Uber’s Long and Winding Road to 50% Take Rates

The percentage cut that market-maker platforms take from the price consumers pay for products and services is often a contentious business issue. E-commerce marketplaces like eBay and Etsy, freelance services companies like Fiverr and Upwork, and online travel agencies like booking.com and Expedia, all face consumer and/or merchant resistance to increasing their take rates, which currently range from 10% to 25%.

Apple’s higher 30% take rate on App Store purchases has been the flash point in Supreme Court and class-action lawsuits that will be decided later this year. And in another case, federal and state regulators have sought to rein in Ticketmaster from leveraging its monopoly strength to impose mandatory fees that have inflated its take rate to 40% or more.

In all these cases, the term take rate is widely understood to mean the percent of gross merchandise value — the amount a consumer pays for a product or service — left after a market-maker nets out its payments to suppliers.

This terminology is certainly not unfamiliar to Uber, one of the largest market-maker platforms in the world, which, in its early years, recruited drivers by regularly running ads on Craigslist and Facebook job boards with simple, high-visibility taglines like “Drive with Uber: You keep 80% of every fare!”

But times have changed.

Based on my research, Uber recently moved into uncharted territory by raising rideshare prices and squeezing driver pay to achieve an average rideshare take rate of over 50% in many cities, which has fueled its rapidly growing profits and free cash flow.

Users on both sides of Uber’s platform are taking notice. Data services company Gridwise recently reported survey results indicating that 60% of consumers have reduced their rideshare usage over the past year due to rising prices. And anguished drivers have been increasingly posting complaints about Uber’s outsized take rates on social media accompanied by screenshots of low-paying trip receipts.

To better understand these marketplace dynamics, I recently analyzed the trip histories of some of Uber’s most loyal, longest-serving drivers, who collectively have given 50,000 Uber rides during the past decade in Florida and Texas. These extensive trip histories provide a detailed accounting of rider prices, driver pay, and rideshare trip characteristics, which reveal incontrovertible evidence of Uber’s shifting business tactics and take rates over the past decade.

The three trip histories are illustrative case studies, not a random sample; their value lies in their longitudinal completeness across a decade of Uber policy changes. To find potential drivers for this study, the author established recruiting criteria that in no way pre-screened for a particular result or outcome. The specific driver screening criteria and their rationales are shown below.

After a recruiting effort conducted February through March 2026, three drivers were identified who met all these criteria. All were used in this study.

Uber’s Early Years
Let’s start by examining the experience of a Texas-based Uber driver we’ll call Ted, who has given roughly 20,000 Uber rides over more than a decade.

As shown in Exhibit 2, when Ted started driving for Uber in the mid-2010s, Uber paid Texas drivers a fixed (85%) percentage of rider fares on all trips, whether or not surge pricing was in effect. Thus, the gap between Ted’s riders’ prices and his pay moved in lockstep over his first four years, reflecting Uber’s former fixed take rate of 15%.

In September 2017, Dara Khosrowshahi was hired as Uber’s new CEO with a board mandate to improve Uber’s financial performance and position the company to go public as soon as practicable.

To boost revenues, Khosrowshahi moved quickly to raise rider prices, increasing Ted’s average passenger fares by nearly 15% over the next eighteen months — nearly four times the U.S. inflation rate over this period. Since Uber still operated under a fixed, 85/15 take rate at the time, Ted’s pay initially moved up in lockstep with Uber’s rising rideshare prices.

But as Uber’s IPO date approached, with the company’s losses continuing to mount, and Wall Street getting increasingly skittish about money-losing tech IPOs, Khosrowshahi apparently ordered a significant cut in U.S. driver pay in early 2019.

The sharp reduction in time and distance-based pay rates, along with a harmful change in how surge bonuses were paid, reduced Ted’s rideshare pay by about 30% virtually overnight, more than doubling Uber’s take rate to nearly 40% (Exhibit 3).

At the risk of getting ahead of the story, it should be noted (Exhibit 2) that even after suffering a substantial pay cut in 2019, Ted continued to be paid little more over the ensuing seven years on a dollar per mile basis — even before accounting for surging inflation over that period — while Uber’s rider fares continued to climb.

But getting back to 2019, Ted’s financial plight was not limited to his home market. To protest Uber’s nationwide pay cuts, driver demonstrations sprang up across the country to bring attention to Uber’s surging take rates at driver expense.

