Will the Rise of Work from Home Lower Uber's Medium Term Profits?

 Post-pandemic many educated people will be working from home 3 days a week.  Some of these people will choose to live further from city centers.  How will such “sprawl” and reduced work trips affect the profitability of ride sharing companies?

For urban economists to be useful here, we need to make some progress on a few core questions.  Does Uber make more money on short urban trips versus picking people up in the far flung suburbs?  On days when urban residents work from home, will they make more on less car trips than on days when they commute to work?  

To repeat my question, does the commute to work or accessing the “consumer city” generate more profit for Uber?   Given that public transit is a technology for taking you downtown, will Work from Home workers make fewer weekly trips to the center city?  Is this good news or bad news for Uber?  If public transit’s share of trips declines in a city, does that mean that the demand for ride sharing has increased?

So, a key point to note here is that Work from Home bundles a daily time allocation with a low frequency residential locational choice.  Both of these decisions affects ride share demand.    

Another issue that arises here is demographics;  partition potential riders into 5 year age groups; so 20 to 24, 25 to 29 , etc.   Which of these age groups will most change their ride share demand based on their new work arrangements?  How does our place of residence, place of work, place of urban consumption and frequency of going to work jointly determine our urban trip demand and how we split them between using our own car versus Uber?

Given that Uber is a for profit firm, what is its best response if some of these elasticities are large and predict that ridership from certain segments will fall because of WFH?