Ubernomics

The wheel. Fire. The telephone. Plastics. 

And now, Uber. 

If you don't know what it is, welcome to Earth. We are here in peace (check your Martian ray guns at the door). Uber started in 2011 and gives literally billions of rides at prices usually highly discounted relative to taxi rates. How do they perform this miracle? They have aggregated the driving skills of hundreds of thousands of extra-dough-seekers who download the Uber app, pass a few tests an—voila!—they are your Uber driver. As a user, after loading in your credit card information and usually home address, you click a button to call a driver, track them on your Google map, and 12 minutes and 8 bucks later, you arrive at Grandmama's.

The service has become so popular that many pundits have begun to question the value of owning a car. And if you live in a major city, it's a really good question if you care about the money and enjoy being chauffered around. 

Let's make up a year's worth of Uber and do the math:

• You go to school or work 200 days a year. It's 8 bucks each way or $16 a day. Times 200. Or $3,200 for the year to commute to work a la Uber. 
• Then 100 days a year, you run errands: a weekly grocery store thing, a monthly dentist, doctor or shaman visit. Each of those is $10 each way for a total of $20 so add $2,000 to your total.
• There are 50 days a year you just don't drive. That's...$0.
• And then there are a half dozen days you want to drive far, like $100 round trip on Uber (that usually gets you like from New York to Paris and back on Uber's super-saver). So we'll call that $600.

So the grand total from your Uber bill on a pretty heavy usage schedule is $3,200 + $2,000 + $600 = $5,800.

That may seem like a lot of dough, but compared with just the depreciation of owning a car...plus gas, parking, insurance, maintenance, and yeah, the occasional ticket (ahem)... it costs about the same amount as driving yourself around. Check out our math here for a comparison.