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[Uber]: Disrupting Livery Service (And Ethics)
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Uber was launched in Denmark today.
The same day it was reported to the police for violating the taxi laws, which are very strict, by the Center of Traffic Control, a public institution. The action stems from reading Uber's policy and deeming it unlawful in regards to taxi driving.
The key difference here is that you have to be a certified taxi driver to drive a taxi. Failure to have a license while operating as a taxi driver is known as Taxi Piracy (sounds cooler than it is), and is punishable by law.
The interesting aspect here is how Uber intends to get around this law. I am not sure if the tested and tried method of "contracting" a driver (who lacks the license) works here since Danish law tends to look at the relationship between companies / contractors and assign blame as appropriate.
Ex. it doesn't matter if it is the driver who lacks the license. If Uber willingly agreed to let an unregistered taxi driver use their services, then the blame hangs on both the driver and Uber.
I believe that the police report focuses on Uber Black specifically as it is more difficult to assign blame to a company for having developed an App and used by third parties of which they have no direct involvement with.
I mean, even after the supply caps out, you have n people who want a cab ride and n-m cab rides available, which means m people don't get to ride a cab. Is it unethical to "ration" luxury goods by price, now?
When this liberation happened in the Netherlands it happened bluntly and swiftly, and people who had their medallions tied to their mortgages basically lost everything. It was handled real shittily by politicians at the time, and caused an actual wave of violence between new and old drivers.
Such scarcity seems a large factor in removing any need to work on quality of service and innovation.
I do believe that taxis need regulation, for safety, price visibility and insurance though, and Uber seems to be carefree at best on at least two of those three.
I was responding to IrondWill's response to syndalis, who said: "Uber has a responsibility to the safety of their passengers and drivers to not try and entice drivers onto the road during a snowstorm with 7x or 8x pricing, and in turn passengers in need of a ride shouldn't be bent over a barrel at rates like that just because uber can."
I was suggesting that perhaps drivers and passengers should be able to make that choice for themselves rather than eliminate that enticement and that choice.
Like, maybe you have a point, but that applies to the point I was addressing.
The idea is surge pricing occurs in pockets which attract more drivers due to higher fares. Even if bad weather affects the entire island of manhattan there are likely to be hotspots.
Short answer: it can be.
Long answer: First, I take issue with calling cab service a "luxury good". For a lot of lower income people, cabs are infrequent necessities - getting to an appointment, or bringing home groceries comes to mind. That considered, it becomes very problematic to use price as the means of rationing, because you basically wind up telling the underclass that they can go get lost.
I take issue with necessary transportation services being run for profit by private companies.
If people need to take taxis to get around the the government should be solving that problem by working on public transport to replace those car services. Or they should be running one of their own.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I spent two years broke as shit with no car. I took a sum total of one cab ride during that time, and it was on my birthday.
Taking a cab home from the grocery store on a regular basis is a particularly bad way of saving money. You get in the habit of doing that and you'll run through the cost of a (shitty, used) inside of a year and a half. Or at least that was the break even point when I ran the numbers at the time.
If having someone personally drive you from place to place doesn't count as a luxury then I don't know what does.
This assumes you grew up in a household in which you were taught how to drive and/or given access to cars. This isn't true for a significant percentage of the poor who will make the occasional cab trip to the supermarket and bring home food for the next 2-3 weeks.
So I was actually a Lyft driver for a few months a bit ago. The work itself was actually pretty okay, drove around a lot of college kids for the most part, but I stopped doing it because the whole insurance situation turned out to be god damned terrifying.
During my interview I asked my mentor about the insurance situation and was informed that I did not have to worry or even inform my insurance about what I was doing, whenever I was driving for Lyft I would be protected under their insurance. Eventually I started reading a bit about Lyft's insurance and discovered some interesting things about it: like the fact that there was a $2,000 on it at the time, or that it only applies when you actually have passengers in the car (not when you are waiting for a request or heading to pick them up), or that if almost any car insurance company discovers that you are driving for the service they will drop you in a heartbeat which can leave you with no insurance whatsoever in the aftermath of an incident if you do something like tell the police that you are a Lyft/Uber driver after an accident.
I e-mailed Lyft about this and, after several attempts over several weeks, received a canned e-mail about how in their view it wasn't their place to get involved with a driver and their personal insurance. I posted the situation and the e-mail on the local Lyft Facebook page and was pretty shocked to discover that basically no one had any idea that they could be dropped from their insurance, and even had 2 replies from people who had incidents where they were dropped from their insurance instantly and Lyft's insurance wouldn't cover whatever the incident was.
I don't know about other Rideshare companies, but Lyft did an abysmal job of letting their drivers know what they are getting themselves into.
This is a thing? Can we cite this (taxi usage numbers by bottom quintile earners)? Also, is this a NYC specific thing?
Http:// pleasepaypreacher.net
I have evidence to the contrary, actually.
I don't drive, I have never taken a cab by myself. I either walk, or I take the bus.
Academician Prokhor "Phyphor" Zakharov, Chief Scientist of China, Provost of the University of Planet - SE++ Megagame
Took tons of buses everywhere though. I would imagine that's more common.
