Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

there it is: kalanick resigns

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick.html

Also tipping coming to Uber.

that'll be their excuse for not paying drivers at all

I mean maybe if 20 of their high level bros and the CEO leave the company might change culture a little bit but the business model isn't any less fucked

Last month I was reeling that Comey is 6'8. That's over. I'm now consumed with this. Consumed pic.twitter.com/32juOosxim

— Jenn (@jenndangerous) June 21, 2017

omfg

honest question for the "Uber's business model is unsustainable" crowd: what made taxis sustainable?

in most of the world outside the US, uber is significantly cheaper than taxis. that's subsidized by VCs.

is it? iirc there was an error in the widely-cited naked capitalism blog / Isabella Kaminska FT posts that claimed that

what happens in the us? They just lose money?

also subsidized by vc's doesn't imply unsustainable. sometimes things are subsidized by VCs until they are not

ok anecdotally everywhere i've been outside the US uber is cheaper than cabs.

subsidized by vcs is not ipso facto unsustainable, but you're playing with fire when you let your valuation get up to $70bn on a loss leader with no path to profitability, no defensible position (hence lyft, juno, etc.). their out, the self-driving research, is in dire legal straits.

but this is like criticizing the foundations of a building while it's on fire and people are running out of the front door.

the explanation i heard is that one of the reasons there is not a national taxi company is precisely because it wouldn't be profitable on a large scale, because of the overhead?

not sure why (or if) they can be profitable on a local scale.

xp

in Bordeaux they are definitely more expensive

i haven't used them since i got JACKED by an uber fare in october

also they're evil obv

but i'll admit it did kinda take that to get me steamed enough to delete the app

xxp that's close to a tautology unless VC funds are terminally stupid

sorry, that was a xpost to flopson. while there's again a race to the bottom on VC funding where companies are traded back and forth and repeatedly sold without ever making money, reality eventually has to dictate that at least some of the funded companies make money. or you find more idiots to fund VC firms pyramid scheme style

follow-up question...

Imo best case scenario Uber dies and some kind of open platform for rideshares where drivers can make up their own fares (and maybe some intermediary takes care of rating for a small cut) and keep 99.9% of the money. a platform makes sense as it takes away the winner-take-all network externality that gives uber pricing power...

so this seems desirable but also i have the feeling it's improbable (for reasons I suspect more complicated than ~capitalism~ but like, also that) can "we" actually get there?

rideaustin is leading the way there. they're a non profit. they're doing great, but they're in a weird position: market with a lot of potential and uber and lyft are banned.

interesting! wonder how they deal with the cabs. I'm moving to a city where Uber is banned in August

I was kind of thinking of that for a business model the other day -- come up with businesses (or even better, non-profits) that create products to disrupt the disruptors

in the case of uber, you'd do the mapping/apps/payment structure, but also do the due diligence of coming up with an ad hoc standard legal framework that cities could sign on to. so anyone who wanted to run a uber-like franchise in a given city would pay for your service. if that means relatively deregulated individual operators in cities with few cabs, then it'd be closer to uber's model. if it was a larger city with licensing requirements, you'd sell to the companies in the space

god I wish uber was banned in SF, they've made navigating the city a total nightmare

it's so convenient to call for a cab from anywhere in the philly metro area and get a ride in 5 min to anywhere honestly i'd happily pay more for the convenience. i worry that once uber is dead i'll just stop using taxis again.

I was kind of thinking of that for a business model the other day -- come up with businesses (or even better, non-profits) that create products to disrupt the disruptors

in the case of uber, you'd do the mapping/apps/payment structure, but also do the due diligence of coming up with an ad hoc standard legal framework that cities could sign on to. so anyone who wanted to run a uber-like franchise in a given city would pay for your service. if that means relatively deregulated individual operators in cities with few cabs, then it'd be closer to uber's model. if it was a larger city with licensing requirements, you'd sell to the companies in the space

do it

my idea was, you open the app, specify destination, notification goes out to available drivers, who have 30 seconds to respond, lowest bid gets the fare (or customer sees all fares next to driver scores/proximity and chooses)

that's the thing with uber, they have several pieces of their business they could easily separate but they're strongly linked together in order to wedge themselves into markets

roughly:
- sign-up for drivers and minimal due diligence (background check, proof of insurance, etc)
- disruption of existing transport model via skirting ad hoc and legal restrictions on the number of available cars available for paid transport (taxi licensing in NYC, allowing drivers to set their own schedules)
- single payment model
- standardizing different vehicles type/sizes for request
- technical framework to allow drivers to announce availability and passengers to request a ride

why are licensing restrictions / restrictions on number of available cars good?

flopson, that's a ridiculously encumbered system! uber's ratings system is garbage in many ways, but it glosses over a lot of the selection criteria in order to do the logical thing: provide you with a ride that meets your base requirements

having adjustable fares for different drivers without basing it on amenities is useless. basing it on some sort of "driver quality" is useless. if you have a preference for a certain driver or custom type of car, we're exactly back to the taxi system where you might have a cab you usually take and you make arrangements with your dude to be available to give you a ride

I mean, maybe that's an option and you give the ability to request a particular driver at a particular time

in SF the number of cars on the street at any given time has skyrocketed because of ride services, it has increased traffic and is super-fucking annoying

xp

why are licensing restrictions / restrictions on number of available cars good?