In its public response, Uber billed the rate changes as a neutral simplification of their fare structures and that new promotions would soon make overall driver take-home earnings comparable to previous months.

As shown in Exhibit 2, for Ted, these claims proved to be hollow promises and set in motion a recurring pattern of misleading claims by Uber about its price, pay, and take rate policies, which we’ll further document in this article.

Uber went public in May 2019, only to be beset shortly thereafter by the Covid pandemic. Within one catastrophic year, Uber’s rideshare gross bookings declined by 75%, putting the company in existential danger. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi deserves credit for decisive moves that helped Uber navigate the crisis and put the company on a path to breakeven by:

• Divesting money-losing non-core operations (e.g., autonomous vehicle R&D, air taxi services)
• Exiting money-losing rideshare and delivery operations in poorly performing regions (e.g., SE Asia, India)
• Decisively cutting headcount early in the pandemic
• Maintaining disciplined hiring and cost control, post-pandemic

But, as shown in Exhibit 5, most of Khosrowshahi’s early actions soon reached their full potential. By mid-2022, Uber was still unprofitable, and its stock price remained mired at 40% below its IPO listing price, putting the CEO’s massive all-or-nothing stock incentive bonus at risk unless he could boost Uber’s market value above $120 billion by September 2024.

Upfront Pricing Re-Energized Uber’s Profitable Growth
Khosrowshahi urgently needed to do something to enrich shareholders and himself. Starting in mid-2022, Uber began introducing “upfront pricing” in the U.S. market, which gave the company the ability to set rider prices and driver pay with proprietary AI-driven algorithms on each of the billions of trips the company books every year.

Uber’s prior business model mirrored the century-old taxi industry protocol of setting rider fares and driver pay according to fixed per-mile and per-minute rates, with the new twist of adding surge premiums to driver pay and rider price during periods of unbalanced supply and demand.

But Uber’s new upfront pricing algorithms largely decoupled prices and driver pay from rigid time and distance rates, enabling Uber to selectively raise prices closer to the maximum each consumer might be willing to pay while lowering pay to the minimum that any driver might be willing to accept on any given trip.

The results were immediate and substantial. For Ted, the Texas driver profiled in Exhibits 2 and 3, his pay stagnated following Uber’s launch of upfront pricing, while rider prices grew far faster than the U.S. rate of inflation. As a result, Uber’s average take rate steadily increased, eventually exceeding 50% this year.

This same pattern was also evident for the two other Uber trip histories we analyzed. Exhibits 6 and 7 display the price, pay, and take rate trends for a veteran Florida driver (Driver A) who has driven roughly 18,000 trips over the past decade, while Exhibits 8 and 9 display the trip economics for a second Florida driver (Driver B) with roughly 11,000 completed rides on Uber’s platform.

The rideshare economics experienced by all three veteran drivers in three different U.S. cities are strikingly similar.

• Until early 2019, drivers benefited from predictable minimum pay rates, with periodic surge bonuses at favorable and fixed take rates, allowing drivers to capture 80% to 85% of rider prices
• As Uber prepared for its IPO, all three drivers experienced sharp pay cuts (30%-35%)
• After Uber launched its upfront pricing policy in mid-2022, driver pay stagnated (within service tiers), remaining far below the rate of increase in auto ownership and operating costs and rider prices.
• As a result, all three veteran drivers saw Uber’s take rate increase from 15%-20% of rider prices early on, to more than 50% this year, leaving them with the no-win choice of netting lower earnings than in prior years or working longer hours to stay even.

In contrast, the striking success of Uber’s upfront pricing strategy on the company’s financial performance speaks for itself. Between 2022 and 2025, Uber’s free cash flow swelled by almost $10 billion, its stock price increased by as much as fivefold, and the CEO succeeded in locking in his sizable stock bonus.

Three sources of competitive advantage have been key to driving Uber’s remarkable turnaround

• Algorithmic pricing control over both sides of its marketplace
• Asymmetric information advantages over riders and drivers
• Pricing power derived from its dominant rideshare market share

Unlike other market-makers like Airbnb and booking.com, Uber gets to set not only the rideshare price it shows to consumers, but also the pay rates offered to multiple drivers who simultaneously compete for work on Uber’s platform. This dual-sided pricing control puts Uber in a position to maximize its take rate on each of the billions of trips matched on its platform.

