Re: jobs created, note that Uber (very specifically, is my guess) allows us to assume FTE when they say "jobs," but is probably more likely referring to the total number of driver profiles created and used at least once. A Daily/Monthly Driver metric would be more meaningful here.
I'd also be interested to see the impact on parking (especially at peak times) if people are using Uber over driving somewhere and leaving their car parked (idle/slack resource) there.
PS - the lack of a footnote attached to (what seems to be a copy/paste) 1 in the subheading is grating haha
if opponents can twist it why shouldn't i believe uber is twisting it to begin with?
Eddard Stark: Lord Baelish, perhaps I was wrong to distrust you. Petyr Baelish: Distrusting me was the wisest thing you've done since you climbed off your horse.
It's off the cuff and I'm sure I'm missing a number of categories, while realizing that you can deduct a certain number as business expenses, but I'm fairly certain you're really (edit) not (/edit) seeing anything close to $90K in the end.
So the $90k might be deceptive because it's not net, but it's a sensible way to compare to what traditional taxi drivers make given uncontrollable variability in car ownership expense.
Not that I think there's anything wrong with that. I just think the stat is pretty misleading.
In major cities like SF and NY, the number of drivers is almost certainly actually increasing, as Uber has basically rendered the medallion (and the protection it provides) somewhere near useless for many classes of fares. Some jobs are certainly being moved from black car and taxi companies who can't compete with Uber on overhead, but the taxi market has been highly regulated to the point of limiting job creation for many years.
"In Seattle the number of arrests for DUI to decrease by more than 10 percent." They better be careful here. If they start cutting significantly into state regulators revenue stream they will be stopped.
Uber's best bet is a "negotiated settlement" with local and state authorities to kick-back some of the cash they are diverting.
I still don't plan to start using Uber extensively because I'm used to walking at this point, but the combination of transparent upfront pricing, accountability, ease of use, speed of pickup, and seemingly typically lower pricing is a compelling case versus zip car. Definitely an actual competitor with walking and public transit, whereas I see Taxis as only really a competitor with driving.
This is true of virtually all claimed job creation numbers.
20k "jobs" / mo gives 240k jobs / year putting them in the top 20 largest private employers in the us [1] with just one year's claimed growth
edit: there may well have been a month where, for sufficiently lax definitions of "created" and "job" it is indeed true that "20,000 JOBS CREATED ON THE UBER PLATFORM EVERY MONTH" but I'm highly skeptical this claim is close to true in anything but the most generous sense
edit2: to their credit, they reported median income and not mean
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_th...
I just heard Kevin Novak (@novakkm) speak @ Geekdom SF and he shared the approach he took along their journey.
While the statistics used to determine the DUI rate in SF and Taxi crime in Chicago are beyond the levels of my knowledge and I can't verify their correctness, the calculations certainly seem a bit suspect. For example, as a pair city when doing a discontinuity test, they chose San Francisco, a city which notably, has Uber. The post doesn't mention a confidence interval or P value in a clear explicit way (outside of the table, with unexplained column headers).[1]
In the infographic, they claim these statistics as facts without mention of any underlying confidence intervals. I'm pro Uber, but this post seems to contain a lot of fuzzy math. It'd be interesting if someone with a statistics background could confirm or deny these suspicions...
New York City presentation suggests a driver with $90k revenue has $41k expenses. [1]
[1] http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/presentation.pdf
They also gave the standard error, which you can use to compute your own confidence interval (95% would be about 2x, or ranging from no effect to a 20% reduction)
The numbers are not the interesting thing here - Uber seems to get battle-ready for lobby-work.
These numbers - correct or not - will be the ammunition their PR and lobby teams will use in the next months.
But those of us here can parse the language quite closely and get some actual information out of it, as well as noting the use of shadows to hide and reveal.
That is impressive. Even if you detect fuel and maintenance and health care, it comes to around 50k a year or so. That's quite a bit given that I assume drivers can choose to work flexible hours and possibly not as stressed out (compared to software engineer with 70k salary).
Also, if an über driver makes $70k++ and a software engineer makes $100k++ base... that's kind of sad.
The technology infrastructure for instant/convenient buying, selling, and delivery of goods and services has been built out. Now it can truly scale by staffing massive amounts of people to actually carry out the tasks surrounding it.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3027355/pixel-and-dimed-on-not-ge...
But I am currently perfectly fine with them running into all the regulatory roadblocks. They have so far shown zero interest in working with the various constituents to figure out what the right structure is for their services. It's easy to say that taxis suck and regulation squashes innovation. But some of this stuff exists for good reason and until Uber acknowledges that, I'm OK with hurdles they are facing.
Normal Taxi services are a pain in the ass to book, not connected to my credit card (so you have to go through the whole guilt trip for not having cash, takes longer, etc), and for whatever reason I always had bad experiences with them at least half the time. None of these things are issues with Uber, leading to much more usage on my part. It's just so damn easy, and even satisfying, to tap a few times and have a car magically show up.
I'm sure some taxi services offer a couple of these features, but none of the ones that I've used. I think one had online booking, but it was broken and I had to find a phone, and then I got no answer, and then I was on hold for 5 minutes.
Why can't I set a custom alert, so I get notified when the taxi is 2 minutes away? That way I don't have to keep looking out the window, or spend 15 minutes sitting on a curb, wondering if they forgot, and I'm going to be late.
If taxis are losing business to Uber, it's their own fault, and lack of innovation.
I think without a third-party assessment of reliable data on the market every opinion on the subject is based on FUD. Unfortunately, at this time we seem to be missing both reliable data and an "objective" assessment.
