Note that this is uber pool and is limited to a section of Manhattan (below 125th street). It's $100 for two weeks or $200 for a month.
Business idea! Sign up for unlimited uber rides and resell them for cash. Just stand on a corner where people are waiting for cabs, charge them $5 in cash to go where they want, and then call an uber pool for them.
Below 125th street is something like 80% of Manhattan's area and probably 90% of the population (including half of Harlem), so it's really not particularly limited. They just are cutting off the outskirts since there likely isn't a high enough density of UberPool users up there for it to make sense.
We need a site ban for forbes.com due to their actively filtering people with ad blocking and history of serving up malware-laden ads. Thank you for the alternate link.
Yes, I have a mental filter to just not click any links to forbes.com. If there were more people who feel the same way, may be we can avoid posting them to HN on account of convenience. (I have nothing against forbes. If they choose to not cater to people with ad blockers, it is their choice. But, I think it's HN community's choice to avoid them.)
I tried to read this article and I couldn't even finish the first sentence. They have a video advertisement with both a pause and a mute button that doesn't work. If you don't want people to ad block, perhaps consider ads that don't drive people away in the first place.
Interestingly I was getting occasional black screens (i.e. the entire screen, status bar and all) in Safari on iOS 10. Not seen that on any other site before.
I live in Manhattan. This is a rip off. The Uber Pool rides can take up to an hour sometimes, they drop off and pick up up to five people on your way. Uber if you are reading this, everyone in NYC realizes what a waste of time Uber Pool is.
How does Uber Pool even work during rush hour? Do you spend all day trapped in Times Square waiting to pick up the second person? Or does Uber try and route around gridlock? Does it just skip the other person if the car gets stuck?
Or maybe I'm paranoid because of a bad experience trying to get to a job interview via cab my first time in NYC.
Uber's wayfinding logic in Manhattan is actively dumb. With billions of dollars they could just hire a thousand locals to sit in a passenger seat to give navigation instructions.
If a car is ahead of me on an avenue, even by half a street, it will send them around the block instead of suggesting I walk forward a bit.
Or, instead of asking me to cross an avenue, it will send the driver down a different avenue for multiple streets to loop back to my position.
It is obsessed with getting on to the expressways. It will happily crawl past relatively free-flowing avenues to squeeze into an expressway full of cars heading to Westchester.
Its estimates of ETA seem to assume that there is no traffic. They are hilariously bad.
Drivers, who have been burnt by customers getting mad at them for not going to an exact location or for "ripping them off", follow the map religiously. No matter what I text or call. They follow an app which was presumably written by people who've never set foot in this city.
Things dramatically improved recently when they added a link to Waze in the Uber app.
And by improved I mean the drivers went from genuinely lost, misdirected, and clueless to merely confused and unaware of their surroundings but traveling vaguely in the right direction.
Uber Pool gives a route in-app that is displayed to each rider. Drivers don't deviate from this because other passengers will be added along the way and their path needs to be relatively predictable I would imagine.
I don't know how the route is determined in-app, but at least for Uber Pool in Manhattan, they are not using Google Maps as much anymore except for stuff like traffic information.
I know my Mini with "Google-backed" maps sometimes has terrible taste in routes and very out-of-date traffic info compared to actual Google Maps. I wouldn't be surprised if somehow the API isn't the same quality as the direct maps results.
Yeah Uber's navigation in Manhattan and Brooklyn is unusually bad in my experience. The last incident that truly soured me on Uber Pool was when it tried to take me from Downtown Brooklyn into Manhattan to drop the other guy off before me, when I was going to Brooklyn Heights. Um.
That, however was only my second worst Pool experience, not nearly as surreal as the driver who spoke nearly no English, and didn't actually understand the basic concept of Uber Pool. So I get in, then it prompts him to pick up another passenger, but he doesn't understand so he drives to the spot and expects me to get out. I try to explain that he just drove by the woman he was supposed to pick up, and after much confusion, she gets in the car. The driver thinks she's a friend of mine, and doesn't understand that we're now going to two different destinations sequentially. Then it prompts him to pick up someone else. It would have been more painful if it wasn't sort of mildly amusing.
Oh wait that might be tied for second with the time that I was headed down Canal leisurely when the app pinged indicating a new passenger, and prompting the driver to take an immediate right, which caught him off guard a little and he veered right into the Holland Tunnel approaches. Thankfully I was paying attention and immediately vocal enough to get him to stop and escape by moving a few traffic cones. Your average tourist would have been blissfully headed for New Jersey in that scenario.
