San Francisco, Birthplace of Ride-Hailing, Becomes the Center of Its Decline

"Starting next month, Uber customers in San Francisco will be able to use the app to hail old-style taxis, long the company’s blood enemies—a fitting coda, perhaps, for a company that exploded out of the city’s SoMa district a little more than a decade ago as the vanguard of a new tech boom, but has since proven mostly that too-good-to-be-true businesses are just that.

Born in 2009 from co-founder Travis Kalanick’s frustrations with getting a taxi in San Francisco, Uber has posted an astonishing $32 billion in losses in its short life, $1.1 billion of that just in the first half of this year.

And long gone are the days when, at the push of a button, an Uber would appear in two minutes and deliver you across SF for $6, thanks to tens of billions in venture capital dollars that subsidized the rides. Average charges for UberX rides in the Bay Area rose more than 38% from $15.54 to $21.49 between June 2019 and June 2022, according to market research firm YipitData. The number of Uber rides in the region, meanwhile, plunged 48% between June 2019 and June 2022."