Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

This is the thread for talking about your experiences with rideshare services/apps. Which ones you like, which ones you don't. The peculiar legal ramifications and restrictions in some cities (e.g. did you know that rideshare services need a taxi license to operate in Minneapolis but not in St. Paul? http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2014/04/twin-cities-are-taking-very-different-approaches-lyft-and-uberx/8830/).

i use uber all the time

seems like a shitty company but i also pay james dolan money for cable so \(o_O)/

Lyft seems embarrassing.

I like how all of those giant pink mustaches lasted like a month on the front end of cars in Chicago weather before being demoted to the dashboards.

whats wrong with a taxi

My one experience with Uber was a mixed bag; basically, don't use them for transportation away from big events unless you are made out of money.

Uber and Lyft just launched in Cleveland this month. Haven't tried them, and can't imagine any circumstance where I would.

hey, taxi

TAXI!!!!

it amazes me that nouveau tech people are so credulous as to willingly throw away decades of accumulated consumer protections and regulations for the novelty of calling an unlicensed cab with an iphone app.

yeah but you can do it with your phone

And you don't have to accidentally touch some peon by handing them money.

everyone who drives for lyft looks like they're pomplamoose roadies

let's all move to our own islands and have no government

whats wrong with a taxi

taxis are great if you can get one

you can say the same about Uber tho, and depending on where/when you contact them it can end up being ten times more expensive

I know some people who drive for Lyft, I would never set foot in a car with them behind the wheel.

ny doesn't have $1m taxi medallions because consumer protections just cost so much - so it's great that the pretty terrible industry (which just did its best to prevent people from the outer boroughs from getting *regulated* taxis) is getting ""disrupted""

otoh I generally don't have trouble finding a taxi the rare times that I do need to get one (even more true thanks to the green cabs) so I have no desire to dl an app so I can pay more money for the privilege.

My one experience with Uber (after a wedding on St. Patrick's Day), the poor guy got pulled over by a cop as he was pulling up to the bar to pick us up.

I'm going to be irritatingly pedantic for a minute. This is at least how it works in Chicago. Taxi regulations are very locally specific:

Hailo isn't a ride share service. It's basically a decentralized, app-based dispatching service for legal, licensed taxicabs. It's another way to call a cab that isn't cab company-specific and leaves out the middle-person dispatcher. It's also a convenient, hassle-free way to pay for a cab with a credit card. Also safer to use a credit card this way since taxi CC machines are sketchy as heck.

Uber has three components - a decentralized, app-based dispatching service through which you can call licensed taxis; a private car service, like a chauffer service; and a private car ride share service called Uber X.

Lyft is just a private ride share service.

So I like the Hailo and Uber taxi-hailing apps a lot. It's not impossible to hail a cab on the street where we live, but you could end up standing around for ten minutes or so or fighting with people on other corners so it's really nice to be able to get a guaranteed taxi. I have had problems with availability of cabs through both apps, and I've had drivers cancel on me for no reason, which is frustrating.

I've never used Uber's black car service because that shit's expensive and I'm not a rock star.

I used Uber X twice - once by accident because I had a credit and thought it was for the cab hailing part, and once with Jeff on purpose because he had the same credit. I never would have used it by myself if I'd realized what was going on. Call me paranoid, but fuck getting into some stranger's unregulated, unlicensed personal car for a god damn ride somewhere. I feel the same way about Lyft. I think there are also some major labor issues to consider with Uber X and Lyft as far as the drivers being classified as independent contractors and not having workers' comp coverage or being covered by wage and hour or overtime laws. Basically they can be paid exploitation rates of pay for what they do, and would have to drive A LOT to make a living.

iatee, in NYC you can only hail yellow cabs on the street, right? And if you want to call for a ride you've got to call a chauffeur service like Uber's black car?

The one person I know who drives for Lyft only does it for a few hours a night a couple nights a week and on one weekend night—purely for supplemental income.

There's also potentially massive liability issues with Lyft and Uber X drivers, just because of the unlicensed and unregulated nature of the services.

There are big problems with the way cabs are licensed and regulated (Chicago fares are some of the lowest urban fares in the nation and drivers don't get paid shit, making it really difficult for them to make a living as well, plus there has been reams of litigation about whether drivers are independent contractors or employees and thus afforded certain legal protections) so I get the appeal of something like Lyft or Uber X disrupting all of that (and again, I'm looking at this from a Chicago perspective, which is a different taxi setup than in other cities) but the whole thing is just too potentially sketchy and fraught for me to trust it.

the idea of being an occasional Lyft driver crossed my mind solely because the idea of putting that horrific mustache on the front of my car cracked me up

legally yeah but in the outer boroughs the lack of yellow cabs meant that hailing black cabs was the norm not the exception. bloomberg created green cabs (which can only be hailed in the outer boroughs / upper manhattan) to legalize/regulate what was already happening and the taxi industry fought it in courts, but eventually lost.

black cabs still exist and still get hailed tho, both in the boroughs and in manhattan.

xp

and while some drivers might make more money w/ uber atm than they do in places w/ fucked up regulations, in the long term the price/wages are gonna be driven down...though I guess soon enough they'll be replaced by google car so

if you mean the driverless car that will never happen

The one person I know who drives for Lyft only does it for a few hours a night a couple nights a week and on one weekend night—purely for supplemental income.

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, April 23, 2014 11:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is what the people I know do. They also use it to drive drunk people around and find out where the party is, then park their cars and get fucked up until the morning comes.

whats wrong with a taxi

taxis are great if you can get one

Flywheel

the day upworthy breaks the story of the lyft murderer who drove his victims to an airbnb death dungeon is the day u know ur paradigm has truly been disrupted

"Please rate your driver"

Echoing that taxis are fine if you can get them -- in SF, depending on where you are and what time it is, sometimes you might as well walk. Lyft has the app and the ease of taking care of everything that way. However, the drivers don't generally know the city as well as taxi cab drivers (though they also don't typically drive as recklessly).

1. there was a big taxi protest in DC today:

Drivers in and around downtown D.C. were gridlocked in traffic Wednesday as a caravan of angry taxi drivers made its way from East Potomac Park to Freedom Plaza — in a protest against app-based ride sharing services such as UberX.

the taxis all honked constantly for about 2-3 hours outside of my work. they weren't little short honks but rather of the HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK, HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK, HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK variety. one one hand, the drivers achieved their goal of getting people to think about the Uber/Lyft/Sidecar issue and to talk about it. on the other hand, the most common thing i heard among pedestrians and workers in the area was "SHUT THE FUCK UP! GODDAMIT, SHUT THE FUCK UP!!"

i want to be sympathetic toward the taxi drivers. but even though i've never used Uber-like services as i don't use taxis very often at all, they clearly seem to be better on a technological level. when a rottweiler munched on my shin and calf a few weeks ago, it took calls to 3 different taxi companies before someone was able to pick up the phone and then agree to send someone to my house. 40 minutes passed before it finally arrived, and i live in DC proper, not way out in the suburbs or something. when the driver showed up, he refused to shut the fuck up even though i made it clear that i was bleeding and in a great deal of pain. he was physically unable to shut the fuck up. then he refused to take me to the nearest hospital (howard university) because "that's not a good hospital". instead he took me to a hospital across town, during rush hour, so the ride took forever. the entire time he talked about how much he loved money and also gave me advice about dog bites. he also, of course, spent a good chunk of time complaining about Uber.

anywhere, clearly an anecdote about a terrible taxi ride doesn't build a very strong case against taxi drivers, but pretty much every time i take a taxi i end up with the most terrible human beings of all time. i haven't used Uber but i've heard that they actually show up, you can tell when they'll arrive using an app, and that they don't talk much. sounds heavenly.

My god, Karl, I hope you called to complain about that driver! The delay is absurd and part of why I am in favor of the decentralized dispatch services provided by Uber and Hailo, but him not taking you to your requested destination is not only straight up awful but must violate some kind of DC consumer services regulation. Is there a complaint number to call? That guy is a god damn menace.

when a rottweiler munched on my shin and calf a few weeks ago, it took calls to 3 different taxi companies before someone was able to pick up the phone and then agree to send someone to my house. 40 minutes passed before it finally arrived, and i live in DC proper, not way out in the suburbs or something. when the driver showed up, he refused to shut the fuck up even though i made it clear that i was bleeding and in a great deal of pain.

sounds like a shitty situation and i feel for you karl malone but you didn't want to call an ambulance?

i was more concerned about the pulsing pain and shooting blood from my leg then taking his taxi ID number or whatever. i kept saying "yeah i'm in a lot of pain right now" as my response to his running monologue about how much he loved money that was occasionally sprinkled with questions to confirm that i agreed that money was awesome as well.

xpost
hard to explain, but i was in enough pain and bleeding enough to need to go to the hospital, but not enough to feel the need to pay several hundred dollars for an ambulance ride.

i (as well as several friends) have been using Uber X and Lyft fairly regularly for months now and they are a thousand times better than your typical taxi service in nearly every conceivable way.

i want to be sympathetic toward the taxi drivers. but even though i've never used Uber-like services as i don't use taxis very often at all, they clearly seem to be better on a technological level. when a rottweiler munched on my shin and calf a few weeks ago, it took calls to 3 different taxi companies before someone was able to pick up the phone and then agree to send someone to my house. 40 minutes passed before it finally arrived, and i live in DC proper, not way out in the suburbs or something.

it took me a while to understand this in my area, being a very infrequent taxi user who never had any of them around growing up, but i think basically taxi companies have a lot of unspoken ways of doing things that they require you to deal with if you want their convenience. factor in having to deal with a lot of demanding erratic customers who don't understand these things and i guess i can understand why they can get kind of fuck-you sometimes.

i'm thinking things like expectations about when people travel, under what circumstances it's reasonable to expect a fast pickup, where they expect you to go (wrt taxis being around you and finding fares wherever they end up).

recently i had an injury and had to take more taxis than i could afford because i didn't have any other way, and i got quite a range of service. some drivers had very slick smartphone apps, a square thingy. some knew where they were going. some couldn't find me standing at the opposite corner from where they expected. one guy had to fill out a card charge on fuckin carbon-copied slips by hand, but when i saw the phone he was working with, and figured what he must be making driving the cab, i really couldn't be irritated at him - anyone who could afford it would leap at the conveniences that would probably help them pull down more tips and other desirables. once i got picked up on a street corner by a passing cabbie i flagged down (apparently this does not really work much) who was ok with dumping me in the front seat with another fare in the back, only to have the actual cab i had called (there were a LOT driving past that night) swoop in and get irritated at the other one, and at me, for taking the fare he had oked. but how was i to know?? i was just standing in a snowstorm with a bum foot miles from home! etc.

i was more concerned about the pulsing pain and shooting blood from my leg then taking his taxi ID number or whatever. i kept saying "yeah i'm in a lot of pain right now" as my response to his running monologue about how much he loved money that was occasionally sprinkled with questions to confirm that i agreed that money was awesome as well.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you had any sort of responsibility to report this guy. It was more of a "Justice for Karl Malone!" kind of thing. I get that way when I get angry at something on someone's behalf.

Oh no, it's cool! Believe me, as I sat I sat in the backseat I thought "what would a more direct person do here? Most people wouldn't stand for this." It's totally reasonable. People's thresholds for bullshit change over time, and I hope that when I'm an older man I'll have the courage to call out bullshit like that.

anyone used relayrides? looks pretty sweet.

this is probably a dumb question but if you get pulled over what are you supposed to show for insurance?

