Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse

Comments

• bob_wiley@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    mixed use spaces that allow people to walk to stuff.

    They are real game changers!

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  • electrogamerman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Nah, bro. We need wider streets and more cars. That will surely reduce traffic.

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    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Correct. Keep on increasing the road to building ratio of cities. Make the streets 500 m wide if you have to. This way there will be so much road and all the buildings will be so far apart that it’s impossible to have traffic jams.

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  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Actually good trains and bus systems, actually good bike infrastructure, mixed use spaces that allow people to walk to stuff.

    You forgot the single biggest factor: quit mandating low density.

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    • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Exactly. In my first time in the US I would spend weeks astonished by the terrible use of land they make of it. Then I discovered business were forced by law to build these stupidly large parking lots.

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  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What if we had Uber, but with big cars that can hold 30 to 200 people, take people along fixed popular routes, don’t charge ridiculous “market price” fees, don’t require tips and arrive every 30 minutes or better so you wouldn’t need an app to hail one over? 🚏🚌💨

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  • Dima@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Seems like they thought that ride-sharing an Uber would reduce traffic, but the cheaper prices just ended up with more people using ride-hailing services instead of public transport.

    Full article text: ##Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse ###Our research at MIT helped make the case for ride-sharing. We were wrong. We don’t want to make the same mistake with robotaxis Carlo Ratti, John Rossant Sep. 16, 2023

    A rush of feet, a cone, and screech! The pinnacle of human technological prowess grinds to a halt.

    Activists in San Francisco have discovered that they can immobilize robotaxis with nothing more than a simple orange traffic cone.

    This attention-grabbing, legally ambiguous stunt has succeeded in showcasing the limits of autonomous vehicle technology. But it may ultimately miss the bigger picture.

    The real threat from robotaxis is the underlying technology. Once these cars inevitably learn to get around the traffic cones and gain the public’s trust, their convenience could seduce us into vastly overusing our cars.

    The result? An artificial-intelligence-powered nightmare of traffic, technically perfect but awful for our cities.

    Why do we believe this? Because it has already come to pass with ride-sharing.

    In the 2010s, the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where one of us serves as the director, was at the forefront of using Big Data to study how ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. The findings appeared to be astonishing: With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses.

    This utopian vision was not only compelling but within reach. After publishing our results, we started the first collaboration between MIT and Uber to research a then-new product: Uber Pool (now rebranded UberX Share), a service that allows riders to share cars when heading to similar destinations for a lower cost.

    Alas, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

    Our research was technically right, but we had not taken into account changes in human behavior. Cars are more convenient and comfortable than walking, buses and subways — and that is why they are so popular. Make them even cheaper through ride-sharing and people are coaxed away from those other forms of transit.

    This dynamic became clear in the data a few years later: On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced.

    We were proud of our contribution to ride-sharing but dismayed to see the results of a 2018 study that found that Uber Pool was so cheap it increased overall city travel: For every mile of personal driving it removed, it added 2.6 miles of people who otherwise would have taken another mode of transportation.

    As robotaxis are on the cusp of proliferating across the world, we are about to repeat the same mistake, but at a far greater scale. The futuristic allure of autonomy — and the enormous profits it could generate for its creators — will be hard for governments and the public to resist. But we cannot let a shiny new piece of technology drive us into an epic traffic jam of our own making.

    The best way to make urban mobility accessible, efficient and green is not about new technologies — neither self-driving cars nor electric ones — but old ones. Buses, subways, bikes and our own two feet are cleaner, cheaper and more efficient than anything Silicon Valley has dreamt up.

    What’s the Cadillac of reducing our dependence on Cadillacs? The good old-fashioned bus.

    This is not to say self-driving technology has no role in the future, just a different (and perhaps a bit less lucrative) one than GM-backed Cruise and Alphabet-backed Waymo seem to be currently focused on.

    Autonomous technology could, for example, allow cities to offer more buses, shuttles and other forms of public transit around the clock. That’s because the availability of on-demand AVs could assure “last-mile” connections between homes and transit stops. It could also be a godsend for older people and those with disabilities. However, any scale-up of AVs should be counterbalanced with investments in mass transit and improvements in walkability. Above all, we must put in place smart regulatory and tax regimes that allow all sustainable mobility modes — including autonomous services — to scale safely and intelligently. They should include, for example, congestion fees to discourage overuse of individual vehicles.

