ago
On the flip side, one of the things I love the most about ridesharing is that you're always just dropped off at the front door and don't have to worry about availability and quality of parking. Even in the best cases, any moderately popular place is going to involve a winding driving path and a moderate trek through a car park to get to where you actually want to be due to the inherent lack of density of cars. In the worst case, there was a time when a group of 4 of us needed to go from the Mission to Alamo Square and one of us happened to have a car on us which involved a 15 minute drive and then a 30 minute circling of the block looking for parking which finally involved us finding a spot half the distance of just walking to the place we wanted to get to.

redox99 4y ago

Yep. Owning a car is about availability. You want to go to X place at any time, any place? You can walk to your car and do so immediately. The same happens with private jets. Yes, some first class seats are insanely luxurious. But you will never have the same experience as owning your own jet that you can hop on at a moments notice.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pclmulqdq 4y ago
I have flown first class and private a few times. IMO international first class is the best flying experience you can get, and beats flying private by a lot (aside from the security...). By the way, I think this is also true of the "luxury" ubers - it's a much better experience than driving.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >By the way, I think this is also true of the "luxury" ubers - it's a much better experience than driving. Well, sure. In general, being driven is better than driving. If money were no object, I would absolutely book a car service for a night in town rather than driving myself. But that would add about $300 to the evening--which I can afford but wouldn't pay just so I didn't need to drive.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I should have specified that it's much better than even driving luxury cars. In NYC, it can be cheaper too - owning a luxury car in that city is VERY expensive.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      For the most part, I'll take getting driven in a Prius over driving a nice BMW. (And this is especially true in NYC where it's not like I'm zipping along mountain roads.)
pfortuny 4y ago
Not only that. Once you are at place X, lots of times you want to do something requiring a car…

standardUser 4y ago

If you live in an area with readily available rideshares, it's even better. It may be 5 minutes instead of "instant", but you'll save some of that 5 minutes by getting dropped off directly at your destination - no parking/walking required. And you don't have to worry about gas. And you can drink if you choose!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pclmulqdq 4y ago
The problem with this is that it often isn't only 5 minutes and cheap - I used to live in NYC which had very high uber/lyft/cab density. They still "surged" to 3-4x the normal price almost every weekend evening, and it was often still hard to get a car during peak hours. Edit: Also, valet parking is readily available in NYC, and very convenient.

ghaff 4y ago

I couldn't remotely get by without a car where I live. But even if I lived in a city with good transit I'd [in most cases] still own a car so I could head out of the city for a weekend without a lot of planning, have the car setup the way I like it, etc. I know a couple who live in a city without a car and I hear of their hassles with Zipcar, regular rentals, Uber, etc.--and it really doesn't sound worth it. Maybe right out of school where you do a lot of activities with friends some of whom have cars. (Basically how things worked when I was an undergrad.)

cycomanic 4y ago
Having lived in a European city without a car, I would never own a car in a city again. Getting to anywhere within the city was much quicker walking, biking or public transport. If we needed a car for e.g transporting things there were about 10 cars from carsharing services within 5min walk of all sorts of sizes, which could be booked instantly using a mobile app. I would even use these for longer weekend trips, even though you could save some money by using a rental car, but that was typically more hassle. Between the cost of car ownership, parking, petrol and lost time for finding a parking spot we likely saved thousands in the 6 years we lived in the city. And had much better quality of live.

gfaster 4y ago

I'm unsure if anyone is seriously making arguments that dropping in Uber/Lyft into a city like Phoenix, AZ would be much more efficient. Rather, it would hopefully help as an intermediate transportation mode for cities that have a somewhat useful transit system. For those cities, mass transit is the highly available mode. To state the obvious, people can want all the availability in the world, but they don't often get that because of the costs associated with it. Cars are expensive[1], and so is parking[2]. The costs of congestion are also typically only paid for by drivers with time (although many cities are toying with congestion pricing). Of course, the cost calculation for residents changes for different cities; the costs in Manhattan vs in Atlanta are very different. So while you in particular may be able to afford the private cost burdens of car ownership, I believe the convenience of owning a car is a woefully inadequate metric to make policy decisions on. This is all mostly moot anyway as at least according to the original post, ridesharing does not positively impact car ownership. [1]: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/64-billion-massachusetts-vehicle-economy https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/64-billion-massachu... [2]: The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup (ISBN: 1884829988)

Izkata 4y ago
Yep, I live in Chicago and it's a cost/convenience scale with Lyft in the middle. Trains/buses are cheapest but take the longest, Lyft costs more but is faster, and driving is even more convenient (say, for groceries) but costs the most, especially if you don't need it very often. Taxis should fit in there somewhere, but I've never used one because public transport was good enough, then when Uber/Lyft came about they hadn't yet come up with anything as convenient (or at least as well publicized).
kortilla 4y ago
> For those cities, mass transit is the highly available mode. But what cities are you talking about? In the Bay Area mass transit is absolutely not “highly available”. Nor in LA, nor in Atlanta, etc. There is, to a rough approximation, one city in the US where you can get by without a car and not feel like you are severely restricted on schedule and destinations - NYC.
- 4y ago

shalmanese 4y ago

On the flip side, one of the things I love the most about ridesharing is that you're always just dropped off at the front door and don't have to worry about availability and quality of parking. Even in the best cases, any moderately popular place is going to involve a winding driving path and a moderate trek through a car park to get to where you actually want to be due to the inherent lack of density of cars. In the worst case, there was a time when a group of 4 of us needed to go from the Mission to Alamo Square and one of us happened to have a car on us which involved a 15 minute drive and then a 30 minute circling of the block looking for parking which finally involved us finding a spot half the distance of just walking to the place we wanted to get to.