
How Uber Is Changing Night Life in Los Angeles - william_stranix
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/fashion/how-uber-is-changing-night-life-in-los-angeles.html
======
jordanpg
> in UberX, the company’s lower-priced service, introduced here last spring,
> can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes

This is absolutely false. Parking in downtown LA is much cheaper than this.
Closer to $5 a night, maybe a little more on the weekends. Sometimes you can
even find street parking within a few blocks of this vaunted Ace hotel that
the author is so infatuated with. Parking isn't a problem on this side of
town.

Moreover, Uber makes no dent on the fundamental problem in LA, which is that
the distances are so great.

It is shameful that the article doesn't even mention the real good news in LA
transportation which is that the Expo Line now stretches from downtown to
Culver City, and will go all the way to Santa Monica in 2015. LA residents
also voted to install a streetcar in the downtown area, although that's a few
years off.

Totally agree with the comment about this being a "submarine article". More
Uber cheerleading.

~~~
j10t
What I find more interesting is that parking SHOULD cost more than it does,
and if it did, Uber would win the cost-value comparison hands-down.

Americans subsidize parking by imposing fees on developers who don't include
"enough" of it, and by reserving large portions of cities' streets for car
storage. Multi-billion dollar highways enable sprawl and cheaper commercial
parking lots. Driving & parking personal vehicles is incredibly wasteful from
a broad economic perspective (but it was the correct path -- a necessary evil
in the absence of density to enable effective mass transit).

Even with the government subsidies, Uber is an economically competitive
alternative to driving & parking personal vehicles. That's the amazing part.
Public policy favors the incumbent behavior, yet "ride-sharing" has still been
able to expose market inefficiencies. Imagine if we killed all the parking
subsidies, or better yet: used economic incentives to discourage driving &
parking personal vehicles, and encourage the behavior that had a lower total
cost.

I believe the future of personal transportation is computer-driven computer-
dispatched vehicles, a game Uber and Google are leading. We can't get there
soon enough.

~~~
ohazi
> What I find more interesting is that parking SHOULD cost more than it does

No, not really. This is a sentiment that I see a lot in San Francisco and NYC,
where it makes a lot of sense, but if you've ever driven in LA, you'd quickly
realize that it doesn't really apply there because the LA met area is
extremely broad, not dense.

In the bay area, you might spend 45 minutes driving from Palo Alto to San
Francisco, and then another 30 minutes - an hour driving in circles looking
for parking, depending on the time/day.

In LA you have the opposite problem. Traffic gets so bad that it's not
uncommon to spend 1-3 hours driving across town on a weekend evening. But once
you make it to wherever you're going, you can usually find parking in under 15
minutes.

------
wdewind
> Even Mr. O’Connell, the über-Uber devotee, is peeved. “The company is
> turning into a soulless psycho monster,” he said. He sides with the drivers.
> “I would much rather they pay them fairly than have to deal with surge
> pricing at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday,” he said.

I grew up really respecting the NYTimes as an institution, but now when I read
what they have to say about things I actually understand I am quite
underwhelmed by their investigative prowess. I feel like they have a serious
habit of using quotes and other colloquial (mis)understandings that are
incorrect to spread FUD about specific tech companies. Check out their record
on AMZN, for instance. In this case they use this guy to set up a completely
false dichotomy: who _wouldn 't_ rather that? I'm sure even Uber would rather
that. But that's not how life (read: the economy) works at all.

~~~
mkhpalm
If you haven't noticed the recent flurry of Uber articles... Let me try to
explain whats going on here.

These days you go to boomberg, nytimes, any blog I know of and say "we'll pay
you X amount of dollars to write an article about Uber changing something."
The "news" outfit gets to write whatever they want but the underlying message
of "uber changing something" has to be there to get paid. The splitting hairs
part is how people think they retain credibility as a "news" outfit because
they use their own words. I think a lot of people would say otherwise if they
saw the whole process from beginning to end.

If that all sounds like unfettered mass manipulation, thats because it is. You
can be in the news all year round if you have the money to burn out fishing.
Pick an source, they all have their price these days.

~~~
throwaway20148
You actually think this is an advertorial masquerading as legitimate trend-
piece by NYT?

~~~
modifier
Yes, this piece is bought. It reads like a classic advertorial for Uber (with
a subtle attack against Lyft).

Read it again and you'll see it.

