Hacker News Reader

Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

20k jobs created? Is hired car use really going up that much? If I had to guess, I'd say a handful of new jobs are created while the rest are just taken from existing taxi companies.

Not that I think there's anything wrong with that. I just think the stat is pretty misleading.

View on HN

Keep in mind that the number of taxis on the road - and thus the number of jobs - is limited in many cities to the number of "medallions" issued (which represents the number of taxis that can be operating in the city at the same time.)

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.

Uber is a great service - head and shoulders above the entrenched taxi industry. Customers like them better, the drivers like them better; but they are lucky that Goldman Sachs had never created a medallion investment vehicle. If upper middle class doctors and lawyers had seen a drop in investment return you know Uber's "stealing" from the medallion holders would have been stopped.

"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 personally use Uber at least 20-50x as often as I would use taxis. That is, for each Uber trip I take, I would take only 1/20 to 1/50 of the same trips via taxi given the choice.

I think this accounts for the increased use. I would go out of my way to avoid taking a Taxi because they're so inconvenient and opaque.

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.

Funny way to arrange this comparison. To me it reads: for every Uber trip I take from my apartment in the Mission to my office in Soma, I would ride a taxi from 24th to 23rd street.

Same here. While I still consider a Taxi as something you only take when you're drunk and have to get home from a party, I've gotten used to taking an Uber or Sidecar for pretty much any trip that would require a muni or bart here in SF. It's gotten to the point that I am downright spoiled.

> I'd say a handful of new jobs are created while the rest are just taken

This is true of virtually all claimed job creation numbers.

smells like bullshit

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com