    To get new technologies right, our cities might follow the example of Singapore. Thanks to its Smart Nation program, the Asian city is now at the forefront of experimentation with autonomy. Yet, like San Francisco, it has experienced hiccups with its self-driving car pilot programs; young people have taken to confusing the vehicles by throwing balls or, more boldly, getting in front of them and dancing. The first reaction of the government, unamused, was to mull a law banning the harassment of self-driving cars.

    However, unlike San Francisco, Singapore has little to worry about in the long run because it already has robust systems to control traffic — a highly efficient mass transit network and a system of Electronic Road Pricing that dynamically taxes cars to prevent congestion.

    These types of measures are easier said than done. To pass even one such efficient, top-down measure in an American city would be no small feat. But this is still a gold standard we should strive to emulate.

    The allure of the self-driving car is that it will liberate us: from thought, from action, from responsibility. But that is not how new technology, from the wheel to the internet, has ever worked. By unlocking new possibilities, technological progress forces us to make new, difficult choices about how to manage it. The next few years will be crucial; we all need to be alert to the unintended consequences of this technology.

    Self-driving cars are coming, but it is all of us who need to take the wheel.

    Carlo Ratti is a practicing architect and a professor at MIT, where he directs the Senseable City Lab. He is a co-author of “Atlas of the Senseable City.” John Rossant is founder and CEO of CoMotion, a conference and media platform focused on future mobility.

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• whitecapstromgard@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The correct way to fix traffic is public transportation: railways and subways.

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  • traches@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The correct way to fix traffic is to stop designing the world around cars to the exclusion of absolutely everything the fuck else including humans.

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    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      And a whole lot of work from home!

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  • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And bike lanes, bike sharing etc.

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  • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    …including working on security measures to ensure that people feel safe using them

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    • realharo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Definitely needs to be solved where it exists, but there are many places in the world that don’t have this problem.

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  • linearchaos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Self-driving callable buses might not be a horrible thing. You open up an app that says I need a ride It tells you where within a mile to walk and send something on its way to drop by and pick you up.

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• red@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  How the fuck was Uber supposed to help traffic? That’s the most American take on solving traffic issues I’ve read in a while.

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  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The actual study modeled a 40% reduction in number of taxis on the road when hailing was made more efficient, with carpooling passengers, and a re-purposing of parking space:

    In the 2010s, the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where one of us serves as the director, was at the forefront of using Big Data to study how ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. The findings appeared to be astonishing: With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses.

    But it turns out that just like with widening highways, human behavior responds to the increased efficiency by stepping up the demand to reach the previous equilibrium again.

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• GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’ve never heard this argument. I’ve heard car share apps could reduce parking issues but how traffic? It’s still a car that can hold generally 4, same as anyone has

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  • CoderKat@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Uber does have a carpool option. But I’m not sure how often it gets used.

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    • merryo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I used that a lot more before COVID

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  • JoBo@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t understand how anyone ever thought they could reduce traffic. Even if they only served people who would otherwise have driven, a cab replacing an A to B and a C to D journey has to do three journeys to replace those two (A to B, B to C, and C to D). It was always going to increase traffic.

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    • GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Again I don’t know this “everyone”, I only heard about parking

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  • Snapz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You’ve never heard about capitalism? Zero labor cost means it’s cheaper to have 100 taxis in your fleet when you would normally have 10.

    If anything, I see it becoming the board game Othello to a degree, the big companies flood every inch of road with their cars instead of the other guys. I’d even see them using groups of their robo cars to create intentional traffic for their competitors, only to then communicate back to their own fleet where the only viable route through town is. This way it’s like a tooth eat and if you want to get across town, you know it will take you 15 mins with Y brand and an hour plus with A brand.

    Wake up and smell the death march called endless corporate growth.

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    • GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The fuck are you dooming about

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  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The text of the article explains that it’s based on reducing the number of taxis (or cars for hire generally) on the road, reducing parking spots, and increasing carpooling:

    In the 2010s, the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where one of us serves as the director, was at the forefront of using Big Data to study how ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. The findings appeared to be astonishing: With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses.

    This utopian vision was not only compelling but within reach. After publishing our results, we started the first collaboration between MIT and Uber to research a then-new product: Uber Pool (now rebranded UberX Share), a service that allows riders to share cars when heading to similar destinations for a lower cost.