Or, in other words, Uber needs to stop spending so much time fantasizing about valuations and robot cars and actually improve their product.
I have no idea why they're spending so much to theoretically develop a monopoly when ever user in this town at least is developing many reasons to bolt to a credible competitor on moment's notice.
My expectation is that self-driving cars will be promptly disintermediated.
"Google Rides", maybe, or "Amazon Prime for People", scatter-gathering over thousands of small companies owning 1 or 2 cars. Prices will fall to the marginal return.
Uber's investor fountain will run dry and they'll be stuck with the same economics as everyone else. There will be no brand loyalty once price-finding apps enter the fray. They'll still be a major competitor, but the fevered dreams won't pan out.
Has anyone tried a self driving car in Manhattan rush hour traffic (or similar cities)? I assume SV rush hour is more slow moving traffic/etc on expressways rather than tiny congested streets.
In any case wouldn't their self driving car implementation be improved by a better mapping and navigation algorithm in dense traffic?
But why would tiny companies win ? big companies still have somewhat better economics(volume discounts, vertically integrated maintenence, a variety of ways to raise capital, maybe a bit of branding(with regards to reliability, cleanliness...), etc).
A company that limits itself to online dispatch and doesn't own any vehicles itself (a) can expand to new cities at almost no cost, (b) can perform well on certain metrics like return on capital invested and revenue per employee, (c) faces no risk from buying too much capacity and (d) bears much less of the costs of risks like bad routing, mispricing or vandal customers, and so doesn't have to spend money mitigating those risks.
Of course, to get those benefits the supply of self-driving cars has to outpace the large companies' ability to expand. The fact your dispatch software can scale to 100 cities in a day is irrelevant if Google, Amazon and Uber are buying all the self-driving cars as soon as they come off the production line.
There are economies of scale, but there are also people who don't know they're going to go out of business for undercutting the major rates.
And there will be people who bought a self-driving car et voila, someone pitches "AirBNB for self-driving cars!" and they decide to undercut Uber to make a few easy bucks.
There will be constant downward pressure on price and no structural way to build a moat against it.
I'm not sure if "ask the destination to move" is technically a routing/mapping problem. Uber tries to get the car to come to you, you being defined as a lat/long pair, not as a presumably bipedal primate.
They might be assuming that their customers don't want to have to walk around to make it more convenient for the driver. (And what if, in fact, you're not bipedal, but use a wheelchair and might not be able to cross any arbitrary street to get to your driver?)
As a customer, I care about literally none of what they do to model the problem.
I only care that it is self-evidently dumb. It wastes 5 minutes to achieve what can be done in 5 seconds.
If I'm in a wheelchair I can tap "no thanks" or set a setting or whatnot. If it's discriminatory (it might been seen as such), invert the setting so that's opt-out by default.
Uber Pool in Manhattan during commuter hours (and potentially other hours?) gives you a location to walk to. They also do not drop you off precisely at your destination. Roughly +/- 2 blocks.
Edit: Incidentally, this is the reason Lyft Line is so terrible commuting in Manhattan. Pickup and dropoff locations are completely arbitrary, which slows everything down for everyone when compared to arranging pickups/dropoffs on easily reachable corners.
It's the same in SF! One time I dropped the pin at the end of a block on a one-way street, near its intersection with a two-way street. The driver it gave me was literally a block away and could have come down the two-way street, only requiring me to walk five steps over to that intersection.
Instead, it kept him on the parallel street one block over and then had him loop over three blocks, one of which was a major street, all to save me from taking those five steps.
I asked the driver about it and he said he was planning to just take the short route, but a) most people aren't ready, and b) it's safer from a rating perspective to follow the given route.
It's particularly baffling since Manhattan is the only place I've been where taxis are a credible competitor. UberX isn't, in my experience, cheaper than the cabs and even X is slower than hailing a cab. The last time I tried to used Pool, it assigned me a driver 20 minutes away; I could have walked the route before the driver got there.
Every other American city I've visited, cabs are impossible to hail and twice the price, but in NYC there are options.
> "How does Uber Pool even work during rush hour?"
I haven't used it during rush hour myself, but I know some people who have. The short answer is: it doesn't work during rush hour.
All of the issues you've highlighted are issues, but even without some exceptional traffic just picking up and dropping off multiple people makes the whole thing interminably slow.