As an illustration of the pricing control Uber’s algorithms exert in practice, Exhibits 10 and 11 display the distribution of driver pay per mile on hundreds of thousands of rideshare trips in four cities over the past year. Users of the GigU app, a technology services company whose app provides tools to help drivers assess their full ownership and operating costs for rideshare and delivery trips, provided the ride-offer data for this study.

With the help of GigU tools, for example, a driver may find that for their particular vehicle and city, trips paying under $1 per mile aren’t sufficiently profitable. The app then applies the driver’s profitability criteria to display on-screen information to advise whether each trip is worth taking, while anonymously logging the trip offers its subscribers receive on the app.

The first three cities displayed in these exhibits, Dallas, Tampa, and Miami, are among the largest Sun Belt rideshare markets. None of these cities has minimum gig worker pay regulations in place, so Uber is free to set trip pay at the lowest possible level that can yield adequate marketplace supply.

As shown, half the trips offered in Dallas and Tampa pay well below the $1 per mile threshold that some drivers may need to generate adequate earnings, compared to Miami’s median pay rate of $1.08. While a given driver may reject a particular low-paying offer, Uber’s algorithms are constantly probing for the lowest pay it has to offer to attract sufficient takers to match rider trip requests, adjusting for instantaneous fluctuations in supply/demand conditions. Thus, algorithmic pricing gives Uber the capability to keep drivers at race-to-the-bottom pay rates reflecting the lowest pay that any active driver on its platform is willing to accept, trip by trip.

Uber’s higher profitability on the preponderance of low-paying trips provides a sufficient cushion to offset its lower profits (or even losses) on the smaller number of trips requiring premium pay rates to ensure adequate supply.

The sophistication of Uber’s algorithms on both sides of its marketplace thus gives Uber an enormous asymmetric information advantage over riders and drivers to set prices and pay rates that maximize its profitability. The effectiveness of Uber’s algorithms is reflected in the rapidly rising rider prices and stagnating pay experienced by the three veteran drivers profiled in this study.

A number of recent studies have documented that rideshare driver pay rates in many U.S. cities, net of auto operating costs, are well below regulated minimum wage levels for employees.

In response, more than a half-dozen states have enacted or proposed rules (by legal agreement or legislation) that set minimum pay levels for gig work drivers. For example, Massachusetts reached an agreement with Uber and Lyft that went into effect in August 2024 to ensure that rideshare drivers earn at least $32.50 per active hour over each two-week pay period.

The effects of this legislation can be seen in the distribution of Uber’s driver pay offers shown in Exhibit 11. While Uber still retains pricing flexibility, its pay rates for Boston drivers are notably higher than in unregulated cities, with very few trips priced below the median pay per mile rates observed in Dallas, Tampa, and Miami.

How Uber Hides Inconvenient Truths
For obvious reasons, Uber has been vigorously lobbying to water down or dissuade other states from enacting strict minimum pay legislation for rideshare drivers. In this regard, while investors have cheered Uber’s growing profit margins, the company has addressed the challenge of how to mask its successful but perceptually problematic achievement of surpassing the 50% take rate threshold in many cities by using a multi-pronged public relations campaign that is as purposefully self-serving as it is misleading.

1. Change the commonly understood definition of take rates
2. Blame the need for price hikes on others
3. Use opaque financial accounting to reduce reported profit margins

Changing the definition of take rates
For starters, since going public, Uber has never disclosed its U.S. rideshare take rates in conventionally defined terms, which is ironic for a company that once proverbially shouted its driver-friendly take rates from the rooftops to recruit drivers on online job boards.

Instead, Uber now chooses to publicize its share of rider prices only in terms of “service fees,” after deducting its commercial insurance costs, third-party fees, and operating expenses.

On its corporate blog, Uber opines that such adjustments are fair and appropriate, given that its “insurance costs were already high, but have increased sharply in recent years.”

Uber goes on to say, “even with [rider] prices going up, the share going to drivers versus Uber’s true bottom line (after commercial insurance costs) is largely the same,” and that “Uber’s true economic take — after netting out pass-throughs — is ~21% globally, and under 20% in the U.S. once insurance is excluded.”

