Yes, I am aware of the ways in which cars are tracked. But you can pay cash for taxis / public transit. For “ride-share” services you have to use an app that is tied to your identity.
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Total Addressable Market is a benchmark to understand the universe in which a company operates, it has nothing to do with what the company is actually trying to achieve. The TAM for life alert-fallen-but-I-can’t-get-up buttons is pretty much every senior citizen in the United States – but no one thinks that anyone is going to penetrate that far. It sets the asymptotic limit and then the question is how far up that curve you can go.
ubers forgetting about school buses , they can roll out an uber to school service where millions kids sit in inverted seats that shake lunch money out of their pockets.
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You’re making me wonder how many automakers and dealers have invested in Uber. The company also pushes drivers to buy newer cars, right? 
When the driver pay sinks so low that they can’t afford to make payments on their new cars, they’ll probably go down the same path as these truck drivers…
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So far my town (and province) has refused to allow Uber or any ride sharing companies to operate. I used to be disappointed at the Luddites in Victoria who just didn’t understand progress. Now, I’m beginning to see that they understood it far better than I did.
There’s a plan to allow ride sharing into BC in an equitable way. This includes minimum wages for the drivers, extra licensing for drivers, and extra insurance for their cars. So far, this has been a no-go for Uber and Lyft. And right now, I’m just fine with that.
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I’m kinda of the opinion that if your business model doesn’t work without exploiting people and resources, it isn’t a good model.
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I’m not the most uppity person but I sure am glad I deleted my Uber account a couple years ago.
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There are exceptions. I’ve heard Chicago’s CTA would be in the green if the rest of the city departments didn’t use it as a piggy bank. I can’t find the source, but last I heard on this was NPR a few years back, something like 65% of fares end up going back into the CTA operational budget.
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What worries me is an seems incredibly probable. Uber succssfully uses their IPO money to better undercut public transit.This results in enough of a ridership decline to tip a few cities into the death spiral. This only takes a few percent of the riders of choice in a community changing modes. The death spiral does what it always does, higher VMT for affluent riders and increased poverty for poor riders. In a few years when the unsustainable business model crashes, everyone is worse off by every metric. It will probably take a decade+ just to crawl back up to the pre Uber baseline for a lot of communities, if they ever do. Cleveland’s rail system never reached a fraction of what it was before the streetcar scandal.
One of the long-form Scrooge McDuck adventure stories had Scrooge at least contemplating becoming the owner of the atmosphere, and forcing every person to wear a meter that would levy a fee on every breath. Gasps and laughter cost more.
When that was written, it was intended to be absurd. Who would do such a thing?
Putting aside the logistical challenges, does it seem absurd that some rich and powerful person would be willing to do that today?
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That’s just an obviously wrong claim, though - since one is clearly replacing a car that goes to a destination and parks, then returns, with a car that does the same trip (and twice over, no less) plus drives around looking for customers in between. (There’s the same problem for people claiming autonomous cars will reduce traffic.)
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Well you can’t short it until you can buy it at the IPO. But who knows if there’s some derivative product that let’s you do this. Seems risky!
what a bunch of sleazy BS? Those tidbits are barely readable and throw completely meaningless statistics around like candy.
I wonder if anyone reads them and actually believes them? Somehow I feel it’s more likely that financial asshats feel they can make a short-term buck off of it.
{sigh}
From that Wikipedia article:
The story as an urban legend has been written about by Martha Bianco, Scott Bottles, Sy Adler, Jonathan Richmond[4] and Robert Post. It has been explored several times in print, film and other media, notably in Who Framed Roger Rabbit , Taken for a Ride , Internal Combustion , and The End of Suburbia.
Here’s historian Martha Bianco, who explores the origins and durability of the myth:
The GM Conspiracy Myth is the quintessential example of the conspiracy story.
But what is its purpose? What role does it play in public consciousness raising and
policy agenda setting? Why - even after numerous scholarly debunkings of the GM
Conspiracy Myth - does it continue to entice?This paper will review the history of the GM Conspiracy Myth, as well as what
legal theorists refer to as “the facts in the case.” The legal explanation of what really
happened goes only so far, though. The whole story about the decline of mass transit in
the U.S. is a story about the failure of public policy and about conflict among competing
constituencies in the transportation policy process. This paper will very briefly discuss
this failure and this conflict and will then conclude with a consideration of - or at least a
hypothesis for - the endurance of the GM Conspiracy Myth.
It’s fascinating reading for both the real history and deft examination of the historiography.
Yeah, yeah, conspiracies aren’t real, only poor people do bad things 
IPO’s can be a love/hate thing. Everybody hates FB right? https://i.imgur.com/ylsoQY0.jpg
Yes, Uber-free Vancouver just posted 2nd year in a row of 7% transit ridership growth, while in almost every other metro in North America transit ridership is shrinking.
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I always assumed that their plan is a race against time. It’s pretty straightforward: spend Other Fools’ Money to subsidize getting people into the habit of using a private on-demand car service, at far below its current actual cost. At the same time, dismantle any regulations in their way (which voters will help you with as long as you’re giving away below-cost rides to the bar) and rush out a self-driving fleet at top speed. If their luck holds, they’ll get costs down (by going fully autonomous and throwing drivers under the proverbial, uh, bus) and have destroyed any practical alternatives before they run out of gullible investors. Subsidies dwindle and eventually disappear, and what we’re left with is a choice between paying a profitable rate for a self-driving Uber, or walking.
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