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Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#361

Post by Zach_the_Lizard »

TrackerFF wrote: post #337
lacker wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the part where Uber let you get a cab through an app rather than hoping a taxi was driving by and waving your hands at them. It really is a far, far better product when you can get a cab wherever you want, instead of just in a few areas.

Must be a US thing - in Scandinavia you always call the taxi company, and they'll send you a taxi - with time and price estimate. It's been like that since forever.

This is possible in the US as well, but depending on where you live this might take a long time, be expensive, or both. Plus, you get no sense of where the cab is. And sometimes cab drivers refuse to go to your neighborhood.

Uber solves that.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#362

Post by bsder »

toasterlovin wrote: post #237
bsder wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Expense was never really an issue for me. My issue was always summoning the taxi . I was generally operating in secondary markets like Las Vegas off-strip, San Diego, or Pittsburgh. You couldn't schedule your trip to the airport because you never knew when the stupid taxi would show up. While I hate many things about Uber/Lyft/ridesharing, they changed the customer service expectation of the whole field.…

You have to realize how small the group of people is who can regularly afford to hire other people to perform services for them (which is what a taxi is). You're in that group, so the problem for you is convenience of hailing. But most people just can't afford to hire others to perform services for them on a regular basis. And that will never change, since it's inherent to the distribution of incomes in the populatio…

> You have to realize how small the group of people is who can regularly afford to hire other people to perform services for them (which is what a taxi is).

You will note that I picked a specific use case: going to the airport.

For anyone who flies (and lots of people fly for one off events--so you aren't automatically "well-off" just because you have a plane ticket), transportation to the airport is particularly painful because you have a fixed time deadline.

Most of the options really suck--ridesharing is actually the most cost effective of the bunch.

If you take your own car, you have expensive parking and get the joy of the shuttle from long-term parking (often longer than a ridesharing ride). If you order a shuttle, it will be slow and have multiple people and tends not to be well time controlled. If you call a taxi, it may not show up as you don't have tracking or the ability to penalize them. Limos work well but are ferociously expensive if you can't split the cost.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#363

Post by Marsymars »

vkou wrote: post #280
dougmwne wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we're talking about Chicago and this is the very center of normal. There are in fact millions of people who work in the central business districts of the world's most expensive cities. Uber has 75 million riders. If they could actually convince some fraction of those millions of high income urbanites to only use Uber for their transit needs that would yield a disproportionate share of their revenue. It's great th…

I don't have free parking, I pay $150/month for it. But I'm also a wealthy techie who happens to live within spitting distance of a booming downtown. 90% of the people living in my metro area (Seattle) do not pay $150/month for parking (And I'd wager that 99.9% do not pay $400/month for parking). ... And most of those people have commutes of >4 miles. The problem with taxis is that you pay by the mile. You'd be an id…

> Most of your costs with a car are fixed.

A lot, but typically not most - I drive about 12k km per year (16 km commute 2-3 days per week) and over the past six years my fixed costs have been around $7k. My variable costs have averaged $0.26/km for about $16k total. (All CAD)

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#364

Post by Pyxl101 »

CJefferson wrote: post #294
pathseeker wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Law enforcement? Buy your own gun and defend yourself. Firefighters? Buy your own water hose. Exploitive employers? Grow your own backbone. Those first two aren't similar because I don't volunteer to have crime committed against me or for my house to burn down. People voluntarily drive for Uber.

People drive for Uber because Uber forces traditional taxi companies out of business by (a) breaking the law and (b) losing 5.2B.

What laws is Uber breaking, or has it broke? Can you provide a citation? As far as I've been able to determine through research, the claim that Uber was breaking the law is largely a myth.

Most cities have historically not regulated transportation providers where the customer contracts with the provider ahead of time, or they are regulated in a different class and much more leniently than taxis. "Black car" aka livery and limousine services have existed long before Uber, and were not breaking the law in cities where they operated.

Most cities consider taxis to be vehicles that can be hailed by riders at the curb, where the trip is not pre-arranged and the customer has no prior business relationship with the transportation provider. Although Uber now has the ability to book actual taxis in some cities, this is not the category in which Uber historically operated.

Uber was able to grow quickly in part because it tapped into the large established base of private car services. These services existed in cities all over the world, but there was no unified interface to book cars with them. That's the niche that Uber filled. If you talk to many drivers today, they work for these companies (or own their own small company) and use Uber to fill their downtime.

For more information on this, see: "How does Uber overcome taxi medallion regulations?" on Quora: https://www.quora.com/How-does-Uber-overcome-taxi-medallion-...

> Before Uber and ride sharing, not all cars with personal driver for hires were taxis. You also had livery cars (such as limousine or black cabs) and various other systems. In cities that enforce a medallion system, taxis have more rights than livery cars; specifically, they are authorized to respond to street hails, ie to pick a passenger that waves at them from the street. Livery cars only can take a pre-arranged trip. As the number of medallions is limited, the right to take street hails is exclusive to taxis.

