"TNCs had little impact on congestion in the western and southern San Francisco neighborhoods."
Recently Supervisor Peskin apparently reached a deal to impose a "net fares" tax on the TNC's. I wonder if they will consider differentiating it by neighborhood: imposing larger charges downtown. Peskin has also lobbied for downtown congestion pricing although that is harder to implement, politically and technologically, than such a tax.
> Peskin has also lobbied for downtown congestion pricing although that is harder to implement, politically and technologically, than such a tax.
Politically, sure. The idea has been floating around for at least a decade that I know of, and probably longer.
Technologically? License plate readers on every intersection, let's say, for the sake of argument, every intersection along Van Ness and South Van Ness going east, and every intersection along Folsom going Northwest. Maybe put the northern boundary at about Washington Street and also have readers at off-ramps. Maybe give people driving along the Embarcadero a free pass though and set the Eastern boundary there. Every car that enters this section of the City has their plate read, and you either pay with FasTrack or get a bill in the mail at the end of the month. If you live in this part of the City, you can apply for a waiver, oh and since we're reading plates and doing a DMV lookup for the address, the City could even charge extra if the vehicle is commuting in from outside the City. Actually, taking that into consideration, you wouldn't even need to apply for a waiver, any vehicle registered to an address within this zone simply wouldn't be charged.
In fact, to make this more interesting, if someone calls a Lyft or Uber to an address within that zone, you could have them collect a surcharge which will be paid directly to the City.
The technical challenge isn't very hard, actually kind of boring, I think the bureaucratic challenge is a bit harder once you get through the political challenge, which is the real hurdle. That is a potentially large source of revenue for the SFMTA though, between the tolls, the surcharges, and the additional monthly passes sold.
Congestion pricing is certainly do-able, and it would have the significant advantage of charging all vehicles rather than just TNC's. But it is technologically more complex to install readers everywhere than to tell TNC's to vary the tax they already pay. In other cities downtown congestion pricing has cost a couple hundred million to set up, and it takes some time.
“TNC information was based on data originally gathered by researchers at Northeastern University from the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of Uber and Lyft that show the locations of available vehicles to mobile apps, and then was shared with the Transportation Authority.”
Why would they use such a terrible data source. I had always assumed the cars in the Uber map are indicative anyway, not the actual location. Uber gives trip data to cities why not get real data
The issue with conclusions of reports like these is that yes, Uber/Lyft contributed to a congestion increase, but what would that increase have looked like without Uber/Lyft? How much would congestion have increased by without Uber/Lyft (due to the strong economy, jobs, etc)?
Would people instead have purchased cars and driven them around instead? Would we actually have had higher congestion?
Publishing reports like these without controlling for the economy/jobs/popularity of these cities seems to me to be an unfair attack on Uber/Lyft, where the real culprit might just be a strong economy.
How exactly would you control for all the rest? Where is there another San Francisco that doesn’t have Uber that we can go measure?
I think these estimates pass the sniff test at least. Downtown SF has very little parking relative to demand, so Uber / Lyft are practically the only way to get there in a car.
The fact that it’s extremely difficult or impossible to control for these things doesn’t mean that any analysis which doesn’t control for these things is valid or useful.
"Downtown SF has very little parking relative to demand, so Uber / Lyft are practically the only way to get there in a car."
So, wait... Your argument is that there is a natural disincentive to go downtown with a car, unless one uses Uber or Lyft... But you also somehow doubt that the car traffic that is downtown has been caused by Uber and/or Lyft?
So is everyone an idiot because they just drive around downtown, give up, and go home? Or they aren't in on this Uber/Lyft secret that nobody has heard about?
Or... And I'm just spit-balling here... Maybe you just argued against yourself very effectively.
