491–500 of 527 posts
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Land Rovers do not drive on sidewalks, for a start.
Have you never seen a car mount the pavement in order to get around a blocking vehicle? Or even to park, straddling the pavement and the road?
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Yes but that's a bus. Public transport is intrinsically a worse and less convenient experience than having a private driver.
Maybe this is true for you where you live, but it is certainly not true in other places.
(Let me just pre-empt someone's example of some billionaire somewhere who loves catching buses, I'm sure there's one out there somewhere.)
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Uber's pricing is definitely too low. I paid $3.75 for a 20 minute ride at one point and decided to stop using it entirely because that just seems like exploitation. I'm completely willing to pay more to give workers better wages. Lyft (and other competitors) not only charge more, but drivers keep more of it.
Isn't Uber heavily subsidizing fares with capital funding? I thought that was part of their monopoly strategy.
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>If _everyone_ used lyft line/uber pool, the vehicles could be larger and more efficient. That's called a bus. If I have to ride in an efficiently routed, high capacity vehicle I'm essentially just riding a bus service with an app that tells me when the next bus is coming. What you're describing is just an upgrade to a public transportation system. There is no reason a well administered city government couldn't do al…
The bus doesn't necessarily go where I want to go, when I want to go there. Uber/Lyft do. At scale, they can do both demand-dispatching and ride-aggregation. > There is no reason a well administered city government couldn't do all of this. It would be great if they did, but I'm surely not holding my breath for everyone to get a well administered city government. In the hypothetical that we're discussing (uber/lyft us…
Hail a cab? You can even use a cab-hailing app? There is nothing magic about Uber/Lyft's service that a municipal taxi service couldn't use.
And an aggregated bus service through Uber isn't going to be any better. Once the VC funding subsidy runs dry and the dream of cheap, point-to-point ride hailing is going to die. You're going to have to learn to walk a few blocks every now and then.
>As long as there's a competitive market with multiple entrants, the cities wouldn't be at the mercy of the private corps.
If you're talking subsidization then it will have to be. Administering tax subsidies or credits for using ride-hailing in lieu of actual public transit would be a nightmare to implement if the market is truly open to any entrant to the market. And there is no reason a city government should want to allow a private corp to skim off the top either.
>But seriously, smartphone penetration is quite high. And how many smartphone users don't carry their phone with them when they go out?
More than you would think. Young people, old people, poor people, mentally handicapped people, people who have been away from power outlets for a while. Foreigners who don't have domestic SIM cards yet.
>Buses aren't a good choice for "everyone" either--they only help people whose trips align with bus lines and schedules.
Bus lines and schedules aren't exogenous. They're put together based on estimations of where the demand for the bus line is. You think people aren't at the mercy of Uber and Lyft's schedules? You call a car and it says you're waiting 15 minutes for the next ride, that's no different than going to the bus stop and seeing that you'll be waiting 15 minutes for the next bus.
Here is how I see it. I rely on those rides to go to work every single day and here what it (would) costs me. Uber: $250 a month.(Majority) Lyft: $500 a month (Whenever Uber is too expensive) Bus : $100 a month (1h:15 for 6 miles and 3 buses... No) Politics and all internal conflicts aside, there is a need for these services whether we like it or not. When I need to make a decision in the morning I take whatever is t…
You can't boil all possible use cases of "transport" down to a single implementation. You can't boil all possible traveller budgets down to a single pricing model. etc. etc. There are many axes for determining the appropriateness of a given mode of transport, for a given person.
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For all of your mega city visits, have you been to Tokyo? If so what did you find unreliable about it? The one criticism I can see is when transport is slowed/halted due to typhoons. I found that the public transportation in most of Japan was well enough, such that I never thought to myself "If only I had a car/rental right now..." Not to mention how punctual the transportation is. Compared to where I live, where del…
How can these trains possibly be profitable with that kind of schedule? In fact I remember reading somewhere that they lose money... Which made me wonder whether that kind of loss is OK and can be waived off as a govt. benefit in lieu of private car ownership. I don't know how the economics would work out, but it would be interesting to see how they compare.
They shouldn't lose too much money or be too expensive to run, but that's the conversation to have, not how much profit they generate.
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> There is a legal distinction between accidentally hitting a pedestrian with your car and intentionally doing so. The difference is between manslaughter and homicide. We take age, sanity, and intent into account, but hitting someone with your car is illegal no matter your mental state. Likewise, tax fraud (intentional) is punished differently than tax negligence (unintentional). In either case, the action is illegal…
I don't follow your argument. This car example seems to qualify under your definition of thought crime.
I mean to say that intent (and other aspects of mental state) can influence the severity of punishment.
It shouldn't determine whether something is legal, however.
Hitting pedestrians ought to be illegal regardless of whether you intended to do it or not.
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If you meant to be sarcastic I still dont get it. If you didnt, why do you attribute the first to the op?
No sarcasm intended. The op chooses to use uber and profit from low cost fares. He pays little and uber is only able to pay out meagre to their drivers. Uber is not profitable, they cannot pay their drivers better without raising the fares. Isn't this a fact? I didn't mean the op personally, but all who use such a service which imho exploit drivers. One chooses to use such a service and has to shoulder part of the re…
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The bus doesn't necessarily go where I want to go, when I want to go there. Uber/Lyft do. At scale, they can do both demand-dispatching and ride-aggregation. > There is no reason a well administered city government couldn't do all of this. It would be great if they did, but I'm surely not holding my breath for everyone to get a well administered city government. In the hypothetical that we're discussing (uber/lyft us…
>The bus doesn't necessarily go where I want to go, when I want to go there. Uber/Lyft do. At scale, they can do both demand-dispatching and ride-aggregation. Hail a cab? You can even use a cab-hailing app? There is nothing magic about Uber/Lyft's service that a municipal taxi service couldn't use. And an aggregated bus service through Uber isn't going to be any better. Once the VC funding subsidy runs dry and the dr…
Are you arguing for or against ride-hailing apps, here? The original comment you replied to was that ride-hailing (as exemplified by uber/lyft) is a much better experience than existing public transit.
> And an aggregated bus service through Uber isn't going to be any better.
Compared to existing public transit (on a set schedule/route), uber/lyft are better because they're demand-dispatched based on where people want to go and when.
> Young people, old people, poor people, mentally handicapped people, people who have been away from power outlets for a while. Foreigners who don't have domestic SIM cards yet.
Many of those people will also have a hard time figuring out which buses (with which combination of transfers) will get them where they want to go. Assuming that public transit even goes where they want to go in the first place.
You're concerned about excluding people, but you're ignoring all the people who are excluded by transit routes/schedules.
> Bus lines and schedules aren't exogenous. They're put together based on estimations of where the demand for the bus line is.
Those estimates are exactly that, estimates, and the resulting routes are subject to lobbying. Plus, the bus lines don't change very often--if they did, it would be very confusing.
But demand-dispatched transportation like uber/lyft know exactly where people are starting from, exactly where they're going, and exactly when. If there's a popular show at a music club, the bus lines aren't going to adapt to that in real time.
> You call a car and it says you're waiting 15 minutes for the next ride, that's no different than going to the bus stop and seeing that you'll be waiting 15 minutes for the next bus.
The difference is that I'm waiting at home rather than waiting at the bus stop. And that the car is going where I want to go, without transfers.