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.
It used to cost far less in NYC until they made them be tlc.
What’s TLC?
You might hear about medallions in New York City and this is the agency that sells them, enabling a taxi to operate in the city legally.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer sitting in prison, used to own several medallions. Those things used to go for over $1 million few no new ones have been made in the last 70 years. That was until Uber and Lyft came in.
It’s the city taxi and limo commission. They heavy to follow all the taxi rules and fees and stuff
Bear in mind this was in Manhattan, one of the most transit oriented places in the world. You could go that distance by subway for $2.75, 24 hours a day. Either the journalist was being stupid, or overlaps more likely, wanted to prove a point.
NYC might be the most “transit-oriented” city in America, but in the world? Not then close. Not by a mile.
Most big cities in Europe have a mix of buses, subways, and trams that make taking public transport a no-brainer. That includes Eastern Europe, too. That’s also true of any big city in China, Korea, and Japan.
What makes you say that New York doesn’t have that, most of the city is well served by rapid transit. And I was talking about Manhattan specifically, which is one of the most transit dense places in the world, even if you leave out local buses and just stick to subway and BRT, you can basically get anywhere in the borough. Yeah, parts of the outer boroughs lack frequent transit (especially SI),but most NYers don’t drive, sticking to trains and the occasional taxi. If New York isn’t transit oriented, I don’t know what is.
You are totally right, but all the downvotes show how biased Lemmy is.
Also you clearly wrote “one of…” not THE most transit oriented places in the world, and yet the other person clearly missed that part.
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.
Actually I live in NYC and often public transportation, especially bikes, are faster to get around Manhattan than car services. Outer boroughs need more infrastructure though. Places like Queens and Brooklyn as you get away from the city become harder to navigate without a car or car service and taxis can be rarer
As someone from rural Scotland, hearing Brooklyn described as ‘getting away from the city’ is unintentionally hilarious!
Ha, it is definitely a local slang. People in outer boroughs will say “I’m going into the city for the day” if they are going into Manhattan, even though all the boroughs are “New York City” and mostly high density
I miss going out to that far little hamlet of Whitestone Queens and getting a sandwich at Cherry valley.
As someone from Paris, I also find it quite bizarre.
I visited NYC this spring with my wife and we took precisely one Uber ride, from the airport to our hotel. It was $80. We then proceeded to spend less than $80 total the rest of our several day trip crisscrossing all over Manhattan on public transit, including back to the airport to leave. Public transit was faster, cheaper, and easier than the Uber, for sure.
Uber jacks up prices in “airport zones” to an insane degree. For example an Uber from Seattle to Sea-Tac is about $75. I rented a car in Portland, drove up to Seattle for the weekend, and drove myself to the airport for $60. An Amtrak ticket from Portland- Seattle is around $40 usually.
This doesn’t work everywhere, but when I’m flying back into PDX (the best airport) I’ll take the light rail public transit two stops and get a ride share from the Target parking lot. Ends up being about half the price once you’re far enough away.
Last time I took a taxi from an airport was when I was on crutches recovering from a leg injury, and even then I thought twice about it.
“From airport to city center” is such a common trip that it’s often going to be the best arrangement of transit lines the city has, even if other paths are less optimal.
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Example: Las Vegas
Monorail on the strip, Uber to get there
Corruption? I don’t follow. Why would anyone want to make it harder to access a place of business? Where I live, businesses often make shuttle services directly to their location from common departure points to ensure people are deeply incentivized to come in and waste their money. The specific example I’m thinking of is a casino.
Profit scheming with taxi drivers directly off of someone’s first expenditure in the city kind of sounds like poor planning even for the greediest of schemers.
Doesnt sound like you know the outer boroughs that well if you think we need cars in Broolyn. Brooklyn as a whole is very well covered with subway and bus lines. You simply don’t need a car in Broolyn. Queens on the other hand is different. Although majority of the population in Queens has access to subway, a good chunk of the territory has limited access to subway lines. They can rely on public bus but that’s not always convenient. For those parts of Queens, I agree, you MIGHT need a car. Even staten island has its own subway line and busses. Most people on Staten Island has a car because it’s just more convenient to get out of the island.
You don’t need a car in Brooklyn, but I am not wrong with what I said.
As you leave Manhattan the farther away you get the more you will see cars and the less you will see public transportation options. This is an inarguable fact. From the US Census, Staten Island has the highest amount of car ownership, only 16% of households in Staten Island did not have a car in 2021. 37% of Queens households did not have cars, 55% of Brooklyn did not have cars, 59% of the Bronx did not have cars. Maybe I should have said Staten Island and Queens instead of Brooklyn, but almost half the households have cars in Brooklyn.
In Manhattan, 76% of households do not have cars.
Many parts of Queens and Brooklyn are considered “underserved” by public transportation by the city and state governments and it is a very known equity issue in the city. Improvements have been made over the recent years, hopefully we will see the new Interborough Express completed.
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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?
$10*
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.
I mean that’s how the market works isn’t it? It’s the best way to attract more drivers to those sort of locations.
That said public transport should be in place for situations like this so we don’t have 50 cars leaving but 1 bus instead…
It’s almost like we should regulate the industry to ensure that no one party in the deal is abusing the other. Taxis are regulated and can’t charge surge rates for a reason, when you are stuck somewhere and there are only a couple options to choose it isn’t a balanced market and therefore needs the state to ensure fairness
that regulation won’t happen though
if a politician says that from next month on flights, gas and meat will be taxed according to the environmental impact then I’m pretty sure that politician won’t be in office anymore that next month.
