
Lyft and Uber Won’t Be Happy Until They’re Your One-Stop Transit Guide - mikece
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/business/dealbook/lyft-uber-bike-sharing.html
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jacknews
I get the pitch.

Customer wishes to go from A to B. Ride-sharing app will plan the trip and
charge for each leg, because they own them all.

Personally, I don't think it's ever going to work that way, at least not on a
single locked-in platform, and I think this is all hot air, fed by hot
quantitative-easing cash.

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woolvalley
Can't you see the dream of automated synchronized carpool pickups from metro
train stations?

I don't think uber will ever make it's own metro lines, but I can really see
how it could be made to work well together.

~~~
magicnubs
Yeah, I think it's more likely to work like there's some psuedo-integration
and more standard data-sharing between Uber/Lyft and transport hub owners. An
added check-box to schedule an Uber or Lyft when you're purchasing your
train/plane ticket, with U/L paying a percentage of each ride to the rail
company/airport. That also allows U/L to better predict how many vehicles they
would need to have on standby for arriving passengers, even being able to
update on the fly as they receive info on delays and routing changes. I doubt
they're at all interested in owning a airline.

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treis
I'm pretty sure I already have my one-stop transit guide in Google Maps.

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toomuchtodo
Which coincidentally just removed the ability to book Uber trips in app.

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elvirs
they are making space for 'request Waymo van'

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princeb
i sure wouldn't mind some vc-subsidized underground trains.

maybe if they became competitive rapid transit operators as well, the world
could become a better place

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giantsloth
This happened with trains in the 19th century and it was an absolute disaster.
Please learn your history on privatized public goods. It results in massive
fragmentation in standards, extreme levels of corruption and an overall worse
experience for most people.

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karthikb
Suggest that you actually look at privately run transit infrastructure that
exists today. Tokyo subway systems (JR, Tokyo Metro, Keisei) - all private. Or
Hong Kong - MTR is private.

The real problem is putting operations and verification in the same hat -
public or private. Private transit systems work well when government
regulators have the power to set and enforce a strict SLA. They fail without
oversight. Same with public systems. When the operational and regulatory
agency are the same, it becomes hard to penalize failures.

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TylerE
Your definition of 'Private' is interesting.

Tokyo Metro is owned by... the national and local government.

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karthikb
Tokyo metro is one company of many that provide subway services in Tokyo.
There’s also JR, Keisei, and several other companies. Some are fully private,
some are joint ventures with the government - but key is that none of these
companies have oversight power over themselves.

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inferiorhuman
In theory there is separate oversight over public transit in the United States
as well. In California the CPUC regulates, for example, Muni and BART while
the CHP has oversight over agencies that use state and federal highways (the
subset of the Muni fleet that runs down Van Ness and 19th Ave is under the
purview of the CHP). In practice the regulators are feckless.

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kennydude
> There are already apps like Citymapper that help commuters figure out the
> best way to navigate between two points in a city. But Lyft and Uber have
> the advantage of actually running some of the transport networks that can be
> used to make those trips happen, and would like users to never leave their
> platforms.

Citymapper is starting to run it's own transport in London. It has/had a smart
bus and now operates a smaller version

~~~
mmahemoff
Indeed and it's a great experience, comes up as a recommendation when
searching for a route and acts like a hybrid between a bus and an Uber.
CityMapper also shows dockless bikes now and it would be extremely surprising
if they didn't get into the bike/scooter space too.

The convergence is fascinating.

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jdlyga
They're still very expensive compared to subways and buses. In New York,
subways are pretty dirty, but a good bus is usually better and faster than an
Uber.

~~~
usaar333
The article is talking about bikes though. Bike shares are definitely cheaper
than subways and buses.

Case-in-point: in SF, Ford GoBike (by Motivate, soon to be part of Lyft) costs
$15/month. A monthly bus (MUNI) pass runs at $73, clearly more expensive even
if you use pre-tax money to pay it.

~~~
cwal37
In the DC area, an annual Capital Bikeshare membership is only $85. I recently
started mixing some biking into my commute and thought about purchasing a
bike, but the $400-500 I was looking at for something durable and well
reviewed was hard to justify for my fairly chill, all-trails, 1-4 times a week
biking home from the office. Particularly when I compared it to the
dramatically lower personal overhead associated with the bikeshare. Of course,
my living and working situations are fortuitously situated with respect to
existing docks, but I really enjoy not worrying at all about "my" bike.

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thebradbain
If I could book a trip through Uber that was

Walk 5 min to BART Station --> Ride to Montgomery Station --> Catch a timed
transfer via Uber Pool to work

with all of the details figured out at the time of booking, I'd consider
replacing the last leg of my journey with Uber rather than waiting for a MUNI
bus or train like I currently do. The draw for me would be in the convenience
of solving the variables of my commute for me.

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cozzyd
I wonder how Lyft and Uber have avoided ADA requirements.

~~~
usaar333
Both offer wheelchair accessible cars. I'm not sure what the formal ADA rule
should be on them, but offering these services seems to work out for everyone.