At PAX East, there was a lot of social stuff happening in the larger boston area that was not really public-transit friendly.
And its nice to step out of the fancy dinner, hail a car through some manner of witchcraft, and go right to the next party some miles away.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Http:// pleasepaypreacher.net
My assumption would be a lack of knowledge of options. From WSCC in Seattle there's a wealth of great options (restaurants, shopping, events, etc) in walking distance or easily accessible via public transit.
Synd was talking PAX East, the one with a larger, sexier crew of cool people.
everywhere you would want to go in boston & cambridge is easily accessible by public transit.
boston's cold in march, though, and nothing is more convenient than your phone beeping when a warm car is outside ready to drive you direct to your destination.
Well I'm glad that Uber investors are certainly ok with using money to silence criticism.
Http:// pleasepaypreacher.net
Im not going to dive 30 clicks deep into articles that consist of a paragraph and a few tweets. Who is this journalist and what did Kutcher do?
That's the kind of nerdery we do here on our good days
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Does Kutcher actually think the plural of journalist is journalist?
Depending on where you go to grab a cab, many times (even though it is illegal) they will ask you where you're going before they let you in and if you're not going somewhere that lets them easily get a return fare, they'll just drive off. Credit card machines are mandated now, but many times you'll get the "oops, my machine is broken" and when you point out it is illegal and that they can't actually be driving with it being broken, they bring it out and now it miraculously works.
Uber is ridiculously easier to use, better service, and generally cheaper (minus surge pricing).
Uhhh he posted a few tweets. Specifically supporting the Uber exec who thought it would be a fine idea to dig up dirt on any journalist who criticized Uber's practices.
Uber exec said this.
Basically using money to silence journalism they disagree with. Ashton Kutcher who is an investor in Uber supports the idea of using money to silence journalism and accuses Lacy of being a shady journalist because uhh she wrote stuff he didn't like. Classic kill the messenger campaign.
Http:// pleasepaypreacher.net
Just to be clear, we are talking about the subset of people who use livery to do grocery shopping after 10 pm on Halloween, New Years, and St. Patrick's Day or during the first hour immediately after major football game or concert concludes.
If somebody is working three jobs and is literally so busy that they must rely on livery AND cannot wait until the afternoon of January 1 to go shopping, surge pricing is the least of their problems.
So basically you are diverting supply from one area to another? That would certainly raise the roof on the effectiveness of surge pricing.
Though it does nothing for the safety argument.
Right, but part of your argument was that "If there's a cap on surge pricing related to safety it means that there are fewer options available to people who may legit need transportation". To which I pointed out that this only happens if the cap is low enough that it actually effects the number of vehicles available. And then pointed out reasons why surge price's ability to put more options on the road is rather limited. Which means any negative effects of a cap you mention are equally limited. Because a surge pricing cap set above the level where you max out the supply of drivers will have no effect on the supply of drivers.
And this all becomes especially relevant with bad weather issues since bad weather tends to cover a rather large area and so moving services from one area to another is just shuffling the options around not adding new ones.
Yeah, I would support the idea that poor people use cabs. You see them use it alot for grocery trips (large trips to the store are a pain in the ass to impossible on public transit).
I doubt surge pricing has any effect on their use of these services though.
Like all the bits about skirting the local laws seem to come down on 'and it's probably not quite legal but they're definitely better than Taxi's still'. So maybe the issue is less Uber (though burying jouranlists is a shitty thing to talk about) and more that there exists a climate in which merely being a modern and well run taxi firm (because that seems to be what they're doing really) is the ingredient for massive success.
They also go "fuck the law" in countries where taxi services are way better.
I could also start a modern and well run firm in any sector if I got to ignore the regulations about insurances and equipment and licences and such.
Well, in the current regulatory framework, there shouldn't be a rigid cap. People should say, "Hey, I mad X dollars due to surge pricing for 10 minutes work!" and their buddy will say, "Damn, I wouldn't mind doing that." and then the magic of supply and demand works.
Plus, if you have 10 drivers and 100 passengers, well, you need some way to pick which 10 you pickup, and surge pricing is a good method in some respects (see below):
You're arguing (in no substantial part correctly, mind you) against all of western, modern capitalism at that point. Uber isn't unique or especially egregious in this regard*.
* This is a great example of especially egregious:
Except it doesn't work that simply because that makes alot of assumptions about people's ability to do that work, their desire to do it and their even knowing it's possible. And all within a small time frame.
These all do a huge job of dampening any effects of "the magic of supply and demand". In the short term, shit don't work like that.
In some respects. And a bad one in other respects.
Surge pricing obviously doesn't create drivers from clay, but it does two things:
a. as the average expected earnings and the marketing friendly, "I made a bajillion dollars in 30 minutes!" goes up, more people will become drivers long term.
b. in the short term, it will make some drivers decide to do "one more ride."
They are also uniquely positioned in that their business model assumes people can be "at work" after receiving a text message quite quickly, so it's not like surge pricing for male lead understudies of Romeo and Juliet productions with original Shakespearean pronunciations, which even if you have someone willing and able to do that, they need more than 5 minutes notice.
I'd argue it's the best, with my general strong caveats about pricing regulating scarcity when income inequality is too high.