My point was actually that the traffic is already relatively self-regulating due to the lack of parking, most people don’t get there by driving. Sure it’s plausible that Uber or Lyft increased the traffic, but it’s difficult to assert that in an alternate universe without Uber or Lyft that more parking would not have been built (attracting more cars), or that you’d have more traffic from cruising (people hunting for parking). Development plays a huge role as well, perhaps Uber has allowed more development than would have been feasible without it, or perhaps all the new development would have happened anyway, either way it’s a complex adaptive system that you can’t easily just say “ah, THIS is the one and only cause.”
I guess your assumption is that every one gave up on buying car and instead every day they drive to work. The impression i have from my friends is different: they use lyft when they cant take car or want to drink while with strong economy the can afford having car as well. I dont know any single person who would sell their car because they can travel with lyft to work every single day.
Really? My experience has been extremely different, albeit both of us only really have antidotes.
My friends/coworkers who got jobs in the city directly after college all don't have cars. Think 2013-2018 graduates. The only ones with cars, either grew up in the bay, or have worked outside the city at some point. Mind you these are all people who have a license in their prior state/country.
At the most basic level: YYou take your congestion per citizen metrics before the market entry of uber, which should be linearly related, and extend that line. Then you draw another line with the metrics after uber. If you see a difference and you can't explain those away wwith other causes, you're confident it's ddue to uber.
The study very likely threw some more statistical tests, controls And models at it, but that's the gist.
Not an unexpected rresult either: personal vehicle use means the car is on the road twice per day, uber twice per passenger and the distance between passengers.
"and you can't explain those away wwith other causes" feels very ambitious to be sufficiently confident that there couldn't possibly be another cause, but I guess that's the best we can do
Typical HN reaction - smug intelligent-sounding question to doubt the validity of a hypothesis backed by data and detailed analysis, by completely ignoring the details in a given linked article.
Your question is answered on page 15 (How Do We Determine the Causes of Changes in Congestion?) of the report you are happy to debunk so eagerly.
A tax on just ride hailing is mad. They are cheaper than owning your own vehicle, in part, due to real efficiencies in terms of maintenance and depreciation. Why on earth would anyone want to incentivise individual car ownership?
>I think real issue here is that road usage is mispriced.
The problem is not that roads are too cheap but that the alternatives are too expensive in terms of time, money and quality. Making what is the most effective (all things considered) transit option for a huge chunk of the population more expensive just hurts everyone. It's like raising prices on bandwidth in order to reduce network congestion. The solution is more capacity. That capacity doesn't need to be for cars but you need to add capacity.
I don't think the problem is capacity so much as temporal capacity. There's a large opportunity cost in having a big road empty for most of the day. Surely a smaller road that's busier for more of the day would be better?
I don't in principle have a problem with bandwidth being priced according to congestion. What we have instead is rationing.
You could make road pricing approximately revenue neutral by reducing fuel and vehicle excise duty.
Road traffic is a particularly good case for variable pricing because there is a discontinuity in traffic jam likelihood versus cars on the road - essentially, roads get full at a certain point, so the marginal cost of extra cars increases rapidly as it approaches that level.
This would encourage traffic to spread across more of the network, deliveries to happen at off-peak times, the 9-5 work cycle to be relaxed, pollution to be spread out more evenly across the day (to times when people aren't walking around).
So, for clarity: I'm saying make it cheaper to use the roads sometimes, and more expensive at other times.
> Publishing reports like these without controlling for the economy/jobs/popularity of these cities seems to me to be an unfair attack on Uber/Lyft, where the real culprit might just be a strong economy.
I agree. That is why this report is so good. The section "How Do We Determine the Causes of Changes in Congestion?" covers this question.
" this time to systematically estimate the individual contributions to changes in roadway congestion of the factors of transportation network supply change, population change, employment change, and TNCs."
I agree that they have done a good job and that the conclusion that Uber/Lyft contributes to congestion increase is very valid and should be considered to take actions in the city.
Uber is really a heaven sent product for me and my family. We have to pick up and drop off our daughter at her day care on a daily basis and without Uber, I am not sure how would we have done it. I hope we can expand studies like this with the quality of life improvement which services like Uber have been responsible.
