461–470 of 516 posts
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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.
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> I can’t imagine my life without uber. You literally can't imagine your life, if say, you lived in Vancouver?
I have never been there so really I cannot imagine :)...joking aside, I meant it in my current context. This can change in 10 years but honestly I do not enjoy driving in traffic so I am thankful for uber.
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In the past month, I and friends/family have experienced the following with Uber: - Accusations of racism - Dangerous driving - Detours/no idea where they're going - Being held hostage (took 4 very strong demands to be let out) - Given a lecture because the driver couldn't find the address and told if you don't like the service to get out. The grass isn't always greener
Sure, those problems can still exist with Uber - but drivers who cause problems are systematically weeded out over time. I've had my fair share of issues, but it makes a big difference to me that once I give a driver a bad rating/report them to Uber they will never be matched with me again, and if they consistently deliver bad experiences they will eventually be removed altogether. A taxi driver can exhibit the same…
We take taxis quite seriously in England. They are granted licences from the local government (the council). They are overseen by Licensing Officers.
I've only reported a taxi driver once (I can't recall exactly what for, but it wasn't anything too egregious), but it seemed like a swift and thorough investigation. They quicky summoned the driver to their office to explain himself and then gave me a report on the matter.
Customer input seemed to be taken quite seriously.
However, it seems the licensing framework does seem centred around drivers' criminal convictions, so the police would have to be involved in serious matters.
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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…
Uber and lyft are both on the way down. The price at which they need to operate to be profitable is not a price that most americans are ready to pay. As simple as that. For now they delay this reality by subsidizing rides in order to generate business. In some cities like San Francisco, most incentives were removed and among my friends we all stopped using Uber (unless we really have to). It simply became way too exp…
Uber and lyft are both on the way down. The price at which they need to operate to be profitable is not a price that most americans are ready to pay. As simple as that. For now they delay this reality by subsidizing rides in order to generate business. In some cities like San Francisco, most incentives were removed and among my friends we all stopped using Uber (unless we really have to). It simply became way too exp…
Same thing happened with Via in NYC. They used to offer $5 flat rides to anywhere in Manhattan, now prices for the most part are variable and sometimes much more. It was unfortunately too good to be true. They offer a subscription pass that can use pre-tax dollars but for me personally it's not the same.
This is particularly important for industries with large network effects like ridesharing.
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R&D is the only way that they survive in the long term. Uber's entire plan is just to keep hemorrhaging money until autonomous vehicles come online. They just did not expect that to be as hard of a problem as it has turned out to be.
But if autonomous vehicles are ever a thing, where does Uber actually add value? Wouldn’t Tesla etc just “cut out the middleman” and capture that value themselves? Also Uber as a company has zero experience of owning and maintaining a fleet of vehicles. They’ve entirely sidestepped that problem. What evidence is there they can do it better than anyone who does do it, like say Hertz?
The vehicles get told to go from point A to point B and does safely and effectively. Uber still plays the role of interacting with the customers, "booking" a car for them, collecting payments, etc.
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R&D is the only way that they survive in the long term. Uber's entire plan is just to keep hemorrhaging money until autonomous vehicles come online. They just did not expect that to be as hard of a problem as it has turned out to be.
Yeah, that's not going to happen in large parts of the world. Autonomous vehicles will never work in the chaos of Delhi or Jakarta's traffic
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I'm suggesting that ride sharing doesn't have to be a tech company. I just want to get across town, there's no requirement that the company that does this has to fund flying car research or have fancy offices around the globe.
I travel across Asia Pacific for work. The global nature of ride hailing apps are convenient in this context in a similar way to MacDonalds (fast, convenient and you kind of know what you’re going to get). Try hailing a cab in Thailand, Indonesia or Malaysia. They will ask your destination and quote you 5-10x meter fare. Use a ride hailing app and you get approximately the meter fare.
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Uber as a product is very technologically complex, mainly because of the scale it operates at. You can read about some of their tech at https://eng.uber.com .
Only if you want to have a huge and complex system. If you have small and localized ones, it should be very cheap.