The Uber Report
After almost ten years of losing billions and making tens of millions or friends and a few enemies around the world, the ride-sharing company looks like it's finally on the road to profitability.
My enjoyable and lucrative Uber career is over after seven years, 7,000 trips and probably 11,000 human passengers.
The pandemic virtually killed the business in Pittsburgh for almost two years, but my retirement is mostly because I'm 75 and I moved to the little and very sleepy college town of Bethany, WV, which has fewer than 1000 people and sits in the middle of nowhere 70 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh.
But Uber -- which all the naysayers and car-haters and public transit lovers predicted and hoped would die despite its obvious benefits to cities and suburbs around the world -- is finally showing that all the billions it's spent on its quest to become the Amazon of micro-transportation is paying off.
It's finally showing a profit. It surpassed 2 billion trips globally in a single quarter -- an average of almost 1 million trips per hour.
And 5.4 million humans on Earth have well-paying jobs (mostly part-time) delivering people and stuff.
8 billion trips a year -- I wonder how all those people got from here to there before Uber came along?
Uber and me
I’ve always been a big fan or Uber — even before I became a part-time driver — because I saw how it was going to kill the evil taxicab racket in every city in America. Here, under the title ‘I Uberman,’ are some links to the many things I’ve written in defense of Uber and the benefits it brought us.