Also, there are other things which have improved too. Such as less drunk driving, improved safety especially when traveling at nights, predictability vs. taxis etc.
Argue based on merits of your point vs. trying to fit families into stereotypes you believe. We are proud to live in the city and are happy with our lives.
Not really, I’m friends with my neighbors who have kids and I have no problems with families in San Francisco. They take their kids on the MUNI and I see plenty of other families on there as well.
Personal attacks will get you banned on HN. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all, regardless of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is.
Eh, it depends on how you look at it. If you are comparing Lyft/Uber to public transit, yeah they lose out by a lot, but I don't think a lot of people are doing that. I think a lot of people are comparing Lyft/Uber against the cost of owning a semi-new car in a major city and that's much more comparable.
Here's a super ball park monthly cost breakdown:
- Car payment: $250
- Parking: $200
- Insurance: $85 (~$500 every 6 months)
- Gas: $50
- Registration: $40 (~$500+ a year)
- Saving for maintenance: $50 (assuming $600 a year, which is probably low)
That's super super napkin math, but that's almost $700 a month for a car, which is basically the same as $30 each work day for a month. On top of that, you don't have to deal with the hassle of parking in a city, which has to be worth something.
Your parking number seems low. May depend on where in the city you are parking. But driving to work means parking in two places regularly which could be more like 500/month. Depends where you live and where you work.
No - you are wrong. Dropping off kids has a lot of convenience if you take an Uber. You don't have to worry about parking and can actually spend time with your kid, like read them a story, when you drop off via Ubers vs. yourself. In my estimate, I save at least 15-20min per dropoff when I take Uber vs. when I do with my car. In the morning that 15-20min extra matter a lot.
My comment was basically in support of using Uber for regular transportation as it costs about the same as owning a car. At the end I even mentioned that Uber only might be easier because you don't have to worry about parking.
If I'm reading your comment correctly, you are also in favor of an Uber only lifestyle because it allows you more time with your kids, saves you time, and you don't have to deal with parking (which I also mentioned).
If that's the case, I think we're on the same side.
$600 per year for maintenance, assuming this is an average sedan built within the last 5 years, is very high. New vehicles need oil changes every 10k miles, and tires every few years. That's it (on average).
I live in the rust belt, which is probably the worst environment for vehicles. I buy new, keep cars for 6 years or so, and I spend very little on maintenance. New vehicles simply don't require much to keep running well.
Also, $40 a month for registration? Most places are $50-$100 a year. Is California that much more?
Also factor into the car cost the time lost driving there and back. That could easily be a couple of hours a week. Say 6 hours a month. What’s that worth? Could be $120 to $1200 a month.
In SF, Uber pool rides are cheap ($20 can usually get you anywhere in the City, and shorter distances at off peak times are often under 10). Compared with just cost of parking which is easily 300+ a month at many apartment buildings and only a piece of the cost of car ownership, commuting via Uber/Lyft actually makes economic sense.
>If the average is actually $20, two rides a day (working day) are $800 i.e. more of the $700 calculated above
In which case owning the car is a no brainier because of the personal freedom and massive amount of inconvenience it affords. If you want to go on a road trip or eat taco bell at 1AM you can do that for just the price of gas (though you probably shouldn't do the latter because odds are if you want Taco bell at 1AM you're also stoned out of your mind and unfit to drive).
Do you have kids? Do you know how expensive it is to raise them? The preschool costs around $3k/mo at least. Compared to that $300/mo is pretty minor and the convenience it offers is totally worth it.
Pretty sure most people aren't spending $3,000/month on private school. My kid goes to public Kindergarten which is free.
Even in Toronto, which has some of the highest daycare costs in Canada, it was only $1,500/month. Aftercare at the school is $800/month. I'm very fortunate to make a good living so I can afford such things but even I balk at the idea of taking a daily Uber to drop my kid off.
