21–30 of 64 posts
43% of Americans are now covered by Uber. Seems like they've hit most of the densely populated areas. I'm sure it will take much longer than that to hit the less populated areas, if ever. For most cities (read: not large and dense), Uber will probably not work.
I doubt the automotive pun was intended, but if it was, it's in poor taste, and if it wasn't, it's a nasty oversight - considering the last time people read a headline about an "Uber impact," it was because a little girl was killed. It's extremely important to consider such things in this kind of language.
When I first read the headline I thought it was a press release about an accident.
But I am currently perfectly fine with them running into all the regulatory roadblocks. They have so far shown zero interest in working with the various constituents to figure out what the right structure is for their services. It's easy to say that taxis suck and regulation squashes innovation. But some of this stuff exists for good reason and until Uber acknowledges that, I'm OK with hurdles they are facing.
20k jobs created? Is hired car use really going up that much? If I had to guess, I'd say a handful of new jobs are created while the rest are just taken from existing taxi companies. Not that I think there's anything wrong with that. I just think the stat is pretty misleading.
In major cities like SF and NY, the number of drivers is almost certainly actually increasing, as Uber has basically rendered the medallion (and the protection it provides) somewhere near useless for many classes of fares. Some jobs are certainly being moved from black car and taxi companies who can't compete with Uber on overhead, but the taxi market has been highly regulated to the point of limiting job creation for many years.
20k jobs created? Is hired car use really going up that much? If I had to guess, I'd say a handful of new jobs are created while the rest are just taken from existing taxi companies. Not that I think there's anything wrong with that. I just think the stat is pretty misleading.
This is true of virtually all claimed job creation numbers.
These stats are mindblowing. Uber is available to a little less than half of all Americans and with an average pickup time of < 10 mins. I'm amazed they were able to accomplish this in 4 years. Travis Kalanick is an insane entrepreneur.
Re: jobs created, note that Uber (very specifically, is my guess) allows us to assume FTE when they say "jobs," but is probably more likely referring to the total number of driver profiles created and used at least once. A Daily/Monthly Driver metric would be more meaningful here.
I'd also be interested to see the impact on parking (especially at peak times) if people are using Uber over driving somewhere and leaving their car parked (idle/slack resource) there.
PS - the lack of a footnote attached to (what seems to be a copy/paste) 1 in the subheading is grating haha
While the statistics used to determine the DUI rate in SF and Taxi crime in Chicago are beyond the levels of my knowledge and I can't verify their correctness, the calculations certainly seem a bit suspect. For example, as a pair city when doing a discontinuity test, they chose San Francisco, a city which notably, has Uber. The post doesn't mention a confidence interval or P value in a clear explicit way (outside of the table, with unexplained column headers).[1]
In the infographic, they claim these statistics as facts without mention of any underlying confidence intervals. I'm pro Uber, but this post seems to contain a lot of fuzzy math. It'd be interesting if someone with a statistics background could confirm or deny these suspicions...
That is impressive. Even if you detect fuel and maintenance and health care, it comes to around 50k a year or so. That's quite a bit given that I assume drivers can choose to work flexible hours and possibly not as stressed out (compared to software engineer with 70k salary).
The numbers are not the interesting thing here - Uber seems to get battle-ready for lobby-work.
These numbers - correct or not - will be the ammunition their PR and lobby teams will use in the next months.