I've always blamed my move from New York to SoCal on an ex-boyfriend that cheated on me for money. We broke up two weeks after I accepted a job in Newport Beach to be closer to him while he lived temporarily in LA. Seven months after our break up (over the phone, no less) he had his come to Jesus moment, requesting that we schedule a brief meeting. It was mostly for him to admit that he had gotten back on Tinder and left me for another Chinese lady, a relatively talented writer living in a five-bedroom apartment in LA. She doesn't need to work for money, he said. Her apartment is huge, he said.
Newport Beach is a sparse, flat and beige town composed of imported palm trees, Botox, Italian and German sport cars, stretches of scorching sand, surprisingly delicious food, and one cybersecurity company. I moved thinking I would get a car to solve the transportation problem: How hard could it be to get a US license, much less purchase insurance and a car?
I tried. I really did. The DMV appointments were scheduled months in advance and the traffic rule book was downloaded and perused. I even made a preliminary visit to a Volkswagen dealership and tested a Golf in Huntington Beach. But when it came down to sitting for the writing test, I couldn't bring myself to show up at the DMV. I just couldn’t become a car owner. It's not who I am; it's not who I ever will be. I'm a city dweller. I'm from Singapore, I lived in New York—I don't need a car.
And, really, I didn't. 877 of rides later, I can say I rode Uber and Lyft for one year.
I didn't initially think rideshares were going to be my permanent solution. The health-conscious part of me reasoned I could walk 50 minutes to work several times a week. (That's like, what, 40 Manhattan blocks with traffic lights?) The frugal part of me reasoned I could take a bus in the morning and a rideshare at night. (You'll save $7 each morning, which is $35 a week, or one grocery trip, I thought.) But there's really nothing more depressing than walking 50 minutes along a highway with cacti on one side and speeding cars on the other. Plus, the buses couldn't cut it. They were infrequent and late; I hated monitoring them on my dinky iPhone 5 screen.
At one point I investigated scooters, but discovered that while 12 scooter companies operate in neighboring San Francisco, they are banned in pristine Newport Beach. Could I have bought one? Yes, but the thought of scootering directly next to cars with vanity plates like "VROOOM" and "A55HOLE" was enough to bury this idea. In Seattle, I saw Lime Pods and thought perhaps the city would roll them out, too. Alas.
So I was stuck with Uber and Lyft. I read somewhere that most users of these apps don't own cars. Car owners tend to call a rideshare when they're headed to the airport, somewhere with insufficient parking or dinner, where they plan to drink uninhibited. I, however, rode Uber or Lyft to work, the supermarket, the doctors, yoga, Laguna, airports, and home. I was completely reliant on ridesharing and this required of me the strictest sense of efficiency.
Here’s how a recent day looked: To avoid the cost of a Lyft ride, I started with a 20-minute walk to the nearest USPS in the sweltering sun. I walked steadily to avoid perspiration, but by the end of my jaunt I was shvitzing. Then I took a Lyft to work. During lunch I took FRANC (free rides around Newport Center) to Citibank to withdraw money for my therapist and deposit a check from LOT Airlines, from when they abandoned me in Warsaw, then I FRANC-ed back to work. After work, I FRANC-ed to Wholefoods and bought a week's worth of groceries. From Wholefoods, I took a Lyft back home. I cooked a bunch that evening to avoid extra trips to lunch.
Lyft total: two rides for $14. Really, what was life before FRANC?
Another day: I took a Lyft to my gynecologist and discovered I am still with cyst. It's been three months, and the pain is unyielding. After coming to terms with my womanhood—in other words holding a pity party of one in the OBGYN's waiting area—I took FRANC to work. At lunch, I hitched a ride with a coworker to grab food. I complain about my cyst. After work, I took a Lyft to my neighborhood nail salon to treat myself because, boy, I hate being a woman. After I paid for someone to make me feel prettier, I took a Lyft home for the evening.
Lyft total: three rides for $23.
