How Uber Is Changing Night Life in Los Angeles

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/fashion/how-uber-is-changing-night-life-in-los-angeles.html

43 38 12 years ago

wdewind2• 12 years ago

Even Mr. O’Connell, the über-Uber devotee, is peeved. “The company is turning into a soulless psycho monster,” he said. He sides with the drivers. “I would much rather they pay them fairly than have to deal with surge pricing at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday,” he said.

I grew up really respecting the NYTimes as an institution, but now when I read what they have to say about things I actually understand I am quite underwhelmed by their investigative prowess. I feel like they have a serious habit of using quotes and other colloquial (mis)understandings that are incorrect to spread FUD about specific tech companies. Check out their record on AMZN, for instance. In this case they use this guy to set up a completely false dichotomy: who wouldn't rather that? I'm sure even Uber would rather that. But that's not how life (read: the economy) works at all.

mkhpalm• 12 years ago

If you haven't noticed the recent flurry of Uber articles... Let me try to explain whats going on here.

These days you go to boomberg, nytimes, any blog I know of and say "we'll pay you X amount of dollars to write an article about Uber changing something." The "news" outfit gets to write whatever they want but the underlying message of "uber changing something" has to be there to get paid. The splitting hairs part is how people think they retain credibility as a "news" outfit because they use their own words. I think a lot of people would say otherwise if they saw the whole process from beginning to end.

If that all sounds like unfettered mass manipulation, thats because it is. You can be in the news all year round if you have the money to burn out fishing. Pick an source, they all have their price these days.

throwaway20148• 12 years ago

You actually think this is an advertorial masquerading as legitimate trend-piece by NYT?

pessimizer• 12 years ago

You don't send checks to major newspapers for stories.

What you do is write the story yourself and send it to media outlets, and they'll rewrite it and publish it because they are lazy. Publishing positive puff about a company is a no-op for the papers, because it doesn't open them up to criticism or liability. Publishing positive puff about a tech company makes you seem young.

[PRESS RELEASE] Uber: single-handedly fixing the most common complaint in LA, if you'll let them.

wdewind2• 12 years ago

Right, we've all read PG's submarines piece. Now my question is why is NYTimes writing stuff against Amazon? I couldn't find even a pro-ish Amazon editorial when I searched, and if there is one it's severely outnumbered by misunderstandings and falsities about Amazon written by Krugman and friends. I think there are some really great arguments to be made that there are big problems with AMZN, but NYtimes fails to make all of them in favor of traditional "but where are the profits" type arguments.

I pick on the Amazon story in particular because I had a position in Amazon and so I followed media about it in particular. I'm sure there are other companies that are similar. I'm not particularly shocked or outraged by it, but I would like to know why they are so angrily anti-Amazon, if only to better understand their bias.

stblack• 12 years ago

but now when I read what they have to say about things I actually understand I am quite underwhelmed by their investigative prowess.

IME this is true of all reporting, regardless of the source or subject.

The more removed we are, the more we tend to believe what's reported is true.

gerbal• 12 years ago

Different sections of the NYTimes have very different tones and journalistic merit. This article was published in the FASHION section of the paper.

mturmon2• 12 years ago

Excellent point. Fashion is probably the most advertorial oriented of the NYT sections...except for Home/real estate.

bkeroack• 12 years ago

As an Angeleno, I generally resent NY Times trying to tell the rest of the nation about life in Los Angeles. Every single article I've read in that vein has had the same trite, vaguely condescending cliches like "America’s most auto-centric place", etc. Los Angeles is vast, and some areas are as walkable as Manhattan. We're also building more rail lines than anywhere else in the country.

Uber is popular here (like any large city I'm sure) but Lyft has a strong presence (especially in West Hollywood). Frankly, most people I know choose to live near their favorite nightlife spots to avoid the driving problem, or near mass transit.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

I've been in LA for 13 years now, and it's a mixed bag.

The traffic is even worse than most people can imagine, if you're driving across several neighborhoods and/or on the freeways. Most other cities don't come close, DC being a notable exception. But even then, the traffic here lasts longer and stretches further. Angelenos don't measure distances in miles, we measure it in how long we expect it to take.

Parking can be a hassle in specific places, but for the most part you can find space near where you're going at rates that are reasonable. Although there is less free parking than many other cities.

But at the same time, LA is a city of neighborhoods all mashed together, and some of those neighborhoods are quite walkable. I live within a block or two of a ton of restaurants and shops, and within a short 5-10 minute drive of 90% of my needs.

It's sucked when I've had jobs that required cross-town commutes, but otherwise it can be quite pleasant.

Lot of taxis here. Lot of Uber/Lyft. Lot of Town Car services for the entertainment industry (when you see that town car heading in the neighborhood for a 4:30 AM pickup, you might not envy the actor's life too much).

