Uber CEO balks after a reporter tells him the cost of his 2.9-mile Uber ride: ‘Oh my God. Wow.’::undefined
The fact that a 2.9 mi car ride costs $50 with a tip is fucking insane. This country is absolutely backwards when it comes to transportation. Everything is nearly car centric. Minimal options for alternatives.
People who have never experience good public transport don’t know what they’re missing tbh. When I lived in Japan for a few months I could get around the whole city without much planning. It was so freeing not having to think about transportation. I think public transportation + last mile assistance (e-scooters, e-bikes etc.) is by far the most efficient an free transportation experience out there.
I recently got a folding e-bike in a city with great public transport (a folding bike can be carried along at any time, regular bikes only outside rush hours). Now I can be anywhere in the city within about 20mins, which is very liberating. I’m actually faster than going by car due to being able to bypass traffic jams, and not even including the 20mins+ needed for finding a parking spot.
In a faint way, I might almost frame this as a positive thing.
The gig workers driving Uber vehicles are generally the sort of people that absolutely need it. And, especially in a hub like New York City, $50 fares should be the sort of thing that pushes people into making use of either the bike share system or subway, rather than promoting increased traffic congestion at peak times. And yes, I am aware in many cases that results in increased trip times; which should be a motive to invest further in these systems to make them faster and more convenient.
I don’t think it’s just Uber - America will at some point have to wake up to the expected costs of its heavily service-focused industries, the value of an individual person’s time, and of one’s own personal vehicle for a trip.
The reason fatrs are up is because instead of subsidising the trips (i.e. anti-competitive behaviour), now UBER is taking a massive cut to make back all the VC money.
The fares should have never been dirt cheap to begin with.
Does a CEO even know the value of $20 or $51? Isn’t that the same as $0 to them?
It’s one banana Michael. What could it cost, $5?
Imho people that earned a lot of money see more difference between $0.20 and $0.51 than others - being more conscious about the value of the goods without being weighted down by the costs to simply exist
Went to a concert at an arena about 3 miles from my house, to get there was about eight bucks to go home was 60.
Yep. Went to Disneyland a year ago and the trip there was very affordable. The trip home was 3-4x higher since it was closing time.
Uber’s net profit for the twelve months ending March 31st, 2023 was $-3.36bn. That’s negative 3.36 billion dollars. They posted their first ever operating profit today. August 1st, 2023.
So yeah, really cool company. Not at all some sort of horrifying demon of modern capitalism…
Pretty sure Uber’s sole existence is owed to cheap debt and a bubble in venture capital. Them and WeWork soaked investors for all they were worth and never gave a flying fig about profitability because there was always some one willing to float a cheap loan
They got investment because they were building a monopoly first. It really just tells you how valuable monopolies are if it wasn’t obvious enough already. It’s more reason why we can’t let monopolies happen.
Like Amazon, which only had net losses for several years (from 1994 to 2002) in order to focus on aggressive growth and outcompeting other similar services by setting excessively low prices on books and media.
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It was a sound business idea though. Just a shitty investment idea.
The owners/founders made shitloads off it (at the expense of investors.)
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oh, yeah. the gig economy and the startups that exploit is genuinely awful. Can’t say I feel bad for the duped investors, though. They invested in a genuinely shitty company. so. heh.
“from downtown New York City to the West Side”
$50 is what you’d expect if you lived in nyc, or been there enough
Not from the area, what’s the deal/context?
I’m assuming it’s a traffic cluster fuck?
It’s one of the densest, most populated 2.9 miles in the world. The route takes you through the core of manhattan/nyc.
Thank you! That’s what I was missing!
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Next ask him how much a $10 meatball sub delivered from 2 miles away should cost.
“With Uber, the vast majority of your fare is going to your driver. Earnings per week for our drivers are up 40, 50 percent over the past four years, because that is the cost of time and the cost of labor. I think that’s positive.”