Not to mention that Manhattan below 125th St is subway central - I can see the value for people in Brooklyn and Queens who live in subway deserts, but Manhattan? Even regular non-pool Uber is already slower than taking the train during rush hour.
I can appreciate that uberpool is a great thing for people in other cities, but the product market fit for Manhattan is exceptionally poor. I wonder why Uber is bothering with this market when there are many others (see: SF) where this "unlimited pass" would be actually useful.
It's useful for people who work out on the west side highway like at IAC or in the Starrett-Leigh building and live on like Avenue D or something. Or other similar oddly crosstown commutes that aren't necessarily gridlocked. Or people who work in hospitality like bartenders and so on who have to otherwise take a couple trains to get home.
I've taken a taxi or Uber in Manhattan even when a train would be faster when I have a business call I need to take. I know that cell service/internet availability is a reason others I know will sometimes choose to take a car.
NO that's not how it works, in fact the street capacity of cars being fixed is the very reason why car sharing networks are awesome, otherwise you are stuck in current situation where each individual has his/her own car leading to traffic and congestion.
There's a decrease in traffic from car sharing from what you state, moving from a single individual in a car to several in a car, however the overall capacity of the road remains fixed. If car sharing networks become popular in comparison to public transit, then the amount of cars will increase and this will eventually come in conflict with the physical limits of the road network.
> otherwise you are stuck in current situation where each individual has his/her own car leading to traffic and congestion.
This is a terrible assumption. The deal being offered is Manhattan -> Manhattan, and only below 125th street. That's a population of ~1m people[0], which doesn't even factor in age demographics. There are 1.6m commuters into manhattan each day and only 225k cars registered in manhattan[1]. Only 30% of employees in manhattan live in manhattan[2]. Basically, the share of people using uberpool will almost exclusively come from pre-existing public transportation.
As someone who lives in Manhattan below 125th street, you could not be more wrong. What you have is transition from Cabs with single rider to Uber Pool, not Subway to Uber Pool.
Also you are using figures of user who live "outside" Manhattan which do not at all benefit from Uber POOL.
> As someone who lives in Manhattan below 125th street, you could not be more wrong.
I've lived in NY for 30 years. I've lived below 125th street in manhattan for a decade of that. The wealth of statistics available to defend your point is at your fingertips. And... you went with "nuh-uh". That doesn't really convince me of much.
For some anecdata, I've only known 1 person to take a cab in both directions every day. The only reason was because they got a new job. 3 months later their lease was up and they moved to a more convenient spot. I know plenty of people who take cabs several times a week, but that's also not a demographic it will be taking from.
> Also you are using figures of user who live "outside" Manhattan which do not at all benefit from Uber POOL.
That was my point. I'm pointing out that the majority of the traffic comes from elsewhere or non-commuter traffic, meaning that the impact of this would be insignificant in the big picture.
I think the idea is that if all cars are automated then the street capacity grows. Imagine if all the cars on the road are talking to each other with swarming algorithms. Now you don't need stop lights, you don't have people cutting each other off, you don't have gridlock, you have seamless merging. You can also have the cars intelligently route around congestion to balance flow (similar to what Waze does only much more efficient since all cars on the road could do it).
Sure, there's still a limit to what the road can carry, but it would be much higher.
I get this idea but the gains from this sort of "perfect drivers" scenario are pretty fuzzy.
Maybe the biggest gains for this concept would be on the highway, but in a city with pedestrians and cyclists, where there certainly does need to be stop lights, and much, much more cautious automated drivers, I'm skeptical the effect would be large.
Even if the road capacity increases with self driving cars, I find it hard to believe that its ever going to reach the same densities as other forms of transportation. Pictures like this one[1] come to mind.
I never bother taking Uber during rush hour. You'll take as long (or longer) as taking the subway. I guess the only advantage is that you don't have to share your personal space with plebs like me who take mass transit :P
I regularly take UberPool in London, and I have company maybe 30-40% of the times. I don't know whether this is a general thing in London, or my experience is an outlier.
No the car just drives out of its way to pick up new people, they do it to make the ride profitable. It is completely unreliable as a ride to work, since a 30 minute commute can turn into an hour one if the algorithm takes the car too far off course.
Before you get all excited about this, it's ONLY UberPOOL and your destination must start and end in Manhattan. So if you use this to commute for two weeks you're paying 10 (edit: obviously 100/20 = 5, it's early. leave me alone) dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal because of the overhead of splitting the ride.
