Uber and Lyft May Be Making Traffic Even Worse (sciencemag.org) 173
A new study published in the journal Science Advances suggests that, from 2010 to 2016, cars driving for the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft were making traffic worse in the San Francisco. The new findings echo those of another study of New York City. An anonymous reader shares a report from Science Magazine: A comparison of traffic speeds from 2010, before ride-sharing apps were widely used, with 2016 shows the time cars spent sitting in San Francisco traffic increased by 69%. To find out how much of that was caused by ride-sharing vehicles, researchers used [a computer model that simulated the speed of traffic with Uber and Lyft vehicles removed] to forecast what traffic might have been like in 2016 without Uber or Lyft.
To do this, the authors needed to know how many additional cars Lyft and Uber were putting on the streets. When the companies refused to share this information, researchers used a program that had thousands of "ghost users" ping the Uber and Lyft apps every 5 seconds for 6 weeks in 2016, revealing the locations of nearby drivers -- and how many were on the streets at any given time. The model closely predicted the real-life traffic seen in 2010 and, after plugging in the Uber and Lyft driver data, 2016. The researchers then used the model to envision 2016 traffic minus the cars driving for Uber and Lyft. Without those cars, the model estimated just a 22% increase in traffic delays from 2010-16, suggesting ride-sharing companies were responsible for more than half of San Francisco's real-world traffic increase. The remainder of San Francisco's traffic increase was accounted for by growth in population and employment, which grew by roughly 70,000 people and 150,000 jobs respectively.
To do this, the authors needed to know how many additional cars Lyft and Uber were putting on the streets. When the companies refused to share this information, researchers used a program that had thousands of "ghost users" ping the Uber and Lyft apps every 5 seconds for 6 weeks in 2016, revealing the locations of nearby drivers -- and how many were on the streets at any given time. The model closely predicted the real-life traffic seen in 2010 and, after plugging in the Uber and Lyft driver data, 2016. The researchers then used the model to envision 2016 traffic minus the cars driving for Uber and Lyft. Without those cars, the model estimated just a 22% increase in traffic delays from 2010-16, suggesting ride-sharing companies were responsible for more than half of San Francisco's real-world traffic increase. The remainder of San Francisco's traffic increase was accounted for by growth in population and employment, which grew by roughly 70,000 people and 150,000 jobs respectively.
"Maybe"? (Score:2, Informative)
You mean, by making hundreds more drivers go out and do the taxi routine without a license, alone in a car you can possibly do anything else?
Remember the myth: these companies were about some kind of "sharing economy", where you would fill your almost empty car with people who were coincidentally going in the same direction.
Consider the reality: it is a taxi service with a business model that says "fuck you, we're not paying taxes and license fees".
What else do you expect?
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Licenses for osetnsibly proving competency is one thing. Government restriction of numbers entering a profession is corruption that brings warmth to the hearts of officials getting kickbacks worldwide.
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Because your local town council is notorious for ordering foreign invasions.
That's not science (Score:5, Insightful)
If I did a "study" where I simulated driving in New York City if one were to take all of the blue cars off the road, and it showed driving was better if you took the blue cars away, that doesn't mean that an increase in blue cars is responsible for traffic congestion. Because people *would drive green cars* if they couldn't drive blue ones.
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You get it!
That's not a relevant analogy (Score:2)
Blue cars didn't appear in 2009 from a single car company, joined by one other in 2012. If blue wasn't an option, other colors would have been chosen and the traffic would have been exactly the same. Whereas if Uber and Lyft had never existed, a very small percentage of those drivers may have become traditional taxi drivers.
You just don't like the study and are finding an ad hoc reason to do so. But you can't really argue with it when they were collecting location data every five seconds for six weeks. It's
The trips would still be taken (called my wife) (Score:2)
> Whereas if Uber and Lyft had never existed, a very small percentage of those drivers may have become traditional taxi drivers.
I believe that's the wrong metric.
It's not about the number of professional drivers, it's about the number of cars on the road, the miles driven.
