Ride-hailing in Metro Vancouver: Uber, Lyft, Sidecar - emerging technologies

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Uber and Lyft drivers will be out of work in a few short years. Waymo now has a larger market share than Lyft in San Francisco. To be clear, the Waymo taxi's are 100% driverless.

Once economies of scale kick in for driverless taxi's, the cost of a ride will come down significantly. People who normally commute using public transit will start to use driverless taxi's. These cars are going to take over the public transportation industry.

Waymo’s celestial ascent into the cultural zeitgeist — a rise that has been propelled by dystopian memes and sheer, futuristic novelty — has only been matched by how it continues swallowing its competition. The Alphabet-owned autonomous driving company saw explosive exponential growth in ridership in 2024, with driverless rides increasing from 77,000 to more than 312,000 lifts by August of last year alone, according to the California DMV; as of publishing, Waymo asserts that 30% of their rides are to local small businesses.

Independent contractors for Lyft and Uber have been saying they’re “cooked” for a while, citing massive declines in available requests as a result of Waymo’s success. (This, however, is a tandem issue: Waymo’s ride-hailing operations in San Francisco coincided with the increased number of regional rideshare drivers that began working during and after the pandemic.) But now factual data is showing that the aforementioned broiling is, indeed, happening … and at a rate quicker than once thought.

According to YipitData, a data and analytics firm based out of New York City, Waymo’s gross bookings from August of 2023 to April of this year have surpassed Lyft’s in market share. The twenty-month data analysis highlighted Uber’s dominance in San Francisco ridership — well over 50% of all trips booked via a ridesharing application were done on Uber throughout the analysis — but showed, perhaps more surprisingly, how quickly Waymo clambered into the commonplace. Waymo is also currently beating Lyft, a company that has operated rides in San Francisco since 2012, in total gross bookings.

https://underscoresf.com/in-san-francisco-waymo-has-now-bested-lyft-uber-is-next/