uberX just got even cheaper!
Written byFrom Monday, 18 January 2016, uberX prices in Penang will be dropped, making it up to 15% cheaper to get around Penang.
This is good news for all Penang-ites! This price drop brings further accessibility to those who need it, whether it’s a short trip around your neighbourhood in Gelugor to run some errands, dashing out for a meeting from work at Georgetown, a quick get together with your colleagues over lunch in Gurney or getting home safe after a night out in Precinct 10 – we’re providing a safe, reliable and affordable way of moving around.
Fare Breakdown
And there’s good news for Uber partners as well!
When prices are low, the demand for Uber rides increases! This means less time waiting around for the next rider, which translates to more trips overall – and a growth in earnings for partners.
The New York experience perfectly illustrates that. After operating in the Big Apple for 4 years, we have collected the necessary data to compare prices and average partner driver earnings over a substantial period of time.
Between 2012 and 2015, the prices of Uber in New York fell by almost 30%. However, in tandem with that, the number of partners increased by more than 30%, and in the same period, the average earnings of partners increased.
With lower prices, the Uber platform simply becomes much more efficient, which means the time spent by partners on the platform becomes much more efficient.
To understand this better, just look at what an hour’s work on the Uber platform looks like for a partner in New York from 2012 to 2015. There are 3 different states in which a driver can be in – either waiting, en route to a rider, or on a trip with a rider. Earnings increase when a partner spends more of his time on trip.
As this graph clearly shows, Uber partners now spend over half their time on trip in 2015, as compared to a quarter of an hour 2012. What is also significant is the proportion increasing year on year.
In other words, this means that partners now spend more time earning than waiting, and therefore fewer hours of work are required to achieve the same amount of earnings.
How is this phenomenon explained? Partners benefit from the increased number of riders using Uber across all hours. In addition, the increase in the number of partners on the Uber platform allows for significantly reduced wait times as the rider and driver are closer to one another, as shown by this graph:
