Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

man why does los angeles have such backwards views

Uber driver drove me into oncoming traffic in DT Atlanta twice and the only apology he could muster was an "oh no".

considering my recent accident i was pissing myself

fairly sure the first he must have blown a red. second i think he turned left with no green arrow while cars were oncoming.

first time he also sat like a deer in the headlights in the lane.

⭐️❌❌❌❌

remember when the argument for this thing was "and c'mon, who likes riding with those crazy TAXI drivers amirite?"

this job is unbelievably hard on drivers... there was a vigil in nyc recently for an uber driver who'd killed himself. they must be under incredible pressure, all the time, and with very little latitude to say "nah I should pass on that fare, I need a break/decent night's sleep for my own safety's sake." it's crazy.

Woman dies in Arizona after being hit by Uber self-driving SUV

A woman crossing a street was killed by an Uber self-driving sport utility vehicle in Arizona, police said on Monday, leading the ride services company to suspend its autonomous vehicle program across the United States and Canada.

The accident in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe marked the first fatality from a self-driving vehicle, which are being tested around the globe, and could derail efforts to fast-track the introduction of the new technology.

The vehicle was in autonomous mode with an operator behind the wheel at the time of the accident, which occurred overnight Sunday to Monday, Tempe police said.

gonna be hard for uber to argue this one was an independent contractor so they can dodge liability

Who was, the car?

This is obviously still considerably better than manned vehicles - but I'm not surprised that it's Uber's that have the first fatality.

I've probably said this in thread before, but I find the comparison of self-driving car test data to real driver data highly misleading. First, you're relying on data from test driving in limited conditions of the Company's choosing vs all human driving. How much are the test cars driving at night on poorly lit roads? On slick roads? In snow? How challenging are the routes they drive? At what speeds?

Second, while I can see how this cuts both ways, you are not comparing self-driving cars to good human drivers under normal conditions, because the aggregate human data includes drunk drivers, reckless drivers etc. Now granted if everyone used self-driving cars that would eliminate drunk and reckless drivers. But I'm not convinced that we've gotten to the point where a self-driving car is as safe a driver as, say, a responsible, rested adult with perfect vision under no influence of substances. The reason that does matter is that if you're asking me to get into a self-driving car, I would like to know that the car's driving is at least as safe as mine, not just average.

from the video, it looks like you wouldn't fault a human driver. but it looks like an accident that should be avoidable for a self-driving car with superior night visibility.

perhaps a person slowly walking a bike draped in grocery bags across the road is a strange corner case, and they try to be a bit too smart about what an object to avoid should look like.

the thing to remember is that for the autonomous driving AIs that are trained on driver data, they are trained on human driver data

someday an AI defending itself will claim 9/10 human drivers would have run over the pedestrian

c3p0 certainly would

this how we die

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/video-suggests-huge-problems-with-ubers-driverless-car-program/

New York State, at least, is pushing back against the "they're not employees" argument.

It's called vomit fraud!

Competition driving fares down pretty dramatically in nyc, much easier to get to those good spots. 2018 is pretty rad

if you're not, you know, a driver

whoa

Did a double-take when I saw this number: Every week, there are 11,000 Uber and Lyft rides *on campus* at UCLA. That’s not including trips that start or end there! https://t.co/CP649n2XX0

— Laura J. Nelson 🦅 (@laura_nelson) January 31, 2019

xpost to calstars

yeah as driver it's kinda funny how ppl treat you like human garbage

Sigh. I got in a yellow cab the other day and it was in poor condition inside, old, everything was plastic, and the passenger divider with sliding window made the back seat so small I could barely sit down and had to put my legs sideways.

I was also remembering the "old" days of calling livery cars and being on hold for infinite minutes, cars that were supposed to be on the way coming 15-30 mins late, speaking to rude dispatchers who might not understand me and I might not understand them, never knowing what the car looked like so finding it at the airport was 100% anxiety, drivers trying to rip you off if you didn't agree to the price ahead of time, and so many other shitty things.

Whereas I can call a car with Juno (I only use June on the basis that afaict they pay the drivers more?) that arrives in 1 min and it's a nice passenger vehicle and I know the driver's name/license plate. There's no downside, if you're a passenger. But are drivers surviving? Idk. :(

https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2019/01/30/lyft-and-juno-sue-nyc-to-block-minimum-pay-rules-for-drivers/#2799dc9457b7

Barcelona to outlaw Uber in the most obnoxious way possible

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/31/uber-cabify-suspended-operations-barcelona

I had an experience a few months ago that left me really sour on both rideshare services and cabs, tbh. I was at a concert at a big arena in a different suburb from the one I live in, roughly 10-11 miles from my house. Not really conveniently served by public transportation, the train line is within a walkable (if a long walk) distance, but there are almost no sidewalks and tons of major intersections to try and get through.

