Uber CEO balks after a reporter tells him the cost of his 2.9-mile Uber ride: 'Oh my God. Wow.'

The fact that a 2.9 mi car ride costs $50 with a tip is fucking insane. This country is absolutely backwards when it comes to transportation. Everything is nearly car centric. Minimal options for alternatives.

In a faint way, I might almost frame this as a positive thing.

The gig workers driving Uber vehicles are generally the sort of people that absolutely need it. And, especially in a hub like New York City, $50 fares should be the sort of thing that pushes people into making use of either the bike share system or subway, rather than promoting increased traffic congestion at peak times. And yes, I am aware in many cases that results in increased trip times; which should be a motive to invest further in these systems to make them faster and more convenient.

I don't think it's just Uber - America will at some point have to wake up to the expected costs of its heavily service-focused industries, the value of an individual person's time, and of one's own personal vehicle for a trip.

Does a CEO even know the value of $20 or $51? Isn't that the same as $0 to them?

Went to a concert at an arena about 3 miles from my house, to get there was about eight bucks to go home was 60.

Uber’s net profit for the twelve months ending March 31st, 2023 was $-3.36bn. That’s negative 3.36 billion dollars. They posted their first ever operating profit today. August 1st, 2023.

So yeah, really cool company. Not at all some sort of horrifying demon of modern capitalism…

“from downtown New York City to the West Side”

$50 is what you’d expect if you lived in nyc, or been there enough

Next ask him how much a $10 meatball sub delivered from 2 miles away should cost.

I always thought Uber was supposed to be like carpooling.

That's ~4.74 kilometers, by the way.

I had to use this service one time, to pick up my wife from the hospital in the middle of the night. The guy never even picked her up and I still had to pay 50 goddamn dollars. Fuck this company.

These prices are set via algorithm, and time of day seems to be a huge part of it. My 2.5 mile trip in Washington DC on a Thursday morning at 7:30 was $55.

"It was 10 am on a sunny weekday"... supply and demand. Take the number of people wanting a ride and divide by the number of drivers available, and in some way that number will be the multiple.

Area will matter (Apparently NYC), but Uber is a gig economy, people use it as a side hustle, so during the day, many of them are probably working another job. Not to mention 2.9 miles in NYC isn't like 2.9 miles in Champaign Illinois, that can be a long ride.

But there are a ton of factors, maybe there was no drivers in the area, maybe everyone was busy, but you still took the ride, so obviously it wasn't too crazy. Uber will continue to charge what they can, but I'm sure the number of available drivers willing to take a fare for that price (The price Uber offers them, not the end user price), will always matter.

Infinitenonblondes in the comments talks about a 3 mile ride, 8 bucks to go there, 60 bucks to leave, because it was a concert. The demand for a ride right after a concert is going to be at record level peaks... of course it's going to go through the roofs.

2.9 miles isn't even far. You could just walk.

Some popular neoclassical economic models rely on the "No-Ponzi-Scheme" condition being true. Essentially meaning that Capital can't become negative because there are no ponzi schemes which affect the economy.

This seems like that assumption is just one of the wrong ones.

Archive link for this article: https://archive.is/OtCBR

If what he says is true, that it's going up because of driver pay, that's good at least. Uber at least has competition in Lyft, and both have a lot more markets to enter around the world by chipping away the established local taxi businesses, which can also compete by dropping their prices...

Overall I think Uber is a net positive. But $50 is a pretty ridiculous fee.