[valj]

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I imagine the key is in how you build defensibility around the core ride-sharing business.

Ride-sharing suffers from the problem of clustered networks - you can be a global player like Uber and still lose the entire city of SF to a competitor like Lyft, or feel a minnow like Juno tear into your margins in NYC.

Having bike sharing in your pocket helps you build a wider moat around these clustered networks. If I typically take a bikeshare to the subway every morning, and rarely Uber on the weekend, Uber might win 10 low-margin trips from me during the week (bikeshare to and from the subway every day), and through the use of a loyalty program incentivize me to make my 2 high-margin weekend ridesharing trips Uber trips.

So yes, it is an adjacency, and it is lower margin than ridesharing and capital intensive, but this is a difficult market and at this point in the game it might make sense.

[joncrane]

This is the first economically feasible, rational, and internally consistent response in this thread.

While it still takes a leap of faith to buy, the argument is sound. And using some other posters' terminology, we can put it like this:

If this works, it will drive significant revenue growth and consolidation of both the rideshare and bikeshare markets.

If it fails, meh. It's just "rounding error."

Seems like a low-risk, high reward proposition to me, the way you stated it.

[subpixel]

So Uber will use no-margin bike rides to market loss-leader car rides. As ridiculous as this sounds you may be correct.