~~~
kradeelav
Negative. I'm physically disabled and not in one of their ~3 select cities
(still a large city, mind you; ATL is hardly small) with that additional
'service' and the friction to get a workable vehicle is next to impossible.

Of course, it's obvious that's working as intended - providing disability
services is often treated by businesses as nothing but a cost center. Never-
mind the fact that the elderly would be the perfect early users for comparable
services + autonomous vehicles.

~~~
catkin
I've tried to request WAVs in various cities around the world (SF, NYC, LA,
London, Portland, Paris etc) on both Lyft and Uber and the results are
depressing. Overwhelmingly, if there are any WAVs available, they are only in
cities where local ordinance requires them, and even then there are usually
only a handful in the city. Wait times can be long at times.

I think the only place in the US where the experience was remotely good was
New York, but even then wait times were closer to 20 minutes instead of 2
minutes as they would be for able-bodied people.

The only other thing I can say about this is that Uber/Lyft drivers are
required to store a foldable wheelchair upon request. And unlike taxi drivers,
they can't just drive by you when they see your chair. In that respect, the
experience is better. But there are too many situations when a foldable
wheelchair is not possible/desirable, and a true WAV is required.

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wybiral
I live in a city with a decent bus system, bike lanes, and where it's never
too cold to walk.

Never used Uber but I have on occasion hailed a taxi or taken a local ride
share alternative in a pinch.

~~~
oftenwrong
I have taken nice walks at -20 degrees. You just need adequate clothing. At
that temperature, you should avoid exposed skin.

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PaulRobinson
The headline reminded me of once reading the McDonald's investor relations
website, where they claimed there was so much upside to investing in them
because they were hoping to eventually deliver "just one meal per day" to each
of the World's 7 billion inhabitants.

Now to be fair, they claim to feed 68 million people each day right now, so
they are on their way.

But there is a reason that in a free market, they are unlikely to ever create
the pseudo-monopoly they desire.

And with public transport, Uber and Lyft have even more of a hurdle to clamber
over.

Firstly, in many parts of the World the public transport system is government-
owned in some capacity. You can buy Citibike, sure, but it's not actually
possible to buy the London equivalent: it's operated by the Mayor through the
public sector entity Transport for London (TfL).

And this is in in the UK where there is extensive privatisation in the bus and
train markets, so you'd think there would be opportunity there. Maybe now: the
free market experiment on these quasi-monopolies has been widely considered at
least a partial failure and the appetite for nationalisation of the train
network has never been higher.

Developing cycle networks is reasonable. I despise the "leave anywhere" bikes,
because they are already cluttering up London in reaction to the government
owned scheme. However, I can see how this is super attractive for some classes
of customer, and the cost base is low enough it wouldn't surprise me to see
the mayor follow suit and mimicking their platforms.

But a wholly integrated stack? I'm sceptical.

A system where I could book a point-to-point journey from say my home to my
girlfriend's mothers (180 miles away) that incorporated car from my home to
the train station, the train itself and then a car at the other end would
appeal, but only if it was significantly price competitive with me doing that
myself right now, which ideally requires advance booking, a model that Uber is
specifically uninterested in.

It's also not obvious Uber/Lyft needs to own or operate most of that stack,
and owning it may actually make it less attractive.

Given an Uber or Lyft app that did this, and a third-party app that used APIs
to integrate and give me wider options and more competitive pricing, I'm not
likely to go with Uber or Lyft.

Uber's & Lyft's only option then is to try and eliminate in its entirety any
sense of competition. This rarely ends well.

So you then end up with a race to the bottom on price, and that's unlikely to
lead to profitable businesses, unless they try and borrow budget airline
business models, which again, models itself on advance booking price/yield
management, a model Uber and Lyft seem to be trying to avoid.

I don't quite see the big picture here. CityMapper might be the people to
watch in this space...

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mlthoughts2018
But their lines of business have inherently low barriers to entry and inherent
economic disincentives to artificially keep supply as high as these services
do in outlying regions.

The minute they either pay drivers less, charge riders more, or reduce supply,
it’s an immediate opportunity for another entrant. Diversifying into e-bikes
won’t change that. It’s just an inherent property of the entire concept of a
regional taxi service.

Self-driving cars won’t change anything either, as they will just be yet
another commodity device that all those would-be entrants can lease and use
all the same. The extreme sensitivity to price competition would remain.

The real reason for these auxiliary transportation acquisitions by Lyft or
Uber and all the fluff about being “the Amazon of transportation” is simple:
they don’t have anything close to a profitable business model. It’s wholly
reliant on keeping ride supply artificially high in outlying areas and prices
artificially low, through VC subsidy.

In the meantime, they need splashy new stories to tell to keep the hype train
going. First it was going to be Uber Eats and other gig economy extensions.
Not profitable either? OK, let’s do something with bikes or city travel
guides.

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0xB31B1B
“Ridesharing isn’t a profitable business” - this isn’t true. Uber and Lyft
both have many cities that have positive unit economics. IIRC the North
American market as a whole is profitable for both companies. Both companies
are losing money because they are plowing into more and more growth (a la
amzn), not because the business is bunk.

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subway
Both Uber and Lyft punt massive operating costs onto their semi-disposable
drivers.

