Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017 • Hacker News Board

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#411

Post by lmm » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

lhorie wrote: post #410

lmm wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're right, I should just throw my car in the sea. If I also throw out my computer, my grandchildren will be proud that I tried to help bankrupt the ecology-destroying companies that mine rare metals for these gadgets you and I use to waste time online. OR I could just be honest with myself and acknowledge that I'm selfish despite knowing that merely existing is a huge burden on the planet. You can have a sense o…

> you can have sense of proportion Driving three towns over isn't actually that long of a drive, compared to, say, driving downtown from uptown. The sense of proportion comes from the length of the drive. Sure the carousel was nice, but going to the library or the swimming pool is muuuch more appealing on any given weekend. In any case, how far does one take the fun-vs-impact dilemma? Is using a couple of dollars wor…

> In any case, how far does one take the fun-vs-impact dilemma? Is using a couple of dollars worth of gas worse than killing a 7 yr old top-of-food-chain wild predator so we can have a fresh tuna sushi roll? Does it make sense to keep thousands of buses running at 10% capacity 7 days a week when we could all just stay home watching youtube and eating delivered food? One can draw an arbitrary line anywhere but unless they're either an ecological saint or admittedly selfish, there's going to be some amount of hypocrisy in that line.

There are degrees of selfishness; "everyone's somewhat selfish therefore being arbitrarily selfish is fine" is a fallacy. How much ecological impact you consider acceptable is a matter of personal conscience just like how much money you consider it acceptable to spend on personal amusement rather than worthwhile causes, and in the same way there's no clear bright line; rather there's a spectrum from saintdom to niceness to decency to nastiness to evil.

> Wrt taxes, taxing suburb living costs seems totally arbitrary. Even the current income/sales tax system makes more sense imho: spend less == less ecological impact

Pigovian taxes on pollution are mainstream economics orthodoxy. That Georgist land value taxes are optimal and would therefore be better for the economy than income/sales taxes is only slightly less so. It's not about suburbs specifically and it's far from arbitrary.

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#412

Post by kidsil » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #169

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #150

Not sure why so many people here are almost virtue signaling the act of not owning a drivers license. I agree—It's perfectly okay to not own a car if it doesn't make sense to your life situation. That being said, the ability to drive is nevertheless a useful skill and asset and at least in the United States, does not have a very high barrier to entry (for better or worse). There is so much in the United States that a…

It sort of blows my mind. I get that people have different interests and hobbies but the idea that people would live in San Francisco or Seattle and be "I'm fine with mostly just hanging around the city and looking at the mountains from here" is a bit hard for me to digest. And, as I said in another comment, renting a car has frequently been the obvious approach to get to places I need to get to on business trips.

I suppose HN users tend to be people who don't like to go outdoors too much, not THAT surprising.

It's likely that people who like to stay indoors, spend more time on the computer, perhaps coding... perhaps working as a developer...

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#413

Post by astura » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #181

astura wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't be enough for most people - the average mileage driven per year for a male between 20 and 34 is almost $18,000. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

I would guess it's enough when comparing to the people that are dropping car ownership for lyft or uber (especially considering that lyft and uber would be very expensive at those mileages).

While I don't disagree with you the context for this was "spending little on a car without driving a junker."

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#414

Post by astura » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

GhostVII wrote: post #318

astura wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Talk about "bubble mentality," this is the very definition of "white people problems." Kids take the bus all the time with their parents. My brother, sister,and I took the bus all the time with my mom or grandma or occasionally both when we were very young. Sometimes when we'd add in a few cousins too, then we'd be rolling 8+ deep. My parents car was always breaking down and my grandma never learned to drive so…

What does it have to do with white people? And I don't think they were saying that it is impossible to ride the bus with a family, but it is certainly not as nice, especially in places with poor public transit. Try taking public transit when you live a 10 minute drive out of the city, its just not going to work. Ride sharing isn't great because if you have a large family you have to split up, and it's not available e…

"white people problems" is an idiom - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=White%20Peop...

>As defined by the great Louis CK in his concert film "Hilarious", these problems affect Americans in the middle to upper class. This is when your life is so amazing, that you make shit up to be upset about.

Riding on a bus with children is not different from walking on the sidewalk with children, going to the store with children, going to the park with children, going to any public event with children, or simply leaving the house with children.

If you read the thread, the context was about "Cities need to invest in public infrastructure, especially fast efficient public transit" the reply was "you can't ride the bus with children because, idk, they exist?" My post was directed at that reply.

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#415

Post by astura » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

rimliu wrote: post #372

astura wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Talk about "bubble mentality," this is the very definition of "white people problems." Kids take the bus all the time with their parents. My brother, sister,and I took the bus all the time with my mom or grandma or occasionally both when we were very young. Sometimes when we'd add in a few cousins too, then we'd be rolling 8+ deep. My parents car was always breaking down and my grandma never learned to drive so…

It's only non issue if your time is non issue.