I've used Uber or Lyft a few times. Every time, if Uber or Lyft didn't exist, I would have either called my wife to come get me, called a cab, or driven my own car. A car would have been driving me. It doesn't matter whose car; it's on
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Parking expensive or what? (Score:2)
I guess it's not surprising that there are parts of San Francisco where many people prefer not to bring their own car and leave it parked.
Do you happen to know why those areas discourage bringing your car? Is parking expensive, hard to hard find? Are the areas served by toll roads?
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Because people *would drive green cars* if they couldn't drive blue ones.
Yeah but would they? Maybe they don't like the colour green and go back to riding on blue busses. This has been covered a lot recently, Uber unfortunately are not displacing many drivers. They are displacing actual carpooling and public transport.
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If I did a "study" where I simulated driving in New York City if one were to take all of the blue cars off the road, and it showed driving was better if you took the blue cars away, that doesn't mean that an increase in blue cars is responsible for traffic congestion. Because people *would drive green cars* if they couldn't drive blue ones.
If only the researchers were as clever as you and thought of that.... of wait, they did, because they're serious researchers and not elementary students doing a science fair project.
Some of the Uber and Lyft cars replace trips taken by private vehicles.
Others replace trips made my public transit, or bikes, or they create a trip that wouldn't have otherwise occurred, or it's just the driver wandering around looking for fares.
It's actually a complicated problem which is why they did complicated stuff to answe
Not a fair comparison either ..... (Score:2)
If people decide to drive themselves places, vs. just catching an Uber, Lyft or what-not, once they're going to create additional traffic on the road for the whole time they're driving to or from the destination. (For example, we live about 45 minutes outside the DC area. If I drive in to DC, I'm on the road that whole time, both ways, in ADDITION to any driving I need to do in DC to get from one part to another.) If I take mass transit in to DC instead, but hail an Uber or Lyft after I arrive? I've cr
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FWIW? I do try to walk to my destinations when I get off the Metro. I always try to find out where the nearest stop is, vs. a DC destination. I was referring more to the situation where you go down there for an event, and then wind up doing other things in the area before heading back. Not everything is going to be easily accessible from the Metro, just because your first destination was.
And some people do the BikeShare thing. That's great. But I often find I need a vehicle with some actual room to carry
Control (Score:5, Insightful)
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Some would take public transit, carpool, or simply travel less.
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What means of transportation would the Uber and Lyft customer have used, were Uber and Lyft not available? Would those alternative means of transportation have increased the traffic congestion, too?
Why they all would have lined up for buses like good little citizens, of course!
Silly! Everything is zero sum!
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Not necessarily: much users/costumers will use, because of the price/convenience, mass transportation (like buses/trains) instead of taxis or self cars, which betters the traffic...
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Any mode of transportation that requires a car to go 10 minutes to pick up a passenger, and then drive 10 minutes to the destination is going to increase congestion. Furthermore, any zero friction origin/destination transportation system that offers a single seat for the whole trip, on demand, is going to increase the number of trips taken.
If you want to change it, you need to force pedestrian-centric development and find ways to add friction for using a taxi or uber/lyft.
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Carpooling, public transport, walking.
It's amazing how slack I and many others have gotten now that there's a taxi service available for 1/3rd of the cost it was in the past.
Re:Proper public transportation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Proper public transportation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why are "subsidies" such a dirty word in the USA? We've spend $7 trillion since 9/11/2001 on wars and SUBSIDIES for shitty theocracies like the Saudis, and SUBSIDIES for defense contractors.
I think you answered your own question.
But more generally, any time people are forced to pay for something they don't want because somebody else wants it but doesn't want to pay the full cost, that's certainly not a good thing. It may in some cases be less bad than the possible alternatives, but "less bad" != "good".
