[j10t]

What I find more interesting is that parking SHOULD cost more than it does, and if it did, Uber would win the cost-value comparison hands-down.

Americans subsidize parking by imposing fees on developers who don't include "enough" of it, and by reserving large portions of cities' streets for car storage. Multi-billion dollar highways enable sprawl and cheaper commercial parking lots. Driving & parking personal vehicles is incredibly wasteful from a broad economic perspective (but it was the correct path -- a necessary evil in the absence of density to enable effective mass transit).

Even with the government subsidies, Uber is an economically competitive alternative to driving & parking personal vehicles. That's the amazing part. Public policy favors the incumbent behavior, yet "ride-sharing" has still been able to expose market inefficiencies. Imagine if we killed all the parking subsidies, or better yet: used economic incentives to discourage driving & parking personal vehicles, and encourage the behavior that had a lower total cost.

I believe the future of personal transportation is computer-driven computer-dispatched vehicles, a game Uber and Google are leading. We can't get there soon enough.

[ohazi]

> What I find more interesting is that parking SHOULD cost more than it does

No, not really. This is a sentiment that I see a lot in San Francisco and NYC, where it makes a lot of sense, but if you've ever driven in LA, you'd quickly realize that it doesn't really apply there because the LA met area is extremely broad, not dense.

In the bay area, you might spend 45 minutes driving from Palo Alto to San Francisco, and then another 30 minutes - an hour driving in circles looking for parking, depending on the time/day.

In LA you have the opposite problem. Traffic gets so bad that it's not uncommon to spend 1-3 hours driving across town on a weekend evening. But once you make it to wherever you're going, you can usually find parking in under 15 minutes.