Short version - Lyft server issues, couldn't get a driver to accept my request over 2+ hours of trying. Uber (which I always try to avoid using, had to reinstall the app) was going to cost over $110 for whatever reason... so, no. Called a few cab companies, first one laughed at me when I said where I was and hung up on me; second one told me it'd be a 3-4 hour wait for a ride; third told me they don't serve that arena since the arena signed a deal with Lyft for a dedicated waiting area. End up having to call my wife and wake her up at 2:00 a.m. to come pick me up. Just frustrating on all sides.

fuck all of these companies, they should be outlawed imo. they put more cars on the road, treat their employees like shit, and provide a service already readily available from other providers

fwiw, don't disagree with that. Usually use cabs when I'm doing an airport trip or short trips within the city, but outside of Chicago city limits the cab services are so terrible that they aren't much better. Refusing to accept credit cards, refusing to cross certain arbitrary lines, etc etc.

oh that wasn't directed at you, that was just my general feeling

jon it sounds like all the Lyft drivers might have been at the dedicated Lyft waiting area?

That's where I was, but it was just a pickup zone, you still had to request the ride through the app. There were a couple of Lyft "helpers" in the waiting area, one of them confirmed when I asked him for help that the servers were having issues and that he didn't know when it was going to be resolved. He tried requesting a ride for me as well with no luck. That's when I turned to the other options.

I mean it was probably just a perfect storm of issues but it was frustrating to have so many options theoretically available but still have no luck.

-they put more cars on the road-

i once asked a driver if he thought it was better to wait for rides in a static place or drive around, and he said lyft encourages them to drive around. gas alone...

A more serious proposal might start with the possibility that Uber is opposed to public transit by design—every ride taken on a subway or bus is competition for its growing supply of cars.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/dept-of-design/uber-and-the-ongoing-erasure-of-public-life

$5.24 billion loss in the second quarter for uber

expecting a hard-hitting speech from the coach at halftime

Ouch
With a service that’s indistinguishable from its competitors and no physical product, I think it’s going to be hard for Uber to turn around these losses

imagine if Uber's investors put that much into public transport infrastructure in their cities

It's a long J'accuse, but the tl;dr is that Uber will never, ever recover and the sooner it crashes/burns, the better:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-destruction/

These beliefs about Uber’s corporate value were created entirely out of thin air. This is not a case of a company with a reasonably sound operating business that has managed to inflate stock market expectations a bit. This is a case of a massive valuation that has no relationship to any economic fundamentals. Uber has no competitive efficiency advantages, operates in an industry with few barriers to entry, and has lost more than $14 billion in the previous four years. But its narratives convinced most people in the media, invest­ment, and tech worlds that it is the most valuable transportation company on the planet and the second most valuable start-up IPO in U.S. history (after Facebook).

Uber is the breakthrough case where the public perception of a large new company was entirely created using the types of manufactured narratives typically employed in partisan political campaigns. Narrative construction is perhaps Uber’s greatest competitive strength. The company used these techniques to completely divert attention away from the massive subsidies that were the actual drivers of its popularity and growth. It successfully framed the entire public discussion around an emotive, “us-versus-them” battle between heroic innovators and corrupt regulators who were falsely blamed for all of the industry’s historic service problems. Uber’s desired framing—that it was fighting a moral battle on behalf of technological progress and economic freedom—was uncritically ac­cepted by the mainstream business and tech industry press, who then never bothered to analyze the firm’s actual economics or its anticompetitive behavior.

In reality, Uber’s platform does not include any technological breakthroughs, and Uber has done nothing to “disrupt” the eco­nomics of providing urban car services. What Uber has disrupted is the idea that competitive consumer and capital markets will maximize overall economic welfare by rewarding companies with superior efficiency. Its multibillion dollar subsidies completely distorted marketplace price and service signals, leading to a massive misallocation of resources. Uber’s most important innovation has been to produce staggering levels of private wealth without creating any sustainable benefits for consumers, workers, the cities they serve, or anyone else.