There are a lot of moving parts in these statements that have the effect of suggesting little change in Uber’s take rate over time. But this is highly misleading, as Uber is conflating its net rideshare revenue (after deducting its fees, insurance, and operating expenses) as a percent of rider fares with drivers’ gross revenue (before any operating cost deductions from their pay).

While Uber’s commercial insurance costs and government fees have risen over the past four years, drivers too have recently experienced an unprecedented increase in their insurance and auto operating costs, as shown in Exhibit 12.

In an apples-to-apples application of the conventional definition of take rates, both Uber’s and drivers’ take rates ideally should be high enough when applied to rider prices to cover their respective costs. But as we’ve shown, Uber’s take rate has roughly tripled over the past seven years, generating additional revenue to offset the company’s rising costs, while drivers’ take rates have commensurately shrunk, leaving them struggling to cover their rapidly increasing auto ownership and operating expenses.

Thus, while Uber’s terminology self-servingly avoids the need to acknowledge its outsized take rates in conventional terms, its metrics are highly misleading.

Blaming the need for price hikes on others
Uber has consistently blamed its recent need to raise rider prices on greedy lawyers, overbearing regulators, inflation, and driver pay demands, belying evidence that the company has raised rider prices considerably faster than can be legitimately explained solely by these external factors.

For example, while it is true that Uber’s reported commercial insurance costs have been growing, Consumer Watchdog recently reported that Uber largely self-insures its mandated coverage and appears to have been over-accumulating reserves over the past few years, later releasing over $4.1 billion as unrestricted cash. This report thus suggests that Uber may have been overcharging itself for insurance, beyond what could justify its recent rider price increases.

As another example of blame-shifting, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was recently asked to explain the reasons why Uber rides have gotten a lot more expensive over the past few years.

Exhibit 13 below shows Khosrowshahi’s response, in essence suggesting that Uber has merely had to keep up with general inflation and meet drivers’ demands for increased pay. But in reality, over the three years prior to Khosrowshahi’s CBS interview, Uber raised median US rider prices by 18% — twice the US inflation rate — while cutting driver pay by 9%.

Opaque financial accounting
There is a stark disconnect between Uber’s claims that it is “perfectly transparent” in reporting its fees and expenses, and how drivers perceive these line-item expenses that ultimately determine their pay. Uber’s reported commercial insurance expenses have always been a particular bone of contention.

From Uber’s perspective, “the legal system remains broken, allowing personal injury lawyers and a shady network of pain management doctors, chiropractors, and third-party lenders to exploit rideshare insurance mandates for financial gain,” propping up a system where up to 45% of rider fares in places like Los Angeles are swallowed by state-mandated insurance costs.

In response, Uber has aggressively and successfully lobbied for passage of a new California law (SB371) that substantially reduces its mandated rideshare coverage, and the company is now actively supporting a ballot initiative that would cap the contingency fees lawyers can charge injured clients in California.

Rideshare drivers see the situation in starkly different terms, widely viewing Uber’s high and opaque commercial insurance fees with skepticism and distrust. That’s because Uber’s commercial insurance fees can vary wildly from trip to trip and often reach levels more than ten times higher on a per-mile basis than premiums drivers say they could pay for comparable commercial insurance on their own.

To see this disconnect, consider an example cited by Levi Spires, a veteran Uber driver and podcaster with over 15,000 trips under his belt who recently posted his trip receipt for a 7.5-mile UberX trip where the passenger was charged $47.21, the driver was paid $9.50 ( a take rate of 80%!), and Uber’s commercial insurance and operating expense charge was $23.46 ($3.13 per mile!). While this may be an extreme case, Uber’s lack of any explanation of how its insurance costs are determined contributes to suspicions that Uber is inflating fees to pad its insurance reserves, suppress driver pay, and lower how the company reports its rideshare profit margins.

These starkly different viewpoints came to a head during a podcast interview journalist Kara Swisher conducted with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in front of a live tech audience in San Francisco in October, 2023.

Swisher introduced the topic by reading an excerpt from an article I had recently published on forbes.com, titled Uber’s New Math: Increase Prices and Squeeze Driver Pay, which, she warned her guest, “I’m sure you didn’t like”:

“Armed with customer database market insights, Uber is in an ideal position to practice what economists call first-degree price discrimination — that is, charging each customer prices based on their known willingness to pay and setting each driver’s pay based on their known willingness to serve. The resulting upside potential of price discrimination is enormous.”

