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Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse
(www.sfchronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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The correct way to fix traffic is public transportation: railways and subways.
The correct way to fix traffic is to stop designing the world around cars to the exclusion of absolutely everything the fuck else including humans.
And a whole lot of work from home!
And bike lanes, bike sharing etc.
...including working on security measures to ensure that people feel safe using them
Definitely needs to be solved where it exists, but there are many places in the world that don't have this problem.
Fair, but where I am it certainly is an argument I hear from many people - particularly women - that refuse to use public transport alone, particularly at night. There's only so many reports you can read about people being groped, sexually harassed or hurt, see the security being buddies with the loudest and rowdiest pack of gangsters in the section and look a female friend in the eye as they recount someone whipping our their wiener in front of them, then walking away like nothing happened. Eventually, "that won't happen to me" turns into "shit, it just might".
This may be an issue of selection bias, but downplaying it does the progress of public transport a disservice - infrastructural improvements need to go hand in hand with service improvements, if we want them to become a viable alternative.
Oh, by the way, this is a big city in southern Germany. We're not even the worst place.
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How the fuck was Uber supposed to help traffic? That's the most American take on solving traffic issues I've read in a while.
The actual study modeled a 40% reduction in number of taxis on the road when hailing was made more efficient, with carpooling passengers, and a re-purposing of parking space:
In the 2010s, the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where one of us serves as the director, was at the forefront of using Big Data to study how ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. The findings appeared to be astonishing: With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses.
But it turns out that just like with widening highways, human behavior responds to the increased efficiency by stepping up the demand to reach the previous equilibrium again.
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I've never heard this argument. I've heard car share apps could reduce parking issues but how traffic? It's still a car that can hold generally 4, same as anyone has
Uber does have a carpool option. But I'm not sure how often it gets used.
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I don't understand how anyone ever thought they could reduce traffic. Even if they only served people who would otherwise have driven, a cab replacing an A to B and a C to D journey has to do three journeys to replace those two (A to B, B to C, and C to D). It was always going to increase traffic.
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The text of the article explains that it's based on reducing the number of taxis (or cars for hire generally) on the road, reducing parking spots, and increasing carpooling:
In the 2010s, the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where one of us serves as the director, was at the forefront of using Big Data to study how ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. The findings appeared to be astonishing: With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses.
This utopian vision was not only compelling but within reach. After publishing our results, we started the first collaboration between MIT and Uber to research a then-new product: Uber Pool (now rebranded UberX Share), a service that allows riders to share cars when heading to similar destinations for a lower cost.
It goes on to explain that it's a problem of induced demand (same phenomenon that causes highway expansion not to actually help with congestion in the long term):
Alas, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Our research was technically right, but we had not taken into account changes in human behavior. Cars are more convenient and comfortable than walking, buses and subways — and that is why they are so popular. Make them even cheaper through ride-sharing and people are coaxed away from those other forms of transit.
This dynamic became clear in the data a few years later: On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced.
We were proud of our contribution to ride-sharing but dismayed to see the results of a 2018 study that found that Uber Pool was so cheap it increased overall city travel: For every mile of personal driving it removed, it added 2.6 miles of people who otherwise would have taken another mode of transportation.
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It's almost like we need to prioritize a better form of interconnected transportation that's more efficient at moving larger amounts of people with a small foot print.
To clarify, it does not have to be a bus, but it can be a tram, train, subway, elevated rail, cable car, bike, scooter.
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Can’t read the article since it’s behind a paywall.
Uber/Lyft and ride share companies in general put more cars on the road. Even worse, most of them just sitting idle waiting for the app to send them a fare (idling vehicles bad for environment).
Robotaxis are no different. Most of them will just sit idle or drive around aimlessly until a rider(s) are assigned. If conditions are less than ideal, then they are often just found sitting until the conflict can be resolved.
Witnessed multiple times where an automated car just sits at a light with hazards on because the light was broken due to recent power surge. Just 1 downed vehicle in a 3 lane road in downtown area caused significant traffic to pile up.