You should really read your post from the perspective of the working poor and think about what you're saying from a position of privilege.
I am talking about SF here which doesn't have a great public school system. Also, I was replying to a comment where someone is making a snarky remark about what one should or should not do with their money - and was attempting to provide context.
And this is hacker news. I am reasonably sure that we aren't representing working poor here but mostly well paid and skilled professionals.
You're out of your mind if you think most people with children are paying $3k a month for child care. $3k a month is the entire income for a minimum wage couple with a child isn't it? I don't think your experience is typical.
>I'm amazed that Uber is considered an affordable commute device. Is that a SV phenomenon ?
Just the cost of registering a car in CA buys you a lot of Uber rides. Then there's parking and maintenance (the HN demographic is taking their cars to the dealer, not down the street to the neighbor who fixes cars as a side gig) and the fact most people rich enough to afford to use Uber every day are comparing to the payments on a Tesla, not a one time purchase of an old Civic.
It's an upper-class phenomenon that's exacerbated by some SV and CA specific economic circumstances.
It is both cost+convenience. As I mentioned in one of my other comments, parking near the day care is a major issue, even for a few minutes - so an old Civic wouldn't have helped. With my own car, I would have to at least spend 15min every day trying to look for parking and I would rather spend that time making our kid comfortable in school.
Yeah, no shit. I own a bike and hardly ride it because if I ride on the sidewalk I’m screamed at for endangering pedestrians; if I ride in the street lane I’m screamed at and cut off by drivers for going too slow; if I ride in the handful of bike lanes I’m at extreme risk for being cut off by an Uber taxi, Lyft taxi, delivery vehicle, or some random person in a car and they always say “I’ll just be a second you can go around me!!” but if I do then I’m in one of the other two areas and here comes the screaming and the maybe dying.
So if I can’t get there by walking, busing, train, or biking in wide open spaces, I’m just not going because damn, people in cars sure do act entitled to the spaces where I’m supposed to be and think nothing of swinging that two ton block of deadly metal around in ways that may smear their paint but could injure or kill me with little effort.
I don't understand why cities even allow cars. For example Amsterdam would work so much better if the roads became bike/electric-scooter* lanes with limited car access.
In New York (well, Manhattan), London and Paris it would work even better because you have a subway.
That would also solve the air quality problems of those cities in one fell swoop.
* Gas scooters - particularly two-stroke - are a relic from the past and need to be banned.
It wouldn't work in Paris, with the current infrastructure, there's a lot of places that can't be easily reached with a car. In addition, there's a lot traffic that goes through Paris from one subburb to another.
Scooters are not a perfect solution. They are maybe part of the solution to the global problem of congestion, but how do you travel the last miles when you are 70 years old or you have a baby and it's raining ? Scooters only solve the problem for a specific segment of the population, not for everyone.
In many ways, I think solutions like this are just kicking the can. Travel in a place like Bangkok for one day. Red lights look like the start of a motocross rally. There are even motorbike taxis. And motorcycles deciding the sidewalk doubles as a bike line is a common sight. But traffic is still completely brutal. That's also with city wide subway and airtrain transport options as well.
The problem is simple. People need access to the roadways in a fashion that grows linearly to low exponentially. But the capacity of the roadway capacity stays constant with an occasional constant bump. Even if you suddenly toss every single driver on a scooter, it's just one of those constant time bumps. You'll eventually bump into the exact same problem of a constant road capacity against an increasing roadway access demand.
You need a way of linearly, and indefinitely, increasing traffic capacity, not one-off constant value work-arounds.
Amount of potential traffic can't grow without limit. People need space to do other things. That puts a natural limit on the amount of traffic because people don't go places just to get there. They go places to do something when they get there.
The big underlying factor is population increase, both permanent increases of the local population and temporary increases from visitors. Though I imagine there are also other factors even beyond that one that also increase traffic. It's probably safe to say that increased income results in more activity involving transport, for instance. I'd agree there's definitely some theoretic cutoff where it becomes practically physically impossible to squeeze any more people into an area, but I'm not sure how practical it is to consider that since you're hitting major dystopia long before you get to that point.
A MUNI bus ride is 1/10 the cost of an Uber or Lyft and people would rather spend the extra money to not deal with the SF public. Ride share to work, your favorite restaurant, bar, and then home. It’s like living in the suburbs in the city.
I wonder how many people who can’t afford a vehicle but don’t want to deal with public transit would leave SF if ride sharing was banned outright.
Worse they add an extra leg to all trips, not just more trips. At best it’s last drop off location > pickup location > drop off location. On top of that many drivers will go to a fourth location to wait for their next passenger.
“A MUNI bus ride is 1/10 the cost of an Uber or Lyft…”
How I wish that were true. Certainly it can be depending on whether it is Prime Time and some other variables, but generally taking a shared Lyft or even a private one, MUNI is more like 1/2 to 1/4 the cost.
Now the thing working against a shared Lyft is if a trip on the bus to my destination will take 30 minutes, a shared ride will be about 20 or 25, so for my use case I’m almost always calling a private car except when time isn’t a factor but overall comfort is.
That is to say, it isn’t cheap, but it is competitive if you’re willing to pay a tiny bit extra for a much more comfortable ride. That said I still try to stick to public transit when possible, except when time is a factor and I can’t rely on the bus.
To be clear, Uber and Lyft are in cash burn phase, still...
Yes, this is essentially still a free market economy but the prices of rides are largely subsidised to bring them to a point where they compete with public transport.
That said, public transport is often a last mile problem. How do you get to and from the node, with a baby, in bad weather etc.
Public transport is far from ideal and TNCs fill the gap willingly.
TNCs fill the gap so easily by piggybacking off the Auto Lobby. If we had more, denser public transport coupled with reliable safe bike lanes (heck sometimes the whole sidewalk is missing...) public would be much more attractive.
I'm not sure how credible this is but someone who work at one of the ride sharing company told me most of the cash burn happens in new markets for rapid growth and established markets like SF are profitable.
> prices of rides are largely subsidised to bring them to a point where they compete with public transport
Is this location based? I'm in the UK and my recent trips with Uber have cost around the same as a standard taxi and nowhere near as cheap as a bus would have cost.
I’m sure this is comparing Uber Pool or similar rather than riding the car all by yourself. Also, San Francisco has multiple transit agencies and transferring between them means paying another fare.
> I'm in the UK and my recent trips with Uber have cost around the same as a standard taxi ...
My experience is that they're about 10-20% more expensive on short local trips, but about 20-30% cheaper on medium distance trips, where Uber drivers have the benefit of not having to return to the area where their company operates from.
It seems tautological that uber/lyft would increase congestion. The one and only way it would not be true is if every single person who used the service had a previous option that they were readily utilizing. Though even there nonpassenger driving hours would probably cause a net increase in congestion anyhow. But I think it goes without saying that there are countless people that end up 'driving' far many more miles thanks to uber/lyft, myself being one of them.
In other words as you make transport more desirable, available, and affordable - congestion will increase. The natural retort against this is public transport, but route/time restrictions as well as other passengers will always pose a limit on both the desirability and availability of public transport, though it certainly tends to nail the third criteria at least.
I've heard that at many times 1/3 of cars on the road in SF are looking for parking. Don't really believe it is that high, but, if true, would be a way for uber/lyft use to decrease congestion in a meaningful way.
I use Lyft a lot when I travel, but I'm also acutely aware that such services have their downside. For example, using Lyft the way I do spares me both the hassle and the liability of a rental car in two unfamiliar and notoriously bad traffic environments (Silicon Valley and Seattle). How is that possible? Because that hassle and liability are pushed onto the driver, whose livelihood would be far more affected by an accident than mine would be. :(
With respect to congestion, there is definitely a problem that so many rides leave the driver somewhere other than where they'd want to be. Taking rides to and from dinner is one thing, because those trips balance out pretty well. Using a TNC as a commute alternative is quite another thing, because everyone wants to go one way in the morning and the other way in the afternoon, leaving every car occupied only half the time. Even worse, the effect is most concentrated in exactly the places people least want to drive themselves because of the pre-existing congestion. Every bad place gets worse.
I don't know of any solution that others aren't already likely to mention, but it's definitely a problem looking for a better solution.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 77.4 ms ] threadRecently Supervisor Peskin apparently reached a deal to impose a "net fares" tax on the TNC's. I wonder if they will consider differentiating it by neighborhood: imposing larger charges downtown. Peskin has also lobbied for downtown congestion pricing although that is harder to implement, politically and technologically, than such a tax.
Politically, sure. The idea has been floating around for at least a decade that I know of, and probably longer.
Technologically? License plate readers on every intersection, let's say, for the sake of argument, every intersection along Van Ness and South Van Ness going east, and every intersection along Folsom going Northwest. Maybe put the northern boundary at about Washington Street and also have readers at off-ramps. Maybe give people driving along the Embarcadero a free pass though and set the Eastern boundary there. Every car that enters this section of the City has their plate read, and you either pay with FasTrack or get a bill in the mail at the end of the month. If you live in this part of the City, you can apply for a waiver, oh and since we're reading plates and doing a DMV lookup for the address, the City could even charge extra if the vehicle is commuting in from outside the City. Actually, taking that into consideration, you wouldn't even need to apply for a waiver, any vehicle registered to an address within this zone simply wouldn't be charged.
In fact, to make this more interesting, if someone calls a Lyft or Uber to an address within that zone, you could have them collect a surcharge which will be paid directly to the City.
The technical challenge isn't very hard, actually kind of boring, I think the bureaucratic challenge is a bit harder once you get through the political challenge, which is the real hurdle. That is a potentially large source of revenue for the SFMTA though, between the tolls, the surcharges, and the additional monthly passes sold.
Why would they use such a terrible data source. I had always assumed the cars in the Uber map are indicative anyway, not the actual location. Uber gives trip data to cities why not get real data
Would people instead have purchased cars and driven them around instead? Would we actually have had higher congestion?
Publishing reports like these without controlling for the economy/jobs/popularity of these cities seems to me to be an unfair attack on Uber/Lyft, where the real culprit might just be a strong economy.
I think these estimates pass the sniff test at least. Downtown SF has very little parking relative to demand, so Uber / Lyft are practically the only way to get there in a car.
Why do you need to get there in a car?
I use Muni and Caltrain.
So, wait... Your argument is that there is a natural disincentive to go downtown with a car, unless one uses Uber or Lyft... But you also somehow doubt that the car traffic that is downtown has been caused by Uber and/or Lyft?
So is everyone an idiot because they just drive around downtown, give up, and go home? Or they aren't in on this Uber/Lyft secret that nobody has heard about?
Or... And I'm just spit-balling here... Maybe you just argued against yourself very effectively.
My friends/coworkers who got jobs in the city directly after college all don't have cars. Think 2013-2018 graduates. The only ones with cars, either grew up in the bay, or have worked outside the city at some point. Mind you these are all people who have a license in their prior state/country.
The study very likely threw some more statistical tests, controls And models at it, but that's the gist.
Not an unexpected rresult either: personal vehicle use means the car is on the road twice per day, uber twice per passenger and the distance between passengers.
Your question is answered on page 15 (How Do We Determine the Causes of Changes in Congestion?) of the report you are happy to debunk so eagerly.
Link (PDF): https://www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/content/Planning/T...
I think real issue here is that road usage is mispriced. Singapore does it well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Road_Pricing.
