Comment of the Day: Howard: The Taxi Unicorn's New Clothes: "I say both!...
...There is no capacity without driver naivete and there is no business without investor naivete subsidizing riders.
As someone who lives (with wife and 12-year-old) in an urban area with good public transit (and more particularly, in a very convenient neighborhood), I am part of a one car household, so I easily use uber a dozen times or more a month.
While I don't want to turn into tom friedman here, I do occasionally chat with the uber drivers about their approach, and as far as I can tell (insofar as my random conversations constitute something approximating a sample) they think of driving as a way of putting extra cash in their pockets with limited extra expense. the typical comment is "I drive until I have taken in x dollars."
I have never yet heard a driver say "I've figured that given depreciation on my car, I have to have a passenger 90% of my driving time to really get ahead...."
I am impressed with the driver's syndicate: the upside of uber-like services, after all, should be a need for fewer cars altogether.