~~~
walshemj
Native Advertising is the industry term

------
shalmanese
Another thing about Rideshare in LA is that being a driver is the almost
perfectly complementary job for a struggling actor. You need a car anyway to
get to auditions and you get to set your own hours and make a decent enough
wage to survive in LA.

~~~
mbertrand
Totally agree, almost every one of the Uber's I hop in and strike up a
conversation with the driver they end up being a struggling
actor/comedian/musician. Seems as if it is a welcome alternative to getting a
job as a server at a restaurant.

------
jonahx
This seems like an example of a submarine article:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

------
ibejoeb
I think a lot of folks are nitpicking. Yes, the $4 is a shortest ride. Yes,
you can park overnight in DTLA for $7. Yes, there is still traffic congestion.
Yes, there is a false dichotomy or two. It's not stellar reporting of the
economics of it.

The real point is cultural. Planning a drive is real. DUI is a way a life for
a lot of people, so much so that the it is viewed as a revenue generator.
Fueling and parking take a significant amount of time. Uber and similar are
changing these things, at least partially because the price is right and it's
pretty reliable, which the article points out.

It's more convenient to take Uber to a meeting. It's more convenient to take
Uber for a night out.

Anecdotally, Uber changed the way I do things, and I think it's generally for
the better.

On the other side of the coin, I absolutely _hate_ Uber in NYC. I've never had
a good experience.

------
bkeroack
As an Angeleno, I generally resent NY Times trying to tell the rest of the
nation about life in Los Angeles. Every single article I've read in that vein
has had the same trite, vaguely condescending cliches like "America’s most
auto-centric place", etc. Los Angeles is vast, and some areas are as walkable
as Manhattan. We're also building more rail lines than anywhere else in the
country.

Uber is popular here (like any large city I'm sure) but Lyft has a strong
presence (especially in West Hollywood). Frankly, most people I know choose to
live near their favorite nightlife spots to avoid the driving problem, or near
mass transit.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I've been in LA for 13 years now, and it's a mixed bag.

The traffic is even worse than most people can imagine, if you're driving
across several neighborhoods and/or on the freeways. Most other cities don't
come close, DC being a notable exception. But even then, the traffic here
lasts longer and stretches further. Angelenos don't measure distances in
miles, we measure it in how long we expect it to take.

Parking can be a hassle in specific places, but for the most part you can find
space near where you're going at rates that are reasonable. Although there is
less free parking than many other cities.

But at the same time, LA is a city of neighborhoods all mashed together, and
some of those neighborhoods are quite walkable. I live within a block or two
of a ton of restaurants and shops, and within a short 5-10 minute drive of 90%
of my needs.

It's sucked when I've had jobs that required cross-town commutes, but
otherwise it can be quite pleasant.

Lot of taxis here. Lot of Uber/Lyft. Lot of Town Car services for the
entertainment industry (when you see that town car heading in the neighborhood
for a 4:30 AM pickup, you might not envy the actor's life too much).

As an aside, I'm actually impressed at how fast the subway system is currently
growing. Unlike some cities, projects here are getting completed in years as
opposed to decades. The subway/light rail is very different from 10 years ago,
and will be very different again in 10 more years. It's still a huge, spread
out city, but Metro is tying it together relatively quickly.

~~~
melvinmt
I keep hearing over and over how traffic sucks in LA but I've learned two
things since I got here: don't drive cross-town too much (I live near the
busiest intersection in Hollywood, yet 90% of shops and restaurants I need are
within 5-10 mins drive) and live where you work (30 min walk).

~~~
ido
Live where you work sounds nice in theory but practically it's not u usual in
tech to change jobs every 2-4 years and I don't want to move that often
(especially with a family and mortgage rather than rent).

------
kalleboo
If anyone is curious as to what the taxi regulation looks like in Los Angeles
which has lead to this, this paper looks like a good start.

[http://www.taxi-library.org/driving-poor.pdf](http://www.taxi-
library.org/driving-poor.pdf)

> The Taxicab Commission determined how many taxicabs were needed for Los
> Angeles and divided the city into five geographical zones. Taxicab
> franchises then bid on the zones and for an allotted number of taxicabs to
> operate in each zone

> the taxi industry is among the largest source of political campaign
> contributions to members of the City Council. The Los Angeles Times reported
> that in 2000 (the last year new franchises were awarded), taxicab companies
> paid lobbyists $288,000 in that year

------
mhartl
_“I can just, like, YOLO with Uber,” she said._

I nominate this for Millennial Sentence of the Year.

------
mbertrand
While I'm not overly impressed with the post I have to agree with the
sentiment of it as Uber/Lyft has made living in LA without a car much easier.
Coming from another major city my wife and I were dreading the idea of having
to buy a second vehicle for me just to live daily. Thanks to rise of ride
sharing services we haven't had to and that makes living here, not just
nightlife, a lot easier given the lack of useful public transportation.

------
facepalm
Didn't they have cabs in LA before Uber came along? I smell some hyperbole in
that story.

~~~
rwhitman
Yes there are cab companies in LA. There aren't many and they are just
_awful_. Never any place you need them, you have to call a dispatcher and they
never show up remotely on time (sometimes not at all, or in bizarre cases
three show up at once and fight over you), incredibly expensive, in very short
supply at peak times. I left LA before Uber hit but I've heard from friends
basically the same synopsis of what this article states, it's transformed
cabbing it on weekends which is a huge deal

~~~
facepalm
Thanks - that is the first argument I heard in favor of Uber. I mean thinking
why cabs sucked so hard, I suppose it is difficult to create a new cab company
to fix things. So maybe Uber makes it simpler to fix things by starting a cab
company (a cab company of one car+driver).

------
andyidsinga
so, in the towns where uber is popular is there a perfext storm of really
unreliable taxi service + a large desire to use a car that doesnt look like a
taxi?

~~~
dibbsonline
I think so, I can use a smartphone app / web page to order a taxi now. There's
no surge pricing, the cost is predictable as well as the drivers income, they
are not expensive and they are reliable, at least in cities, in Australia.

Maybe I've hit middle age, but it sure looks like evangelising uber is a
desire to carve some bohemian fashion for ones self by simply making a
materialistic change to a brand of taxi, it's only skin deep really, fashion.

Either that or there was a genuine gap in the market.. again any sort of taxi
company with OK service would have succeeded.

~~~
JeremyBanks
_Either that or there was a genuine gap in the market.. again any sort of taxi
company with OK service would have succeeded._

This is how I see it. Uber is not particularly revolutionary, but the existing
taxi system in many areas was so regressive and unpleasant to use that it
didn't take much more than a decent app to upstage them.