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1) You make it sound as though buses being subsidized is bad? Roadways are subsidized too. I don't know about you, but they don't spring up out of the ground like weeds where I live. They are funded with taxes, most of them from property and sales taxes because of point 2:
2) Gas taxes don't come even close to covering the cost of the roads, barely a third. Your source is completely full of shit.
https://taxfoundation.org/gaso... [taxfoundation.org]
https://www.citylab.com/transp... [citylab.com]
https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/... [uspirg.org]
Motorists in th
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"Obviously these people weren't going to do that anyway?" It is not reasonable to cherry-pick one counter-factual ("they would have taken the green car") while rejecting another ("but they would never have taken the red car!"). But we don't need to rely entirely on hypotheticals.
Transit ridership has been plumetting across North America. With a handful of small exceptions - and one big one. In Vancouver, ridership is skyrocketing [vancouversun.com], up 7.1% in 2018, 5.7% in 2017, and 4.5% in 2016. That's over 18% in three yea
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Public systems aren't as convenient and generally not as safe, due to the plebs that you yourself pointed out.
I find it unimaginable that public transportation could be inconvenient and not safe. But then again, I'm not from the US...
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Ridesharing wouldnâ(TM)t be expected to reduc (Score:5, Insightful)
Ridesharing wouldnâ(TM)t be expected to reduce traffic. It reduces transportation costs, by shifting cars from being parked all day and 5% utilized to driving a much higher percentage of the time, so fewer cars can provide transportation to more people. That frees up a lot of parking, but it results in more cars on the road at a given time, because ridesharing drivers have to drive to their next ride.
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You're conflating car usage with road usage. Firstly, this isn't ride sharing, the car wasn't going that direction already and picked you up on the way. Taxis are the least efficient use of the road, while waiting for a fair they drive around, then when they get a call they need to drive to the fair. That is far more usage per trip than someone driving from point A to point B.
The argument about car usage is also bunk, the vast majority of car usage occurs at the same times every day. There will never be mor
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I don't know what taxis and ride-share vehicles really do where you're from, but where I live, they find someplace nice to PARK and WAIT for a fare. Once they've finished a fare, they are often able to park again, near where their fare debarked, and wait for another fare. Your claim that they stay moving, burning gas all day while hogging the road is just flat-out rejected.
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Let me repeat; Taxis are no better in this regard.
Let me repeat; everyone driving their own car is an order of magnitude worse.
Ride-shares are not, on the whole, responsible for worsening the problem.
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The entire point of ride sharing when it was first introduced was to allow people to SHARE a ride! That was the entire selling point, that if Person A needed to go to Spot Y, and Person B was going to Spot X which brought him past both Person A and Spot Y, then Person A would get a shared ride with Person B. If that system had worked and not become some variation of a taxi service instead it would have reduced traffic.
Doesn't necessarily put more cars on the road (Score:2)
That seems to be the reasoning in TFA, but it's based on the assumption that if these riders drove their own car, they would've spent zero time searching for parking. If the time spent looking for parking plus driving between the parking space and the final destination (both ways, e.g. if you had to park two block away from the restaurant) equals the time th
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That's a terrible argument. By your reckoning, an Uber driver wastes the value of his car because, literally, he actually WALKS to work.
He walks to his car and sits down in it. He's AT WORK now! Any driving at that point, by your reckoning, is wasted value! Rubbish.
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A car that is utilized only 5% per day is not being wasted. Eventually, after about 15 years, the owner will use all 200,000 miles of the cars value. [...] In both cases, you get the same number of miles out of the car, so nothing was wasted.
That's not how it works. Vehicles degrade both from miles traveled, and from years of weather exposure. Vehicles therefore tend to accrue more miles in their lifetime if you put more of them on per year. If the car suddenly expired when it reached a certain number of miles, that wouldn't be true.
The Uber driver actually wasted the most value of the car resource, because the uber driver wasted miles driving from job to job.
If cars came with a fixed number of miles and used them up, that would definitely be true. But since it isn't, you've got to actually study the situation to determine whether they use their cars up faster or not.