I wasn't commenting on the time aspect, I was commenting on "it's difficult to ride the bus with kids, because, uh, they exist."

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#416

Post by astura » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

copperred wrote: post #192

yardie wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet people have to do this everyday out of necessity. The alternative to not driving is not no car, public transport, ride sharing, and car hire all fill a need. BTW, met a few people with marginal income. They totally wrecked their credit by buying a car. They did not foresee the TCO on a car. After loan payments, insurance, gas, and maintenance they were barely keeping afloat. Payday loans finally sank them and…

I feel that many of the uber/lyft drivers are in this position. They squeeze some money out of the asset that they have, but in the long run I don't see how they come out ahead.

Love him or hate him, Mr. Money Mustache figured he's make less than minimum wage driving for Uber

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/22/mr-money-mustache...

That being said, it would make sense to drive for Uber in some small subset of the population: if you enjoy driving and would otherwise just be out joyriding, might as well get paid. Or if you are a student with varying classwork loads or bored people who would rather be doing something than watching TV.

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#417

Post by lhorie » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #411

lhorie wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can have sense of proportion Driving three towns over isn't actually that long of a drive, compared to, say, driving downtown from uptown. The sense of proportion comes from the length of the drive. Sure the carousel was nice, but going to the library or the swimming pool is muuuch more appealing on any given weekend. In any case, how far does one take the fun-vs-impact dilemma? Is using a couple of dollars wor…

> In any case, how far does one take the fun-vs-impact dilemma? Is using a couple of dollars worth of gas worse than killing a 7 yr old top-of-food-chain wild predator so we can have a fresh tuna sushi roll? Does it make sense to keep thousands of buses running at 10% capacity 7 days a week when we could all just stay home watching youtube and eating delivered food? One can draw an arbitrary line anywhere but unless…

> There are degrees of selfishness

I don't think anyone's disputing that. I just find it weird that someone would call out another person's lifestyle as "vacuous consumerism" or whatever when they have their own nowhere-near-ideal-but-somehow-arbitrarily-kosher footprint. You might, for example, recycle but I'm not going to be giving anyone crap if they aren't as meticulous about it as the japanese are.

I keep hearing "well here in europe you don't need a car as much" as if that's some sort of sound argument. I mean, that's great for them, but I don't speak french, dutch and certainly not norwegian, so what, I'm supposed to spend $10k+ to move my whole family there so I can lug around a stroller or a bag full of books on the train for the sake of the planet? Sorry, not gonna happen.

It's easy to be single and tell other people "look, I spend so little, I'm such a model earth dweller". I've been there. Now try doing that while enriching your kids lives, while having a public transit system that doesn't span much further than downtown core, and while having considerations about proximity to family, etc. It's a totally different ball game. And that's my whole point: different people have different lifestyles for various reasons. One's single european lifestyle is not necessarily going to work for someone else living somewhere else with a family. If anything, the "you have car, you bad" attitude is self-absorbed and short-sighted.

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#418

Post by lhorie » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 7:22 PM UTC

cr1895 wrote: post #380

lhorie wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting things delivered to your home is far less exhausting Fair. But on the other hand, having ice cream and meatballs at Ikea is a thing. You also need to account for cost of delivery and for returning things. And that's just ikea-related things we do. > 5 bakeries that I can get to in 5 minutes of bicycling and more restaurants than I could care for That describes downtown of any half decent metropolitan city a…

>you can't do "5 minutes of bycicling" when you have 2 toddlers. I just want to say: come visit the Netherlands sometime. It will surprise you. (granted, the cycling infra is far superior than most other places in the world)

Ah, yeah, I've heard wonders about it. Would love to come visit. But yeah, you're right. When I was in Toronto, cycling from my apartment to work was just a 15 min ride, but it's definitely not something I would've felt safe doing w/ kids on the bike.

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#419

Post by fiftyacorn » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

pricetag wrote: post #401

fiftyacorn wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Id probably get secondhand How far are you cycling? It might be worth upping the price too and going electric

Yeah used is probably my best bet. It’s only 7 miles a day roundtrip.

7 is a perfect distance - what sort of roads? Id tend towards a commuting road bike with panniers, and mudguards/fenders.

Re: Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

#420

Post by pxlpshr » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

hycaria wrote: post #370

pxlpshr wrote: post #194

My wife and I share my Jeep but I tried really hard to be carless in Austin, TX. I even experimented with a variety of Segways (at the expense of many jokes) and alternatives to a bike for the longer-hauls so that I'm not drenched in sweat when I get to the office. [1] I was totally fine when we lived downtown as it's becoming very walkable, but it's pretty impractical when you live even a short distance from the cor…

Stay downtown then. If being carless was so important, that was the way to pursue it.

You speak with so much conviction about living in a shoe box with 3 dogs!