Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver II: How we doing?
615 Responses
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BenWilson, in reply to
I wouldn't hold your breath for electric cars making viable taxi services. Taxis do big miles, and they can't plan in advance how many. Which makes electric a very limiting option.
Whether it would be viable in an online carpooling commuter service is somewhat independent of the electricness. That's either viable for passenger vehicles or it isn't, regardless of drive train. I'm thinking that it probably will become more viable, and your wish may be partially granted. By partially, the problem is still people who would simply rather have the whole vehicle to themselves. I expect this will still be the majority for quite a long time. Even driverlessness is not going to improve this. It might help with the parking. Or it might make parking anywhere near big cities anywhere at all a nightmare, as self-driving cars park out the inner suburbs completely. But people won't care because it's just the robot doing it. However, the robots won't be able to make traffic in commutes go faster. Could be less irritating, I guess, to sit there without having to control the vehicle.
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Sacha, in reply to
Could be less irritating, I guess, to sit there without having to control the vehicle
Works that way on buses and trains.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Works that way on buses and trains
Yes, being able to do something other than drive is a consolation for the discomfort that often results from crowding in with other passengers. But in one's own vehicle it could be actually quite luxurious. Especially if parking it was not an issue - I can see people picking much bigger vehicles. Which is not going to improve commuting times. But improving comfort could be a big factor. Naturally that will come at considerable cost. Strangely, people seem to be OK with that when it comes to cars, but outraged about it with public transport. There's sort of a public consensus that a public facility like a train or bus should be designed with cost cutting as its number one purpose. I can barely sit in a bus seat, so small have they become.
BTW, this is all IF self driving cars become a reality here soon. Goodness knows what things will really be like in 30 years. That's a time frame over which it is possible to build a decent commuter rail system, and over which Auckland's population is likely to justify that. People crawling in from outer suburbs in huge driverless limousines could be seen as the schmucks, as passengers on nicely designed trains with cafe facilities scream past them. It doesn't have to be only the passengers on the Waiheke Ferry for whom commuting is actually a pleasurable experience, a daily wind-down with mates drinking a coffee or a glass of wine, and watching the world go by.
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Moz, in reply to
I can see people picking much bigger vehicles
I can more easily imagine the opposite. Get a comfy armchair, add wheels, and only use it where hairless hominids aren't allowed to drive. Once your "car" is 1m wide and 2-3m long, you can fit a fukton of them into the roads we already have, and without all the baggage they can be quite zippy.
Think of it as a super-Smart car. Europe already has a microcar category (1000W,200kg) and Japan has their under-900cc category. 1kW sounds like a joke when the most gutless car you can buy has 20kW, but then that 20kW car is hauling 600kg of defences against other moronists around.
Sure, for a chauffeur service like you run, that's not going to work. But once the human-driver part of the problem is replaced by a few kilos of electronics, I suspect we will fairly quickly see "robot only" lanes, if not entire roads. When planners see the numbers they're going to piss all over the "right to drive" people, because with mesh networked robots I expect they'll more than double the road capacity... until some meathead tries to operate the machine themselves. Literal head-made-of-meat in this case.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I can more easily imagine the opposite.
I can see both, really. Smart cars haven't really taken off here, nor have any number of small personal transportation devices. I think people are righteously concerned about safety in tiny vehicles. But yes, better planning would help. Hell, mere bike lanes would do that for the most obvious form of small personal transportation, the "safety bike" that has been popular all around the world for over a hundred years. But that involves overcoming infrastructural inertia. The technological solution to cars being a PITA during rush hour is compelling to people who don't believe in the government doing a damned thing. I suggest that this mindset is strongly aligned with that of getting a BFC (big fuck-off car), and bugger the cost. Indeed the greater cost is part of the enjoyment, particularly if it is highly conspicuous.
Gut feeling is that the two streams will continue side by side. There is a mindset driving driverless cars that is not rooted in practicality at all, and the incredible cost of engineering them will be spent many times over just because of the sci-fi angle. It's a lot like the Moon mission and now the Mars mission. There's very little real use in sending someone on a round trip to Mars from any other angle than just to say that we could do it. It's not even controversial that we could do it, all that is controversial is whether it is truly worth the enormous price tag. I've never doubted that a robotic future is real, any more than I doubted that we could send a space probe to Pluto. Given enough time, our probes will eventually travel interstellar distances.
What I doubt is that we really have any idea if it will happen in our lifetimes. At least with the space probes, we can be pretty damned sure that it will not.
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BenWilson, in reply to
But once the human-driver part of the problem is replaced by a few kilos of electronics, I suspect we will fairly quickly see “robot only” lanes, if not entire roads.