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Correlation isn't Causation (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't buy this study. All it demonstrates is that reducing the volume of vehicles on the roads by x has a benefit of y. Ban any group of vehicles of a similar volume and you may see a similar benefit. Being mindful that ride-share vehicles are being shared endlessly instead of being reserved by one person for a single trip in and a single trip home. I would wager that ride-share vehicles move many more passengers during a similar length of travel as one suburban commuter. There's also too much murky water in their reasoning for their "expectation" of traffic increase. It's quite possible that ride-share actually reduced the volume of traffic, as the rest of us "expect" instead of "increased it more" as they claim.
Re:Correlation isn't Causation (Score:5, Interesting)
If I want from A to B with my own car, I drive from A to B. If I hail a share driver, the car goes from C to A first before going to B. Thus I have an additional trip that would not have happened if I had driven my own car. And if I don't own a car, I would have taken the bus or walked or used the bicycle. But now with Lyft and Uber, I generate two additional car trips without even owning a car.
So it makes sense that Uber and Lyft make traffic worse compared with the situation without them.
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You're partly right, but ride-share vehicles don't make just one trip per day, with extra stops in between, as you describe. They go on to spend the rest of the day making additional trips. Over the course of the day, they've made, let's say, the equivalent of 3 round-trips from the 'burbs to the office. But they've served 10 passengers. That's sort of like taking 7 cars off of the road.
Re:Correlation isn't Causation (Score:5, Interesting)
The general rule is: If you do something that makes traffic easier or cheaper, you generate new trips, which would not have happened before because they were too cumbersome or too expensive. Lyft and Uber make car driving cheaper and easier, and thus, you get more car traffic.
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What you don't take into account is that those "side trips" are much shorter than one whole trip for each passenger. Add them together and you easily see that the length of the whole trip and travel time, divided by the number of passengers served, is much MUCH much smaller than if each passenger has their own car for the whole trip from A to B. I question your ability to reason, since you fail to understand.
By your own argument, riding the bus adds traffic because of all the individual stops! And buses don
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chances are they're going to need to go back to their origin to get their next fair.
Even if true, they're now operating in the direction opposite the commute traffic. They still produce emissions, but not traffic problems.
You're also assuming that they immediately get a new fair and can drive directly to the pickup, instead of needing to circle for a while.
They don't need to circle, they just drive to the area where they expect to pick up fares, and hopefully park while they use the app to try to find another fare.
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I will NEVER understand why you treat each ride-share trip as being equivalent to a whole trip by one car with one passenger from home to office. Even if that were true, there's still one vehicle serving multiple passengers. But it's that, plus the individual trips are mostly shorter too. Ride-shares do not, on the whole, generate more traffic than every passenger having their own car and making their own way from A to B plus needing their own parking spaces at both locations as well.
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Drivers also idle in random places in the road, generating more congestion, and tend to be unfamiliar with local areas, leading them to drive at inconsistent speeds. I also suspect the app in line/shared/carpool mode of directing drivers out of their way through busier areas in order to fish for another passenger.
I've also talked to quite a few drivers who commute into San Francisco from Sacramento, Stockton, and other relatively distant areas, these jobs generate both local and commute traffic.
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You don't go from A to B in your own car. You go from A (source) to B (destination) to C (parking spot).
Uber goes from D (previous drop-off) to A to B. Admittedly the distance from D to A is likely greater than B to C, but we're not talking about miles driven. We're talking about
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It's much more complicated than that. Someone driving themselves will often have to do extra driving in the areas of the worst congestion to find a parking space. That particular time of driving is often slow and obstructive to traffic. In addition, to handle the increase in traffic volume they say occurred during those years, more parking spaces would have been needed without Uber and Lyft than with. This increase in parking spaces would cause more traffic problems even if they tore down buildings and buil
And what about they people taking those Uber's? (Score:2)
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Nah, what we assume is that everyone should have a car! After all, if not having a car causes more traffic congestion, then the solution is one car per driver....
it is more than just uber and lyft happening in SF (Score:2)
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Yes, but the study's authors "expected" a certain amount of increase in traffic volume, for whatever reasons, but saw more. Then, they reduced the volume in their simulation by the amount they "estimated" ride-share vehicles contributed, and lo and behold, saw a reduction in the increase! Blame ride-share! We live in a vacuum! ;)
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BART trains are at capacity, but BART rails are not. BART needs more trains to function correctly. Uber is subsidizing trips, so the drivers get paid more than you think they are. Lyft probably is, too.