I use Uber and Hailo for calling real cabs. I don't use the ride sharing services, probably because I just use the real cabs, they always seem more plentiful. But I like the idea of them and fully support them.

relayrides = car rental

cab drivers i'm sentimental about but i truly hope car rental companies get disrupted out of existence by this thing

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists

what exactly did this guy say? I can't track it down anywhere, just reactions to it.

fuck these services

no way in hell am I entrusting the lives of my children with some unlicensed uninsured asshole with a handlebar mustache

A pink handlebar mustache pasted to the front of his car, even.

had way more shady shit pulled on me by cab drivers than i have ever received while using uber/lyft.

^

lol shakey wtf are you talking about unlicensed uninsured

Ubs has been pretty good to me except the multiplier suxxxxxxxx

THe uber app is also pretty awful it's like a videogame interface

I mean the #aesthetics

uber means never having to find a dd / leaving my car somewhere distant if im out and alcohol becomes a factor. plus reduction in such stressors as finding parking v valet etc. it's pretty much the best. i never fuck w lyft or whatever else tho

tax the hell out of these people and do more buses / trains at all hours in cities that aren't new york ffs. i get how it's better than cabs for the customer but it's not solving any other problems and libertarians are wrong abt this shit being inherently good. it was totally galling to see a "fb friend" share a "petition" to keep lyft legal in my city, like ok fine it's very weird and hypocritical how this place is "pro-business" only if it jibes with a religious cult, but on the other hand, if trax ran until 2 here, drunk driving is addressed, less drivers on the road is addressed (we have the biggest smog problem in the country), suddenly you might have a night life, etc.

miateesslessness

I don't think you should be opposed to expanding the market for taxis if you want to stop drunk driving and make it easier to live w/o a car

these companies are pretty clearly run by terrible people but so are taxi cartels

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/668CE98E-0A61-406E-87E5-546157F4E18C.png_zpshjrvwiti.jpeg

Legit terrifying

lol shakey wtf are you talking about unlicensed uninsured

― ✓ out this insane nakh yall (gr8080), Tuesday, November 18, 2014 11:57 AM (5 days ago)

these drivers tend to only be insured for personal travel -- not for transporting passengers for money.

http://blog.uber.com/ridesharinginsurance

i was thinking of lyft -- not sure about shakey

https://www.lyft.com/safety

personally, it just seems like there's too overwhelming a douche factor involved with using these services, but i felt that way about cell phones in the late 90s/early 00's

i agree with matt though about regulating and taxing these things -- same with Air BnB

sarahell, what's your opinion about the types of insurance the drivers for these companies carry?

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20141122/lakeview/cyclist-struck-by-two-cars-on-lake-shore-drive-early-saturday-police

Awful situation but wondering how the insurance stuff may shake out here with the Uber driver.

http://www.policygenius.com/blog/insurance-secret-uber-doesnt-want-know/

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Leaked-transcript-shows-Geico-s-stance-against-5910113.php

I took UberX a few times recently just to try it out (once when we didn't have our car and needed to get somewhere), here are my thoughts:

1) From work (midtown manhattan) to home it was exactly the same price as a regular yellowcab, and unlike the yellowcab the uber guy didn't gun it and didn't take what I know to be the fastest route, so not doing it again from work
2) From my neighborhood, however, it was great -- car services around here suck and often just tell you they don't have someone available, whereas uber had a guy with a car seat her in five minutes.
3) However, they charged about 30% extra for the car seat, which seemed kind of ridiculous
4) I was annoyed at how unclear it was how much it was going to cost -- the first time I specifically got the fare estimate, but the second time I somehow missed it, and once you pass that there doesn't seem to be any meter or anything else telling you how much you're paying and why
5) Uber is just the douchiest name ever, and their logo looks like something out of Robocop
6) All three Uber drivers I had were professional drivers who had previously driven for black car services so the "ridesharing" thing is nonsense
7) Ultimately yeah there is a douchey vibe to the whole thing -- you can even hook up your spotify account to the driver's stereo so you're the fucking DJ in your uber while you do lines off a hooker's ass or whatever
8) The cars were all very nice, though almost pointlessly so -- the "family" one we got was a Toyota Avalon hybrid, and the one that took me home from work was some monstrosity luxury SUV

TL;DR, I'll probably use it again in my neighborhood just because cabs and car services are so difficult, but otherwise it has no major appeal for me over a regular cab, and I barely ever take cabs anyway

Also, one of the drivers told me "Last year, it was great, I made good money and I could work a normal day and go home. Now they cut the rates and I have to work 15 hours to make the same money I made in 8"

my friend is a Lyft driver & she said basically the same thing -- she's driving for both to try to make up the shortfall

I still dont think I understand whats better about Uber (or what was percieved to be) than taxis. Here in Melb we can order a proper taxi with iphone apps as well as by calling or hailing on the street; you can pay by card (credit or debit) on proper wifi connected machines in all the taxis, and its reasonably cheap.

Is it something else that makes uber better? Cant be the price from what im reading here.

There are some cities in the US where the cab system really doesn't work well, and I think San Francisco is one of these.

Trayce, in NYC we mostly have a pretty good yellowcab system and black car car services make up the difference, but there are places like my neighborhood where it's still difficult to find any kind of cab. I also don't think you can hail regular taxis by smartphone app right now in NYC but not sure. Beyond that though, the improvements are not huge -- the cars are a little nicer (in my three experiences) but modern NYC cabs tend to be well-maintained, clean, up-to-date cars. I guess the choice of music thing is sort of neat but I didn't use it because it seemed assholish. I do like the fact that there are so many uber drivers with carseats ready - I don't think regular cabs ever have this.

But yeah there are cities with poor cab service. My brother in LA says everyone there uses Uber because both public transit and cabs are not great there.

But yeah, taxis are so different in different cities that I think there's a lot of yawning gaps of incomprehension -- people in cities with good taxis say "what is the point of this" and people in cities with crap taxis say "how are you not using this"

Similarly -- I think Uber-like services are really well-adapted for the use case of "it's 3am and I'm drunk at a bar whose street address I don't know and I need to get home and I don't live in a city where cabs are just driving by all the time" -- I think this is the kind of situation most people are either in reasonably often (in which case they're in the "how can you not use this" camp) or basically never (in which case "what is the point of this.")

e.g. someone whose typical use of a taxi is "I'm out of town for work and I need to get from my hotel to the airport" (e.g me) seldom to never encounters the situation where this service would be useful.

Yeah makes sense.

Lest it be thought btw that Melb's taxi system is *good*, it kind of isnt, but for other reasons (very large majority of the drivers are very recent immigrants who have absolutely no idea where they are going; lot of cleanliness issues, abusive/rude drivers etc)

Some people have told me they had luck hailing Ubers at the airport when the taxi line was really long, but if enough people start doing that it will also be hard to hail Ubers at the airport I assume.

is über just for rich ppl who don't want middle eastern cabbies or is my impression off?

the uber drivers I had were all middle eastern or central asian

One thing I did notice, I think the drivers were a little more reticent about chatting with us, even when I engaged them a bit, and that may be because of fear of bad ratings if they say the wrong thing. This felt a little off to me.

it amazes me that nouveau tech people are so credulous as to willingly throw away decades of accumulated consumer protections and regulations for the novelty of calling an unlicensed cab with an iphone app.

― adam, Wednesday, April 23, 2014 5:33 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

in Chicago ubers are banned from doing airport pickups (drop offs are fine)

xp isnt the essential appeal (beyond availability/speed etc depending on ur area) how it feels like the opposite tho? - like ppl find a kind of superficial airless safety in being machine processed by this abstract "system" rather than having to deal with the nebulous fallibilities of their own human initiative interaction etc. like hurting says it's like ocp running johnny cabs only cos the android tech isnt there yet so they have to subjugate actual driver persons

Yeah in fact I had almost that exact same thought - that this feels like an intermediate step toward automated cabs

I dislike Uber's upper management as much as anyone, but have used the service numerous times in the bay area and it's inexpensive, easy, and the drivers I've had have always been perfectly nice. Taxi's have refused to drive me from BART to the house with luggage because it's not far enough.

If you're willing to pay the multiplier Uber is great during a rainy day when it is impossible to catch a cab

How much is the multiplier. It's exceedingly rare that I'd be in that situation -- only time I take cabs in Manhattan is when I leave the office very very late.

I'd really take the subway any time except my train often either doesn't run or runs very very infrequently and only local after certain hours.

It varies according to how high the demand is

For me it was 2.2 then 2.0

There was that story of the woman who was charged $320 because it was like a 7x multiplier on Halloween and she didn't know

i opened uber in the middle of a blizzard in Manhattan around 10pm the Saturday before Xmas last year and the multiplier was around 7.5x

When the multiplier is in effect does it flash big on the screen? Like is it plausible that that woman could have missed it?

IT does but she was drunk coming home from a party

You have to tap through it

recently ive seen it make you re-type the multiplier amount as a sort of confirmation/captcha

hey look an unbiased opinion

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2014/11/22/in-defense-of-uber-an-unbiased-opinion/

Does anybody actually use Uber's rating system?

Seems weird for a system that's otherwise supposed to be frictionless

Stop the Yelpification of Everything

i had a guy drop me off once who wasn't terrible but did miss a few turns and was also sort of cold and unfriendly say "five stars, right pal?" as i was exiting the car. i responded "you too, pal."

I had a guy turn around and show me his phone and tap 5 stars as I was getting out and I guess I was supposed to do the same for him

Finally!

Xxxxxxpost to unbiased opinion

So far I gave 5 stars to all three guys based on nothing expressly wrong and assuming that anything less is probably bad for them. I kind of hate the five-star rating system for that reason. My favorite mexican place has an even four stars on yelp, which I would probably treat as a sign of "meh" if I didn't know better. People give two or three star reviews based on the stupidest shit.

It's a fucking cab ride, if it gets you from A to B safely and in a reasonable amount of time without harassment by the driver, and the cab isn't somehow revolting, that should be enough. When did we start having such refined tastes in everything?

I've said this upthread, but in Chicago, Uber is an app that works as a decentralized taxi dispatch. Cab drivers licensed by the city can sign into the Uber network, then passengers log into the app, request a taxi, and if there's a taxi driver signed into the network nearby they'll accept the ride request and come get you. Then Uber charges your credit card (and takes a percentage off the fare as a user fee). There used to be a competing network/app called Hailo but they pulled out of the North American market due to competition.

There's also UberX, which is what Uber is everywhere else (not taxis), and Uber black cars, which is the black cars. And then Lyft, which is Lyft.

Anyway, I love the taxi hailing aspect of it. Where we live now isn't a taxi desert, but it can take ten minutes standing on a corner (and lots of glaring at other people who are also competing for cabs) to hail a taxi where we live now. I've only used the UberX part when there have been zero cabs available on the app and couldn't take public transit for whatever reason (usually because I was running too late), but I generally don't like it. I have an issue with exploitation inherent in most of these "sharing economy" set ups (like Task Rabbit, probably Instacart), especially with the way drivers used to be able to make a living as an Uber driver (it is also really hard for Chicago taxi drivers to make a living without driving an insane number of hours per shift because the fares are so low here) until those assholes cut the rates.

I don't know. I wish Hailo had stuck around. Trying to call a taxi through the taxi company's dispatcher is an exercise is frustration and waiting an hour only to find out that somebody cancelled your call and didn't tell you. If nothing else, I'm hopeful that Uber will prompt taxi companies to get their shit together on that front.

Oh that's UberT right? Does anyone know if you can use that in NYC?