    It goes on to explain that it’s a problem of induced demand (same phenomenon that causes highway expansion not to actually help with congestion in the long term):

    Alas, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

    Our research was technically right, but we had not taken into account changes in human behavior. Cars are more convenient and comfortable than walking, buses and subways — and that is why they are so popular. Make them even cheaper through ride-sharing and people are coaxed away from those other forms of transit.

    This dynamic became clear in the data a few years later: On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced.

    We were proud of our contribution to ride-sharing but dismayed to see the results of a 2018 study that found that Uber Pool was so cheap it increased overall city travel: For every mile of personal driving it removed, it added 2.6 miles of people who otherwise would have taken another mode of transportation.

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    • GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Again, I’ve never heard this popularized

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  • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Not only that, it also takes passengers away from public transit because door to door is more convenient than waiting for a bus or changing lines in between.

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  • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Idea is that instead of 4 cars containing 1 person in each of them you get 1 car with 4 people in it. No idea how well it works in practice though, I assume most people who already drive will want to keep driving alone even if it is more expensive.

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    • xthexder@l.sw0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The way I see them get used, the driver is never going anywhere themselves, they’re just working as a taxi. I’ve never seen Uber reduce the number of cars required, but I have been in situations where we needed to call 2 Ubers when everyone would have fit if the driver’s seat was available.

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• NarrativeBear@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s almost like we need to prioritize a better form of interconnected transportation that’s more efficient at moving larger amounts of people with a small foot print.

  1000005111

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  • sugartits@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s almost like people don’t enjoy sharing rides with crackheads that don’t really reach their destination…

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    • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s almost like a lack of investment and propoganda from car companies have convinced people public transportation can’t be convenient, clean, and reliable.

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    • Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Put more money into the public transit system instead of a private company that shafts both paying customers and their employees and maybe those problems could be taken care of.

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    • Mdotaut801@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Agree. I literally have to drive to work. There’s a public transit stop right by my house but then I’d have to take 1 more train, and 2 busses to get within 10 ish blocks of my office. No thanks. Especially in the winter when the homeless chill in the trains and busses taking rips off their crack pipes thinking they’re being sneaky. It smells like burnt plastic. I know what you’re doing. I’m not going to put myself around that.

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    • NarrativeBear@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      As valid you point is, it also holds true for taking a Uber Pool or Robo taxi where a drunk or crackhead decided to jump in and join you, or you them.

      The only difference being if it happens on a Uber Pool ride you don’t have the option of “jumping on the next one” without forking over a sum of money or canceling your trip.

      Not to mention at the same time you are stuck in the same congestion caused by a inefficient (though comfortable?) mode of transportation.

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    • cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You are correct, there are too much crackheads and not enough infrastructure investments.

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• malloc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Can’t read the article since it’s behind a paywall.

  Uber/Lyft and ride share companies in general put more cars on the road. Even worse, most of them just sitting idle waiting for the app to send them a fare (idling vehicles bad for environment).

  Robotaxis are no different. Most of them will just sit idle or drive around aimlessly until a rider(s) are assigned. If conditions are less than ideal, then they are often just found sitting until the conflict can be resolved.

  Witnessed multiple times where an automated car just sits at a light with hazards on because the light was broken due to recent power surge. Just 1 downed vehicle in a 3 lane road in downtown area caused significant traffic to pile up.

  I just want sane non-car centric infrastructure. Why is that so hard for this country to do? Need to undo this 1950s era of urban planning and transportation.

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  • OberonSwanson@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Need to undo this 1950s era of urban planning and transportation

    I was a kid when I saw it, but wasn’t that one of the end messages of the movie, Roger Rabbit?

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    • Decoy321@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Correct. They were going to level Toon Town, or whatever it was called, to make room for a highway. I will never forget this scene because high pitched Christopher Lloyd was fucking terrifying when I first watched it as a kid.

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    • rmuk@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Oh, great. I spent the last 35 years trying to forget about that poor shoe. Thanks.

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• Jimbo@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Uber was supposed to help traffic?

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  • dhork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The original concept of Uber was ride-sharing, where it would match up riders going to a similar destination, like the airport. But I haven’t seen that option pop up in quite a while.

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    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Just like AirBnb, both the company and car/home owners figured they could make more profit by making it a full time gig…

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    • landlordlover@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The original concept of Uber was ride-sharing, where it would match up riders going to a similar destination, like the airport. But I haven’t seen that option pop up in quite a while.