Subjective (perhaps biased) observation... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know about making traffic worse, per se... but driving around the greater bay area, and in SF especially (where I spend a lot of time on surface streets), I do tend to notice that a large percentage of ill-behaved drivers have ride-share stickers/signs in their windows. And the number of times one of them will slam on their breaks and fly across lanes of traffic to get to the curbside for their pickup/dropoff, often blocking a lane in the process, is particularily rage inducing.
This could all be confirmation bias on my part, but I sure don't feel like they make my driving experience any easier...
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That's definitely the case everywhere.
The only difference is now, taxis are invisible except for those stickers. Before, you could clearly tell a taxi from the paint jobs, so you'd expect it to do insane things and generally drive like shit. Now, you never know which drivers are going to randomly stop and turn around in the middle of the street for no apparent reason....
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I don't know about making traffic worse, per se... but driving around the greater bay area, and in SF especially (where I spend a lot of time on surface streets), I do tend to notice that a large percentage of ill-behaved drivers have ride-share stickers/signs in their windows. And the number of times one of them will slam on their breaks and fly across lanes of traffic to get to the curbside for their pickup/dropoff, often blocking a lane in the process, is particularily rage inducing.
This could all be confirmation bias on my part, but I sure don't feel like they make my driving experience any easier...
Probably a real effect, if your salary was proportional to how quickly you could navigate though heavy traffic you'd probably drive like an asshole too.
Competition with public mass transportation (Score:2)
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The low prices in "ride-sharing" Apps (relative to "normal" taxis) makes much people avoid using buses/trains... I've noticed much of this issue here in Brazilian cities (what, obviously, worsen traffic by putting more cars on the streets).
It depends. In cities such as DC, where the METRO stops running around midnight, it's convenient to METRO somewhere and Uber or Lyft back. It helps that METRO is very safe all hours of the day and is an integral part of how people get around in DC.
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no one here travels to SF? (Score:2)
Ride sharing has increased traffic not because "more taxi-like cars", but because of two human reasons:
1) lazy - instead of walking 6 blocks, they'll call a ride share for just a few dollars (which when there was only taxis, they never would have done because it's cost prohibitive).
2) few ride busses because it's only a few dollars more to call a shared uber/lyft. Before that option, public transport was some people's only way.
Both reasons are better for the consumer - they have more choice, and get places
They're missing the point. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, Uber and Lyft have added to congestion. But that's not the metric that really matters. What matters is the time and hassle to make a trip from point A to point B.
As long as I've lived here, San Francisco's MUNI has always been utterly dysfunctional outside the Market Street and Embarcadero areas, assuming it goes there at all (Which, in the case of the Richmond for example, it doesn't.). If you're going from Market to the Mission or Glen or Balboa park, you can transfer to BART and get where you're going. But that still leaves vast areas of the city under or un-serviced by MUNI. And all that there is shuts down overnight. So if you're going out to clubs or bars, you're SOL for the ride home, so far as transit is concerned.
And cabs? Forget about it. It's not just the prevalence of tech, but the total wretched uselessness of the taxi companies that caused Uber and Lyft to get their start here in the first place. Their dispatch lines are a sick joke. They won't bother to show up at the specified time, if at all. The "my credit card machine is broken, pay cash" scam abounds. And if you need to go to or from the avenues, you may as well just walk. About the only thing to do if you're going to play the taxi game is to walk to a downtown hotel, pretend to be a guest there, and grab one of the cabs that troll for those SFO fares. Just don't plan on taking a cab back to the downtown corridor if you do.
So yeah... do Uber and Lyft add to overall congestion? Sure they do. But, even so, they've actually made it significantly faster and easier to get around town versus the per-Uber/Lyft era of MUNI/BART (only useful if you don't leave the Market/Mission/Embarcadero areas), and taxis (useful only for tourists going to/from SFO and a sick joke for everyone else.).