― Mordy, Wednesday, June 21, 2017 1:48 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you end up with burst events in city centers (or worse, other areas with limited road space) when major events end, where the number of cars on the road exceeds the traffic planning and the algorithmic pricing goes through the roof and the traffic slows to the point where half the number of cars, each making two trips, would be faster than the full number of cars attempting to make one trip

the point is not to have Uber die and go back to the shitty pre-Uber cabs situation, but to go to something better, what could have been possible before capital got its grubby hands on it and forced it into a natural monopoly w/ network externality

or unintended consequences: when uber came to my area, it was a few years after a revitalized bar area opened up downtown. prior to uber, there was a taxi stand on one corner. people would form a line, cars would line up on the side of a major street that wasn't directly in front of the bars, and the taxi company employed a security guy to make sure drunks didn't get in fights

as soon as uber became dominant, the taxi stand shut down, people started waiting all along the block directly in front of bars, and there was no orderly line or security. if people staggered their departure times it might be fine, but bars close at 2am

flopson, that's a ridiculously encumbered system! uber's ratings system is garbage in many ways, but it glosses over a lot of the selection criteria in order to do the logical thing: provide you with a ride that meets your base requirements

having adjustable fares for different drivers without basing it on amenities is useless. basing it on some sort of "driver quality" is useless. if you have a preference for a certain driver or custom type of car, we're exactly back to the taxi system where you might have a cab you usually take and you make arrangements with your dude to be available to give you a ride

I mean, maybe that's an option and you give the ability to request a particular driver at a particular time

I think you misunderstood my post but I'm on my phone so I don't want to type it again. my system is easy peasy. request ride, get some offers within 30 secs, choose the rider/proximity/fare you like best

waiting in a line sounds bad mh, let the drumks fight cmon

cities are taking a good look at how they license private transportation providers and where they can pick up passengers, and taxi companies are figuring out shit needs to change

if we had decent national policy guidance, or if transportation dollars went into research instead of barely maintaining a decaying road infrastructure things might not have gone this way

why would I not always pick the cheapest/closest driver?

the driver ratings would need to be normalized, and that becomes your problem, because if there are publicly available driver ratings it turns into yelp

in SF the number of cars on the street at any given time has skyrocketed because of ride services, it has increased traffic and is super-fucking annoying

xp

― Οὖτις,

I have friends in Long Beach who are super fed up with this shit

we're running toward the ideal vision where everyone drives for uber six days a week, goes out for dinner/drinks on the seventh, and takes an uber home

it's so irritating, instead of taking cars *off* the street in SF you have all these people driving their cars in from out-of-town to make money, resulting in several thousand more cars on the street than pre-uber, and they don't know how to drive in the city, they double-park everywhere (even in intersections!), it drives me up the fucking wall

tbf eventually the city will have to spend all its money maintaining local streets due to the extra wear, and when the people go to drive home the bridges will collapse from lack of maintenance

why would I not always pick the cheapest/closest driver?

the cheapest will often not be the closest that's the point. let's say you're far from second nearest cab, nearest guy can charge you more. drivers see each other on the map, gives them incentive to spread out

i agree ratings would have to be normalized. could be done by an intermediary or in-house

so they have a race to evaluate a distance number, your location, maybe your destination, and provide a quote for rate?

you might have a future in the gamification of commerce

drivers probably know those numbers quite well. but an app could come up with a preliminary fare which they could scale by a factor. also, you laugh but in most of the world cab fares are negotiated by drivers on the spot!

in most of the world cab fares are negotiated by drivers on the spot!

yup, and this never bothered me tbh

prices set by bosses who take a cut even though they offer nothing. my idea = fuck them, make an open platform, let drivers set their own rates competitively and keep all the money

does uber or any of the others require a destination be entered before you can request a ride?

I understand where it'd be useful -- some drivers wouldn't want to leave an area, or go too far -- but it opens a lot of problems

it didn't used to but does now ya

I guess it could fuzz the location and just give a general neighborhood for a drop-off point but I think there are a lot of reasons why you'd only want your driver to get your actual destination

like I could see someone I was stalking take out a phone to request a ride, pull the driver one up on my phone, and be pretty sure I know where they live

ok so it garbles it a bit

I would say something about drivers just always declining to take people to ethnic neighborhoods but outside of public transportation, people pull this all the time already