There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective, especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be 5-10 minutes +/- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn't actually save a worthwhile amount of money.
This is compared to ~$2.50 a trip on the subway, which (depending on which line you're near and whether you have a transfer) could take substantially less time than a car ride.
There are however some "subway deserts" -- the upper-east and lower-east sides come to mind -- whose residences would greatly benefit from skipping two long walks a day.
This is a great point! Too bad they ran this promo right _after_ it stopped being 100+ degrees on the 4,5,6 platform at union square or I might have done it just for this reason o_o
> So if you use this to commute for two weeks you're paying 10 dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal because of the overhead of splitting the ride.
So, you take a ride to work and then you teleport back to your origin?
And the whole exploiting people who don't understand the math of their business and are actually losing money / putting themselves into life altering IRS debt thing...
Many large companies in manhattan participate in pretax programs that allow people (myself included) to get a monthly metro card for ~60 dollars. So yeah these types of programs will never compete with that.
Isn't Virginia a huge coal-mining state? I'm surprised nuclear is that high of a percentage.
I recall visiting a coal-mining museum in some state that had a big coal industry, and it was amazing how optimistic and pro-coal the whole thing was. (Note that I said "amazing", not "surprising".)
There's some here, but most of the coal mining activity is further west. West Virginia is the biggest coal state on the east coast and second biggest in the US. Nice map here:
It looks like their electricity is absolutely dominated by coal.
Even though not much in mined in state, we're close enough to WV and others that it seems like it would still be the obvious source here. I'm not sure why it's not, although I'm glad!
There's also the whole: subway = not air conditioned and miserable, uber = air conditioned and comfortable. Also, as a Hudson Valley resident for most of my life, Indian Point and nuclear power in general is a huge concern for me.
When I was in New York this summer I carried around a sweater because it was too cold in the subway. It was 30-33°C outside most of the time (the Google machine tells me that's 86-91°F). It's true that the subway stations were miserably hot, though. (I'm European, but you can probably tell from my complaining about American air conditioning)
I'd assume I'm getting downvoted because I made a comment about my trepidation towards nuclear power.. If you lived within an emergency evacuation zone for a nuclear plant you may feel the same (disclaimer: I don't, but I lived close enough to Indian Point to feel unsafe, and everytime I take Metro North and see it fly past my window, I think what a risk it is)...
Indian Point is a liability to the people and the ecosystems of the lower Hudson Valley. New York State / Cuomo recently denied Entergy's certificate to continue using the Hudson River (1), which they are battling in court. Terrorism risks aside, this is not a state of the art nuclear plant. It's over 40 years old, the bolts are (literally) starting to break (2), and there was a recent radioactive leak (3) into the HUDSON RIVER. How can this not be worrying? It's been shown that NY can maintain energy levels at a cost of 20-30% higher without nuclear power (4), a number I hope will decrease as NY improves wind and solar (mind you, this report is from the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that vehemently supports fracking). This comes down to an increase of $76–$112 per residential customer. Personally, I'd be willing to pay twice that if it meant shutting down IP.
Most lines have working AC. But I bet that anyone (myself included) that complains about the NYC subway being hot is most likely referring to the 10-15 minutes of hell standing on a subway platform in absolute delirium-inducing 95 degree, 100% humidity, Gotham city fresh air.
Also, uberpool is terrible. Can easily make a 20 minute ride 60 minutes depending on how many other fares they pick up/drop off on the way.
I took one into the city once to try it out. Normally a 20 minute drive, we stopped and picked up 2 other fares. They both got dropped off before me (which is insane), and it ended up taking over an hour.
The worst part? The drive told me that if we dropped off one and another came up, he'd have to pick that up too before dropping me off.
I have used uber and lyft in many cities and been satisfied. Never once in NYC. I probably just have bad luck, but honestly in manhattan it's the same price to get a cab even at 3am and doesn't require an app or surge pricing. I've heard the same anecdotes from friends. The notable exception is going to or from other burrows. It's often cheaper to get a car from a service if there's no surge, though the green cabs are starting to compete when traveling from somewhere outside manhattan.
In general transit problems (and thus solutions) don't translate from other cities to New York or vice versa.
Not only is Forbes a publication which forces people to disable ad blockers and then serves them malware-laden ads, but they have also written a headline here which is misleading through omission of crucial details.
