Really? My experience has been extremely different, albeit both of us only really have antidotes. My friends/coworkers who got jobs in the city directly after college all don't have cars. Think 2013-2018 graduates. The only ones with cars, either grew up in the bay, or have worked outside the city at some point. Mind you these are all people who have a license in their prior state/country.
How many of these people would stay in SF if Lyft/Uber were banned entirely?
At first most if not all, but it might play a part in their long term goals. Hard to say though.
To be clear, Uber and Lyft are in cash burn phase, still... Yes, this is essentially still a free market economy but the prices of rides are largely subsidised to bring them to a point where they compete with public transport. That said, public transport is often a last mile problem. How do you get to and from the node, with a baby, in bad weather etc. Public transport is far from ideal and TNCs fill the gap willingl…
To be clear, Uber and Lyft are in cash burn phase, still... Yes, this is essentially still a free market economy but the prices of rides are largely subsidised to bring them to a point where they compete with public transport. That said, public transport is often a last mile problem. How do you get to and from the node, with a baby, in bad weather etc. Public transport is far from ideal and TNCs fill the gap willingl…
> prices of rides are largely subsidised to bring them to a point where they compete with public transport Is this location based? I'm in the UK and my recent trips with Uber have cost around the same as a standard taxi and nowhere near as cheap as a bus would have cost.
> I'm in the UK and my recent trips with Uber have cost around the same as a standard taxi ...
My experience is that they're about 10-20% more expensive on short local trips, but about 20-30% cheaper on medium distance trips, where Uber drivers have the benefit of not having to return to the area where their company operates from.
How exactly would you control for all the rest? Where is there another San Francisco that doesn’t have Uber that we can go measure? I think these estimates pass the sniff test at least. Downtown SF has very little parking relative to demand, so Uber / Lyft are practically the only way to get there in a car.
"Downtown SF has very little parking relative to demand, so Uber / Lyft are practically the only way to get there in a car." So, wait... Your argument is that there is a natural disincentive to go downtown with a car, unless one uses Uber or Lyft... But you also somehow doubt that the car traffic that is downtown has been caused by Uber and/or Lyft? So is everyone an idiot because they just drive around downtown, giv…
My point was actually that the traffic is already relatively self-regulating due to the lack of parking, most people don’t get there by driving. Sure it’s plausible that Uber or Lyft increased the traffic, but it’s difficult to assert that in an alternate universe without Uber or Lyft that more parking would not have been built (attracting more cars), or that you’d have more traffic from cruising (people hunting for parking). Development plays a huge role as well, perhaps Uber has allowed more development than would have been feasible without it, or perhaps all the new development would have happened anyway, either way it’s a complex adaptive system that you can’t easily just say “ah, THIS is the one and only cause.”