On weekdays, I might ride an Uber or Lyft anywhere from one to three times a day. On weekends, that goes up to anywhere from two to five times a day, depending on how reckless I'm feeling. (Should I go for brunch, 20-mins out in Laguna?) So what does all this riding look like when converted to numbers?
The cost of taking Uber and Lyft for one year in SoCal, stacked up against car ownership and public transportation:
Uber/Lyft: 7200 USD/yr
New Toyota Prius: 7028 USD/yr
Used Toyota Prius: 5880 USD/yr
Chargeable Tesla Model 3, rear-wheel drive: 7158 USD/yr
Monthly MTA card and 120 Lyft rides: 3072 USD/yr (me in New York, 2018)
This is my contribution to one basic argument for public transport. But, forgetting financial considerations for one second, how do the other pros and cons of taking rideshares stack up?
Pros:
Cons:
This year, I've made 877 trips with Uber and Lyft. They range from six-minute rides to the grocery store, so that I can satisfy a chips craving, to one-and-a-half-hour rides to LAX. Long-haul rides do not bode well for anyone. Such trips start out well: The driver spots me holding a luggage bag and gets out of the car to help. The app promises I'll be at LAX in 50 minutes. The driver and I have been swapping CO2 for the last hour. The app now says 15 more minutes, but that was 23 minutes ago. The driver and I resent each other. Finally, after audibly sighing for what feels like forever, I am curbside and the driver snarls at me while I drag my luggage out of his trunk. I can't blame his attitude. I mark our perseverance with a 20% tip.
The worst part of Lyft's app, by the way, is that the final destination inexplicably remains hidden from the driver. (I can't remember if this is the case for Uber, as I ride Uber less than Lyft.) I'd wager most people prefer Uber and Lyft to taxis because they negate the need for providing directions. The app knows where you're going. But, the driver doesn't. And so, you tell him exactly. He clicks his tongue. This is a ride he wouldn't have accepted if the destination was disclosed earlier. I'm irritated because I'm unwanted, and I'm repeating myself despite going out of the way to avoid conversation at all costs. I know it's not the driver's fault, but it's irksome.
I've met many people in my time being chauffeured from A to B. More often than not, my driver holds two jobs. He or she is anywhere from 18 to 75 years old. I've met students working to make an extra buck, white-collar professionals trying to write off taxes on their new Tesla, retirees looking for conversation, yoga teachers, dog walkers, car dealers, nurses, jail wardens, and creepy neighbors that now know my unit number. Some drivers are exceedingly nice, offering mints, water and the option to change the music or temperature. Some are business-minded, spending our short time together selling me on additional services like phone reparation or yoga classes. Some are informative, offering explanations of SoCal phenomena like "momsicles," "June gloom," or "marine layer." And, of course, some are just downright rude, imposing their political beliefs on me before my first cup of coffee.
In this sense, traveling in cars has helped me understand the world. Yes, putting aside my bewildering attachment to my expired identity as urbanite, they basically make my being in SoCal possible. But, I don't need a car. I'm a city kid! I'd rather be waiting for the 6 train at Union Square at 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. In August.
Cars are necessary to maintain a certain quality of life in SoCal. The region simply isn't built for the alternative. The grey area that Uber and Lyft is filling serves a very small set of people—like NY transplants who move westward and begin to miss the MTA. What SoCal needs is infrastructural change. Call me crazy, but all hail the Hyperloop. Trains are the way of the future. It's beyond comprehension that SoCal can't get its shit together and build a reliable train network. It works for cities like New York, Chicago, and DC. It works for entire countries, like Singapore, France and Japan. It works internationally, like the Eurail within the European Union.
The argument that ride-sharing will take cars off the road is untrue. Unless it is an increasingly dense area with reasonable public transportation, there will always be car owners. This was never a convincing argument, despite what Uber and Lyft say to their investors, regulators or maybe someday, Greta Thunberg.
I read recently that Elon Musk wants to put 1 million robo-taxis on the roads in 2020, offering Tesla owners the opportunity of making more than $30,000 a year by sharing their cars while they’re busy at work. Whether or not this is a reality for 2020 is a delicious Twitter thread for another day. But I doubt Musk’s desire to make Tesla an appreciating asset is to curb traffic. If anything, I imagine robo-taxis will only add thousands of wandering cars to the roads everyday. How this would impact congestion, energy consumption and, importantly, passenger and pedestrian safety is worthy of significant study.
