Celebrating Cities — A study of Uber in San Francisco and New York City
Zaid Haque is Graduate Student in Connective Media (Class of ‘17) at Cornell Tech, and spent a summer between semesters working with Uber as a Design Researcher. Below are some of the learnings from one of his projects at Uber.
One of Uber’s most important values is to celebrate cities, and with that comes the understanding that every city has its own dynamic; every city works differently. We do our best to work with every city individually and create designs that can scale easily through all of them. However, understanding the similarities and differences between the nature of different cities doesn’t come easily without the opportunity to experience them together, while constantly observing and noting differences down. Here’s a look at the rider flow for New York City (specifically Manhattan) and San Francisco, and what some of the subtle (and not so subtle) differences are.
Use cases
First and foremost — why do riders take Uber (or any ridesharing service)? Given New York’s highly integrated public transportation infrastructure, it seems like most people in New York only take a ride for special reasons — whether they are carrying luggage, going somewhere with a family or taking a ride for business purposes (or sometimes just fed up of waiting for the train)— compared to the population of the city, a much smaller portion of New Yorkers rideshare than people in San Francisco. In San Francisco, ridesharing to some may be a daily necessity to get from place to place, where public transportation may not take them, or may take longer. These differences by themselves create a vastly different rider demographic between the two cities.
Requesting a ride
With Manhattan’s easy to understand, gridded structure of numbered streets and avenues, it makes it very easy for riders to request rides at cross streets, two-way avenues or one-way streets and expect the driver to know exactly where they are. At the same time, however, GPS inaccuracies in areas with skyscrapers sometimes means that the rider could unknowingly request the ride when their phone’s GPS thinks they are on the other side of the block. In comparison, although downtown San Francisco does not have avenues in the same way Manhattan does, there still is a sense of structure with Market Street running through the middle of the city, like a spine, with numbered streets running perpendicular to it. Due to designated lanes on streets reserved for busses and taxis, riders here have to be mindful of places that that they cannot be picked up, due to fast moving traffic on a single lane, for private vehicles. Market Street is a good example of this.
Waiting for the ride
Requesting a ride on a smartphone looks deceptively simple, and that’s what all ridesharing apps are striving for. When a rider is matched, they see their requested pickup location on one side of the screen, and the driver on the other side, regardless of the space between them. The distance between them is always perceived as the same, until the rider compares it against the scale of the map that they are on. Given the sheer difference in size between Manhattan and San Francisco, sometimes it’s easy to assume that the driver and rider are the same distance between each other at the time of dispatch, but the distances between them at Manhattan may be much greater than in San Francisco. Sometimes riders may get frustrated while waiting slightly longer than they expected to, but this may be because of both the distance, and also traffic regulations (like no left turns on a specific street at a specific time) that applies to both cities.
Finding your car
Becoming a driver in San Francisco is relatively simple, which is why many driver-partners do this part-time along with other work, or while studying. Drivers can use their personal cars (which, in Uber’s case, in SF, can be any 4-door car less than 15 years and not salvaged). In comparison, New York City driver-partners have need to follow certain city regulations, which even govern the type of cars they may drive. All ridesharing cars in NYC (including Lyft, Gett, Via, and Juno cars) are black in color, and have a special license plate. This makes it slightly more difficult to spot your car amongst a sea of other, very similar looking cars. When you order an uberX in NYC, for example, chances are you’ll be getting a black Toyota Corolla or Camry. So will the person next to you if they ordered an uberX as well. How do we make sure that riders don’t accidentally step into the wrong car when it’s harder to differentiate between them in a city like New York?
Most ridesharing cars in NYC (including Lyft, Gett, Via, and Juno cars) are black in color, and all of them have a special license plate (yellow in color, and starting with the letter ‘T’). This makes it slightly more difficult to spot your car amongst a sea of other, very similar looking cars.
The ride itself
First of all, it’s important to note the driver demographic differences between SF and NYC, and how that affects the ride. Whereas in San Francisco, drivers are your Average Joe who can be anyone from a suburban mom to a stay-at-home dad to a college student looking to earn a bit on the side, drivers in New York are very different, again mainly due to the city restrictions requiring all ridesharing drivers to obtain a TLC license, further restricting the amount of people with various occupations wanting to rideshare part time. The people who have an advantage here are individuals who were drivers earlier, whether it was for a Yellow Cab or other private transportation agencies. How does this affect the ride though?
Entering the car
Yellow Cabs only have passenger seats in the back — the front passenger seat stays empty. Rideshare partners who were formerly taxi drivers are used to this dynamic, and so in places like New York, drivers are used to having people in the back. The front seat is usually pulled all the forward by default, to give the maximum amount of legroom to the rider who, if traveling alone, would sit in the rear right corner of the car, diagonal to the driver if they wished to have a conversation. If riders do not wish to have a conversation, they sit directly behind the driver. However in San Francisco, a large portion of ridesharing drivers were never involved in transportation, and so they are happy with having drivers sit in the front or back. In San Francisco, if a rider wants to talk to the driver they would sit in the front seat. Drivers prefer riders who do not wish to talk sit in the backseat.
Navigation
Many drivers who are more familiar with the cities they drive in prefer to use their own judgement for navigation, whereas drivers who are relatively new, or live outside the city prefer using navigation. A couple of factors that play into this are how long the driver has been driving, how complex the city they are driving in is, and how far they live from the city. New York drivers, mostly having driven prior to joining Uber and other ridesharing services, have a good understanding of the city they operate in. Given that a place like Manhattan has a simple gridded system, it’s easier to understand as well, meaning many of the drivers prefer using their own judgement. However, they always make sure to ask the rider if they wish to follow the navigation system out of courtesy. San Francisco drivers, on the other hand, mostly do not live in the city. Many come from nearby cities like Oakland and Sacramento to drive in San Francisco. Compounded with the fact that many of them have not driven before, they prefer to use navigation apps more. Naturally, there are always a couple of exceptions, and most drivers are open to suggestions from riders on faster routes.
Time of day
This is a factor that does not seem to affect San Francisco as much as New York. Daytime ridesharing in New York is very different from Nighttime ridesharing. The graphic below from Gizmodo shows a good example of how greatly the population of differs between day and night. This infographic is from 2009, so we could probably assume that the population differences may be even more polarized now (even if it’s a slight change).
How does this affect the ride? For starters, traffic during the daytime is much higher than traffic at night. People who take Uber during the daytime are generally trying to get to a meeting, or somewhere important with a time constraint. Riders are in a time pressure to get to where they need, and sometimes may try to push the drivers to drive faster to get them there. The extra traffic restrictions during the daytime (e.g. no left turns on some roads) may cause further frustration, adding to a more stressful ride. In contrast, during the night usually riders use ridesharing services to go somewhere with no time restriction, like a casual meetup as opposed to a business meeting. There is less traffic on the roads as a vast portion of the population that is around during the day lives outside of the island itself.
Designing for Cities
It’s interesting to see how the nature of the city, the population and even the geography has an impact on the way our riders experience Uber between these two cities. But what’s more important to both us, and other companies with services that operate in multiple countries and cities, is how all these factors impact our customers. As we continue growing with operations in 450+ cities worldwide, it becomes increasingly vital for us to understand that if there are so many differences within two cities in America, how different must it be in other cities across the world?
