在本地交通工具中,我们已经有了很多选择。比如,在纽约,我们有出租车、Lyft 和 Uber;在旧金山和 LA,我们有出租车、Sidecar、Lyft 和 Uber。

In the local transportation market, we now have lots of options in addition to mass transit. Here in NYC, we have taxis,Lyft, and Uber. In SF and LA, we have taxis, Sidecar (our portfolio company),Lyft, and Uber.

我常希望能有个一统江山的 app,它能实时呈现所有价格区间的各种空闲的交通工具,能够及时给人最好的服务,或者能允许你自己在价格与等车时间之间做出选择(就像 Sidecar 做的那样,顾客自己决定付司机多少钱)。但事实是,市场上有各种价格的服务,你所面临的选择也永远不止一个。对你来说,忠诚于某一个应用的成本很高。

I’ve always wished there was an aggregation app that pulled all the prices and availability in real-time across all the available services and got you the best fare at the time. Or allowed you to make the choice between price and ETA (the way sidecar’s app does). It turns out there is a lot of price variability in the market and there is not one choice you can make all the time that will work out well for you. Being loyal to one app costs you.

今天早上,我收到了 Boris 发来的文章,他们计算了钟情于一个 app 的“忠诚成本”。

Then this morning, a blog post popped up in my inbox courtesy of my friend Boris. In this post, they calculated the “costof loyalty” to one just one app.

在曼哈顿,如果 Citibike 和地铁(最便宜最方便)不管用,我就搭出租车。当你搭不到车时,你才会花更多钱用 UberLyft

I mostly use taxis in manhattan when Citibike and subway won’t do and that’s because they are the cheapest and most available option. Uber and Lyft are for times you can’t get a cab and you’ll pay through the nose when you take that option as they are almost always surging at those times.

另一个有趣的事情是,这张表显示,在旧金山和 LA,对出租车的忠诚度是最昂贵的。这太疯狂了,出租车迟早会因为价格太高而退出市场。

Another interesting thing about these charts is how taxis are the most expensive service to be loyal to in SF and LA.That is crazy. They are going to go out of business in those markets with that pricing.

但最让我骄傲的是,我们公司投资的 Sidecar 的忠诚成本最低,这是因为他们不采用峰值定价,而是允许司机根据自己的意愿自行调整定价。Sidecar 就像分享型的出行方式,在市场中实现了最低出行成本。不过,也如图显示,在旧金山,Sidecar 的等车时间相对最久。

But mostly I am proud that our portfolio company Sidecar is the least costly service to be loyal to. That is because they don’t use surge pricing and instead allow drivers adjust pricing in their marketplace model as they desire. Sidecar is committed to using a true marketplace and things like shared rides to deliver the lowest cost rides inthe market. It is also true that Sidecar ETAs are a bit longer as this chart of SF shows:

回到我开头的想法,就是说如果有个人能打造出一统江山的 app,它能告诉我们可以实时选择哪种出行方式,那么我们就会对这个 app 很忠诚。Boris 他们还在文章里就是这么做的,你可以用 What’s The Fare,它会告诉你市场里价格最优的服务是哪个。如果有人走得更远的话,他可以把这些信息做成一个移动应用,人们可以在它的界面上预定出行方式。

Going back to the opening thought, which is that someone should build an aggregation app on top of all of these services sowe can replace the app on our home screen that we are most loyal to with an app that works across all services. The authors of this blog post did just that and you can use What’s The Fare to tell you who has the best price in the market.It looks like right now its just a web/mobile web app and all it does it give you the fares. If they or someone else went further, made it into a mobile app,and used the services APIs to actually book rides (if the APIs were available to do that), then we’d really have something.

这才是这个市场长期的发展方向。我希望我们能够希望做到。GoogleApple 的地图是实现这个方向的理想界面。出发吧!

That’s the way this market should work long term. I hope we can get there soon. Google Maps and Apple Maps are the idealinterfaces to make it happen. Let’s go!

来源:AVC (英文原文)https://avc.com/2014/10/the-cost-of-loyalty/

36氪(中文译文)https://www.36kr.com/p/216496.html

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