Oh also even though cab drivers in Chicago must by law take credit cards, you still run into a lot of drivers who will give you a raft of shit or straight up refuse to drive you if you're paying with a card, so getting a licensed city cab through Uber takes away that irritation. Also also the credit card networks that taxis use are notoriously insecure, so there's that, too.

Jeff and I got an UberX ride home from a beer festival thing a couple weekends ago and the driver was probably the best driver I have ever ridden with. There was a lot of traffic but he was calm, he didn't do that nauseating thing a lot of taxi drivers do where they accelerate rapidly as soon as there's an opening and then slam on the breaks, his car smelled really nice (and not like Black Ice air freshener trees, which give me a pounding headache), and even when a total dingaling pulled out in front of him, his only response was to say, "Hey" sort of the way you'd say "Hey" to a coworker who stopped by your cube to chat for a second. We gave him five stars and I hope that he is able to make a comfortable and happy living as a driver.

I thought NYC was weird in that you can only hail yellow cabs in certain areas and only call for a ride service in other areas?

Yeah I've never had good luck trying to get a yellow cab in BKLYN/QNS and gypsy cabs make me a bit nervous (irrationally since I've only had bad experiences with that type of service in China)

xp it's more complicated than that, and also it's changed somewhat in recent years. You can and always could afaik hail a yellow cab anywhere, but it used to be you just didn't see them outside Manhattan very much, being that mostly poor and working class folks lived in "the boroughs" -- less likely to take cabs to begin with and cabs also sometimes refused to take people there. As that's changed, you start to see more yellow cabs in some parts of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, although they're still not easy to find in many neighborhoods. So ride services fill the gap. There's also this new green cab thing which is sort of confusing, but my understanding is that they're hailable only in the boroughs (to make up for the lack of yellow cabs) but not in Manhattan because of the limit on medallions.

Interesting.

I find taxi regulations fascinating. They're so labyrinthine.

so far my favorite uber drivers (i am almost always referring to UberX when i say uber btw) have been middle aged dudes who are doing it as a hobby/excuse to get out of the house on nights/weekends

We also use Uber Cab to send out babysitter home if it's late. Easy to just to call a cab, it takes her home and just charges it to me.

Supposedly this is a new dispatching app that partners with taxi companies, not individual drivers. I've read mixed reviews, but I'd like to try it.

http://gocurb.com/

I honestly don't care who I use, I just want to use the technology, whoever offers it. If it can be the cab companies, that's great. If not, I find alternatives.

isnt the essential appeal (beyond availability/speed etc depending on ur area) how it feels like the opposite tho? - like ppl find a kind of superficial airless safety in being machine processed by this abstract "system" rather than having to deal with the nebulous fallibilities of their own human initiative interaction etc. like hurting says it's like ocp running johnny cabs only cos the android tech isnt there yet so they have to subjugate actual driver persons

this feels OTM, cf the reassuringly anonymous, Lysol sameness of Holiday Inns vs Bobby's Sky-Line Mo-Tell

How was your stay at Bobby's Sky-Line Mo-Tell?

sshhhhhhhhhh

(it was a no-tell mo-tell)

My feeling about substituting tech for human systems is that when ppl imagine how great a technological solution is going to be, they envision it working in the ideal way. In reality it will only be ideal for the rich or those for whom the cost of the service isn't a barrier to its use--anyone who cares about price or uses a lower price point-oriented version of the system will get a sub-ideal user experience. And when you do have the inevitable issues with it, its inconsistencies and inefficiencies, the fact that there's no human relationship or human intervention will mean you have no recourse at all to mitigate the quality of the experience.

Like, it's not nec choosing a uniformly smooth tech experience over an inconsistent human one.

Right, and the benefit of a city-granted monopoly is the power to regulate those experiences even for people who can't afford the "premium" services, although, to be fair, there's already a black market in cab service and a lot of people with less money are already using the black market cabs and already have less recourse.

There is human interaction, though. You don't get in a car/cab you ordered through this ap and sit silently behind a partition while your personal driving servant silently drives you to your destination. You have to confirm this is actually your ride and not somebody who's hanging out in front of your building in the same kind of car, tell the person where you're going, and make as much small talk as you are inclined to make. And I've ridden in glorious silence in licensed taxis, too.

The inconsistency of human interaction comes when you try to order a cab through the company's dispatch service, and the problem there is not having to talk to somebody on the phone. It's getting the actual taxi to come pick you up.

I don't care how I communicate with a service. I just want to know that I can get a ride in a reasonable amount of time and that my call won't be mysteriously cancelled. In that respect, Uber (and the much missed Hailo) has the benefit of me being able to see the GPS of where the driver is, so I guess to that extent I prefer an app, but that's not about what I can avoid (contact) but about what I get (a decent idea of when my ride is coming).

xp Oh yeah I don't mean necessarily NOW but in terms of seeing this as an step toward an even less human, more automated experience, whatever that might look like. Also inspired by watching a rich person hail an Uber car twice in a few hours with no concern whatsoever for any possible surcharge.

Also from seeing someone I know repeatedly posting on fb about the difficulty of working late and getting a yellow cab in Manhattan to pick her up to get home from work at like 10pm (lol marketing art direction) bc she's Black and taxis won't stop for her at night. And she could call an Uber car but she'd have to be willing to pay more just to mitigate the negative effect of racism, and how that's only available to the moneyed. I mean, nothing new here, just seeing it again in a new context.

That's interesting because I was just thinking about how Lyft and Uber are cheaper than licensed cabs in Chicago (UberX is significantly cheaper if you aren't stuck with surge pricing), so you end up with a situation where the consumer protections of licensed taxis are only available to people who can afford it.

Just to get my bias out there, I welcome with open arms the day cars drive themselves and I can use my smart phone to call up my personal autodriving pod to take me to my destination. But that's not about avoiding people (I like people and I work from home so when I do get around people I tend to TALK TO THEM A LOT ABOUT THINGS plus also I love talking to cab drivers (see: fascination about taxi regulations). That's about me generally hating cars and a constant low-level anxiety about being run over by one.

I've been wondering whether Uber's prices will eventually rise if they manage to take over a big enough chunk of the taxi market. Seems like they strategically lowered their prices recently to gain market penetration. Don't know whether they're highly profitable at current rates or not.

You know what's annoying? When a taxi asks if you wanna take the FDR

io did you ever read Rainbow's End by Verner Vinge? There are autodriving egg pod cars in that and it's supposed to read as dystopian but I was like "YES BRING IT ON."

xp My guess is that they will definitely rise and drivers will not get a commensurate bump in income. I wouldn't put it past Uber to be playing a really rotten bait and switch long game with their pricing and what their drivers earn.

I'm all for avoiding human interaction in cabs. Most of the time, I'd prefer my cab driver to say the bare minimum to me, but some just won't shut up. Bring on robot drivers.

Uber next versh will probably allow you to specify your preferences to display to the driver i.e. No Talking, Stare Forward, Don't Look At Me Snorting Coke From A Vial I Keep In My Pocket

Athletic, demure, aggressive, sleazy

I've been wondering whether Uber's prices will eventually rise if they manage to take over a big enough chunk of the taxi market. Seems like they strategically lowered their prices recently to gain market penetration. Don't know whether they're highly profitable at current rates or not.

seems like they're making plenty of money, I would expect prices to go down rather than up tho. having a consistently cheaper competitor around would be a bad thing. also there's gonna be a race to the bottom w/ how much they pay drivers.

Uber next versh will probably allow you to specify your preferences to display to the driver i.e. No Talking, Stare Forward, Don't Look At Me Snorting Coke From A Vial I Keep In My Pocket

― 龜, Monday, November 24, 2014 12:01 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/q7wvew/nathan-for-you-independent-cab

here is my weird/lol story involving race and uber:

on a weeknight over the summer, i hailed an UberX while leaving a predominantly black nightclub on the near-south side of Chicago. (fyi Chicago is very segregated with the south side being predominately black and the north side predominately white).

once the driver picked me up and i told him my address (several miles north of downtown) he chuckled and told me that when he accepted my fare he was in the middle of trying to decide whether to call it a night and head home or to take one more rider for the evening.

he told me that when he saw my name and location pop up, he guessed that i was black and likely lived on the south side, where he himself lived. (my name is p uncommon, and usually one people associate with older black men.)

he was good-humored about how his gamble backfired, and i apologetically joked about how bad i felt having to make him drive so far north before he got to head home for the night.

also nb: deej was with me

"spotify premium users can now choose the soundtrack that plays during their rides" -- uber app update that came through just now

sarahell, what's your opinion about the types of insurance the drivers for these companies carry?

― 龜, Sunday, November 23, 2014 5:27 PM (Yesterday)

based on what gr80 posted about the companies' policies -- those look like the standard business auto levels of coverage required by the City of SF for government contractors -- which is good. It does look like (from the Uber page linked) that they have not always had adequate insurance, but are in the constant process of improving it based on regulatory issues and incidents.

w/r/t Spotify in cabs my mind went to this scene from The Comedian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IERGKjwBAHg

uber was expensive(ish) in London this summer but the two drivers I had were super nice and helpful. also I'm not sure why everyone wants to come to taxi drivers defenses. they are run by crappy cartels with weird city lockup contracts and bullshit and are no better than anything else. they're not some prized public institution (in SF anyway).

yeah for all the safety and regulation talk regulated yellow cabs are crashing into buildings and plowing down people every day in ny

and obv you're taking your life in your hands anytime you get in any car, taxi, uber, etc. I ride casual carpool every morning and I know loads of people who are surprised I haven't been beheaded or kidnapped or something.

Also from seeing someone I know repeatedly posting on fb about the difficulty of working late and getting a yellow cab in Manhattan to pick her up to get home from work at like 10pm (lol marketing art direction) bc she's Black and taxis won't stop for her at night. And she could call an Uber car but she'd have to be willing to pay more just to mitigate the negative effect of racism, and how that's only available to the moneyed. I mean, nothing new here, just seeing it again in a new context.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Monday, November 24, 2014 12:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/10/21/357645869/apps-makes-googly-eyes-at-riders-tired-of-being-snubbed-by-cabbies

This pretty much sums up the #1 policy problem with Uber-type services imo:

In fact, it's traditional taxis that are now claiming discrimination — that they're being treated unfairly because they can't compete with services like Uber and Lyft, which aren't subject to the same government regulations and can thus charge riders less.

"You don't give advantages to one industry and oppress, take other people's livelihoods or jobs by regulating them and deregulating their competitors," Hailu Asrhu, a 30-year veteran of the cab industry, told The Huffington Post. "We're not at a position for competition. Competition has to play a fair game," Asrhu added. "I want regulation or deregulation for everybody — equality and equally for everyone."

It's very much like the charter school movement, or what happened with deregulation of the telecoms, where instead of outright dismantling a public-sanctioned monopoly, they give private players unfair advantages and erode the public-sanctioned monopoly.

http://www.autostraddle.com/why-lyft-and-uber-endanger-both-passengers-and-drivers-a-former-lyft-driver-speaks-out-261279/

The stuff about drivers not being able to cancel rides without penalty is troubling.

argh, friend now works for uber, keeps approvingly posting uber propaganda, started to gently argue with him in one thread but it's obviously pointless, not like he's going to hear me out while fully bought in. Just posted this:

http://blog.uber.com/ride-ahead

with this as the pull-quote

"In 2015 alone, Uber will generate over 1mm jobs in cities around the world and with that millions of people may decide that they no longer need to own a car because using Uber will be cheaper than owning one. Parking could become less strained in our biggest cities, and city congestion may actually start to ease due to uberPOOL’s expansion and success."

