It's interesting that you brought this up, when we sat down to write this, we didn't feel there was actually good terminology yet to refer to this space. We chose 'ride-sharing' as the least-bad way to refer to the industry after informally surveying what journalists had been using so far, for consistency. At least for Lyft, Sidecar, and UberX, the 'sharing' part makes some sense to me because you're sharing another person's vehicle that they possibly already owned, while for Uber Black and Lyft Plus, these are professional services so the term is less appropriate. I would definitely welcome a new term to describe the rides space.
Whilst "unlicensed taxi" is probably too perjorative (although more accurate I feel) I would go with something like "Alternative Taxi"?
I suspect that it won't be many years before it's just plain "taxi" again. If Uber and other alternatives are proving the current companies are over charging they will just succeed in becoming licensed in a world of lower charges.
Technically it means, percent of fare estimate requests by users to whatsthefare.com, with the presumption that those users are indeed looking to take the ride that they searched for.
Most of the date ranges are Sep 16 - Oct 8, which should give 3 weeks of data including for the Day of Week charts, but for analyses involving ETA the range starts on Sep 22 because it wasn't tracked until a bit later. But we wanted to be explicit about exactly which dates we're using for each chart.
We plan to keep tracking these trends as data rolls in and keep the community updated.
These are great data, but I'm concerned that the methodology is fatally flawed. Do we have any real reason to believe that whatsthefare requests track closely to actual ride requests?