As an aside, I'm actually impressed at how fast the subway system is currently growing. Unlike some cities, projects here are getting completed in years as opposed to decades. The subway/light rail is very different from 10 years ago, and will be very different again in 10 more years. It's still a huge, spread out city, but Metro is tying it together relatively quickly.

melvinmt• 12 years ago

I keep hearing over and over how traffic sucks in LA but I've learned two things since I got here: don't drive cross-town too much (I live near the busiest intersection in Hollywood, yet 90% of shops and restaurants I need are within 5-10 mins drive) and live where you work (30 min walk).

mturmon2• 12 years ago

I have an online subscription to the NYT, and I've lived in LA for about 20 years. I totally agree with you.

They tend to send reporters in to live here for a couple of years, so they regard a Manhattan life style as the baseline and any deviation from that is, at best, quirky, and going down from there towards crazy at a fast clip.

I was hoping there would be reader comments for this article, because the only thing better is to read Alfonse from Staten Island writing in that he visited his cousin in 2002 and the traffic was horrible, and Sydney from the UWS testifying that he lived there for two years in the 1990s and it really is as bad as all that, probably worse, and how do they live that way.

shalmanese• 12 years ago

Another thing about Rideshare in LA is that being a driver is the almost perfectly complementary job for a struggling actor. You need a car anyway to get to auditions and you get to set your own hours and make a decent enough wage to survive in LA.

mbertrand2• 12 years ago

Totally agree, almost every one of the Uber's I hop in and strike up a conversation with the driver they end up being a struggling actor/comedian/musician. Seems as if it is a welcome alternative to getting a job as a server at a restaurant.

mbertrand2• 12 years ago

While I'm not overly impressed with the post I have to agree with the sentiment of it as Uber/Lyft has made living in LA without a car much easier. Coming from another major city my wife and I were dreading the idea of having to buy a second vehicle for me just to live daily. Thanks to rise of ride sharing services we haven't had to and that makes living here, not just nightlife, a lot easier given the lack of useful public transportation.

kalleboo• 12 years ago

If anyone is curious as to what the taxi regulation looks like in Los Angeles which has lead to this, this paper looks like a good start.

http://www.taxi-library.org/driving-poor.pdf

The Taxicab Commission determined how many taxicabs were needed for Los Angeles and divided the city into five geographical zones. Taxicab franchises then bid on the zones and for an allotted number of taxicabs to operate in each zone
the taxi industry is among the largest source of political campaign contributions to members of the City Council. The Los Angeles Times reported that in 2000 (the last year new franchises were awarded), taxicab companies paid lobbyists $288,000 in that year

jonahx• 12 years ago

This seems like an example of a submarine article:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

jordanpg2• 12 years ago

in UberX, the company’s lower-priced service, introduced here last spring, can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes

This is absolutely false. Parking in downtown LA is much cheaper than this. Closer to $5 a night, maybe a little more on the weekends. Sometimes you can even find street parking within a few blocks of this vaunted Ace hotel that the author is so infatuated with. Parking isn't a problem on this side of town.

Moreover, Uber makes no dent on the fundamental problem in LA, which is that the distances are so great.

It is shameful that the article doesn't even mention the real good news in LA transportation which is that the Expo Line now stretches from downtown to Culver City, and will go all the way to Santa Monica in 2015. LA residents also voted to install a streetcar in the downtown area, although that's a few years off.

Totally agree with the comment about this being a "submarine article". More Uber cheerleading.

nextstep• 12 years ago

Completely agree. The article mentions how shitty it can be going from the West side to Silver Lake, possibly 3 hours with traffic. How would an uber make this any better? I guess you can spend those hours in the backseat instead of at the wheel, but that still a shitty waste of time and nothing like the lifestyle in New York as the quote claims.

gdubs2• 12 years ago

In my experience – I commuted from Silverlake to West Side for almost two years and have sat in three hour traffic – being chauffeured is _dramatically_ better. It kind of goes:

driving yourself < driving with a companion < being chauffeured

Driving requires constant focus, especially in stop-and-go traffic, and it can be downright exhausting. Driving with a friend makes it a little better, but you're still 'in it together' and it can still be exhausting. Sitting in the backseat while someone drives you, while maybe not that best use of your time, allows you to shut off your active brain and focus on something else: reading, napping, working on a laptop, etc.

The truth is that talking on the phone, podcasts, audio books -- these didn't really make my commute more bearable in the long run; and my theory is that you're not really able to shut off your focus on the road. That focus is what's exhausting.

gdubs2• 12 years ago

Those rail lines are great progress, but let's face it -- they still require a schlep to get to your final destination: party in the hills, bbq in malibu, office miles away from the closest rail line...