"You don't give advantages to one industry and oppress, take other people's livelihoods or jobs by regulating them and deregulating their competitors," Hailu Asrhu, a 30-year veteran of the cab industry, told The Huffington Post. "We're not at a position for competition. Competition has to play a fair game," Asrhu added. "I want regulation or deregulation for everybody — equality and equally for everyone."

but you're not going to get the taxi industry to actually support this kind of deregulation, at least not anywhere w/ medallion systems.

you should send your friend that uber ceo's quote about self-driving cars xp

The congestion part is particularly lulzy -- we're going to alleviate road congestion...by providing a service that drives people around in cars!

eh it's not totally nonsensical, in a world where people actually give up their personal vehicle they're likely to make fewer trips overall

In NYC it seems like people only own cars if they (1) need them on a regular basis, (2) go out of town a lot or (3) have money to burn. None of these seem likely to change with Uber, maybe it's different in other cities. Like my wife drives to her job because where we live to her job takes a ridiculous amount of time by subway, and she's not going to save money if we give up the car and she Ubers it to work every day.

upper middle class people who live in dense-for-america-but-shitty-transit areas could give up their cars. so like, it's not absurd to suggest that it could happen in the bay area, dc, even LA.

http://gawker.com/uber-turned-on-surge-pricing-for-people-fleeing-sydney-1671193132

What what raging buttholes

"fares have increased" kind of makes me think it is an automatic thing and they don't have people tweaking stuff, meaning in dire situations fares will be really high and only the rich will make it out alive once uber takes over the whole ride industry

Did you even read the article

article sucks balls on most levels

yeah? the cited tweet saying that it was intentional is this one, which has the phrasing I mentioned:
https://twitter.com/Uber_Sydney/status/544319760809222144

I think Uber is managed by malicious libertarian motherfuckers, but I also think they would be lazy enough to program surge pricing into the system without having an override mechanism, because they think surge pricing is always appropriate

it sounds like that's almost definitely what happened, but I agree with your assessment of the company

I think Uber is managed by malicious libertarian motherfuckers, but I also think they would be lazy enough to program surge pricing into the system without having an override mechanism, because they think surge pricing is always appropriate

You say this like being malicious libertarian motherfuckers didn't lead to automatic surge pricing without an override mechanism.

oh, no, they are lazy malicious libertarian motherfuckers

You know they then backed down and offered free rides out of the CBD after the backlash, right.

yes, that also was a headline

http://thepointsguy.com/2014/12/insider-series-what-uber-drivers-know-about-passengers/

Found this article weird and unsettling

http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Uber-driver-accused-in-sexual-assault-due-in-court-5977119.php

So far I'm unsettled by this bit of nonsense: "Just like a good marriage, both an Uber driver and a client have access to their own halves of the Uber app."

haha yeah that is totally creepy

like, that is a bizarre image of both a marriage and the relationship between a hired driver and a rider

Right???

"Uber isn’t concerned with lowering their prices, because many drivers manage to show up at clients’ pick-up locations with their own SUVs, Cadillacs or Mercedes sedans."

What the...

I didn't understand what that meant.

FWIW the few times I have used Uber the cars seemed unnecessarily nice. The one time I took it home from work I got some oversized super-luxury SUV, and my 5'9" self felt kind of ridiculous riding in the backseat of it, alone, across the 59th street bridge.

I would probably be more inclined to use it if it were 30% cheaper for cars that were less nice, instead of the same price as a cab.

asymmetric warfare, just like marriage

Based in part on that article, I'm still happy to continue not using any of these damn services

http://thepointsguy.com/2014/12/insider-series-what-uber-drivers-know-about-passengers/

Found this article weird and unsettling

― 龜, Wednesday, December 24, 2014 11:00 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this article

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick smugly jokes that his extremely profitable company has garnered him so much tail that he now refers to it as “Boob-er,” so nobody exactly expected Uber to be particularly sensitive towards women. All the same, the whole Avions de Chasse catastrophe really takes the cake. As soon as BuzzFeed News got ahold of the story, Uber quietly pulled the promotion from their website, and later described it as a “clear misjudgment.” Avions’ co-founder Pierre Garonnaire described the situation as a cultural misunderstanding, explaining that “They didn’t anticipate the reaction of Uber US. In the US, you are more Puritan. For me and most of the people of France, it was a good idea. It was fun.” Sarah Lacy hit the nail on the head when she explained in her op-ed “The Horrific Trickle-Down Of Asshole Culture: Why I’ve Just Deleted Uber From My Phone” that Uber “…posted an ad that encouraged, played on, and celebrated treating women who may choose to drive cars to make extra money like hookers.”

Jeez

how idiotic can you be?

it's so puritanical to find mysogyny disgusting

you know, the Puritans, those bastions of female empowerment

I am scared to contemplate the answer to that question xxp

in France, the driving, it is sexy

lol

You know, where there is regulation and public ownership you may well get some bureaucracy problems - problems with many people working in committee - but they strike me as preferable to a situation where one person and their business sweeping in, getting rid of the competition and installing their particular brand of personal shitness so that it becomes inescapable

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5822.html

Uber capping NYC fare multiplier at 2.8x

Recent usage in LA. Cab to downtown hotel - $65 with tip. UberX back to the airport $23.

hey look i got an entire chicken for $2

it's disruptive poultry

Uber capping NYC fare multiplier at 2.8x

― 龜, Monday, January 26, 2015 1:27 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

On account of the storm, I mean

I'm a $2 chicken kind of guy.

i dont want to google it but pretend i posted a giant picture of super gross factory mega cage chicken hell on earth shit here

http://i.imgur.com/9EYyU5x.png

ffffuuuuuuuuu!

Uber does seem pretty sketchy but at the same time I don't know if I want to defend the medallion system

all the local taxi services here are pretty much one company, and they had a cab stand downtown near bars, with security, a line to stand in for catching the next cab, and off-duty cops for security

I guess they got rid of that and are doing doorside pickup now, which basically just means they don't feel like paying for security and there will be cabs darting around everywhere instead of one orderly spot

corporations are a disenfranchised minority too my friend

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/how-to-get-your-uber-passenger-rating-110747101269.html

Saw this today and inquired about my rating. 4.7, good enough I guess?

http://chicago.suntimes.com/business/7/71/364926/uber-panic-button-coming-chicago

Good point in the article, that an uber cab is a horrible place to commit a crime, because of all the data that is being gathered from both rider and driver, you're going to get caught.

When I used to take regular cabs, I'd use my phone to take a picture of the cab number, just in case I needed it for whatever reason.

My wife (pregnant and not feeling well this morning) and I had to get our daughter and a bunch of stuff for her birthday, including a guitar, to the preschool today, and it was 10 degrees out, so we took an uber (never cabs in our neighborhood). It cost me $18 to go a distance I can walk in about 10 minutes, and somehow I never saw the price estimate in advance. I think they tack on a huge surcharge for the carseat. Left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, although I didn't have many other options since even the black car services are impossible to get near me.

Carseat surcharges is bullshit IMO.

I guess there is the time it takes the guy to put in the carseat. Maybe that's worth like $3.

Maybe extra insurance? Idk

Recent uber experiences: guywho drove around holding his iPhone in one hand, looking at it for directions (two actually)

Guy who had clearly hotboxed his car before picking me up

It's all good tho

So the Montreal mayor, Denis Coderre, pointed to the fact that uberX was illegal. In response, the company launched a bullshit petition that misrepresents every thing the mayor has said, and threaten to 'not exist' anymore in the city ('Imagine if Uber didn't exist anymore' oh no). Freaking scare tactics of this kind are why I'll never use this service.

I was waiting for the bus in front of these multi million dollar condos across the street and this young profesh dude came out, crossed the street, waited for about a minute then got in an uber car and I don't know his life but I think he takes Uber to work every day because it's cheaper than parking downtown and he's too rich to take the bus.

^ the future of western cities.

Guy who had clearly hotboxed his car before picking me up

feel like there might be a startup idea here

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/03/are-taxis-safer-than-uber/386668/

http://openstreetcab.com/
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/535886/data-mining-reveals-when-a-yellow-taxi-is-cheaper-than-uber/

despite what uber says, uberx is easily proven to more expensive than yellow cabs for rides < $35, which is the vast, vast majority of taxi rides

I've been using Zipcar, which has been totally perfect for my purposes, and I've never had any problems. The city where I live has them parked all over town, and there are 3 or 4 at the train station that is a 5 minute walk from home. It's pretty sweet and you can get a car on a moment's notice for $10/hr with unlimited gas.

Fuck an uber, I would go with taxis all the way.

p sure that in chicago an uber ride will almost always run cheaper than a taxi

Absent surge pricing, yeah it's cheaper. Which is saying something since we have super cheap cab fares here, too.

I was in Dallas a few weeks ago and all my rides were like $3, 4

nyc costing a lot schocker

what a bunch of assholes

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/04/02/uber_leaves_san_antonio_to_protest_regulations_it_wasn_t_an_empty_threat.html?wpsrc=fol_fb

City of Madison just voted to legalize Uber as long as it carries insurance at the same level as taxi companies, guarantees rides 24/7, and doesn't surge-price; in other words, if they operate under essentially the same constraints taxis do. Uber says it can't do business under those circumstances though I haven't heard them directly say they'll stop operating in town. Taxis here are pretty good so I think there won't be the same level of outcry.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/06/17/uber_drivers_ruled_employees_by_california_labor_commission.html

lol

Really interesting. I wonder how it will go on appeal.

https://medium.com/@cassiemarketos/dear-uber-bbb174aadc78

starting to wonder if Courtney's ever been to France before:
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Courtney-Love-Attacked-in-Paris-by-Mob-of-Taxi-6348842.php

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-06-23/this-is-how-uber-takes-over-a-city

Courtney Love's comments are being widely publicized in France; I gather she doesn't know that negatively comparing places to Baghdad is something racists here do.

gov today says it's going to enforce the law against uberpop; not sure how that's going to work but

if you use uber you are an advocate/a lobbyist/collaborator ?

lol u mistyped a question mark at the end

controversial opinion: surge pricing is good

in cities and areas where transportation is available and private transportation is purely a luxury, I could see that it would be viable

as it is, uber is displacing transportation with controlled rates in areas that lack good public transportation, meaning people who really need a ride (and are able to wait a little while) will still have to pay much more

that and the fact that uber takes the lion's share of surge pricing dollars

if you cross a picket line you're a scab.

can't argue that

people who really need a ride (and are able to wait a little while) will still have to pay much more

vs people who really need a while and can't wait and are willing to pay a lil more for it to come

waiting an hour for a cab on NYE or after big free outdoor concert where even public transit is stuffed is bad, so many ppl would pay more to gtfo & more drivers would show up

that and the fact that uber takes the lion's share of surge pricing dollars

they have to give something to incentivize more drivers to actually show up though

how uber splits up the ca$h is a separate issue though

the surge price downside is if I'm not in that neighborhood and break my arm. now not only do I wait much longer, I pay significantly more to get to the hospital because a bunch of assholes went to a giant concert

the incentive they give is... business
if they have the majority of the taxi-like vehicle traffic in their system, then the times when people use your service instead of uber is limited to surge periods when you would have been busy anyway

the incentive they give is... business

no that's the incentive under fixed rates

i don't see why broken arm dude is better off in a fixed rate system. what if he lives somewhere it wasn't worth it for fixed ride cabs to go?