      Wrong, it started as “Ubercap” and you could request a black luxury cab. It eventually turned into the app we have now with people trying to make ends meet. It was and is a taxi service.

      Straight from Wikipedia.

      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#:~:text=Following a be….

      www.investopedia.com/articles/…/story-uber.asp

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    • Snapz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The original concept of Uber was ride-sharing undercutting traditional taxis by operating at a loss until the taxi model was essentially dead and then using newfound monopolistic power to juice profits from every angle with reckless disregard for people or the environment they live in until/if regulators stop us.

      That wasn’t the original concept, you’re confusing the phase 1 marketing pitch for the “concept”.

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  • itwasawednesday@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah that’s a silly statement, guarantee there was little altruism when they, like most, started their business.

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• NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Uber was supposed

  They were never supposed to do anything good.

  In their beginning, Uber was a special purpose vehicle for Big Tech (=their Investors) to perform political changes in all kinds of foreign countries, making them compliant, using methods that the others couldn’t use openly.

  After their evil head has left, they are just another startup that has become big and fat and brainless.

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  • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    In their beginning, Uber was a special purpose vehicle for Big Tech (=their investors) to perform political changes in all kinds of foreign countries, making them compliant, using methods that the others couldn’t use openly.

    Could you talk more about this / link things to read about it?

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    • marv99@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You can start with The Uber files, which “is a global investigation into a trove of 124,000 confidential documents from the tech company that were leaked to the Guardian.”

      Summary

      Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals

      Some examples:

      • The cache of more than 124,000 internal Uber files lays bare the ethically questionable practices through which the company barged its way into new markets, often where existing laws or regulations made its operations illegal, before lobbying aggressively for those same laws or regulations to be altered to accommodate it. Read here
      • Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a “kill switch” to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries. Read here
      • Two of Barack Obama’s most senior presidential campaign advisers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, discussed helping Uber get to access leaders, officials and diplomats. Read here
      • At least six UK government ministers, including the then chancellor, George Osborne, and the future health secretary Matt Hancock, did not declare secret meetings at which they were lobbied by Uber. Read here
      • The inside story of how Uber used its connections to the Conservative party to lobby Boris Johnson in a rearguard effort to stop Transport for London introducing new regulations. Read here
      • One of Uber’s top executives quit amid questions for the company about whether its European operations were structured in a way that avoided tax. Read here
      • Uber secretly hired a political operative linked to Russian oligarchs allegedly aligned with Vladimir Putin in an attempt to secure its place in the Russian market, despite internal bribery concerns. Read here

      […]

      As Bonus some older articles about their overall ethics and practices:

      • Harvard Business Review: Uber Can’t Be Fixed - It’s Time for Regulators to Shut It Down
      • NY Times: How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide paywalled | archived article
      • The Verge This is Uber’s playbook for sabotaging Lyft
      • BuzzFeed: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists
      • Business Insider: Uber has lost its licence to operate in London … as "Uber was not “fit and proper” to hold a licence"
      • Business Insider: France was right to punish Uber, according to a top European legal adviser | archived article

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    • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I don’t know any comprehensive story.

      Maybe their yearly and quarterly financial reports are still online. Look for the war budgets, 10 figure style.

      And the news from that time, what they were actually doing and what were they bragging about.

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• aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Being stuck in “traffic” surrounded by empty cars would make me want to walk into the ocean.

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  • spacebirb@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Oh god thank you for that depressing image

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• DarienGS@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Robotaxis could potentially help traffic by being smaller than current cars. The vast majority of journeys shouldn’t require anything bigger than a Renault Twizzy.

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  • Syreniac@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    On the one hand, you are right. On the other hand, will the consumers of robotaxis want to use small cars or will they push for full size ones?

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    • greavous@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Don’t give them an option…

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• scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Ridesharing apps could try to reduce the number of cars in the road but that would slow down their service. They can optimize anything they choose to, but right now they have been trying to flood the market with many drivers so rides are available quick with low prices. They don’t care about congestion or drivers. This is what you get.

  The fact that more car rides happen with ridesharing should have been predictable, I guess. Suddenly car transport is available to people who can’t afford the high costs of keeping their own car in NYC. And it eliminates the parking problem.

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• creditCrazy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Maybe because Im a car guy who enjoys driving but a self driving car is not only at best not even fixing car dependency but at least with a conventional car I can shift self driving cars I see being extremely boring to use there’s a reason why I always use my bike for my daily commute and my car as a weekly whip and the country side

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