Only if you don't value your time. Either you're paying even more for taxis and rideshares than you would to own your car, or you're spending an hour on trips that would take 10 minutes by car.
It's not. Even if you walked to your job. The additional money you would pay in rent / time / uber is not worth it. Just buy a car unless you live in an actual pedestrian city.
Certainly not, and in many cases it may even cost more than that to drive your own car. But the car comes with a huge advantage that taxis have fallen short on:
The cost is upfront. People sit down and budget $x for transportation and then they know that amount of money will get them anywhere they want to go. People hate having to decide in the moment whether they want to spend the money or not. I notice a similar phenomena when it comes to mobile phone service. People would rather pay extra for a plan that provides more than they could ever need than to have a lesser plan and pay overages when needed because the overages require thinking about it in the moment, rather than pre-planning how much they want to budget. $70/hr. isn't even going to have anyone thinking twice about changing their behaviour completely.
Maybe robs-taxi services will pioneer a pay ahead of time service that captures the necessary mindshare that will make ownership obsolete, but that won't have anything to do with the technology. There is nothing stopping a taxi service from doing that today with human drivers. It's just a tough business model to work with when providing services, so it is uncommon.
It's not a great assumption that there is a viable taxi network in most American suburbs with less than 50-70k people. Even with uber, you might be waiting for an hour if it's available. Even if there is a good network you might be out ~20-30 bucks each way and need a taxi between every destination.
Given that a brand new car costs around 500/month in the US it wouldn't take many such excursions to make the car worth it. Once you've purchased a car and incur it's fixed monthly costs you're incentivised to use it for everything rather than incur further incremental transit expenses.
You don't have to use them all the time, though... there's plenty of things I couldn't afford to do all the time but sometimes it's worth paying extra for, a service like this could be one of them. If something urgent comes up that Magic+ could fix in 15minutes and that I don't have 15 minutes to use and it can't wait, a $25 fee could easily be justifiable, even if my salary was only $50k. The same way as most people wouldn't have a chauffer, but that doesn't mean taxis aren't sometimes worth paying for.
It really depends on what taxi service you use, but on a long run it can be cheaper and more convenient than owning a car, if you do not need to use it every day.
If people who would have driven their own car now take a taxi instead the math doesn't work out unless the taxis have to drive five times the average trip length for making pickups.
The cost difference is likely to be much more than between a present-day taxi and a car. The biggest cost for taxis is the labor of the driver, which usually dwarfs depreciation/maintenance/gas by an order of magnitude. If taxis are currently cheaper than car ownership for you, self-driving cars may be cheaper than taxis may be cheaper than that by a factor of 10x.
Would you pay 10x to avoid having to share seats, particularly for an activity that's still a fairly large chunk of the household budget?
Eh, that's doubtful actually. In most US cities (other than, say NYC, SF, and a handful of others), taxi service is expensive and slow to arrive. Parking is free, and cars can be obtained relatively cheaply.
It depends on the circumstances. On the other hand, for me, if taxi rides were half the price I doubt it would affect my ridership at all over the course of a year. MAYBE for one or two marginal car rentals.
The demand for taxis is so high that a driver bluntly told me to give him my cell phone and setup GPS route, otherwise hes not going. And that was a good 2-burrow trip for $40. Bottom line; they don't need you -- you need them.
Yup, Uber helps a little bit, but unless you're in the heart of the city, it can easily become very unaffordable. Like $80 per night. If you like to have a vibrant social life, even wealthy people can't afford it. That's not even touching US driving culture.
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