Convenience Big Store: Forget Uber, I’m going back to taxis

22 October, 2021

In the headlines

Actor Alec Baldwin has accidentally shot and killed a cinematographer in New Mexico, on the set of his upcoming film Rust. The 63-year-old fired a prop gun, unexpectedly launching a "projectile" that hit Halyna Hutchins, 42, in the stomach. She was flown to hospital in an air ambulance, but died shortly after. The Queen is "in good spirits", having spent Wednesday night in hospital, says Buckingham Palace. Booster jabs of the Pfizer vaccine offer "near-total protection" from Covid, says The Times, after a study showed a third shot raises protection by "a further 95%". The PM has "piled pressure" on vaccine chiefs to let people have boosters less than six months after their second doses.

Comment of the day

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Forget Uber, I'm going back to taxis

After flying to Los Angeles airport, I found myself in an "unhappy crowd of restless travellers" who'd been waiting as long as half an hour for their Lyfts and Ubers, says Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times. The Lyft prices I was offered for the six-mile journey home "ranged from $59 to $108". In 2015 I paid $8.43 for the same trip. It's now clear "the promises from founders of rideshare businesses were nothing but pie-in-the-sky fantasies".

The shortage of drivers and the ensuing "surge pricing" are annoying but make sense, given supply and demand. Less defensible is the idea that these services get "more people into fewer cars" and dramatically reduce air pollution, as Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick proclaimed. An "abundance" of research proves the opposite: in San Francisco, home to both Uber and Lyft, traffic speeds have plummeted. In most cities rideshare drivers "cruise around without passengers 40% of the time". A ride-hailing trip is 70% more polluting than the average car trip it replaces. People even use Uber or Lyft instead of public transport or walking. As for my journey back from the airport, "I hopped into a cab and was home in 15 minutes. The tab: $34.69."

We can fix climate change. World War Two showed us how

Fixing the climate is going to take "sudden and drastic" action, says George Monbiot in The Guardian. Those who say this is impossible because there's "no money", governments are "powerless" and people won't tolerate any more than the most "tepid" measures are dead wrong. As always, "political failure is a failure of imagination". When President Roosevelt called on American industry to "outbuild Hitler", the levels of production he demanded were considered impossible. But after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, "the impossible happened". Entire civilian industries were retooled for war.

General Motors began turning out tanks, fighter planes and machine guns; Oldsmobile hammered out artillery shells. By 1944 Ford was producing a new long-range bomber every hour. In the short time America was at war, it produced 87,000 naval vessels (including 36 aircraft carriers), 296,000 planes, 102,000 tanks and armoured cars, and 44 billion bullets. Roosevelt called it a "miracle of production", but it was also a miracle of civic duty. Meat, butter, sugar and shoes were rationed. Posters warned "When you ride ALONE, you ride with Hitler! Join a car-sharing club TODAY", and "Waste helps the enemy: conserve material". Everything – "chewing gum wrappers, rubber bands, used cooking fat" – was recycled. When governments and societies "decide to be competent", they can achieve the impossible. "Catastrophe is not a matter of fate. It's a matter of choice."

Noted

Fishermen have landed a vast sunfish off the North African coast. The 10ft whopper was too heavy to be weighed on the boat's scales, but was estimated at two tonnes – that's 50% more than a hatchback car. Sunfish enjoy bathing near the surface, and this one got caught in tuna nets. It was released safely.

Tomorrow's world

A kidney bred in a pig has been successfully transplanted into a braindead woman, says Jason Koebler in Vice. It processed urine as normal for 54 hours before the woman was removed from life support and died. The operation was funded by United Therapeutics, whose CEO, Martine Rothblatt, wants to build futuristic pig farms growing human organs on a mass scale.

On the money

When Apple announced a $25m profit in October 1996, after a string of quarterly losses, executives were understandably over the moon. As developer James Dempsey recalls on Twitter, they held a company-wide meeting and gave employees postcards boasting "I was there". In the same quarter of 2021, the tech behemoth generated $25m in profit every 2½ hours.

Snapshot

Zeitgeist

Right-wing American radio host Dennis Prager, 73, has finally fulfilled his ambition of catching Covid. Suspicious of vaccines, he sought "natural immunity" by hugging "thousands" of strangers. After testing positive last week, he announced on his radio show on Monday: "I have walked the walk on this matter and here I am." He plans to treat himself with ivermectin, an unapproved medicine used for skin conditions.

Snapshot answer

These are some of the 400 items of clothing belonging to the late author Gabriel García Márquez that went on sale for charity this week in Mexico. The Colombian Nobel laureate, whose novels include Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude, died in 2014. He was quite the dandy, according to his granddaughter Emilio García Elizondo: "Gabo had favourite tailors and designers." There's even a jacket with one of his pens in its pocket.