A tax on just ride hailing is mad. They are cheaper than owning your own vehicle, in part, due to real efficiencies in terms of maintenance and depreciation. Why on earth would anyone want to incentivise individual car ownership?
The problem is not that roads are too cheap but that the alternatives are too expensive in terms of time, money and quality. Making what is the most effective (all things considered) transit option for a huge chunk of the population more expensive just hurts everyone. It's like raising prices on bandwidth in order to reduce network congestion. The solution is more capacity. That capacity doesn't need to be for cars but you need to add capacity.
I don't in principle have a problem with bandwidth being priced according to congestion. What we have instead is rationing.
You could make road pricing approximately revenue neutral by reducing fuel and vehicle excise duty.
Road traffic is a particularly good case for variable pricing because there is a discontinuity in traffic jam likelihood versus cars on the road - essentially, roads get full at a certain point, so the marginal cost of extra cars increases rapidly as it approaches that level.
This would encourage traffic to spread across more of the network, deliveries to happen at off-peak times, the 9-5 work cycle to be relaxed, pollution to be spread out more evenly across the day (to times when people aren't walking around).
So, for clarity: I'm saying make it cheaper to use the roads sometimes, and more expensive at other times.
I agree. That is why this report is so good. The section "How Do We Determine the Causes of Changes in Congestion?" covers this question.
" this time to systematically estimate the individual contributions to changes in roadway congestion of the factors of transportation network supply change, population change, employment change, and TNCs."
I agree that they have done a good job and that the conclusion that Uber/Lyft contributes to congestion increase is very valid and should be considered to take actions in the city.
Also, there are other things which have improved too. Such as less drunk driving, improved safety especially when traveling at nights, predictability vs. taxis etc.
I'm amazed that Uber is considered an affordable commute device. Is that a SV phenomenon ?
At this point, you have no argument but probably are just pissed that families are co-habiting your preferred non-family only city space.
Get a life and do something with it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here's a super ball park monthly cost breakdown:
- Car payment: $250
- Parking: $200
- Insurance: $85 (~$500 every 6 months)
- Gas: $50
- Registration: $40 (~$500+ a year)
- Saving for maintenance: $50 (assuming $600 a year, which is probably low)
That's super super napkin math, but that's almost $700 a month for a car, which is basically the same as $30 each work day for a month. On top of that, you don't have to deal with the hassle of parking in a city, which has to be worth something.
My comment was basically in support of using Uber for regular transportation as it costs about the same as owning a car. At the end I even mentioned that Uber only might be easier because you don't have to worry about parking.
If I'm reading your comment correctly, you are also in favor of an Uber only lifestyle because it allows you more time with your kids, saves you time, and you don't have to deal with parking (which I also mentioned).
If that's the case, I think we're on the same side.
I live in the rust belt, which is probably the worst environment for vehicles. I buy new, keep cars for 6 years or so, and I spend very little on maintenance. New vehicles simply don't require much to keep running well.
Also, $40 a month for registration? Most places are $50-$100 a year. Is California that much more?
If both rides are around $15 on average, than you get an afvantage.
In which case owning the car is a no brainier because of the personal freedom and massive amount of inconvenience it affords. If you want to go on a road trip or eat taco bell at 1AM you can do that for just the price of gas (though you probably shouldn't do the latter because odds are if you want Taco bell at 1AM you're also stoned out of your mind and unfit to drive).
Even in Toronto, which has some of the highest daycare costs in Canada, it was only $1,500/month. Aftercare at the school is $800/month. I'm very fortunate to make a good living so I can afford such things but even I balk at the idea of taking a daily Uber to drop my kid off.
You should really read your post from the perspective of the working poor and think about what you're saying from a position of privilege.
And this is hacker news. I am reasonably sure that we aren't representing working poor here but mostly well paid and skilled professionals.
You're out of your mind if you think most people with children are paying $3k a month for child care. $3k a month is the entire income for a minimum wage couple with a child isn't it? I don't think your experience is typical.
