Uber's Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic (technologyreview.com)

Drivers stuck in traffic in Mexico city are lately seeing a fleet of sign-toting drones buzzing at them, saying (in Spanish) "Driving by yourself? This is why you can never see the volcanoes." (It's a reference to the smog that often hovers over the city and obscures two nearby peaks.) Turns out, it's an ad for UberPOOL, part of Uber's big push into markets across Latin America. From an MIT Technology Review article: Uber already does more business in Mexico City than any other city it operates in, and Brazil is its third-largest market after the U.S. and India. Uber sees Latin American countries as generally easier targets for expansion than either of its top two markets.Umm, I get that Uber has self-driving cars now in Pittsburgh, but they don't fly (at least as of now). So wouldn't they be stuck in the traffic as well?

Comments

The ending comment

[Calydor]

Please do a bit of quick math.

If each car stuck in traffic has one person in it, and Uber can cram just two people into each car, there would - theoretically - be half as many cars on the road at that given point in time, which would likely help to seriously reduce traffic congestion.

Re:The ending comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Math? Here's some math: A taxi has to drive much farther on average to get you from point A to point B than you would have to drive to make the same journey in a car you owned and kept with you. If the world magically switched overnight from privately-owned cars to some Ubertopia where GM (or whoever) owned every car in the world and rented them out by the mile, traffic congestion - and therefore trip time - would skyrocket.

Re:The ending comment

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, public transportation. Just infinitely more profitable - and environmentally destructive - than the usual manifestations. If you slap an Apple logo on a bus and rename it a SmartBus or an iBus, it's still a damn bus. And hardly anyone in America rides the bus or carpools if they can afford a car (or a taxi even). You also neglect the time that you and your iBus will spend waiting (on the street/curb, causing congestion) while the other 7 idiots you're carpooling with meander their way out to the car. I'm sure you'll love waking up an hour earlier every morning because you're the iBus' first pickup (or getting home an hour later because you're the last dropoff).

If you work somewhere where parking is *that* bad, then you're why public transportation is a thing. Invest in and "optimize" that instead of cheerleading GM's trillion-dollar daydream whose success relies on overthrowing a huge part of American culture - if not the very concept of personal property that's been ingrained into our brains since we were monkeys.

stupid questions for stupid customers

[frovingslosh]

If you drive to work and park your car there, then drive home that evening, your car only has to drive to and from work. If you call Uber for a pickup. someone (or something) drives a vehicle to you and then takes you to where you want to go. It then drives to the next pick-up, which during morning rush hour is more likely than not another commute from the suburbs into the city. At the end of the day the car with no paying customer makes another trip "home". Overall it isn't hard to see that the more Uber cars there are on the road replacing private cars, the more total miles will be driven and the worse traffic will be.

You might say to you could reduce the total miles driven with Uber if rides were shared, although that would add inconvenience and lengthen the trip for most people. But you can ride-pool already if you are so inclined, so there seems to be no good reason to use Uber if the goal is to reduce traffic and time wasted in traffic.