Unless you are working in the gastronomy, then your work and time is worth shit
I had to use this service one time, to pick up my wife from the hospital in the middle of the night. The guy never even picked her up and I still had to pay 50 goddamn dollars. Fuck this company.
These prices are set via algorithm, and time of day seems to be a huge part of it. My 2.5 mile trip in Washington DC on a Thursday morning at 7:30 was $55.
There was speculation that the algo takes several features into account not just time. Things like battery life, distance from frequent locations, etc. So for instance: profile is a young lady, she is on 10% battery and is several miles from home at an entertainment hub like a nightclub/concert so jack the fare up cos she’ll take it regardless, type stuff.
I used to have a very unreliable Jeep that would break down for weeks at a time. I bit the bullet and ubered to work. I have screenshots showing the fare climbing over the course of a week to six times the original price for the same trip as the algo learned that I needed to work and did not have a car.
Jesus Christ that’s horrible. We’ll need to now make something like virtualbox for Android to isolate these shitty ass apps from knowing system details and shit.
EDIT: We all need to go check our uber transactions to see if cost per ride corresponded to life events.
“It was 10 am on a sunny weekday”… supply and demand. Take the number of people wanting a ride and divide by the number of drivers available, and in some way that number will be the multiple.
Area will matter (Apparently NYC), but Uber is a gig economy, people use it as a side hustle, so during the day, many of them are probably working another job. Not to mention 2.9 miles in NYC isn’t like 2.9 miles in Champaign Illinois, that can be a long ride.
But there are a ton of factors, maybe there was no drivers in the area, maybe everyone was busy, but you still took the ride, so obviously it wasn’t too crazy. Uber will continue to charge what they can, but I’m sure the number of available drivers willing to take a fare for that price (The price Uber offers them, not the end user price), will always matter.
Infinitenonblondes in the comments talks about a 3 mile ride, 8 bucks to go there, 60 bucks to leave, because it was a concert. The demand for a ride right after a concert is going to be at record level peaks… of course it’s going to go through the roofs.
2.9 miles isn’t even far. You could just walk.
Only if fully able-bodied and there’s safe footpath present, but yeah, more of us should just walk.
That’s an hour walk- one way- for the the “average” person.
Throw in climate hazards- winter where I live, that walk is happening in -10f temperatures, probably with wind blasting enough to be deadly.
In summer, we typically have temperatures reaching 98-101 f for about a week with muggy-as-hell 80’s for several months. Also enough to be deadly.
Further, let’s say hypothetically, that’s a grocery run. Frozen goods out for that long pose a food safety risk.unless your lugging an ice packed cooler or something… which kinda sounds like my personal version of hell… that’s also likely to, you know, be deleterious to one’s health.
(Okay so maybe you luck out and just get the squirts.)
People who can’t walk usually can’t drive either. Stop with this irrelevant “able body” argument.
Go back to reddit
Yep, have walked such distances semi regularly
Not if where you live is a car-centric hellhole with uneven, badly kept or sometimes even nonexistent sidewalks, and where cars are eager to run you over at every intersection because they have a “Why are you walking? You must be a poor so fuck you.” Mentality
I live in Houston. Probably the least pedestrian friendly city on earth. I would still walk over paying that.
Some popular neoclassical economic models rely on the “No-Ponzi-Scheme” condition being true. Essentially meaning that Capital can’t become negative because there are no ponzi schemes which affect the economy.
This seems like that assumption is just one of the wrong ones.
If what he says is true, that it’s going up because of driver pay, that’s good at least. Uber at least has competition in Lyft, and both have a lot more markets to enter around the world by chipping away the established local taxi businesses, which can also compete by dropping their prices…
Overall I think Uber is a net positive. But $50 is a pretty ridiculous fee.
Uber has engaged in rampant employee misclassification, even going as far as changing California’s constitution to get away with it. Shit like that should not be allowed
Lol. I also have a bridge to sell you