like let's be real, on-demand automobile transportation in a large urban area is ideally a luxury or used for special cases of need. the reality is that public transportation is not there, and in mid-sized cities (or ones that are large but with shitty public transport) uber is succeeding in expanding the user base but has a number of regressive practices that screw over some drivers and passengers who need basic on-demand transportation

Uber's been a huge story in Toronto the past month or two. I never use cabs, so I haven't been following closely.

xp that's the problem with private taxi systems in general. some places have regulations in place guaranteeing you will get a ride eventually, but uber's trying to work around that, too

I get that more cars showing up when a huge event ends is definitely an opportunity to charge more money for prioritized service, but other than the increased price part, don't taxis tend to swarm around those events anyway, since it's an easy source of guaranteed fares?

most taxis working during a surge would go to the surge, the rest would go scoop up fares elsewhere. the problem isn't cabs being directed to surge areas, the problem is not enough cabs during the surge, which pricing fixes by giving drivers who wouldn't have gone out incentive to do so

people were pissed cause they raised prices during a power outage in affected nabes. I get the knee jerk moral disgust, but the effect is more cabs for ppl who need to gtfo of the power outage

*people in Toronto were pissed

http://i2.wp.com/thelibertarianliquidationist.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Mises-thumbs-up.png?resize=1800%2C1947?w=580

i don't think there's anything austrian about this argument?

nobody seems to mind surge pricing for airlines, hotels, etc etc basically everything. in the long term more cabs and market pricing is gonna make cab rides more affordable and accessible, surge pricing once in a while doesn't change that. it was almost impossible to hail a legal cab and take it to a poor / far out part of the nation's biggest cab city until recently and nobody seemed to care.

uber is a terrible company for totally different reasons.

what are they?

it flaunts the law openly which gives it an advantage over anybody playing fair and had the venture money to get away with it, pretty clearly aims to be a monopoly, brags about how well paid its drivers are when they'll pretty obv have their wages driven down to oblivion eventually, gets its way via lobbyists / behind closed doors

oh, lyfe

agree wth the breaking the law/lobbyists stuff being shitty. but i'm not so sure about wages & monopoly. i mean, i'm sure they aspire to be a monopoly (don't we all) but will they? are taxis a natural monopoly? there's still competition among taxi companies, right? why would rideshare apps be any different then? i guess downloading two apps onto your phone is a bit more of a pain in the ass than saving 2 separate taxi company numbers

it flaunts the law openly which gives it an advantage over anybody playing fair and had the venture money to get away with it, pretty clearly aims to be a monopoly, brags about how well paid its drivers are when they'll pretty obv have their wages driven down to oblivion eventually, gets its way via lobbyists / behind closed doors

this is like, all interweb companies since the 90s

uber's insane valuation shows that a lot of people think that it's more than just a company that eats the taxi industry - like if that's all that happens in the end then yeah it will have to compete on price. if it ends up serving as the technology for a deeper transportation network then it might actually end up w/ a pretty scary monopoly.

yea but then we can just anti trust it

more like goober

I stand with iatee

......

waiting for public transport?

:)

lol

some rich ppl put money on it becoming 'technology for a deeper transportation network' isn't justification for doing anything now though

well yeah esp since it isn't a monopoly yet, but I do think not giving your money to a thuggish company when there are other alternatives is probably a good idea

also cars suck? this isn't hard.

the conviction that it's absolutely necessary to be able to travel anywhere at any time for the right market price is so fucking gross and unhealthy.

meanwhile fossil fuel extraction is destroying all the poor rural areas that these companies and their users won't give a shit about until coastal flooding gets bad and it's way too late. fuck yeah they should be blocked but more than that literally all their resources should be redirected toward alternative energy development.

this kind of energy being invested in a "new" form that is really just a more efficiently parasitic version of the old one, while the new forms that earth wants for survival are put on the backburner is so infuriating.

where are the wind turbine thugs? we need amoral assholes making a shitload of money on solar panels. the possibility is there. if a company can make their dream of strong arming taxis out of existence a reality surely we can dredge up an incentive of billions in an artificial market of solar panel bucks or w/e. we have smart economists, even on this board, maybe they could combine a model for an alt energy market with one for being kewl and kill two birds with one stone.

mega otm

nobody seems to mind surge pricing for airlines, hotels, etc etc basically everything.

People freaking hate airline pricing, are you kidding me? And what they especially hate about it is the unpredictability and time-dependence.

There are def amoral asshole thugs making bank off of solar panels are u kidding

Xxp

They just arent as sexy or visible or clownish as these jokers

ppl shouldn't charge for stuff other ppl want or need tbh

/nobody seems to mind surge pricing for airlines, hotels, etc etc basically everything./

People /freaking hate/ airline pricing, are you kidding me? And what they especially hate about it is the unpredictability and time-dependence.

they might not love it but it I don't see articles on 'why we need to regulate airlines so they can't charge more for holiday flights'

idg matt's rant. money spent on cab rides you call from an app on your iphone wouldn't have otherwise been spent on r&d for renewable energy. the rich dudes who fund uber also throw insane amounts of money at tesla.

also more cabs makes it easier for people not to own cars

I think surge pricing feels particularly predatory because most cities don't have good comprehensive 24 hr public transit. In the absence of good PT, cabs fill some of that role (practically and...emotionally, say), and the idea of a public good suddenly being subject to surge pricing doesn't sit well with most ppl.

uber itself doesn't help matters by being so nakedly malevolent and shitty

I would be interested to hear or read an analysis of uber in the framework of the "right to the city" http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city

my friend drives for uber, or did drive quite a bit til she found out what see you next tuesdays they are

ppl shouldn't charge for stuff other ppl want or need tbh

― irl lol (darraghmac), Sunday, 28 June 2015 14:26 (Yesterday) Permalink

excuse me didn't give u permission to blow my mind dude

I've become hooked on Uber tbh. I don't drink like I used to but the peace of mind is awesome.

https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/uber-or-the-technics-and-politics-of-socially-corrosive-mobility/

socially corrosive mobility – I like it.

It's very much like the charter school movement, or what happened with deregulation of the telecoms, where instead of outright dismantling a public-sanctioned monopoly, they give private players unfair advantages and erode the public-sanctioned monopoly.

― my jaw left (Hurting 2), Tuesday, November 25, 2014 10:54 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is what I keep thinking of too - or, closer to transportation, the brief era of "jitney buses" in Los Angeles, which similarly could cream-skim choice trips, while the trolleys were stuck with increasingly unprofitable franchised lines (struggling in part due to the fact that the streets they ran on, paid for by the trolley companies among other entities, were increasingly choked by cars and jitney buses). To paraphrase Robert Fogelson, the jitneys could ruin the trolleys, but not replace them, since they were never going to run out to all the unprofitable places the trolleys ran. Similarly, MCI could destroy AT&T's financial base in long-distance, but was not about to launch a replacement for Bell Labs or guarantee state-regulated low rates for local service.

You can argue that in both cases the "losing" entities made their own beds, insofar as the trolley companies were happy to have made their buck on land speculation when they first ran the tracks out into the boonies, heedless of future service threats, but there's a lot more to that story and anyway the real loser is the consumer who, once the trolleys were finally shut down (not directly by jitneys, which in fact were banned by law in anticipation of this outcome), has no way to get around besides buying a car.

The question I guess is how much does any of this apply to Uber? Can they effectively soak up the most profitable customers that would have otherwise gone to medallion taxis? And if so, what kinds of effects would that have for consumers? In the extreme hypothetical, if Uber could put all taxis out of business, I think there would suddenly be large swaths of cities where people either cannot get a ride (where the medallion taxis were required to provide one) or are subject to much, much higher "surge pricing." The other stuff about insurance and liability and so on, I really don't know enough about taxis to say... and then the issue of driver compensation which should probably be front and center...

I dunno, the whole business model just kinda wigs me out, it feels like it's "for" app-obsessed libertarian inhumanoid "share economy" boosters like the sick fucks who invented this butler service for busy yuppies on the go, or this thing where you have peons go fetch you cash from an ATM. I realize this is a knee-jerk reaction and that it is possible someone could eventually invent a "share"-based business that doesn't overwhelm me with creepy vibes and assumptions about its creators/intended customers.

In other cities I suppose there's also a question about what this would do to transit services, if frequent transit riders were to switch to Uber, but I sort of doubt it since the price difference is so huge - most people who're really commuting five days a week on the train is not going to switch to Uber, right? In NYC at least, transit ridership is the highest it's been since the Depression, so that's not a super pressing question...

I live in a suburban neighborhood where standing on a corner flagging a cab is an impossibility. Miami is a driving town. Uber consistently prices $7-$10 less than a cab ride of comparable length. Its business practices are heinous and I'm waiting for the first successful class action law suit though (and it's still technically illegal here).

if you use uber you are an advocate/a lobbyist/collaborator ?

this appeared today: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fred-grimm/article25618213.html

when uber is a crime only criminals will uber

https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/uber-or-the-technics-and-politics-of-socially-corrosive-mobility/

― j., Monday, June 29, 2015 10:26 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is good and worth reading imo. first couple paragraphs i was put off by the style/verbosity but it really does sum things up really well re: this neoliberal fantasy-verse and the risk to things which were, in the first place, not left to the smooth flows of the open market for a reason.

Where innovations in personal mobility could just as easily be designed to extend the right to the city, and to conceive of on-demand access to all points in the urbanized field as a public utility, Uber acts to reinscribe and to actually strengthen existing inequities of access. It is an engine consciously, delicately and expertly tuned to socialize risk and privatize gain. In furtherance of the convenience of a few, it sheds risk on its drivers, its passengers, and the communities within which it operates.

Maybe I'm just a closet app-obsessed libertarian inhumanoid "share economy" booster, but I'd probably try the butler for yuppies.

The ATM one, not sure much, since I'm usually not that lazy.

where are you gonna be between your home and anywhere else cash is needed that you couldn't just go to an atm along the way anyway

who uses cash?

lol @ defending fucked up exploitative & racist taxi companies like some socialized public good from a left wing pov

as of right now, uber is cheaper, pays drivers more, gives them more flexible hours, and goes places taxis won't go. onus is on leftists to show how despite all these things it is still inequitable. you can't just say mrmrmmmarket? socialize risk privatize reward?

lol, assumed at first 'fucked up exploitative & racist taxi companies' referred to uber, then wondered why you did a 180 degree turn and were sticking up for them.

Anyway, 'pays drivers more'- does it?

Where innovations in personal mobility could just as easily be designed to extend the right to the city, and to conceive of on-demand access to all points in the urbanized field as a public utility, Uber acts to reinscribe and to actually strengthen existing inequities of access.

like this is just such empty fantasy feel-good economics. who's going to drive "on demand access to all points in the urbanized field" (what does that even mean?) and who's gonna pay? do i have to pay for people who chose to live in the burbs to cab to work every day? taxis and uber complement public transit, why not just say "let's have really good public transit"?

can max or someone translate the David harvey out of marxese? all the surplus values make my head spin

xp- yeah, google "krueger uber"

taxis and uber complement public transit, why not just say "let's have really good public transit"?

i think this is where a lot of these discussions break down--i mean for one i think "let's have really good public transit" is a given for everyone involved in the conversation except maybe travis kalanick. i mean, markets built on top of solid public infrastructure and institutions--who doesn't want this in every arena? so the answer to "why not just say it" is sort of like, well, because that's fantasy feel-good policymaking. the cities we live in now, with few exceptions, have bad public transportation, and anything that 'disrupts' the quasi-public transportation that residents rely on is going to change attitudes about cities, about distances, locations, etc. etc. etc. that stuff is worth examining! even if uber is better than what it's replacing, which in many ways it is.

yah i feel you, I guess I'm discounting the political economy of urban public transit

Among my take-aways from that article were that whatever we think about taxi companies, taxi drivers are, at least on paper, protected in certain (limited!) ways by existing in a regulated, licensed market -- insurance/benefit obligations for example -- whereas Uber gets away with ignoring even the on-paper aspect of this. Taxi customers are, at least on paper, also protected, for example in the requirement that the taxi has to take you way out to your unprofitably remote (but in-city) neighborhood, let's say when the subway is down and your leg is in a cast. Uber isn't subject to these obligations, and in fact its business model seems to be built on avoiding them - keeping costs close to zero by avoiding financial obligation to its drivers, and jacking up the price at will, let's say when the subway is down and your leg is in a cast. Like, specifically this is why we regulate certain markets.

