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Uber rides cost8/26/2023 New Yorkers do have some new options for booking rides. There are two-thirds fewer cabs on New York City streets - only 3,500 per day compared to 10,500 before the pandemic - and it’s not clear how many of those taxis will ever return. Before booking his Uber, Madra also tried hailing a cab for 20 minutes, to no avail. But there’s another driver-related challenge New York City is facing, which can be seen in the rest of Madra’s ill-fated airport ride thread (which included many people reminding him he could have taken the AirTrain to JFK for tens of dollars instead of hundreds). As the apps work to recruit and retain more drivers, Campbell thinks the high prices will likely last two to three more months. Lyft’s CEO John Zimmer also said the company was considering driver incentives. Last week, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company would be proposing new incentives to draw drivers back to the app. Campbell says he talks to drivers every day who say they’re not benefiting from the higher prices that passengers are being charged. The inability for companies to retain employees is not unique to ride-hailing, but the situation is particularly dire right now at Uber and Lyft, where morale among its gig workers is low. “So you have the perfect storm of extremely high demand and extremely low supply, which makes it seem like reliability is at an all-time low - and prices are as high as they’ve ever been,” Campbell says. “People have been cooped up and are taking their first ride in a year, or a year and a half, and there are many more people wanting to get out there.” In the Before Times, Uber and Lyft handled these moments of peak demand really well - “surge pricing,” you no doubt remember, was the term - but now there’s another factor that’s complicating the issue: a driver shortage. Much like the supply-chain issues that are plaguing virtually every industry now, Uber and Lyft are dealing with a moment of exceptionally high demand, says Harry Campbell, who reports on the industry at the Rideshare Guy. Today my Uber ride from Midtown to JFK cost me as much as my flight from JFK to SFO. But why now? A sudden boom of vaccinated riders ready to hit the town? A shortage of drivers? Start-up-subsidized transportation companies finally facing the financial facts? The shocking incongruity of Uber’s pricing in particular went viral when Sunny Madra, vice-president of Ford’s accelerator program, posted screenshots of a Wednesday morning ride from midtown Manhattan to JFK Airport that cost $248.90 - about as much as his flight to San Francisco. Ride-hailing prices are up - way up, by 50 percent or more over pre-pandemic rates. And just as New Yorkers started to peel off their masks and make their way back out into the world, they were confronted by a rather rude reopening reality. Photo: Eduardo MunozAlvarez/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Images High demand, high prices, high wait times.
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