I am aware that the California High Speed Rail (CSHR) is in progress, though by the time it is complete, I will have moved to another city. Completion of the CHSR will be a monumental help to long distance travelers, but it doesn't solve the issue of public transportation in inter-city and beach town areas. I want to believe it boils down to individual mindsets. If citizens of Newport Beach and other sprawling cities or beach towns became hospitable to other modes of transport, a slew of obvious benefits would follow. To name a few: alleviation of the environmental impact of cars, a rise in the volume and creativity of public spaces and buildings, increased chance interactions that lead to tolerance and understanding of others and, possibly, deeper social and political involvement from feeling a part of the broader community.
I’m not sure how much longer I will be in this beach town I’ve come to know. Until my fated departure, I sign off from my beige apartment surrounded by gated communities with private harbors, cookie-cutter strip malls and nine-lane highways.
P.S.: Some extra thoughts on Tesla Network: Musk's robo-taxi might work better if it operated as if on a bus route. Or, if the app had some way of calculating the time and power required to return to its owner when needed. Putting aside several ways a Tesla may be hijacked, one concern is that if the robo-taxi accepts any trip on its app, it may end up miles away from its owners without resources to return. If a robo-taxi could deposit itself at a charging station, then Musk will need to employ workers at said station to assist with charging.
In fact, why even bother with the Tesla Network? Why not government funding and your taxes be spent on realizing the potential of our bus fleet and network?
P.P.S.: If you're wondering about my love life, I am lucky to have met a wonderful man in San Francisco while on a work trip. I'm hoping to move so I can be with him. Happily, he lives in a city with reasonable bus service and, well, he already owns a car.
Newport Beach is a sparse, flat and beige town composed of imported palm trees, Botox, Italian and German sport cars, stretches of scorching sand, surprisingly delicious food, and one cybersecurity company. I moved thinking I would get a car to solve the transportation problem: How hard could it be to get a US license, much less purchase insurance and a car?
I tried. I really did. The DMV appointments were scheduled months in advance and the traffic rule book was downloaded and perused. I even made a preliminary visit to a Volkswagen dealership and tested a Golf in Huntington Beach. But when it came down to sitting for the writing test, I couldn't bring myself to show up at the DMV. I just couldn’t become a car owner. It's not who I am; it's not who I ever will be. I'm a city dweller. I'm from Singapore, I lived in New York—I don't need a car.
And, really, I didn't. 877 of rides later, I can say I rode Uber and Lyft for one year.
I didn't initially think rideshares were going to be my permanent solution. The health-conscious part of me reasoned I could walk 50 minutes to work several times a week. (That's like, what, 40 Manhattan blocks with traffic lights?) The frugal part of me reasoned I could take a bus in the morning and a rideshare at night. (You'll save $7 each morning, which is $35 a week, or one grocery trip, I thought.) But there's really nothing more depressing than walking 50 minutes along a highway with cacti on one side and speeding cars on the other. Plus, the buses couldn't cut it. They were infrequent and late; I hated monitoring them on my dinky iPhone 5 screen.
At one point I investigated scooters, but discovered that while 12 scooter companies operate in neighboring San Francisco, they are banned in pristine Newport Beach. Could I have bought one? Yes, but the thought of scootering directly next to cars with vanity plates like "VROOOM" and "A55HOLE" was enough to bury this idea. In Seattle, I saw Lime Pods and thought perhaps the city would roll them out, too. Alas.
So I was stuck with Uber and Lyft. I read somewhere that most users of these apps don't own cars. Car owners tend to call a rideshare when they're headed to the airport, somewhere with insufficient parking or dinner, where they plan to drink uninhibited. I, however, rode Uber or Lyft to work, the supermarket, the doctors, yoga, Laguna, airports, and home. I was completely reliant on ridesharing and this required of me the strictest sense of efficiency.
