how many drivers does uber need to serve the bay area [Music] hey everyone welcome back to another exponent product management mock interview my name is kevin and on today's show we have selena we're going to be doing an estimation question but before we dive into that selena do you mind just telling the audience a little bit about who you are yeah for sure and thanks for having me um i'm selena i'm a product manager at google and i've been there about two years now and prior to that i was an apm at yahoo cool thanks for coming on today's show we're going to be doing an estimation question like i said and this is what i'd like to ask i'd like for you to tell me how many drivers does uber need to serve the bay area how many drivers does uber need to serve the bay area okay i'm typing but nothing is writing okay there we go there's a little bit of a lag awesome so i am gonna assume that when we say uh the amount of drivers that uber needs um they're talking about not necessarily how many people are like you know on staff in general just more like given some peak traffic time how many uh drivers are needed to cover that demand yeah we can do that that sounds good awesome cool so then um let's say uh let's say we're just gonna visualize like you know it's a friday afternoon at like 5 30 pre-covered conditions like people are either coming back from work or going out to like dinner with their friends and so at a really high level the way i think we can approach this is um we want to know how many you know writers are being demanded per you know this peak traffic hour um sorry rides are being demanded uh per peak traffic hour and then we also are going to want to calculate how many of these rides per driver um can be done within an hour as well um and so if we take the demand and divide it by uh the supply we'll come out with the number of drivers in the end so basically rides per hour divided by um rides uh per driver per hour will get us the number of drivers awesome so if we tackle the left hand part of this first um in order to find how many rides are being demanded let's sort of take a sense of like how many people we're working with in general so i know that there are about seven million people in the bay area and you know if we sort of think about the types of people who would be picking uber um someone who's under 18 can't really take uber because it's part of just their policy and say if you're above you know 60 you might be too old to be familiar with the technology um and so let's say we have like a 80-year life expectancy for people um and if we assume a uniform distribution of ages uh cutting out under 18s and over 60s that's going to be about 3. 5 million people who could potentially use uber alrighty and so now that we have uh this number um i also want to call out that the amount of rides would differ depending on where you are in the bay area um so i don't know if you're familiar but you know an sf most people don't have cars they walk they depend on public transportation um and in the south bay things are much more spread apart so like most people actually do have a car um and so you know the demand would be less there so um i do want to break it out by like sf versus everywhere everywhere else um and so i know that sf has a population of uh one million and so if we just subtract out like for everywhere else that's gonna be like 2. 5 million people um does this make sense so far yeah yeah this is a good segmentation on the geography and for for the people who who might not be familiar um sf is more city-like whereas everywhere else is a little bit more suburb-like yeah exactly um cool so now if we want to sort of take these two separate geographies um you know not everyone out of these 1 million and 2.
5 million cohorts are going to be ubering again like some people might walk drive you know shuttle if you're working in tech um and so i think one way to sort of approximate this is you know given uh most people in sf do not have a car um and you're thinking about the average friday night uh we know there's three people per household you know maybe you have roommates maybe you're a small family um and so if that's true that's going to be a and you say one person per household has plans that are not within walking distance or on like a bart line um so that would give us 33-ish percent of the 1 million um which is about 333. let's just make it 350 to make it a little bit easier on us in the future um and so that would be how many rides per hour are coming from us and so given what i said earlier about the south bay just having like way more cars i would i would um guesstimate that the demand is probably 10x less um like literally everyone has a car here so if we just sort of um cut that down to 10 we would get point five k um or sorry yeah three uh we would get three point three percent um which let's make that five percent for math um and then five percent of 2.