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Numbers aren't the only story (Score:3)
Recent trip to San Francisco, took Uber the whole time. The driving habits of Uber drivers don't help. They will block traffic for several seconds to get to the right curb. They love to slam on the brakes, which just has the accordion affect behind them. Several of my drivers had no clue where they were or how to get where I was going. They just blindly follow GPS even if it means going through a couple of alleys. I took a 4 block trip to the hotel due to heavy rain. Driver took 20+ minutes because he kept watching GPS but then would decide it wasn't right and do his own thing.
Anyway, I had some good drivers, but I had, and also witnessed some really crappy ones that aren't helping traffic move along.
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Recent trip to San Francisco, took Uber the whole time. The driving habits of Uber drivers don't help. They will block traffic for several seconds to get to the right curb. They love to slam on the brakes, which just has the accordion affect behind them. Several of my drivers had no clue where they were or how to get where I was going. They just blindly follow GPS even if it means going through a couple of alleys. I took a 4 block trip to the hotel due to heavy rain. Driver took 20+ minutes because he kept watching GPS but then would decide it wasn't right and do his own thing.
Anyway, I had some good drivers, but I had, and also witnessed some really crappy ones that aren't helping traffic move along.
This. Uber drivers are not professional drivers, hell, lets be honest, they're not smart or skilled enough to get any better job. They won't ever learn to act like professional drivers who'll avoid sharp/late braking, choose their lanes carefully, learn shortcuts/long cuts. They will just blindly follow the GPS which often doesn't take into account current conditions.
Last Uber I was in was a while ago, first he took us straight onto the Mitchell freeway which any Perthite will know is packed from 3PM on
Traffic (Score:2)
Model 3 Fleet inbound (Score:2)
Uber still loses money on every ride. The "human-driver" model is just too expensive.
Come back in five years and we'll all be laughing about these ancient times. Trains of Model 3 fleet cars will be following at close distances and reducing congestion. If they can get traffic light exceptions they'll reduce it even more.
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Do we really want a 'future world' where someone gets to prop up their antiquated business model by force of law, when others can provide the same or superior service another way? I don't. Taxis benefit from a monopoly. It's increasingly obvious that it hasn't benefited the customers. I mean, just look at the attitude they have toward ride-share: "Crush the interlopers!!!!" Really.
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Doesn't the success of Uber and Lyft clearly demonstrate to you how poorly cities were being served by their old taxi services? If the old taxi services were efficiently providing a service that customers wanted it should have been much, much harder for Uber to penetrate. But there was huge dissatisfaction with the old line taxis and large numbers of people shifted their business onto Uber. It's called competition and competition always makes thing better for the customers. Hint to the old taxi companies -
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IMHO, what unfair competition really means is, if they are not banned, sooner or later, they would destroy all taxi companies in the world!!!
If Taxis actually reduce congestion, it's the only thing that they do that they claim they do. They regularly don't bother to show up at all, they refuse to go to certain neighborhoods, they deliberately take long routes in order to inflate fares, and they drive like shit approximately 99.44% of the time, IME. Literally every time I go through SF, for example, the people who are cutting me off and then driving slowly, and generally driving like dipshits are the Taxi drivers. It doesn't matter if they're yel
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Bravo. I suspect they selected their "expectation" of traffic_volume_growth inappropriately.
Oh those evil tax-paying sociall secure monsters! (Score:2, Insightful)
How dare they make sure their drivers have health care and social security!
And how DARE they actually *pay* for the roads they drive on!
They should do like any reputable capitalist corporation, and STEAL from the people! Business model: Give them NOTHING, but take from them EVERYTHING!
It is the logical conclusion of a for-profit business model.
Just don't use your brain, corporate spokesdrone, okay?
Re: Study with a agenda (Score:2)
You know roads don't have to be built right? They just appear where people travel? If you don't build roads, people just buy trucks.