Here’s how a recent day looked: To avoid the cost of a Lyft ride, I started with a 20-minute walk to the nearest USPS in the sweltering sun. I walked steadily to avoid perspiration, but by the end of my jaunt I was shvitzing. Then I took a Lyft to work. During lunch I took FRANC (free rides around Newport Center) to Citibank to withdraw money for my therapist and deposit a check from LOT Airlines, from when they abandoned me in Warsaw, then I FRANC-ed back to work. After work, I FRANC-ed to Wholefoods and bought a week's worth of groceries. From Wholefoods, I took a Lyft back home. I cooked a bunch that evening to avoid extra trips to lunch.
Lyft total: two rides for $14. Really, what was life before FRANC?
Another day: I took a Lyft to my gynecologist and discovered I am still with cyst. It's been three months, and the pain is unyielding. After coming to terms with my womanhood—in other words holding a pity party of one in the OBGYN's waiting area—I took FRANC to work. At lunch, I hitched a ride with a coworker to grab food. I complain about my cyst. After work, I took a Lyft to my neighborhood nail salon to treat myself because, boy, I hate being a woman. After I paid for someone to make me feel prettier, I took a Lyft home for the evening.
Lyft total: three rides for $23.
On weekdays, I might ride an Uber or Lyft anywhere from one to three times a day. On weekends, that goes up to anywhere from two to five times a day, depending on how reckless I'm feeling. (Should I go for brunch, 20-mins out in Laguna?) So what does all this riding look like when converted to numbers?
The cost of taking Uber and Lyft for one year in SoCal, stacked up against car ownership and public transportation:
Uber/Lyft: 7200 USD/yr
New Toyota Prius: 7028 USD/yr
Used Toyota Prius: 5880 USD/yr
Chargeable Tesla Model 3, rear-wheel drive: 7158 USD/yr
Monthly MTA card and 120 Lyft rides: 3072 USD/yr (me in New York, 2018)
This is my contribution to one basic argument for public transport. But, forgetting financial considerations for one second, how do the other pros and cons of taking rideshares stack up?
Pros:
- No parking, gas, insurance, or maintenance costs
- No worries about selling my car when I move
- I can drink however much I want when I go out
- I save all the time needed to refuel or bring the car for maintenance
- There is no mental energy required to drive a car; I can multitask in the backseat
- I can ignore the need to be aware of rules like tolls, Fastrak, etc.
Cons:
- I have to call a car everyday;
- and be mindful of my phone's battery so that I can call a car everyday
- I must talk to my driver, if he/she is the chatty sort
- Sometimes the car smells
- Sometimes the driver is dangerous
- I'm not able to do road trips without a rental car
- I've pretty much given up spontaneity to keep my rideshare costs down
- I only think in linear terms—is my daily route as streamlined as it could be?
- I have consistent headaches from sitting in the backseat of cars
- I'm basically bleeding money
This year, I've made 877 trips with Uber and Lyft. They range from six-minute rides to the grocery store, so that I can satisfy a chips craving, to one-and-a-half-hour rides to LAX. Long-haul rides do not bode well for anyone. Such trips start out well: The driver spots me holding a luggage bag and gets out of the car to help. The app promises I'll be at LAX in 50 minutes. The driver and I have been swapping CO2 for the last hour. The app now says 15 more minutes, but that was 23 minutes ago. The driver and I resent each other. Finally, after audibly sighing for what feels like forever, I am curbside and the driver snarls at me while I drag my luggage out of his trunk. I can't blame his attitude. I mark our perseverance with a 20% tip.
The worst part of Lyft's app, by the way, is that the final destination inexplicably remains hidden from the driver. (I can't remember if this is the case for Uber, as I ride Uber less than Lyft.) I'd wager most people prefer Uber and Lyft to taxis because they negate the need for providing directions. The app knows where you're going. But, the driver doesn't. And so, you tell him exactly. He clicks his tongue. This is a ride he wouldn't have accepted if the destination was disclosed earlier. I'm irritated because I'm unwanted, and I'm repeating myself despite going out of the way to avoid conversation at all costs. I know it's not the driver's fault, but it's irksome.