Swisher went on to ask Khosrowshahi:

“Talk about the pricing model and transparency with drivers. Every time I get in an Uber, drivers say they don’t benefit from Uber’s higher passenger pricing. You have said 70% of revenue is going back to the driver. Why is there such a disconnect between Uber rides being so expensive and drivers still feeling …you’re getting more of the cut?”

Khosrowshahi confidently disputed Swisher’s concerns by responding:

“In the U.S., not including commercial insurance costs that are very expensive, our take rate is about 15%. And I think a 15% take rate is a fair take rate based on the service and demand that we bring.”

Before Khosrowshahi could continue, a part-time Uber driver in the audience interrupted the proceedings by shouting out for all to hear that the CEO was lying. Order was quickly restored, which then allowed Khosrowshahi to address the company’s transparency with drivers.

“Every week, drivers get their own earning statement. And it shows in every single detail how much essentially passengers paid for fares, how much went to taxes and fees and insurance, how much the driver made, and what our take rate is. We’re perfectly transparent with drivers every week.”

While Uber is indeed perfectly transparent about how big a bite they take out of every rideshare trip for “commercial insurance and operating expenses,” they have never explained how those fees are determined, nor why they are so high and variable.

And there is good reason for drivers to suspect that Uber’s rising rider prices and depressed driver pay are not primarily caused by excessively high insurance costs, but rather the causality may be reversed: Uber may be charging excessively high insurance fees on trips where it has been able to exploit its market pricing power and sophisticated pricing algorithms to depress what would otherwise yield outsized take rates as conventionally defined.

To explore how Uber’s pricing algorithms work in practice, I analyzed the rider prices, driver pay, and Uber’s reported commercial insurance fees provided on over 120 trips that Levi Spires completed in upstate New York over the last two years between Ithaca (home to Cornell University) and Syracuse Airport.

To minimize the effects of possible pricing and insurance fee differences that might exist between different rideshare services (e.g., On-Demand vs. Reserve), I chose to drill down on just Spires’ Reserve airport trips — the most common service type for his airport trips.

The table below shows the mean and variance for Spires’ 100 Ithaca-to-Syracuse UberX and Comfort Reserve trips for rider price, driver pay, commercial auto insurance and operational expense fees, and take rates, taken directly from his trip receipts.

It should not be surprising that there is a large spread between the lowest and highest rider prices and driver pay for these trips, since Uber readily acknowledges that its prices and fares “reflect real-time conditions…that can result in different prices.”

But what was surprising was that the variance in Uber’s commercial insurance and operating expenses on these trips was more than twice as high as the variance in price, pay or Uber’s take rate in conventionally defined terms.

After all, every one of these trips exhibited a nearly identical insurance risk profile that logically should translate into similar fees to cover mandated coverage requirements.

• Same driver
• Same vehicle (Tesla Model Y)
• Same distance (roughly 60 miles)
• Same route (Interstate Route 81)
• Similar origin and destination addresses

And yet, Uber’s “estimated commercial auto insurance and operational expenses” charged on Spires’ 100 Ithaca-Syracuse Airport Reserve trip receipts varied from $13.75 to $50.00. If not the inherent risk of the trip itself, what else could account for such high trip-to-trip variance?

To answer this question, I ran a regression on Spires’ 100 Ithaca-Syracuse Airport Reserve trips, linking the observed commercial auto insurance and operational expense fees to Spires’ rider price, driver pay, and trip time of day. There was no need to consider other trip characteristics, as these characteristics were identical for all trips in the sample.

Here’s what these results tell us:

1. The characteristics of rideshare trips themselves do not at all explain the observed wide variance in CI+OpEx fees Uber charges. The possible effect of trip distance, driver safety record, vehicle, or travel route was already ruled out in the way the survey sample was constructed. The regression results above confirm that the trip day of week, time of day, or UberX vs. Comfort service type are also statistically insignificant in explaining widely varying CI+OpEX levels.
2. What about the possibility that operational expenses (OpEx), if not commercial insurance costs (CI) explain the high observed variability in the sampled trip records? While Uber does not break out these expense categories separately, there are strong reasons to conclude that the vast majority of Uber’s CI+OpEx fees reflect Uber’s insurance costs and are not trip-specific operational expenses.
3. The beauty of Uber’s Transportation-as-a-Service business model is that the marginal costs it incurs to match riders and drivers on any one of the billions of rideshare trips it delivers each year is infinitesimally small. True, Uber incurs significant ongoing development costs to fine-tune its software algorithms, but these are fixed costs recovered through service fees, and not a material operational expense associated with individual trips.
4. This feature of Uber’s business model has been informally validated in numerous conversations with Uber executives, confirming that the CI+OpEx fees are predominantly driven by Uber’s commercial insurance expenses.
5. There is one Uber operational expense related to individual transactions that warrants mention: credit card processing fees. Suppose Uber is able to charge a rider $10 above average on a given trip. Instead of pocketing the entire price premium as profit, Uber would have to pay its credit card processor a relatively painless 2% processing fee, or 20¢, with the remaining $9.80 as incremental profit.
6. Now compare those economics to the results from the regression model, which imply that for the sample of trips analyzed, if Uber increased a rider price $10 above average, it would tend to increase CI+OpEx fees by $3.00, even absent any reason to presume that Uber would actually incur higher insurance expenses on such a trip.
7. Similarly, the regression results imply that if Uber can find a driver willing to accept $10 lower-than-average pay on a given trip, Uber’s CI+OpEx fees would increase by $4.30, again absent a reason to expect actual CI+OpEx increases.
8. For a trip with both premium pricing and lower pay, Uber’s reported CI+OpEx fees would be even higher.

While these regression results don’t necessarily prove causality, there is no other reason to expect why Uber should charge such widely varying insurance fees on trips with an identical risk profile and insignificant operating costs.

Moreover, Uber would have two strong incentives to selectively vary its reported CI+OpEx fees as observed in this trip history.

1. Lower its reported take rates
By conventional definitions, Uber’s take rate on Spires’ 100 airport trips was 48%, not unlike the take rates reported for the three veteran Uber drivers profiled in this report. To the extent that Uber assesses higher CI+OpEx fees on its highest take rate trips (i.e. high price/low pay), its take rates on those trips, as Uber chooses to report them, will be disproportionately reduced. By Uber’s preferred definition, its take rate on Spires’ 100 airport trips averaged only 16%.

2. Generate higher insurance reserves
Assessing higher insurance fees on its highest margin trips puts Uber in a position to pad its insurance reserves, consistent with the findings of the previously cited Consumer Watchdog report on Uber’s accounting practices.

Where Do We Go From Here?
On a recent corporate blog post, Uber expressed its aspiration to foster a strong partnerial relationship with its drivers.

“Uber operates an incredibly large and dynamic marketplace, but it only works when it works for all sides. Aligning our interests with drivers’ is a fundamental principle in how we run our platform: we want drivers to be excited, engaged, and choosing Uber.”

However, my research and extensive contacts with Uber’s driver community suggest that Uber’s actions have consistently belied its words, fomenting an extremely toxic relationship with what is arguably the largest customer-facing workforce in the world.

Uber’s remarkable financial performance improvement has come at the expense of stagnant driver pay and sharply rising rider prices, which the company masks with misleading statements that fall far short of the CEO’s claims of “perfect transparency.”

Going forward, urban mobility stakeholders would be well advised to protect their interests as effectively as Uber has done on its own behalf.

Drivers
Take advantage of available rideshare apps providing decision support tools that effectively level the information playing field that historically has been heavily tilted in Uber’s favor

Riders
Similarly, take advantage of rider price comparison apps to conveniently access competitive rideshare offers, and look out for new driver and driverless rideshare services entering urban markets over the coming years.

Government Regulators
Demand greater transparency from rideshare operators on the economics, safety, and urban mobility consequences of rideshare operations and enact regulations as necessary to protect societal interests against Uber and other market-leading mobility and delivery operators.

The Bottom Line
A decade ago, Uber recruited Ted and hundreds of thousands of drivers like him with a simple, public promise: drive with Uber and keep 80% of every fare. Ten years and billions of trips later, in city after city, Uber drivers are getting less than half. No other major marketplace platform comes close to these spreads.

The evidence presented in this report suggests that Uber’s long and winding road to 50% take rates has not simply been a reflection of rising inflation or insurance costs. It was a carefully planned destination. Whether Uber gets to stay there is now a question for riders, drivers, and regulators who, at long last, have the numbers in hand to consider their choices.