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Unpossible! Others are saying that Uber and Lyft spend the whole day circling around on the streets and using up fuel! They would be surprised to hear that you've seen them parked and waiting for fares! :p
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Your last line makes a good point. Which is that a lot of the irritations caused by ride-shares are exactly the same as those caused by taxis. Taxi advocates tap-dance around this. The reason why ride-shares are eating taxi companies alive is that, because they don't enjoy a monopoly, they are motivated to provide better service. They're often cheaper AND often more responsive for the passengers. They're not "unfair" to taxi companies, THEY'RE BETTER. Taxi companies aren't entitled to an even playing field.
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Monopolies have led to ever-degrading quality of service, ever-increasing fares, and led to riders hating taxi service even when there was NO competition.
The free market isn't much better. I've lived in cities with no taxi monopoly so anyone can become a taxi. As a result, you wind up with clapped out ex-cop cars, beat-up minivans and drivers who have no clue where they are going. Sure you can refuse a ride but the next cab may not be any better. Uber and Lyft, despite their faults, at least has some minimum requirements for a vehicle; which sounds suspiciously like regulations even if it is a private sector action. Asa result, plus the ability to know in
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What's so beautiful about this is that ride-share services are eating taxi companies alive by simply providing customers with better service. They're competing against taxi monopolies who openly attack them in every way possible, including shamelessly blaming them for the same problems taxis cause, and accusing them of the same things we know taxi companies are determined to do to the arrogant interlopers. DERP DORP THHHHHHPPPPPPP
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Disclaimer: I don't live in a big city, nor even in the US, and have never been in an Uber or Lyft car. I have used a normal taxi service two or three times in the past several years.
Does Uber actually provide a better service, or do they only provide a cheaper service? Do they provide a better service entirely because they ignore regulations that are ultimately there to (supposedly) benefit society at large rather than a single person?
Re: DERP (Score:5, Informative)
They are a fairly sleazy company, but traditional taxis aren't exactly paragons of virtue either. So... Slight edge to the traditional taxi on not being huge privacy Invaders and actually following laws, but the Uber experience overall is generally better.
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at least in NYC, taxis are obnoxiously divided with a wall between the driver and passengers (unless they sit in front...but whatever) and are more akin to sitting in the back of a police car. This goes back to ... i guess the 70s or 80s where drivers were regularly assaulted and robbed so they instituted the partition.
But today...NYC taxi's are holding on to a dated approach. Largely because the one or two companies that do the custom work are in bed with the taxi companies who are in bed with the city.
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Ride-shares are cheaper than taxis, and being an option added to the pool of resources to choose from, their availability means they may be available when traditional taxis are busy. You won't be waiting as long. Most reasonable people would consider this to be "better service". They don't necessarily "ignore" regulations, they're exempt from regulations traditional taxi services are obliged to observe because they don't enjoy a monopoly and are structured differently.
The conflict is that the traditional ta
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In what way do you think Uber can provide a taxi service that is cheaper than traditional taxis? They still have to provide a car and a driver. The maintenance costs are the same. The licensing costs and the insurance are the same (except where Uber is breaking the law). In fact, traditional companies with large fleets of vehicles can make economies of scale as compared to individual Uber drivers.
Uber's model is not sustainable and that is why it has never made a profit.
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Does Uber actually provide a better service, or do they only provide a cheaper service? Do they provide a better service entirely because they ignore regulations that are ultimately there to (supposedly) benefit society at large rather than a single person?
It apparently depends on the market and what they can compete with best. Some places they are cheaper, and others they have better service. I'm sure in some they are both. Seattle, from what I understand, they are not as cheap as taxis, but have much better service. In Seattle, from my experience, that means they will actually show up. About half the time I've called in Seattle, they just never showed and after waiting for up to an hour and calling back, the taxis company said the driver said I wasn't there
Re: DERP (Score:2)
Sadly governments don't care enough to provide the people with reasonable parking or public transit. Yeah, we get it, you like your little hipster walkable neighborhoods. But if you don't provide a way in and out, your people are gonna find workarounds to your stupidity.