We already have those. They're called trains and they're way, way more efficient for moving massive numbers of people than any number of tiny personal vehicles could be. You have the smallest personal vehicle possible, called your legs, and it gets you into a piece of infrastructure that is mechanically efficient, extremely safe, and extremely fast. Within this device you can literally stand up and move around, go to the toilet, sit around a table, buy food and drinks.
But yes, there's a funny robotic future where people would cram themselves into a tiny box and scoot along in little lanes, improving on the experience of simply driving a vehicle, or being driven in one, by some amount. I don't know what that amount is, it's hard for me to see any real advantage in it. The door-to-doorness? Or just the pure futurism, the feeling of being advanced whilst actually going backwards, the phony modernism of it. I think that's currently the appeal of Uber. People like to feel that it's hyper advanced, and will brutally ignore that exploiting labour for a pittance to provide a good service is actually very much a retrograde social step.
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Moz, in reply to
it's hard for me to see any real advantage in it. The door-to-doorness?
Exactly. We live 800m from a train station and find it hard to get housemates who will walk that far. Instead we get less rent and people who whine that when we, like our neighbours, have four cars and one off-street carpark, that means that it's hard to find a park on the street.
Offering people the convenience of a train in terms of "jump in, play on your phone, jump out" with the bonus of not sharing with stinky poors and having it go exactly where you want, when you want, is huge. For people who don't, can't or shouldn't operate heavy machinery, there's the second advantage that they get those benefits without having to operate the heavy machinery.
cram themselves into a tiny box and scoot along in little lanes
While I agree with you about that, the evidence is not on our side - millions of people do it every day. Worse, they're adamant that what they do is the only possible way to get from A to B. I work with some of those people, who regularly (frequently!) spend valuable work time explaining to me that riding my bicycle seems dangerous to them (not a reality-based feeling), and that spending huge amounts of money on owning and operating a car is the obvious solution (to make them feel better about their bad choices, I assume). Amusingly, when I offered the most adamant proposer of that "solution" $200,000 cash to provide me with a less than 10 year old, road legal motor vehicle for the indefinite future he declined on the basis that that was not enough money. So he does have an idea of the cost, he just would rather not talk about it.
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David Hood, in reply to
Or just the pure futurism, the feeling of being advanced whilst actually going backwards, the phony modernism of it. I think that’s currently the appeal of Uber.
So, Star Trek doors? (operated as they were by people off camera opening and closing them)
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Moz,
https://theconversation.com/modelling-for-major-road-projects-is-at-odds-with-driver-behaviour-63603
The Conversation chimes in with a timely reminder that when new roads are built people use their mental "travel time budget" to travel further rather than spending less time travelling. Then when the "new road" reaches equilibrium, they complain that their travel time has increased.
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BenWilson, in reply to
While I agree with you about that, the evidence is not on our side – millions of people do it every day.
Well not quite as small as what you were suggesting. Most passenger cars are not 1m wide (with interior even smaller, by the thickness of the walls at the very least) and 2m long (that's about the length of my body, so if I'm to fit inside it, it's going to have to have literally nothing else inside). You're talking about the size of a coffin, not a car. A pauper's coffin. There already are vehicles exactly like that - recumbent bikes. There are lots of electric versions of these around and have been for decades. They're not popular. You're going to have something that is neither safe nor comfortable. It will have no crumple zone at all, no padding, no heating, no view, be very low to the ground, probably have minimal suspension, very little traction, no storage, no handling, no performance. It will improve on a pushbike only by being drier and more efficient. Given that such a thing already exists and is not popular at all, what evidence is there that it will suddenly become a whole lot more popular?
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Now now all of this pie in the sky crap may be ok with those in the dream world of what they think of the future, now get back to the real world. Thats cars, trains buses etc and humans not comforming to anything but them selves. We just get what we have working together. First step get rid of Auckland Transport and look at the problem again. The answer is there and is fairly simple.
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BenWilson, in reply to
We live 800m from a train station and find it hard to get housemates who will walk that far.
Yes, funny isn't it. That's a 5 minute ride on a $50 second hand POS bike that you could chain up at the station. But people would rather do a 5 minute walk to the bus stop and wait the extra half hour at the stop and in the bus.
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BenWilson, in reply to
It's an interesting discussion, if only to debunk that Uber is the commute option of the future. I do see a future of commuting that involves apps and sharing cars, and that one is not that far off and doesn't involve massive infrastructural changes. But it is not where Uber is taking us. Except in so far is it is at least making people more comfortable with the idea that apps and transport have a future together. For that, they've done a sterling job, piggybacking on the far, far more important work that Google already did.