For sure we need those kinds of regulations since most people won’t lift a finger if it’s inconvenient for them - but if noone is showing the politicians that they have support with ideas like this it’s far too risky for them to do and they will just pass the “bomb” to the next government and hope that it goes off when they are in power.
In Germany Merkel for 16 years completely slept on housing (specifically the heating) being a main factor for environmental impact of the whole country and now the current government has to kind of hit the brakes hard and named a deadline after which it’s impossible to install new gas-heating anymore and the backlash was HARD. Would this have been tackled earlier the impact would have been far less but it’s just too risky for politicians to even try something like this if they want to stay in power.
That’s why I think that something like a Citizens’ assembly it probably the only way possible to implement something before it’s too late. As long as there are politicians hoping to be reelected noone will even try - and if there aren’t assemblies then starting a movement of individual change is the only chance we got
There’s nothing stopping you from calling a taxi instead of an Uber.
I’m sure there are some regulations that could help, but there’s also value to the free market. Uber is a luxury service so paying more when it is in high demand makes normal sense.
No one is being forced to use it and there are always other alternatives. Plus, in average, an Uber ride is cheaper than a taxi. Just because surge prices are high to meet demand doesn’t mean there’s a problem.
In many places calling a taxi is a gamble. They often just don’t show up. Maybe ride-share has changed this significantly, but it’s easy to forget no-shows were one of the reasons ride-share became popular. Not just aggressively low pricing.
And yes. I know you can have no shows with ride share. But it’s nothing like calling a phone number and being promised a car and waiting blindly for an hour.
We need the apps and reasonable regulation. And better public transport.
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Seems like they didn’t have any problem getting drivers to take them there when the fares were lower either.
Why didn’t you walk?
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.
I really don’t know how they are not profitable. They must waste a shit ton on self driving technology. They effectively killed a large portion of the taxi industry while now costing more. It’s not as if their app is done miracle app these days. The few taxi services that are left tend to basically have a similar app.
That was the goal. Use unlimited VX money to kill taxis and then get a monopoly. Inflation came at the right time I guess, they can increase prices by a ton and we just blame it on inflation
“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!
It’s 5 to 7 miles, possibly in traffic. 20 to 50 minutes, depending on the time of day. It’s like $30, but could double during rush hour or any popular time of day.
So yeah, $50 whenever you want to go. $30 in the middle of the night.
TIL thank you!
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Cabs are less than Uber. But really just take the subway, unless you’re going across town or something where a car is faster.
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Uber is way way more convenient to order because of the apps. Same reason airbnb is still better for most people when traveling/renting in a new city. Its way more convenient than the traditional way that fancy updated in decades
We need monopoly and housing regulation so these companies can’t exploit people and cause huge harm to neighborhoods while people still get the benefit of the apps making things way easier.
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In addition to the other post, Ubers are incentivized to be clean, pleasant experiences, and cabs absolutely are not.
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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 always thought Uber was supposed to be like carpooling.
That’s ~4.74 kilometers, by the way.
That was the original idea. Pick people up going the way you’re going. Minimal extra mileage, and get paid for the small inconvenience.
But now people are driving just to drive.
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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.
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Because that was part of the terms of service unfortunately. The guy did show up.
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It was on us. Her hospital discharge wasn’t ready, she didn’t have her cell phone on her so couldn’t communicate and the garbage ass ER desk was the most unhelpful group of people. I got fucked.
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Yeah that whole night sucked ass, that was just insult to injury lol
Did you try to sue them or get a refund?
Sue? For $50?!
It could easily cost $5000 in legal fees just to take them to court!
Lol what no. It took months of un subscribing to get them out of my inbox too though, it was ridiculous.
Sue lmao
Why spend another $50 in time lost just to get nothing? That’s insult to injury. :-D
Spite is a powerful motivator.
Are you dumb?
It’s not about money, it’s more about making it sure that they will never do that again to others.
That’s a lot of words for “yes”
It’s not about money. It’s about making them either accept a ride or just deny it. What would you do if an uber driver just accepts your ride and decides to dump you with your money taken by him during some critical time like going to hospital for some emergency or have to catch up a flight or train in the eleventh hour? Will you laugh it off and try catching up another uber?
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.
Wouldn’t have a cab costed the same every day? I’m curious as to how that would compare.
If they are not in a city in the US, probably not. The nearest cab company is 2 towns/cities away from me.
“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.
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.
2.9 miles isn’t even far. You could just walk.
I mean, it’s an hour’s walk for the average person.
And that’s assuming safe neighborhoods, actual sidewalks, good street lighting (if at night), pleasant weather etc.
Not to mention shoes that are actually comfortable for long walks. You’d be surprised how many people don’t have that kind of shoes, and an hour’s walk in their regular shoes would give them blisters.
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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.)
Who is going from Manhattan to West side, or visa versa for groceries?
And the coldest NYC has ever gotten was -1F on Feb 14th 2016, with an average low of 26 degrees in their coldest month.
I live in Minnesota, not NY, and even in Minneapolis, the density of actual grocers is not that high
In any case, most deaths happen from hypothermia at 35-25 F, so that hour long exposure is still potentially lethal
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.
Archive link for this article: https://archive.is/OtCBR
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
If