I keep going back to telephone service because that's what I know the most about, but like, if AT&T had just been allowed to do what it wanted, they would have shut down almost all local service in the postwar era, or at least raised the rates drastically, since it was enormously labor-intensive (complex and multitudinous wiring, endless maintenance, very high-intensity switchboard operations), versus long-distance service which was used primarily by big business and was comparatively simple to implement. (This is muddled a bit because the differential rate structure was itself created by the regulatory framework, but the basic point still holds - long-distance, once it reached a certain point of popularity, was where the money was.) We didn't let them do that because access to the system for the general public was deemed basically desirable; they just had to suck it up and take the unprofitable calls too. MCI was allowed to enter the long-distance market without any obligations to provide local service and it was indeed "destabilizing," ultimately to the detriment of consumers who saw rising bills and declining service after divestment. (And let's not even get into Bell Labs.) So yeah, here I find myself defending the world's largest corporation, itself hardly bereft of sinister activities and shady practices - but there was something even more shady about the way it was undone, and how the public did not really get to make a deliberative choice about which kind of telephonic market they wanted to have.

Some of this, again, is knee-jerk: I just don't like it when a business jumps sharkishly into a regulated market wearing its destabilization as a sign of hep-cat blowin-yer-mind rebelliousness, establishing themselves in that market thoroughly well before there has been any actual public or governmental debate over what the pros and cons might be, and whether it should be permitted. It's like, if a well-capitalized Silicon Valley startup started just digging up the roads without permits and laying their own super-sewers for the rich, I would be like "wait, hold up" even if it could be shown that this was in no way harmful (which seems unlikely) just because I feel like such intrusions should be subject to discussion and being overruled. Instead they just establish themselves, effectively cultivating their own political base and transforming the discussion into a "well, like it or not, they're here to stay and we just have to work around them now!" deal. It'd be one thing if they were jumping into the market for delicious peppermint candy or comic books, but they are jumping into the market for taxicabs, which is regulated for any number of reasons, and avoiding that discussion by pretending that what they offer is somehow not a taxicab.

I dunno, I mean I guess I don't really know enough about taxi regulation to have an opinion, since even my opinion on telephone stuff is pretty gray-area in certain ways. It just feels wrong, what they're doing, and the vibe I get off the company is sooooo snotty and proud about that wrongness.

max, places that have horrible public transporation tend to have horrible quasi-public systems too

the kreuger paper is uber marketing and an uber employee is listed as an author. the drivers' stated hourly wages don't include expenses, and we know that expenses for uber drivers (insurance, repairs, cleaning, etc) aren't congruent to the expenses of the taxi and chauffeur companies, which are more heavily (and justly?) regulated and which pay for more expenses on behalf of their drivers. If working on behalf of uber was a sweet deal, I don't think there'd be such a high turnover among drivers (which the kreuger paper also tells us about).

Kreuger also tells us that uber drivers are whiter, younger, more educated, and more affluent, so speedbird's charge that uber is selling elitism and "comfort" rings true.

I live in the number 2 uber market and public transportation here is great.

DrC otm

I can speak a little bit to taxi regs in Chicago. Taxi rates are controlled by municipal regulation and they are some of the lowest in the country (with an additional fuel surcharge added on when gas gets above a certain price). Taxi licenses are issued through a medallion system under which, as it currently stands, a handful of people actually own the medallions and lease their use out to individual drivers. As a result, taxi drivers were working insanely long hours to try to make enough money to afford to do their jobs. In response, the city did not raise taxi prices, but limited the number of hours drivers could drive. smdh. So it's hard for Chicago taxi drivers to make a living, and I have ridden with a few UberX (as noted previously, in Chicago "UberX" is the ride share service, Uber Black is the black car service, and regular Uber is just a decentralized taxi dispatch service where you can call a licensed city tax through the Uber app on your phone) drivers who were previously or sometimes simultaneously taxi drivers.

One major protection that licensed taxi drivers in Illinois have that UberX drivers do not is that for the purposes of workers' compensation law, taxi drivers are considered employees. That means that if a cab driver is in a car accident while driving, s/he gets the full protection of IL workers' comp statutes. That's no small thing, and is one of the reasons why I still prefer licensed taxis over UberX.

Another thing that Uber does that I think is super shady and worth a closer look is to offer to finance new cars for potential drivers (at least in IL - this may not be legal in all states) at rates that are not so great, creating a company-store type dependance on the company.

Oh I forgot to say that taxi medallions are outrageously expensive, like $350,000, so there is a massive barrier to ownership there if someone wanted to be a self-employed licensed taxi driver.

http://www.wbez.org/news/changes-taxi-industry-leave-cab-owners-underwater-111920

I kind of wonder if taxi drivers "making more money," which they probably do with uber in markets like Chicago where there have been undue restrictions on their rates, is offset in a lot of places by the fact they own the car, have to provide their own insurance and maintenance, etc

It kind of leaves the bad taste in my mouth that some proposed corporate policies "allowing" employees to byoc (bring your own computer! you don't have to use the crappy corporate ones! it's a good deal, we swear!) do. It's touted as a win-win, but really it's just offsetting costs and liability.

tbh I wish I'd put together an uber infrastructure first and then just let taxi companies opt-in to it, where they'd pay a rate for everything the app provides and you could then have second-tier companies offering car/insurance/liability packages. As a driver, you could be employed by a typical taxi company or just buy that stuff ala carte

max, places that have horrible public transporation tend to have horrible quasi-public systems too

― iatee, Monday, June 29, 2015 1:57 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i totally agree! i tend to be on the flopson side of things here generally. like this is funny to read from the perspective of a nyer:

Taxi customers are, at least on paper, also protected, for example in the requirement that the taxi has to take you way out to your unprofitably remote (but in-city) neighborhood, let's say when the subway is down and your leg is in a cast.

since uber is vastly better at/for outer-borough cab rides.

but city transit is such a kludgey system already i think its worth being careful at what we're replacing the horrible bits with, since the stuff that is immediately better may end up being worse in the long run

Employers need to be careful with that BYOC crapola or they're going to run afoul of employer/independent contractor regulations. B-ing YOC might work if the employer pays the equivalent of a mileage rate.

But lord that would be an IT nightmare, too, wouldn't it? Unless you expect employees (OR MAYBE INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS NOW) to access work entirely through Citrix or VPN or something.

Another thing that Uber does that I think is super shady and worth a closer look is to offer to finance new cars for potential drivers (at least in IL - this may not be legal in all states) at rates that are not so great, creating a company-store type dependance on the company.

This is kind of funny you bring it up cos one person I know who was getting a job as an Uber employee also tried to pull some shady stuff to get a new car around the same time. He was trying to get the landlord to forge a made-up lease.

access work entirely through Citrix or VPN or something

hai

cabs are garbage in nyc, that might be yr problem

the kreuger paper is uber marketing and an uber employee is listed as an author.

alan krueger is one of the most credible & nonpartisan (if anything left-leaning, he co-authored the famous NJ-PENN fast food min wage study with david card) empirical economists though. they just gave him the data & there was a stipulation that they wouldn't have a final say on what gets in. if you wanna go full conspiracy you could say they gave him garbage data, but i don't doubt he reported the facts straight.

the drivers' stated hourly wages don't include expenses, and we know that expenses for uber drivers (insurance, repairs, cleaning, etc) aren't congruent to the expenses of the taxi and chauffeur companies, which are more heavily (and justly?) regulated and which pay for more expenses on behalf of their drivers.

good point. wage differentials in that table are pretty big though

If working on behalf of uber was a sweet deal, I don't think there'd be such a high turnover among drivers (which the kreuger paper also tells us about).

this prob has more to do with it being way easier to become an uber driver. people can just try it out as pt thing to make some spare cash. same applies for the white college thing.

I know who Krueger is and I also know uber gave him the data. They're buying his credibility.

I think what you're saying about motivations for starting with uber are true, but I also think it's structured both deliberately and not deliberately to be a socially exclusive transportation network. The two-way rating system makes that tendency seem inevitable and that's the non-deliberate part. The deliberate parts are the libertarian ideals and the marketing.

If uber instigated a reform of the medallion system, that'd be cool.

I also think it's structured both deliberately and not deliberately to be a socially exclusive transportation network. The two-way rating system makes that tendency seem inevitable and that's the non-deliberate part. The deliberate parts are the libertarian ideals and the marketing.

not sure what you mean by this

fwiw despite all i've said itt i think this is a good (though politically infeasible) idea http://m.thenation.com/article/192545-socialize-uber (although my friend brought up a good pt that risk of being socialized could distort incentive to create future start-ups)

I think a worker-owned Uber alternative could be very interesting, though I'd still have many of the same concerns as above, and the worker-owned entrant would face some serious challenges. Uber has deep pockets and no commitment to a fair playing field; it seems plausible they'd be willing to cut their own prices impossibly low in the short-term, to squeeze that competition out of the market. Not sure why it's "politically infeasible" though - I mean there are other worker-owned businesses in the US that get along fine, no?

What I would actually love to see is a political discussion about whether to retain the limited-medallion taxi system, or to open up the field to anybody --- provided they meet X, Y, and Z requirements. Defining X Y and Z would be an enormous headache, but it would mean a chance for the public and policymakers to articulate what they're looking for the taxicab infrastructure to do, and what standards it has to meet for its customers and its drivers. If Uber can actually meet those expectations rather than sneaking into the market through a hole in the fence, fine. I suspect the driver-owned Uber alternative, if someone's finished the technology and business plan by then, would have a lot to offer.

I meant that by having drivers rate riders and vice versa, hidden considerations for ratings will be race, class, language, etc. I think the outcome (an elitist transportation network) of these motivations for rating is unintentional, especially since, for techno-utopian libertarian bros, these rating systems typically imply democracy and meritocracy, where everyone has a voice and an equal chance. However, the elitism is implicit in their marketing and ethos and flouting of the law, and I think in that respect the elitism is intentional.

Putting aside the feasibility of socializing uber, I do believe all standard products and services should be heavily socialized, so I could get behind a national quasi-decentralized transportation network.

The entire idea of meritocracy is a farce, from the origin of the word to now, and it basically means "I value the people who I think are doing /real work/".

It's completely compatible with the libertarian bros idea that most people will get left behind in the dust when they jet off to libertarian tech island some day

these guys really think all manual labor, including driving cars, will be done by robots. as the idea leaders, they will be living in luxury, and the underclass will be the necessary but ostracized robot repairmen

https://d12vb6dvkz909q.cloudfront.net/uploads/galleries/35319/deniro_tuttle.jpg

alan krueger is one of the most credible & nonpartisan (if anything left-leaning, he co-authored the famous NJ-PENN fast food min wage study with david card) empirical economists though. they just gave him the data & there was a stipulation that they wouldn't have a final say on what gets in. if you wanna go full conspiracy you could say they gave him garbage data, but i don't doubt he reported the facts straight.