> Uber can be used to book taxis in certain markets but the vast majority of Uber trips are not taxi rides. Originally, the Uber service was what is Uber Black today, bringing business to livery cars. The cars were already licensed, insured and authorized to operate. They weren’t allowed to pick up a person on the street (still aren’t) but if a trip was booked to the app, it’s considered pre-arranged. So this didn’t change much from a legal perspective.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#365

Post by mathattack »

coldtea wrote: post #95

Glad they're down, and hope the whole "gig economy" burns down too. Where gig economy = padding the loss of decent jobs by replacing the bottom end with desperate deals where "non employed" employees, without regular salary, benefits, company provided work tools, etc., make a pittance, while the organizing company gets a cut from millions of transactions. In some cases, no jobs is better than subsistence/dead-end/exp…

As a consumer, I love that a company more reliable than taxis exists. My mom has mobility because of Uber and Lyft. If they exploit folks, the drivers should get other jobs. (When it’s automated, there won’t be jobs in which people would be exploited)

For me the issue is unreliability of Services like UberEats.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#366

Post by nullspace »

coldtea wrote: post #313
core-questions wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more and more of this planet's 'productivity' is concentrating more and more in the hands of those who produce the AI automations. Sometimes I think folks who think like this really need to get outside more. Yes, a lot of things are being automated, but (a) consider the janky quality of automation, because it's really not mature yet even in purely-software environments where everything can be controlled, and (b) co…

> Sometimes I think folks who think like this really need to get outside more. Yes, a lot of things are being automated, but (a) consider the janky quality of automation, because it's really not mature yet even in purely-software environments where everything can be controlled, and (b) consider the raw cost of doing it vs. the productivity savings and side effects. That just pushes the problem some decades into the f…

This comment is excellent and needs to be emphasized more.

> Besides, it doesn't have to be perfect. It's enough that it renders a good chunk (say 20-60%) of the population useless job wise to have adverse effects.

Ya - within the US at least (current unemployment around 3%?), it does not even have to be at 20 - 60%. My feeling is that even 10 - 15% unemployment or below living wages would lead to revolts, especially if the unemployment is somewhat geographically concentrated.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#367

Post by nearbuy »

munk-a wrote: post #75

Uber emerged into the market as a disruptor in the absolute worst sense of the world - it was challenging an entrenched industry with low efficiency (cab companies make ungodly amounts of money in some markets) but it did so by playing by a different set of rules - skirting both the disingenuous regulations put in to protect cab companies' profit and those in place for the safety of the general public. Even disregard…

The regulated taxi medallion system wasn't good for drivers either. It was good for medallion owners.

Before Uber, taxi medallions in New York were selling for around $1 million. These pricey medallions tended to get bought up by large companies that could afford the investment. Your driver likely couldn't afford one, so instead, drivers would rent a cab and medallion for about $100 per 12-hour shift, on top of the dispatcher fees.

This system was supposed to restrict the supply of cabs to ensure drivers earned a decent wage. Instead, all the value is extracted by the medallion holders.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#368

Post by scarmig »

sharadov wrote: post #360
Decathect wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth is accruing to people with power and capital. The people who produce automations are laborers like the rest of society, just with a temporarily elevated standard of living. As writing software is deskilled and supplanted, it'll be increasingly apparent that we were just a midterm necessary evil to the people signing our paychecks. To me, the central problem is wealth disparity as a proxy for power disparity: o…

How is Sander's solution different from Yang's? Asking, since I don't know?

Fundamentally, Yang suggests a technocratic approach: pass a certain policy (UBI) that would likely fix lots of things if passed, and then observe it work and adjust as necessary.

Sanders doesn't AFAIK support a UBI, but on top of a slew of left-wing policies, his perspective is that you need a mass movement of people to build institutions that can challenge corporate power.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#369

Post by hos234 »

xster wrote: post #229
coldtea wrote: post #95

Glad they're down, and hope the whole "gig economy" burns down too. Where gig economy = padding the loss of decent jobs by replacing the bottom end with desperate deals where "non employed" employees, without regular salary, benefits, company provided work tools, etc., make a pittance, while the organizing company gets a cut from millions of transactions. In some cases, no jobs is better than subsistence/dead-end/exp…

I think this is what worries me about the "mainstream" debate that might be incorrectly framing the whole problem altogether. Here, the rise of the gig economy came from automation. Not in the caricature sense that there are robot automatons that serve your plates in a restaurant, but in a sense that scalable automated processes replaced human dispatchers that answers your phone calls at the taxi companies and radios…

> change the purpose of life

We are not sophisticated enough to get roads fixed and keep the water supply clean. Long way to go. Don't fall for people who tell you it can happen faster, until they have fixed the roads and cleaned the water in one town.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#370

Post by Marsymars »

bsder wrote: post #362
toasterlovin wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to realize how small the group of people is who can regularly afford to hire other people to perform services for them (which is what a taxi is). You're in that group, so the problem for you is convenience of hailing. But most people just can't afford to hire others to perform services for them on a regular basis. And that will never change, since it's inherent to the distribution of incomes in the populatio…

> You have to realize how small the group of people is who can regularly afford to hire other people to perform services for them (which is what a taxi is). You will note that I picked a specific use case: going to the airport. For anyone who flies (and lots of people fly for one off events--so you aren't automatically "well-off" just because you have a plane ticket), transportation to the airport is particularly pai…

Options differ based on location - at my local airport Car2Go is notably more cost effective than Uber, about half the price. (You do have to shuttle to/from the parking, but I've taken it dozens of times without issue.) Limos (or limo company sedans, if you're solo) are also surprisingly affordable - they operate on a flat rate to/from the airport, which is only $10 more than a typical taxi ride from my house.
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