Uber, the taxi app which has made a name for itself with less-than-appealing stunts like offering rides with “hot chicks” and releasing data on our one night stands, has had a very happy new year.
At some points on New Year’s Eve, the firm claims, its drivers were dropping off more than 58 customers every second. This came despite the company’s “surge pricing”, which can boost prices to up to 50 times their usual levels during busy periods. They haven’t released their takings yet, but Business Insider predicted in late December that the Uber and its drivers could expect to take home $100m in a single night.
More interestingly for us, the company’s New Year’s Eve statistics post shows the number of trips taken over the course of the evening in five global cities. The data shows that Uber users in San Francisco headed home earliest, and a fair number of sensible types in all five cities appera to have booked their rides home on the dot of midnight:
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Source: Uber.
In Paris, meanwhile, a healthy group of bons vivants stayed out to 5am and beyond. Start as you mean to go on, Parisians.
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Uber’s data also showed, rather depressingly, that in the surveyed cities, over 100,000 people were in an Uber when the clock struck midnight. Lucky them.
The company has been criticised in the past for its use, and arguably misuse, of customer data – namely, their tracking of our one night stands in major cities for a data blogpost (now deleted) called “Rides of Glory”.
Here, though, the data over entire cities has been collated and released as a single dataset, so your secret mid-party Uber ride to a chip shop and back should, hopefully, remain under wraps.
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