Just the cost of registering a car in CA buys you a lot of Uber rides. Then there's parking and maintenance (the HN demographic is taking their cars to the dealer, not down the street to the neighbor who fixes cars as a side gig) and the fact most people rich enough to afford to use Uber every day are comparing to the payments on a Tesla, not a one time purchase of an old Civic.
It's an upper-class phenomenon that's exacerbated by some SV and CA specific economic circumstances.
The fact that child restraints are not required on public transport (which is itself mysterious) makes it preferable to car transit, for our family.
So if I can’t get there by walking, busing, train, or biking in wide open spaces, I’m just not going because damn, people in cars sure do act entitled to the spaces where I’m supposed to be and think nothing of swinging that two ton block of deadly metal around in ways that may smear their paint but could injure or kill me with little effort.
In New York (well, Manhattan), London and Paris it would work even better because you have a subway.
That would also solve the air quality problems of those cities in one fell swoop.
* Gas scooters - particularly two-stroke - are a relic from the past and need to be banned.
These things look pretty amazing. https://www.gogoro.com
That said the regulation does sounds a bit overbearing
The problem is simple. People need access to the roadways in a fashion that grows linearly to low exponentially. But the capacity of the roadway capacity stays constant with an occasional constant bump. Even if you suddenly toss every single driver on a scooter, it's just one of those constant time bumps. You'll eventually bump into the exact same problem of a constant road capacity against an increasing roadway access demand.
You need a way of linearly, and indefinitely, increasing traffic capacity, not one-off constant value work-arounds.
I wonder how many people who can’t afford a vehicle but don’t want to deal with public transit would leave SF if ride sharing was banned outright.
How I wish that were true. Certainly it can be depending on whether it is Prime Time and some other variables, but generally taking a shared Lyft or even a private one, MUNI is more like 1/2 to 1/4 the cost.
Now the thing working against a shared Lyft is if a trip on the bus to my destination will take 30 minutes, a shared ride will be about 20 or 25, so for my use case I’m almost always calling a private car except when time isn’t a factor but overall comfort is.
That is to say, it isn’t cheap, but it is competitive if you’re willing to pay a tiny bit extra for a much more comfortable ride. That said I still try to stick to public transit when possible, except when time is a factor and I can’t rely on the bus.
If you can't deal with "the SF public", then you have no place living in SF.
That said, public transport is often a last mile problem. How do you get to and from the node, with a baby, in bad weather etc. Public transport is far from ideal and TNCs fill the gap willingly.
TNCs fill the gap so easily by piggybacking off the Auto Lobby. If we had more, denser public transport coupled with reliable safe bike lanes (heck sometimes the whole sidewalk is missing...) public would be much more attractive.
Though reaching “profitability” is not really a focus for them until automated vehicles are ready to replace the humans on the road.
Is this location based? I'm in the UK and my recent trips with Uber have cost around the same as a standard taxi and nowhere near as cheap as a bus would have cost.
My experience is that they're about 10-20% more expensive on short local trips, but about 20-30% cheaper on medium distance trips, where Uber drivers have the benefit of not having to return to the area where their company operates from.
In other words as you make transport more desirable, available, and affordable - congestion will increase. The natural retort against this is public transport, but route/time restrictions as well as other passengers will always pose a limit on both the desirability and availability of public transport, though it certainly tends to nail the third criteria at least.
With respect to congestion, there is definitely a problem that so many rides leave the driver somewhere other than where they'd want to be. Taking rides to and from dinner is one thing, because those trips balance out pretty well. Using a TNC as a commute alternative is quite another thing, because everyone wants to go one way in the morning and the other way in the afternoon, leaving every car occupied only half the time. Even worse, the effect is most concentrated in exactly the places people least want to drive themselves because of the pre-existing congestion. Every bad place gets worse.
I don't know of any solution that others aren't already likely to mention, but it's definitely a problem looking for a better solution.