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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?
What a country!
In Capitalist America, we advetise to the drones!
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.
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In the US we were smart enough to restrict commercial usage of drones.
Not only that, but flying over traffic causes a hazard; what if one of those drones loses power and lands on (or IN a car! convertible?) or distracts a driver causing an accident?
I'm surprised the Mexican authorities aren't all over this.
Until now I thought those people who shot down drones were luddites and assholes. If a drone advertises at me I will use every engineering skill in my toolkit to take those bastards down. And I don't mean knock it out of the sky. But send it back to its base with malware that will fly the entire fleet into the ocean.
A portable, directional EMP device cannot come soon enough.
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Uber never misses an opportunity to come of like a bunch of insufferable assholes, do they?
Did you not rate them? It's rare that a driver will rate you down unless you either rate them down or are a total asshole to them, since they know you'll do the same.
Also this was an add for uberPool, but not having amateur drivers looking for parking helps a lot.
It's even simpler. UberPOOL. Every extra passenger replaces a solo driver. The difference between gridlock and flowing traffic can be 20% or less, so it's not that hard to imagine it making a significant difference...
The service they're advertising is UberPOOL. Did you even read the text you posted yourself?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
So shooting down a drone hovering over your teen daughter sunbathing is being an asshole, but taking down a drone showing an advert is fine? Just wow. You might wanna get your priorities in order.....
The way things are going, people will want to shoot down drones for all sorts of reasons. Some due to adverts which will float around their person and follow them until they say whether they are interested or not (just you wait and see), others because peeping toms were trying to get some nudie shots of them/their loved ones. And people who just don't like being spied upon in some dystopian society. Not sure what the solution is. Banning drones won't work, restricting them will not work due to it being hard to enforce (short of having no-go zones like airports, which are easy to control), and allowing people to take them down themselves will just result in drones being taken down all the time, for a range of reasons as varied as the people taking action against them.