At least I assume the headline on HN represents the Forbes headline accurately, but I don't know, because they won't let me read their content.
This is actually a worse deal compared to the existing Uber Pool Pass for people commuting to a 9-5 20/40 times a week — using that service put you at ~$4/ride.
Interesting to see Uber attempting to compete at a slightly-more than public transit price, but it still seems unsustainable when it comes to paying drivers a fair wage.
Not to mention that the part of town this is limited to is extremely well covered by almost every train, which will virtually always be faster (and cheaper) than getting into an Uber Pool that's going to hop around and pick people up.
This is especially true for people like me (starting in November) who take the metro trains into Grand Central or Penn. The transfer to the subway from those is almost frictionless.
It is $200 this month. Chances are they will increase the price or put a cap the following month as they did in SF. The SF subscription isn't all that attractive anymore.
They're pretty up front about losing money on it. "Uber had promised to invest $10 million in D.C. during the SafeTrack program in a mix of ways. That includes offering financial incentives for drivers while still discounting UberPool this summer in D.C. Some of the money applies to incentives for the Pool Pass as well, since otherwise drivers would not likely feel very motivated to take a $1 fare."
It will be interesting to see how Uber shakes out in the long term. They can't keep this up forever.
I have certainly seen it cause many more people to give Pool a try. They are (were?) doing a flat-rate $3 price with no commitment for Pool rides that start and end within a zone downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. Great deal.
There's probably something to be said here about Uber limiting this to Manhattan - by far and away the most subway-covered area of the city - and not somewhere like East New York that's crying out for transit.
Of course, they do so to make money, and I don't begrudge them that. But it goes some way to highlight the fact that Uber is mostly certainly not a tide that raises all ships.
(as an entirely different aside, the roads in Manhattan are already terrible, and the subway is already quicker for a lot of journeys. Once you add in the fact that the Pool takes you far out of your way... eh.)
I called an UberPool in Manhattan at around 3:00 on a weekday. It was a 10 minute wait and when it did arrive the car already had four other passengers in the car. In many cases it's much faster and cheaper to take the train/cab.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadBusiness idea! Sign up for unlimited uber rides and resell them for cash. Just stand on a corner where people are waiting for cabs, charge them $5 in cash to go where they want, and then call an uber pool for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
Or maybe I'm paranoid because of a bad experience trying to get to a job interview via cab my first time in NYC.
If a car is ahead of me on an avenue, even by half a street, it will send them around the block instead of suggesting I walk forward a bit.
Or, instead of asking me to cross an avenue, it will send the driver down a different avenue for multiple streets to loop back to my position.
It is obsessed with getting on to the expressways. It will happily crawl past relatively free-flowing avenues to squeeze into an expressway full of cars heading to Westchester.
Its estimates of ETA seem to assume that there is no traffic. They are hilariously bad.
Drivers, who have been burnt by customers getting mad at them for not going to an exact location or for "ripping them off", follow the map religiously. No matter what I text or call. They follow an app which was presumably written by people who've never set foot in this city.
Some drivers have both, mostly so they can see the traffic data from Google Maps. I like those drivers.
Edit: I'd actually be surprised if it was Google Maps at fault, given that their Maps team has a large contingent in the NYC office.
And by improved I mean the drivers went from genuinely lost, misdirected, and clueless to merely confused and unaware of their surroundings but traveling vaguely in the right direction.
I don't know how the route is determined in-app, but at least for Uber Pool in Manhattan, they are not using Google Maps as much anymore except for stuff like traffic information.
That, however was only my second worst Pool experience, not nearly as surreal as the driver who spoke nearly no English, and didn't actually understand the basic concept of Uber Pool. So I get in, then it prompts him to pick up another passenger, but he doesn't understand so he drives to the spot and expects me to get out. I try to explain that he just drove by the woman he was supposed to pick up, and after much confusion, she gets in the car. The driver thinks she's a friend of mine, and doesn't understand that we're now going to two different destinations sequentially. Then it prompts him to pick up someone else. It would have been more painful if it wasn't sort of mildly amusing.
Oh wait that might be tied for second with the time that I was headed down Canal leisurely when the app pinged indicating a new passenger, and prompting the driver to take an immediate right, which caught him off guard a little and he veered right into the Holland Tunnel approaches. Thankfully I was paying attention and immediately vocal enough to get him to stop and escape by moving a few traffic cones. Your average tourist would have been blissfully headed for New Jersey in that scenario.