I am sure the data is fine, but it's just a distraction - there's nothing inherent in uber's model that ensures that drivers will be paid well forever, let alone in 2 years. drivers are now operating in a market w/ zero barriers to entry + uber is currently burning a lot of money. and part of the money it's burning is in hiring hundreds of people to develop driverless cars.

if only there was a solution to getting people from place to place that didn't involve thousands of autonomous vehicles

The entire idea of meritocracy is a farce, from the origin of the word to now, and it basically means "I value the people who I think are doing /real work/".

word. Everyone shd read Michael Young's 'Rise of the Meritocracy'.

For Britishers there is also exquisite irony that coiner of the word 'meritocracy' is Toby Young's dad.

let's be real here: fuck 'merit'.

it's cool, because even if you are sick or currently unemployed you can claim you would be doing /real work/ if you were able so you still have more merit than ppl doing manual labor

if only there was a solution to getting people from place to place that didn't involve thousands of autonomous vehicles
--Upright Mammal (mh)

um...there isn't? unless we massively centralized society. the heterogeneity in "places people want to be driven at places in time" is beyond what any centralized service could do

i used to have the smug attitude towards "libertarian bros" and "technology" that you guys have. while it's good to be critical of everything, i don't think it's a particularly healthy bias in thinking about the future & work and all this stuff.

I am occasionally surrounded by hordes of these people and they are the worst fucking people ever btw

everyone knows the problems with meritocracy. being able to rate your cab driver is still a good thing (what if he was a creep?) also driverless cars are a good thing

being able to provide feedback on service is important. rating a driver on a nebulous five star scale where anything less than a 5 means they are going to lose service means a weird negotiation of what "good service" really means

I am occasionally surrounded by hordes of these people and they are the worst fucking people ever btw
--Οὖτις

maybe so! i just think becoming cantankerous & vaguely self-righteous shaking our fists at every instance of the future is prob not the way

while it's good to be critical of everything, i don't think it's a particularly healthy bias in thinking about the future & work and all this stuff.

imo it pays to be critical and think about how and why things are useful and whether they are filling the right niche.

tbh I am straight-up dismissive of things I think are bad and I'm not going to debate what they're doing wrong

like I was just in yr city not long ago, flopson, and I did all my transport via train/bus/walking but if I did need on-demand transport I was sure as hell going to try uber

uber works really well for on-demand transport, I just think they're approaching the market from the angle of shitlords

these guys really think all manual labor, including driving cars, will be done by robots. as the idea leaders, they will be living in luxury, and the underclass will be the necessary but ostracized robot repairmen

― Upright Mammal (mh), Tuesday, June 30, 2015 10:07 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kind of amazing how old-school this all is really. like this is basically how the forward-thinking bourgeois reassured themselves in the 1890s... reading bellamy, idealizing engineers as the clear-sighted makers of tomorrow's world. the national technocracy is just around the corner! no manual labor will be necessary, social strife will be resolved by my lifestyle actually getting more comfortable!

no manual labor will be necessary, social strife will be resolved by my lifestyle actually getting more comfortable!

i mean, they were kind of right? there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890

Also eugenics.

there is definitely more manual labour now than in 1890

?

well there's more poor people that's for sure

http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/images/Popn_Graph2.jpg

the extra few billion are not predominantly working white collar jobs

they are all adorable layabout moppets

I wonder if we have the technology to all live infinitely more creative and comfortable lives if we fully embraced wealth redistribution. Technocratic promises are real and we are all living cleaner healthier better lives than medieval kings but there's no real reason for most people to work other than some at the top want to be obscenely rich. We should be colonizing space and extending our lives to hundreds of years long.

i used to have the smug attitude towards "libertarian bros" and "technology" that you guys have.

I don't have a smug attitude towards them. In fact, I find the intersection of the two pretty terrifying in ways that preclude smugness fyi

only if it was distributed worldwide

if it was the US we'd all buy three phones and bigger cars
xp

Technocratic promises are real and we are all living cleaner healthier better lives than medieval kings but there's no real reason for most people to work other than some at the top want to be obscenely rich.

second part of this is not true

i mean, they were kind of right? there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890

― flopson, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:07 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they were "right" only in that the labor was moved overseas and that automation and electric motors eliminated tons of jobs that existed in 1890. pretty much nothing else about this scenario played out as expected - they really imagined the technocrats would displace the trusts and the cronyist government to run the economy directly, directing production and labor around in some "optimal" way. the closest we got was the new deal maybe - there's a pretty continuous line through hoover (who fits this persona to a T, right down to being a mining engineer -- super heroic turn of the century profession) to rexford tugwell and ultimately to all the postwar big-science, big-statistics, big-social-planning type agents. none of whom actually had as their real project the elimination of drudgery or the fundamental restructuring of society.

so what actually happened was the trusts stayed in power and resisted all but periodically-corrective planning of the economy. they just did some back of the envelope calculations and realized that with immigration capped, wages were going to be forced up anyway, and it made strategic sense to collaborate with unions, and shift increasingly to a consumerist model, to stabilize consumption and flatten out boom/bust jolts. the models were henry ford and henry kaiser, not bellamy or the visitor from altruria. so social strife went down and the unions ended up not permanently contesting the automation of jobs, but the surplus brought by new technology was not manifested as three-day work weeks and leisure for all. one might also refer to e.g. ruth cowan on household labor and automation -- it's a cliche to report it now, but the fact that time spent on household labor did not actually go down with all the new gadgets for sale, by itself, really destabilizes the conjecture that surely with this next go-round, technology will make everything so smooth and effortless that life will be better than ever! but ogmor is correct that the real shadow to this story (and integral to it) is the abused labor overseas. the smooth plane of existence enjoyed by the libertarian bro app designer is not just juxtaposed with the proletarianization of the global south, it's fundamentally made possible by it.

probably preaching an undergrad lecture to the choir here, sorry - just been thinking about this stuff a lot lately.

the extra few billion are not predominantly working white collar jobs
--ogmor

everything increases if you don't control for population. is your argument that things engineers invented didn't substitute for manual labor and the decrease is just from outsourcing manual labor to the convenient extra billions? cause that's wrong. also the increase in pop happened because of increases in agricultural productivity which is a technology that substitutes manual labor

Doctor Casino, my man

^heh yes

yup get that guy on Jeopardy or something

I could argue that tech has allowed an enormous increase of manual labour through population explosion or talk about cases where inefficient manual labour jobs are created for excess population but my point is just that the latter part of this - there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890 - is really obviously untrue

but the surplus brought by new technology was not manifested as three-day work weeks and leisure for all.

people don't want to only substitute money for leisure though, they also want to use the extra money to consume more stuff. not all of this is conspicuous consumption by the rich. we also do work a lot less. you chose 3 day work week seemingly arbitrarily, but average weekly work hours in USA decreased by ~ 1/3

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5-x1snHWGCnZ150FU-w_2Rw6Rw4=/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2475084/hoursworked_per_engaged_person.0.png

couldn't find a graph going back the whole century, but look at table 2 in here https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

in 1900 the three indexed have 59.6, 55.0 and 58.5 hours per week. in 1988 the census has 39.2. i think it's now 33 (http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx)

tbh I think we are talking global here, unless all of your purchases come from yr own country

xpost to self, i think i kinda derailed a few times there but basically the echo i was picking up on, i think, is the idea that if only supply and demand were more precisely matched through technology/technologists, there would be this general benefit to everybody. this was a conservative and a 'progressive' position (witness the embrace of taylorism by the european left -- they figured that achieving efficiency would mean working less to achieve the same output, rather than working just as much to achieve a greater output, then arguing over how to distribute the surplus. or on the conservative side, the 1930s fantasies of frank lloyd wright - we'll all work a couple days in the factory but mostly be tending our virtuous farms.). from ~1890 forward, this was to be negotiated by the engineer. at some point it became the 'planner,' later armed with mainframe computers.

my gut feeling is that a version of the same sentiment is now present in a lot of 'app talk,' especially _____-on-demand stuff: connecting buyer and seller directly eliminates waste, and everybody wins! the implied benefit to society is different, obviously - no one is talking about reducing hours worked in the factory, or peacefully resolving the workers' uprisings. but there's still this faith that a magic technology, properly adminstered, will resolve society's problems. that's been debunked so many times it hardly bears reiterating but the main point must be held: technologies are shaped by society as much as the other way around, and powerful actors choose which kinds of technology to develop, what they're "for" and how to deploy them. blah blah blah, tl;dr sorry.

the "three day" thing was basically pulled out of the aforementioned 19th century discourse, can't give you a specific source i'm afraid, but this kind of thing was in the water.

also just to be clear, not just talking about 'conspicuous consumption' but your more classic, shopworn examples of how supply and demand get stabilized by encouraging more demand - getting this year's fridge, getting the government-backed mortgage for the cheap new house in levittown etc. this isn't to demonize anybody specific in the process -- i'm making really a kind of narrow and probably esoteric/pedantic point about the specific fantasies of certain people a hundred years ago, and i'm just saying that whatever did happen it wasn't what they thought would happen.

I could argue that tech has allowed an enormous increase of manual labour through population explosion or talk about cases where inefficient manual labour jobs are created for excess population but my point is just that the latter part of this - there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890 - is really obviously untrue

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:01 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you think it's still true adjusted for population? unadjusted it's trivial, but do you think manual labor as a % of population has increased since 1890? for the whole world, rich world, USA, whatever

I'm not sure anyone knows, the data for 1890 is going to be incredibly patchy. Unadjusted isn't trivial at all, there are vastly more people now working huge hours doing low paid manual labour than ever before, if that changes it will involve enormous worldwide economic upheaval

Thinking technology will fix human suffering is much older than the 19th century though. Alchemists, occult scientists, and early globalists believed that too. Some of their wildest fantasies (speech travelling through the air as fire for instant communication) have come true to the point of ubiquitous banality.

2006: twitter invented
2008: black president

there's still this faith that a magic technology, properly adminstered, will resolve society's problems. that's been debunked so many times it hardly bears reiterating but the main point must be held: technologies are shaped by society as much as the other way around, and powerful actors choose which kinds of technology to develop, what they're "for" and how to deploy them. blah blah blah, tl;dr sorry.

idk i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates and that ultimately no one person or group of people are powerful enough to control it, and that general attempts to thwart it are misguided. maybe some people are too optimistic, maybe rich people 100 years ago were too optimistic. so what?

The good thing about information technology is it is hard to keep closed. It seems to naturally want to be democratized and freely accessible. Which is a pretty optimistic position but sort of seems inevitable in most cases.

tbrr i ascribe to an acemoglu & robinson-ish view where technology & institutions are determined endogenously endogenously, good technology in the wrong institutional context can still be bad

*only one endogenously there

I'm not sure anyone knows, the data for 1890 is going to be incredibly patchy. Unadjusted isn't trivial at all, there are vastly more people now working huge hours doing low paid manual labour than ever before, if that changes it will involve enormous worldwide economic upheaval

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:25 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why would there be upheaval just because there's a larger absolute number of people doing anything? what if the absolute number of people low paid manual labor increased slower than the number of people doing well paid labor? why would that lead to an upheaval?

