from Hacker News

An Uber Impact

by mp3jeep01 on 5/28/14, 5:18 AM with 61 comments

• by HistoryInAction on 5/28/14, 7:18 AM

  Politically speaking, it is very, very smart that Uber is doing these sorts of studies. As a policy wonk, I wish they were a bit more open about their datasets, analyses, and methodology, but I can see how that would just hand their opponents chances to twist it.

  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

• by frenchman_in_ny on 5/28/14, 6:55 AM

  $90K in (gross) revenue (in NYC), before taking into account operating costs (fuel, lease expenses), depreciation, healthcare, self-employment taxes, etc.

  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.

• by fishtoaster on 5/28/14, 7:02 AM

  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.

• by xwowsersx on 5/28/14, 6:37 AM

  These stats are mindblowing. Uber is available to a little less than half of all Americans and with an average pickup time of < 10 mins. I'm amazed they were able to accomplish this in 4 years. Travis Kalanick is an insane entrepreneur.

• by rusbus on 5/28/14, 7:18 AM

  Uber is pretty great, and I enjoy using it, but many of these statistics are pretty weak and out of context. As others have mentioned, using "income" to describe "revenue" is inaccurate. You can't compare making $90k driving an Uber to $90k at a desk job with a completely different set of expenses.

  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...

  [1] http://blog.uber.com/DUIratesdecline

• by andreasklinger on 5/28/14, 7:20 AM

  In this thread everyone discusses the actual numbers.

  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.

• by devindotcom on 5/28/14, 7:02 AM

  I doubt the automotive pun was intended, but if it was, it's in poor taste, and if it wasn't, it's a nasty oversight - considering the last time people read a headline about an "Uber impact," it was because a little girl was killed. It's extremely important to consider such things in this kind of language.

• by general_failure on 5/28/14, 7:19 AM

  > For example, the median income on uberX is more than $90,000/year/driver in New York and more than $74,000/year/driver in San Francisco.

  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).

• by avelis on 5/28/14, 6:39 AM

  I really wish they could give more data on how they reached their median income stats. I realize they have no incentive to release that. Curious how Lyft and Sidecar measure up as well.

• by capkutay on 5/28/14, 8:29 AM

  What's really significant is that the tech industry is slowly creating new job markets via 'app-driven services'. Doordash, grubhub, amazon, and google's instant delivery services are other examples that can contribute to this new trend.

  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.

• by pbreit on 5/28/14, 7:14 AM

  Uber truly is quite a leap forward in transportation.

  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.

• by mfkp on 5/28/14, 6:59 AM

  43% of Americans are now covered by Uber. Seems like they've hit most of the densely populated areas. I'm sure it will take much longer than that to hit the less populated areas, if ever. For most cities (read: not large and dense), Uber will probably not work.

• by k-mcgrady on 5/28/14, 11:50 AM

  It's interesting to look at these figures while keeping in mind Google's self-driving car project and their large investment in Uber. In 10 years Uber will be able to replace all those jobs they've created with self-driving cars.

• by vampirechicken on 5/28/14, 3:41 PM

  90k is not much in NYC when you take into account how much a driver will need to spend to maintain a car that does livery all day long in NYC.

• by doxcf434 on 5/28/14, 6:33 AM

  Does this mean more people are taking Taxis?

• by asinno on 5/28/14, 7:29 AM

  i still dont get how it has 'created' jobs? i get how uber is convenient/practical for a customer; how is it thaat beneficial for the taxi driver?

• by CmonDev on 5/28/14, 7:56 AM

  I guess this is actual disruption - lots of people are already complaining about loosing jobs :).