I just want sane non-car centric infrastructure. Why is that so hard for this country to do? Need to undo this 1950s era of urban planning and transportation.
Need to undo this 1950s era of urban planning and transportation
I was a kid when I saw it, but wasn’t that one of the end messages of the movie, Roger Rabbit?
Correct. They were going to level Toon Town, or whatever it was called, to make room for a highway. I will never forget this scene because high pitched Christopher Lloyd was fucking terrifying when I first watched it as a kid.
Remember me, Eddie?
I'm melting!
Oh, great. I spent the last 35 years trying to forget about that poor shoe. Thanks.
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Uber was supposed to help traffic?
The original concept of Uber was ride-sharing, where it would match up riders going to a similar destination, like the airport. But I haven't seen that option pop up in quite a while.
Just like AirBnb, both the company and car/home owners figured they could make more profit by making it a full time gig...
The original concept of Uber was ride-sharing, where it would match up riders going to a similar destination, like the airport. But I haven’t seen that option pop up in quite a while.
Wrong, it started as "Ubercab" and you could request a black luxury cab. It eventually turned into the app we have now with people trying to make ends meet. It was and is a taxi service.
Straight from Wikipedia.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/111015/story-uber.asp
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The original concept of Uber was ~~ride-sharing~~ undercutting traditional taxis by operating at a loss until the taxi model was essentially dead and then using newfound monopolistic power to juice profits from every angle with reckless disregard for people or the environment they live in until/if regulators stop us.
That wasn't the original concept, you're confusing the phase 1 marketing pitch for the "concept".
Yeah that's a silly statement, guarantee there was little altruism when they, like most, started their business.
Uber was supposed
Uber was never supposed to do anything good.
In their beginning, Uber was a special purpose vehicle for Big Tech (=their investors) to perform political changes in all kinds of foreign countries, making them compliant, using methods that the others couldn't use openly.
After their evil head has left, they are just another startup that has become big and fat and brainless.
In their beginning, Uber was a special purpose vehicle for Big Tech (=their investors) to perform political changes in all kinds of foreign countries, making them compliant, using methods that the others couldn't use openly.
Could you talk more about this / link things to read about it?
You can start with The Uber files, which "is a global investigation into a trove of 124,000 confidential documents from the tech company that were leaked to the Guardian."
Summary
Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals
Some examples:
- The cache of more than 124,000 internal Uber files lays bare the ethically questionable practices through which the company barged its way into new markets, often where existing laws or regulations made its operations illegal, before lobbying aggressively for those same laws or regulations to be altered to accommodate it. Read here
- Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a “kill switch” to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries. Read here
- Two of Barack Obama’s most senior presidential campaign advisers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, discussed helping Uber get to access leaders, officials and diplomats. Read here
- At least six UK government ministers, including the then chancellor, George Osborne, and the future health secretary Matt Hancock, did not declare secret meetings at which they were lobbied by Uber. Read here
- The inside story of how Uber used its connections to the Conservative party to lobby Boris Johnson in a rearguard effort to stop Transport for London introducing new regulations. Read here
- One of Uber’s top executives quit amid questions for the company about whether its European operations were structured in a way that avoided tax. Read here
- Uber secretly hired a political operative linked to Russian oligarchs allegedly aligned with Vladimir Putin in an attempt to secure its place in the Russian market, despite internal bribery concerns. Read here
[...]
As Bonus some older articles about their overall ethics and practices:
- Harvard Business Review: Uber Can’t Be Fixed - It’s Time for Regulators to Shut It Down
- NY Times: How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide paywalled | archived article
- The Verge This is Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft
- BuzzFeed: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists
- Business Insider: Uber has lost its licence to operate in London .. as "Uber was not "fit and proper" to hold a licence"
- Business Insider: France was right to punish Uber, according to a top European legal adviser | archived article
This is very comprehensive, thank you! Going to save this for later reference
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Being stuck in "traffic" surrounded by empty cars would make me want to walk into the ocean.
Oh god thank you for that depressing image
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