Or, in other words, Uber needs to stop spending so much time fantasizing about valuations and robot cars and actually improve their product.
I have no idea why they're spending so much to theoretically develop a monopoly when ever user in this town at least is developing many reasons to bolt to a credible competitor on moment's notice.
My expectation is that self-driving cars will be promptly disintermediated.
"Google Rides", maybe, or "Amazon Prime for People", scatter-gathering over thousands of small companies owning 1 or 2 cars. Prices will fall to the marginal return.
Uber's investor fountain will run dry and they'll be stuck with the same economics as everyone else. There will be no brand loyalty once price-finding apps enter the fray. They'll still be a major competitor, but the fevered dreams won't pan out.
In any case wouldn't their self driving car implementation be improved by a better mapping and navigation algorithm in dense traffic?
The reason I know the answer is because there is no such thing as a self driving car.
But why would tiny companies win ? big companies still have somewhat better economics(volume discounts, vertically integrated maintenence, a variety of ways to raise capital, maybe a bit of branding(with regards to reliability, cleanliness...), etc).
Of course, to get those benefits the supply of self-driving cars has to outpace the large companies' ability to expand. The fact your dispatch software can scale to 100 cities in a day is irrelevant if Google, Amazon and Uber are buying all the self-driving cars as soon as they come off the production line.
And there will be people who bought a self-driving car et voila, someone pitches "AirBNB for self-driving cars!" and they decide to undercut Uber to make a few easy bucks.
There will be constant downward pressure on price and no structural way to build a moat against it.
They might be assuming that their customers don't want to have to walk around to make it more convenient for the driver. (And what if, in fact, you're not bipedal, but use a wheelchair and might not be able to cross any arbitrary street to get to your driver?)
I only care that it is self-evidently dumb. It wastes 5 minutes to achieve what can be done in 5 seconds.
If I'm in a wheelchair I can tap "no thanks" or set a setting or whatnot. If it's discriminatory (it might been seen as such), invert the setting so that's opt-out by default.
Edit: Incidentally, this is the reason Lyft Line is so terrible commuting in Manhattan. Pickup and dropoff locations are completely arbitrary, which slows everything down for everyone when compared to arranging pickups/dropoffs on easily reachable corners.
Instead, it kept him on the parallel street one block over and then had him loop over three blocks, one of which was a major street, all to save me from taking those five steps.
I asked the driver about it and he said he was planning to just take the short route, but a) most people aren't ready, and b) it's safer from a rating perspective to follow the given route.
Every other American city I've visited, cabs are impossible to hail and twice the price, but in NYC there are options.
I haven't used it during rush hour myself, but I know some people who have. The short answer is: it doesn't work during rush hour.
All of the issues you've highlighted are issues, but even without some exceptional traffic just picking up and dropping off multiple people makes the whole thing interminably slow.
Not to mention that Manhattan below 125th St is subway central - I can see the value for people in Brooklyn and Queens who live in subway deserts, but Manhattan? Even regular non-pool Uber is already slower than taking the train during rush hour.
I can appreciate that uberpool is a great thing for people in other cities, but the product market fit for Manhattan is exceptionally poor. I wonder why Uber is bothering with this market when there are many others (see: SF) where this "unlimited pass" would be actually useful.
Which, I guess, is a use case.
I don't know that I would take UberPool however.
This doesn't scale when everyone is trying to use the service and the street capacity for cars is fixed.
This is a terrible assumption. The deal being offered is Manhattan -> Manhattan, and only below 125th street. That's a population of ~1m people[0], which doesn't even factor in age demographics. There are 1.6m commuters into manhattan each day and only 225k cars registered in manhattan[1]. Only 30% of employees in manhattan live in manhattan[2]. Basically, the share of people using uberpool will almost exclusively come from pre-existing public transportation.
[0] https://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2015reginforce-web.pdf
[1] https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendi...
[2] http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/commuting/index...
Also you are using figures of user who live "outside" Manhattan which do not at all benefit from Uber POOL.
I've lived in NY for 30 years. I've lived below 125th street in manhattan for a decade of that. The wealth of statistics available to defend your point is at your fingertips. And... you went with "nuh-uh". That doesn't really convince me of much.
For some anecdata, I've only known 1 person to take a cab in both directions every day. The only reason was because they got a new job. 3 months later their lease was up and they moved to a more convenient spot. I know plenty of people who take cabs several times a week, but that's also not a demographic it will be taking from.