Prior to its IPO, Uber publicly released limited P&L results. These showed GAAP net losses of $2.6 billion in 2015, $3.8 billion in 2016, $4.5 billion in 2017, and $3.9 billion in 2018.1

In its April IPO S-1 prospectus, Uber recast all its historical P&L results, allegedly to isolate the terrible results in three major markets (China, Russia, and Southeast Asia) that Uber has abandoned from the results of its ongoing operations (which are the primary concern of potential investors).2 But Uber’s S-1 included $5 billion—roughly $3 billion in divestiture gains and $2 billion representing Uber’s valuation of its untradeable equity/debt positions in the companies that took over its failed operations—as part of net income from its ongoing operations. This deliberate misstatement was designed to give potential investors the impression that the profitability of Uber’s current marketplace services had improved by $5 billion, and that Uber actually made a billion dollar net profit in 2018. If one correctly segregates ongoing and discontinued results, however, Uber’s actual 2018 profit improvement was zero. Its ongoing operations lost $3.5 billion in 2017, and lost $3.5 billion again in 2018. The company’s losses over the last four years from still ongoing operations were roughly $14 billion.

Like so much journalism about @uber, this piece is long on drama but never quite says the most important thing: You always need one driver hour per customer hour. So growth is irrelevant to profitability. The model will never scale. (1/) https://t.co/cY9e4Hl3e0

— Jarrett Walker (@humantransit) August 26, 2019

"You always need one driver hour per customer hour. So growth is irrelevant to profitability. The model will never scale." I mean, that's not counting the costs of developing, improving and maintaining the app/network, which of course do scale.

here we go

BREAKING: Former Google and Uber Star Engineer Anthony Levandowski Indicted on Federal Charges — 33 Counts of Theft or Attempted Theft of Trade Secretshttps://t.co/P3gYub1ecz

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) August 27, 2019

unrelatedly

An investor who put money into an index that tracks the Nasdaq in December 2014 would be up ~65%

An investor who put money into Uber--the most hyped unicorn of the decade--in December 2014 would be up ~0.6% pic.twitter.com/zs07GZ8wSt

— Eliot Brown (@eliotwb) August 27, 2019

What's his source for the valuation of non-public Uber shares in December 2014?

https://venturebeat.com/2015/05/10/timeline-how-ubers-valuation-went-from-60m-in-2011-to-a-rumored-50b-this-month/

This has Uber's valuation at $17B in June 2014, and the market cap today is $56B. While it's hard to know exactly what the terms of the private investment were, wouldn't that imply that if you had invested in Uber in June 2014 , you'd have earned nearly a 300% return? I can't really fathom what that tweet is supposed to mean -- the screenshot is just the percent change from the prior day's close so I don't know what the hell he's talking about. Am I missing something here?

Also kind of irrelevant, since an ordinary layperson COULDN'T have invested in Uber in 2014.

oh sorry he said December 2014, so I guess that means the valuation was more like $40B. Still, that gives you something in the range of a 40% return, not .6%.

Also kind of irrelevant, since an ordinary layperson COULDN'T have invested in Uber in 2014.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 6:04 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don't see why this makes the point irrelevant. he's not talking about the implications of this observation for a random person's 401k:

What's amazing is how little chilling effect its performance seems to have had on Silicon Valley

VCs so often pour money into a sector based on the apparent success of a single company. But the poor public markets reception to the most-anticipated unicorn barely registers

— Eliot Brown (@eliotwb) August 27, 2019

(although it was actually relatively easy to invest in uber as a random person back then. it famously had a very active pre-ipo secondary market.)

as for the numbers, i'm not actually sure what he's talking about either. agree that the screenshot is a red herring. he wrote this longer piece but it's firewalled.

for the companies that raised the most money, the return was lower https://t.co/8A0puufhVH pic.twitter.com/c7OgFiHaMg

— Eliot Brown (@eliotwb) August 27, 2019

(fun fact, my employer is on this list and not in one of the good places)

it's not just VCs. superstar fund managers get zillions for steering funds that routinely underperform standard indexes.

One thing I often wonder about Uber -- if they weren't plowing so much money into trying to become the first all-self-driving taxi network by actually developing self-driving taxis, would their main existing business be profitable? Maybe that's something I could figure out reading their SEC filings. Like it seems to me like if you can be profitable as a regular brick-and-mortar car service where you have to actually own a fleet of cars, medallions, a dispatch, etc., then in theory you should be even more profitable if all you do is build an app and make your drivers carry all the expense and risk. Like could a ride-sharing/ride-hailing app business be profitable today if that's all it focused on (e.g. something like Juno).

The article posted by Elvis Telecom spoke a lot about that: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-destruction/

Short answer: No, Uber would not be profitable, because the reason it was good - and it really was, I used it myself on Sundays when I was too hungover to bike to church - was not the app, it was the 20 billion dollars they spent sending more riders on the street, and keeping prices lower, than the fundamental economics of taxi companies allow for.