Linking my posts in a thread above[0]. The goal of Uber is to earn money by allowing utilization of the massive unused transportation capacity bound up in pers

Linking my posts in a thread above[0]. The goal of Uber is to earn money by allowing utilization of the massive unused transportation capacity bound up in personal vehicles. As detailed in a child post of the linked thread, taxi-driving was not a long-term full time opportunity until many regulations (supported primarily by trolley/streetcar incumbents who could not compete with jitney service and by municipalities who could more readily collect fees/taxes from those incumbents than the jitney ecosystem) forced huge scarcity in the provision of point-to-point on-demand transport. Disclaimer: I am not claiming all was perfect, and the thread linked indicates several of the negatives, and the article[1] referenced in the other thread goes into more detail. The argument is that transportation need not be a full-time job; there is sufficient excess capacity that the primary benefit of Uber/Lyft comes not from providing a new livelihood, but in destroying a large source of deadweight loss (large sunk costs in personal vehicles with often-superfluous carrying capacity). [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8875039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8875039 [1]http://www.jstor.org/discover/724795?sid=21105612783593&uid=3739256&uid=2488599363&uid=3&uid=70&uid=60&uid=2134&uid=3739664&uid=2&uid=2488599353 http://www.jstor.org/discover/724795?sid=21105612783593&uid=...