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Moz, in reply to
Most passenger cars are not ... 2m long (that's about the length of my body, so if I'm to fit inside it, it's going to have to have literally nothing else inside)
People sit up in cars rather than lying down. A Smart is just over 2m long (2695 x 1663 x 1552 mm), so that's not a useful objection. And safety tests suggest that small cars well designed are much safer than big cars operated outside their design environment (for example, a big 4WD used in the inner city). The problem here is not technological, it's cultural.
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goforit, in reply to
An app is part of the solution, but one has to keep in mind any app is only an communication tool, its an improvement in communication over the older phone/ Rt / data systems already employed for years in the movement of people from A to B.
One must not put the cart before the horse, the problem of people transport firstly needs to be identifled especially in the Auckland region before any solution can be applied. Lets think of this first. -
Moz, in reply to
(800m from a train station) Yes, funny isn't it. That's a 5 minute ride on a $50 second hand POS bike
Which is exactly how my partner and her sister get there. It's not hard, but it's also not huge fun late on a rainy night. There's a bus route that gets closer to our house if you get off the train a couple of stops earlier and they do that sometimes. As well, the cost of a taxi from the rank outside the station to our place is about $5 and most of the drivers seem happy to do those trips. In winter the bikes can spend days left at the train station.
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Moz, in reply to
. Given that such a thing already exists and is not popular at all, what evidence is there that it will suddenly become a whole lot more popular?
You're actually describing a velomobile, except for half the negatives. One serious issue with velomobiles is the risk of getting rear-ended because they outbrake most motor vehicles, and most of them have at least enough luggage space for a briefcase. There's only one made that doesn't have suspension, AFAIK (Trisled Rotovelo from Oz, but it's $AU6000 rather than EUR 6000).
The real issue is cost, because you pay the whole lot up front, and it's about $NZ10,000+. People really struggle with "$10k up front, $200/year running costs" vs "I can get a car for $5 grand and it's only $2000 a year for rego and insurance, plus $0.50 a kilometre". You've seen that with the Uber earnings figures. Even with an electric assist using current batteries (1000 cycles for $500), it still only costs you 50c every time you recharge it.
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BenWilson, in reply to
one has to keep in mind any app is only an communication tool, its an improvement in communication over the older phone/ Rt / data systems already employed for years in the movement of people from A to B.
It's way, way more than that!! An app on a smartphone is a piece of software running on what would have been a supercomputer in the 1980s, and it backs onto servers that actually are supercomputers in many cases.
Improved communication/organization/optimization, and the social rearrangement that has come about from these devices becoming ubiquitous, and the emergence of social media all combine to make a lot of things possible that weren't before. OK, I don't see a great future (in the short term) in them driving the cars, but there are so many possibilities short of that that are still in their infancy and don't involve incredible technological breakthroughs to succeed, just good organization, a good idea, and a willing audience. Just to see this stuff unfold up close was not a small part of why I became an Uber driver, and I expect this space is going to very rapidly transform in the next few years.
To me the biggest challenge, the conundrum I'm working through, and not alone on it, is how to bring the one last piece of the late 20th century into this: The open source revolution. I still see the need for an umbrella corporation clipping the ticket as one of the main things standing in the way of progress.
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Sacha, in reply to
Blockchain may solve that part of the problem somehow.
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Moz, in reply to
Blockchain may solve that part of the problem somehow.
I think that's an excellent summary of blockchain in general.
Unfortunately it comes with the cost that blockchain is inherently about waste. It's not so much that encryption is wasteful per se, it's that blockchain is built around a race to see who can waste the most resources, biggest waster wins. The more people mine, the higher the operator needs to crank the cost of mining, because if someone gets over 50% of the total ability-to-mine, they get control over what's written into the blockchain and it stops being secure..
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Sacha, in reply to
You may be confusing the underlying blockchain tech with its first example, bitcoin. Other methods are sprouting.
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Gotta headdesk over this. It's like the Small Passenger Services Review that has been underway for ages, in which Uber made a submission, and the recommendations are already in their favour, never happened. Somehow, Simon Bridges is responsible for a "ceasefire" in a war that never happened. He gave them one sideways look, once, which was seized upon as him threatening to ban Uber. That's it, the sum total of punitive actions towards Uber by him, it would seem. Now, we're back to giving them legislative candy. Three bags full for Uber again!!
Meanwhile, on the street, drivers are getting busted constantly. But those who aren't are earning big bucks for Uber, and Uber is paying stuff all tax on that.
Back to business as usual.
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Block chains make everything better. I sprinkle them liberally on everything.
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Uber is suing London's transport regulator in the latest skirmish over rules that may harm the controversial company's business.
Uber will ask London judges to decide the legality of rules that require drivers from non-English speaking countries to pass a language exam, the company said in a statement. The measures also force Uber to notify Transport for London of any changes made to its mobile-phone app.http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11696146
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Sacha, in reply to
legislative candy
Bridges back to grabbing his ankles.
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