> Also you are using figures of user who live "outside" Manhattan which do not at all benefit from Uber POOL.
That was my point. I'm pointing out that the majority of the traffic comes from elsewhere or non-commuter traffic, meaning that the impact of this would be insignificant in the big picture.
Sure, there's still a limit to what the road can carry, but it would be much higher.
Maybe the biggest gains for this concept would be on the highway, but in a city with pedestrians and cyclists, where there certainly does need to be stop lights, and much, much more cautious automated drivers, I'm skeptical the effect would be large.
[1] http://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8a...
I regularly take UberPool in London, and I have company maybe 30-40% of the times. I don't know whether this is a general thing in London, or my experience is an outlier.
Is this one of those 'nobody uses this, it's too crowded' situations?
There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective, especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be 5-10 minutes +/- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn't actually save a worthwhile amount of money.
Also forbes is incredibly spammy so here's the link directly to the promo: https://www.uber.com/info/plus/newyork/
There are however some "subway deserts" -- the upper-east and lower-east sides come to mind -- whose residences would greatly benefit from skipping two long walks a day.
So, you take a ride to work and then you teleport back to your origin?
It's much more comfortable than taking subways (which is also 100$ a month)
But there is the whole: subway = nuclear power = low carbon footprint vs uber = dead dinosaurs.
I recall visiting a coal-mining museum in some state that had a big coal industry, and it was amazing how optimistic and pro-coal the whole thing was. (Note that I said "amazing", not "surprising".)
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/geology/coal.html
It looks like their electricity is absolutely dominated by coal.
Even though not much in mined in state, we're close enough to WV and others that it seems like it would still be the obvious source here. I'm not sure why it's not, although I'm glad!
Indian Point is a liability to the people and the ecosystems of the lower Hudson Valley. New York State / Cuomo recently denied Entergy's certificate to continue using the Hudson River (1), which they are battling in court. Terrorism risks aside, this is not a state of the art nuclear plant. It's over 40 years old, the bolts are (literally) starting to break (2), and there was a recent radioactive leak (3) into the HUDSON RIVER. How can this not be worrying? It's been shown that NY can maintain energy levels at a cost of 20-30% higher without nuclear power (4), a number I hope will decrease as NY improves wind and solar (mind you, this report is from the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that vehemently supports fracking). This comes down to an increase of $76–$112 per residential customer. Personally, I'd be willing to pay twice that if it meant shutting down IP.
1. http://www.riverkeeper.org/news-events/news/stop-polluters/p... 2. http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/baffle-... 3. http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/indian-point/2016/02/0... 4. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/economic-impacts-cl...
I took one into the city once to try it out. Normally a 20 minute drive, we stopped and picked up 2 other fares. They both got dropped off before me (which is insane), and it ended up taking over an hour.
The worst part? The drive told me that if we dropped off one and another came up, he'd have to pick that up too before dropping me off.
I would rather pay the extra for UberX now (or whatever it is called) instead of UberPool
In general transit problems (and thus solutions) don't translate from other cities to New York or vice versa.
- Unlimited Uber rides
nice!!!
- They're Uber pool rides
Oh... not as great, but still decent.
- It's 100$ for the first 2 weeks.. then it's 200$ a month.
Shit deal. No thank you.
At least I assume the headline on HN represents the Forbes headline accurately, but I don't know, because they won't let me read their content.
I think that Forbes should be blacklisted on HN.
Interesting to see Uber attempting to compete at a slightly-more than public transit price, but it still seems unsustainable when it comes to paying drivers a fair wage.
As one of the 80% of New Yorkers who live in the other 4 boroughs, this is useless to me.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[1]: http://www.inc.com/damon-brown/in-the-ultimate-coup-uber-tak...
http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/07/29/uber-dc-monthly-pass-...
Very reasonable price (I suspect, in fact, they lose money on it). Service is OK. I prefer to take a bus but not everyone has a convenient bus line.
It will be interesting to see how Uber shakes out in the long term. They can't keep this up forever.
Of course, they do so to make money, and I don't begrudge them that. But it goes some way to highlight the fact that Uber is mostly certainly not a tide that raises all ships.
(as an entirely different aside, the roads in Manhattan are already terrible, and the subway is already quicker for a lot of journeys. Once you add in the fact that the Pool takes you far out of your way... eh.)