Taxis have historically sucked in Los Angeles. Drinking and driving is a huge problem. Submarine article or not, a disruption of LA's cab business is a welcome change.

j10t• 12 years ago

What I find more interesting is that parking SHOULD cost more than it does, and if it did, Uber would win the cost-value comparison hands-down.

Americans subsidize parking by imposing fees on developers who don't include "enough" of it, and by reserving large portions of cities' streets for car storage. Multi-billion dollar highways enable sprawl and cheaper commercial parking lots. Driving & parking personal vehicles is incredibly wasteful from a broad economic perspective (but it was the correct path -- a necessary evil in the absence of density to enable effective mass transit).

Even with the government subsidies, Uber is an economically competitive alternative to driving & parking personal vehicles. That's the amazing part. Public policy favors the incumbent behavior, yet "ride-sharing" has still been able to expose market inefficiencies. Imagine if we killed all the parking subsidies, or better yet: used economic incentives to discourage driving & parking personal vehicles, and encourage the behavior that had a lower total cost.

I believe the future of personal transportation is computer-driven computer-dispatched vehicles, a game Uber and Google are leading. We can't get there soon enough.

ohazi• 12 years ago

What I find more interesting is that parking SHOULD cost more than it does

No, not really. This is a sentiment that I see a lot in San Francisco and NYC, where it makes a lot of sense, but if you've ever driven in LA, you'd quickly realize that it doesn't really apply there because the LA met area is extremely broad, not dense.

In the bay area, you might spend 45 minutes driving from Palo Alto to San Francisco, and then another 30 minutes - an hour driving in circles looking for parking, depending on the time/day.

In LA you have the opposite problem. Traffic gets so bad that it's not uncommon to spend 1-3 hours driving across town on a weekend evening. But once you make it to wherever you're going, you can usually find parking in under 15 minutes.

andyidsinga2• 12 years ago

so, in the towns where uber is popular is there a perfext storm of really unreliable taxi service + a large desire to use a car that doesnt look like a taxi?

dibbsonline• 12 years ago

I think so, I can use a smartphone app / web page to order a taxi now. There's no surge pricing, the cost is predictable as well as the drivers income, they are not expensive and they are reliable, at least in cities, in Australia.

Maybe I've hit middle age, but it sure looks like evangelising uber is a desire to carve some bohemian fashion for ones self by simply making a materialistic change to a brand of taxi, it's only skin deep really, fashion.

Either that or there was a genuine gap in the market.. again any sort of taxi company with OK service would have succeeded.

JeremyBanks• 12 years ago

Either that or there was a genuine gap in the market.. again any sort of taxi company with OK service would have succeeded.

This is how I see it. Uber is not particularly revolutionary, but the existing taxi system in many areas was so regressive and unpleasant to use that it didn't take much more than a decent app to upstage them.

andyidsinga2• 12 years ago

ok ...some I'm not nuts :)

i also use a taxi app / web page here in portland, oregon ( taxi magic ...which looks like its now called "curb" ) ..it just connects me to two local taxi companies. they haven't failed me yet.

mhartl• 12 years ago

“I can just, like, YOLO with Uber,” she said.

I nominate this for Millennial Sentence of the Year.

ibejoeb• 12 years ago

I think a lot of folks are nitpicking. Yes, the $4 is a shortest ride. Yes, you can park overnight in DTLA for $7. Yes, there is still traffic congestion. Yes, there is a false dichotomy or two. It's not stellar reporting of the economics of it.

The real point is cultural. Planning a drive is real. DUI is a way a life for a lot of people, so much so that the it is viewed as a revenue generator. Fueling and parking take a significant amount of time. Uber and similar are changing these things, at least partially because the price is right and it's pretty reliable, which the article points out.

It's more convenient to take Uber to a meeting. It's more convenient to take Uber for a night out.

Anecdotally, Uber changed the way I do things, and I think it's generally for the better.

On the other side of the coin, I absolutely hate Uber in NYC. I've never had a good experience.

facepalm2• 12 years ago

Didn't they have cabs in LA before Uber came along? I smell some hyperbole in that story.

rwhitman• 12 years ago

Yes there are cab companies in LA. There aren't many and they are just awful. Never any place you need them, you have to call a dispatcher and they never show up remotely on time (sometimes not at all, or in bizarre cases three show up at once and fight over you), incredibly expensive, in very short supply at peak times. I left LA before Uber hit but I've heard from friends basically the same synopsis of what this article states, it's transformed cabbing it on weekends which is a huge deal

facepalm2• 12 years ago

Thanks - that is the first argument I heard in favor of Uber. I mean thinking why cabs sucked so hard, I suppose it is difficult to create a new cab company to fix things. So maybe Uber makes it simpler to fix things by starting a cab company (a cab company of one car+driver).

How Uber Is Changing Night Life in Los Angeles

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