I've met many people in my time being chauffeured from A to B. More often than not, my driver holds two jobs. He or she is anywhere from 18 to 75 years old. I've met students working to make an extra buck, white-collar professionals trying to write off taxes on their new Tesla, retirees looking for conversation, yoga teachers, dog walkers, car dealers, nurses, jail wardens, and creepy neighbors that now know my unit number. Some drivers are exceedingly nice, offering mints, water and the option to change the music or temperature. Some are business-minded, spending our short time together selling me on additional services like phone reparation or yoga classes. Some are informative, offering explanations of SoCal phenomena like "momsicles," "June gloom," or "marine layer." And, of course, some are just downright rude, imposing their political beliefs on me before my first cup of coffee.
In this sense, traveling in cars has helped me understand the world. Yes, putting aside my bewildering attachment to my expired identity as urbanite, they basically make my being in SoCal possible. But, I don't need a car. I'm a city kid! I'd rather be waiting for the 6 train at Union Square at 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. In August.
Cars are necessary to maintain a certain quality of life in SoCal. The region simply isn't built for the alternative. The grey area that Uber and Lyft is filling serves a very small set of people—like NY transplants who move westward and begin to miss the MTA. What SoCal needs is infrastructural change. Call me crazy, but all hail the Hyperloop. Trains are the way of the future. It's beyond comprehension that SoCal can't get its shit together and build a reliable train network. It works for cities like New York, Chicago, and DC. It works for entire countries, like Singapore, France and Japan. It works internationally, like the Eurail within the European Union.
The argument that ride-sharing will take cars off the road is untrue. Unless it is an increasingly dense area with reasonable public transportation, there will always be car owners. This was never a convincing argument, despite what Uber and Lyft say to their investors, regulators or maybe someday, Greta Thunberg.
I read recently that Elon Musk wants to put 1 million robo-taxis on the roads in 2020, offering Tesla owners the opportunity of making more than $30,000 a year by sharing their cars while they’re busy at work. Whether or not this is a reality for 2020 is a delicious Twitter thread for another day. But I doubt Musk’s desire to make Tesla an appreciating asset is to curb traffic. If anything, I imagine robo-taxis will only add thousands of wandering cars to the roads everyday. How this would impact congestion, energy consumption and, importantly, passenger and pedestrian safety is worthy of significant study.
I am aware that the California High Speed Rail (CSHR) is in progress, though by the time it is complete, I will have moved to another city. Completion of the CHSR will be a monumental help to long distance travelers, but it doesn't solve the issue of public transportation in inter-city and beach town areas. I want to believe it boils down to individual mindsets. If citizens of Newport Beach and other sprawling cities or beach towns became hospitable to other modes of transport, a slew of obvious benefits would follow. To name a few: alleviation of the environmental impact of cars, a rise in the volume and creativity of public spaces and buildings, increased chance interactions that lead to tolerance and understanding of others and, possibly, deeper social and political involvement from feeling a part of the broader community.
I’m not sure how much longer I will be in this beach town I’ve come to know. Until my fated departure, I sign off from my beige apartment surrounded by gated communities with private harbors, cookie-cutter strip malls and nine-lane highways.
P.S.: Some extra thoughts on Tesla Network: Musk's robo-taxi might work better if it operated as if on a bus route. Or, if the app had some way of calculating the time and power required to return to its owner when needed. Putting aside several ways a Tesla may be hijacked, one concern is that if the robo-taxi accepts any trip on its app, it may end up miles away from its owners without resources to return. If a robo-taxi could deposit itself at a charging station, then Musk will need to employ workers at said station to assist with charging.
In fact, why even bother with the Tesla Network? Why not government funding and your taxes be spent on realizing the potential of our bus fleet and network?
P.P.S.: If you're wondering about my love life, I am lucky to have met a wonderful man in San Francisco while on a work trip. I'm hoping to move so I can be with him. Happily, he lives in a city with reasonable bus service and, well, he already owns a car.
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