It was once believed that Johann Fust was working for the devil. After several of Gutenberg’s bibles were sold to King Louis XI of France, it was decided that Fust was performing witchcraft. This idea came about for a few reasons, including the fact that some of the type was printed in red ink, mistaken for blood. It was also discovered that all of the letters in these bibles, presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts, were oddly identical. Fust had sold 50 bibles in Paris and the people there could not fathom the making and selling of so many bibles so quickly, because printing had not come to the forefront yet in France. Parisians figured that the devil had something to do with the making of these copies, and Fust was thrown into jail on charges of black magic. He was eventually released, since it was proved he was running a business in which printing enabled the rapid production of multiple copies of the same text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Fust

presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts

any sufficiently advanced technology etc

in many parts of the world the transition to a cash economy has led to longer working hours as people work to support their huge families (with lower infant mortality and more old people to care for). there are some places which have benefited due to specific resources, cash crops or whatever, but the extension of the global market, and with it, medicine & tech, has undermined a lot of local economies so that longer working hours (and mb less desirable work) are the only way people there can compete. under the current economic system I'm not really sure how this will change except perhaps 'very gradually'

population changes are v interesting but not necessarily the result of technology, even medical advances

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CApDu54UcAAzFSD.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CApDu3qUsAAXunG.png

i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates

hahah this is perhaps the stupidest thing I've ever read on this board I mean have you noticed how the last 200 years of technological "progress" are on the verge of rendering life on this planet extinct - mass extinction underway, a century of previously unheard of genocide etc.

http://i.imgur.com/NfClEf0.gif

You never heard of the plague?

Why are we limiting this to 200 years? We are just ignoring all years before the invention of plumbing/sewage.

hahah this is perhaps the stupidest thing I've ever read on this board

very rude shakes smh

I mean have you noticed how the last 200 years of technological "progress" are on the verge of rendering life on this planet extinct - mass extinction underway, a century of previously unheard of genocide etc.

i mean this is an unfathomably big question none of us can really have an answer to. here's something though: even the richest place in the world was barely above subsistence for almost all of history

https://i2.wp.com/www.kevinbryanecon.com/Class11MaxPerCapitaGDP.png

the fact that some of the technology that allowed us to do that also allowed us to kill tonnes of people and threaten the livability of our planet are very troubling (the latter will be solved or at least greatly mitigated by technology). but i mean, solving the problem of an eternity of if-you're-lucky-subsistence-otherwise-starvation is also pretty important IMO

it's surprising to me that on a msgboard consisting of people sitting at the absolute pinnacle of historical & geographical personal income are so cynical about technology

i mean, here's another image from only the past 35 years

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIMwLfPWUAAdV2E.png

is it really the stupidest thing you've ever read to consider that maybe this is a good thing?

flopson otm imo

I wouldn't expect the species to last forever anyway. Might as well have magic boxes that summon wheeled machines to drive us places.

funny this discussion is going on here given the atlantics cover story

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/hard-work-taking-apart-post-work-fantasy

flopson, I don't doubt that technology has helped decrease poverty worldwide, but I don't think World Bank data is the best way to make your case for whatever it is you're making a case for (technologically-aided neoliberalism?).

why not? which data set you would use? i don't know what neoliberalism means

Because they're an organization that has a vested financial interest in proving that unfettered free markets raise developing countries out of poverty. Maybe they do, but the World Bank wouldn't be the organization I'd go to to make the case.

As for this working week issue, contemporary data isn't very thorough, but I've found some commentary. From Lee, McCann, Messenger (2007):

In this chapter, we have reviewed actual working hours from various angles.
First, from a historical perspective, we have observed that developments in
working hours are rather uneven, depending on the degree of social intervention
as well as economic development. Of course, the forms that social
intervention can take are varied, ranging from legislation to financial
support for a specific working-hour pattern that is perceived as socially
desirable.

Second, when the focus is placed upon the manufacturing sector, average
weekly working hours have been relatively stable for the last ten years in
many countries. There is no sign that developing countries are ‘catching up’
with industrialized ones, and gaps between countries remain substantial.
However, average figures mask the differences in the distribution of working
hours across countries. In developing countries, the incidence of both long
hours and short hours is high, and whenever this is the case, average figures
could potentially be misleading.

Third, the aspect of long working hours has been examined based on the
universal threshold of the 48-hour working week and the relative concept of
observance, the latter of which can be defined in relation to the existing statutory
normal hours. The 48-hour working week was introduced almost a
century ago, but our analysis indicates that while the incidence of long hours
(i.e. the proportion of workers working more than 48 hours per week) tends
to have decreased in many countries over the last ten years, long hours are
still widespread. Our estimation indicates that roughly one out of five
workers (or 22 per cent) are working longer than 48 hours per week.
Fourth, observance rates tend to be low in many countries. In fact there is
no reason to believe that ‘stricter’ standards (i.e. shorter statutory normal
hours) can lower the observance rate, as the evidence shows that many
developing countries have low observance rates despite their ‘less-stringent’
regulations. The ERI developed in this chapter, which attempts to capture
both the de jure and de facto aspects of working-hour regulation, shows that
the relationship between statutory hours, economic development and
observance is rather complicated, such that any generalization would be
difficult to make (cf. World Bank 2004).

Finally, on the other side of the working time challenge lies short hours,
which are particularly widespread among women and the self-employed. A
considerable proportion of these short-hours workers are likely to be underemployed
and would like to work more, and they are also more likely to fall
into the trap of poverty. Combined with long working hours, many developing
and transition countries are faced with the bifurcation of working
hours between short and long hours, or put in a different way, between
income poverty and time poverty.

so you think they cook the books? i've never heard that. got any evidence? do other measures not stack up to WB's?

trade def a part of the story in the "East Asia and the Pacific" line on that chart though

funny how deep this thread got so fast, like 2 days ago i was arguing that taxis should be able to change prices across time, now we're talking about technology, the global distribution of wealth and the length of the work week

flopson you know when people are protesting about dropping the debt that developing nations have because basically predatory loans were given to them by monied interests in rich countries in order to control their economies?

Those loans come from the World Bank

i know what the world bank is

i can't find anywhere on the internet claiming that world bank data is cooked. saw something about how their african data is bad but everyone knows that & it's because governments cook the numbers they give out, there is even a book about it. is this an ilx exclusive conspiracy theory?

it may seem like subjective musings on the nature of corporatism but tbf subjective takes are based on patterns of exploitative capital and there is a lot you can do by presenting some facts but not others that runs far short of book-cooking

idk you're in mtl and I would probably skew toward skepticism of social initiatives were I there full-time due to social graft but the SF-based companies are a diff species

need a graph to show outic's decline into one of the most doltish posters tbh

easy there

I take it all back

xp- nah i like social initiatives, i just also like industrialisation and technology. crazy i know

I don't think they've "cooked the books," but I think their avowed investment in the free market and very large, literal, financial investment in developing countries can lead to a less than "objective" methodology. It's like psychometricians and g or IQ. They don't necessarily fudge their data, but their entire livelihood is based on the belief that g is a real thing. And just like in psychometrics, you're not going to see a lot of visible pushback in the literature!

Powell and Skarbek (2004) in defense of sweatshops:

The 60 and 70 hour estimates are more likely to be accurate since these employees often work long hours and six days per week.

The less speculative Garnaut and Song (2006) shows that migrant workers in semi-developed China work "extremely" long hours (about 300 a month) in exchange for crossing that $1.25 a day poverty threshold:

[...] migrant poverty as typically measured is considerably reduced. Once the difference in hours worked between migrants and urban residents is taken into account, we find that migrants would have suffered considerably more from poverty had they worked the same house as their urban counterparts. Our findings raise many questions as to the relationships between poverty measures, hourly income and total work hours that have not received much attention in poverty literature.

Urban workers in China on average work only about 20 hours more per month beyond the typical 40 hour work week, while self-employed workers work about what migrant workers do (somewhere near 300 hours a month on average).

I don't think it's very easy to calculate quality of life, happiness and working hours across the developing world, and I don't think we can unequivocally say that global markets and technological advancements improve or deteriorate these measures. On the other hand, when there's an immediate human cost associated with a technology - say that machines put workers out of business in car factories - that human cost doesn't disappear just because on aggregate people in the world or in a nation appear to be wealthier.

Like I'm not going to ignore the number, however small, of uberx drivers who get sued to oblivion because they don't have (and could scarcely afford) the right insurance.

I don't think it's very easy to calculate quality of life, happiness and working hours across the developing world, and I don't think we can unequivocally say that global markets and technological advancements improve or deteriorate these measures. On the other hand, when there's an immediate human cost associated with a technology - say that machines put workers out of business in car factories - that human cost doesn't disappear just because on aggregate people in the world or in a nation appear to be wealthier.

most things that improve aggregate welfare will have some losers. weavers lose their jobs to the loom, everyone else pays less for their clothes. one of the main roles for governments in trade policy is to redistribute towards losers. that's right there in gains from trade theorem #1, that there exists a transfer system that makes everyone else better off. working hours through the process of industrialization are inverse-u shaped. there are ways to make it less brutal & that's worth talking about, but whether or not to reverse the aggregate welfare improving process shouldn't be up for discussion

So how is that working out for Detroit? People aren't theoretical and the deindustrialization of the US obviously had consequences that blindsided economic planners. And how can you use the phrase "trade theorem no 1" and still be confused by "neoliberalism"?

People's complaints about uber et al are pretty concrete:

1 the transportation network is a public good and should be regulated as such
2 consumers deserve uniform consumer protections
3 employees should have the employee protections of their state. Contractors should have the leeway to negotiate their own contracts
4 commercial drivers need commercial classes of licensing and insurance

The less concrete complaints might be

1 robot taxis are scary
2 libertarian tech bros pls stop lobbying my elected officials

So how is that working out for Detroit? People aren't theoretical and the deindustrialization of the US obviously had consequences that blindsided economic planners.

deindustrialization of the US -> industrialization somewhere else. people in detroit still live in a rich country, many of them left and got jobs elsewhere. i don't think US redistributed enough to compensate losers from deindustrialization (in particular because it affected local economies even in industries other than manufacturing) but there's no a priori reason why people in detroit should have manuf jobs & not ppl in china, unless you're, like, nationalistic

how can you use the phrase "trade theorem no 1" and still be confused by "neoliberalism"?

people use it to mean different things and no one really identifies as it? just seems like a vague word leftists use to throw at things to the right of them? like if neoliberal means fiscal policies of reagan & thatcher i know what it means. you used it in the context of trade policy, i don't know what it means in that context, free trade increased throughout new deal which is not neoliberal (right?) i once read this old washington monthly pamphlet called A Neoliberal Manifesto and it had some good stuff in it and some bad but not a lot that i recognized as what people refer to as neoliberal today

i'm not sure what all 4 of the first complaints mean either. are non-uber taxi companies regulated like a public good iyo? in what way is uber unique in how it deals with contractors? i don't know the answer to those questions

the breaking the law and lobbying stuff is a concern for sure, but taxis are already a huge lobby. does it take a lobby to fight a lobby? idk. the mayor where i live has sided with the taxi lobbies & it doesn't seem particularly cool

Why are we limiting this to 200 years? We are just ignoring all years before the invention of plumbing/sewage.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, June 30, 2015 3:28 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw remotely adequate urban sewerage is basically the last 100-150 years, max. this is complicated though b/c the need for sewers as opposed to privies and cesspools etc. is driven not only by rising urban densities but by the adoption of a particular form of water provision and other uses/practices that go along with it which generate way way more waste, none of which can be effectively or economically separated out for fertilizer (as had previously been the practice).

regarding tech and the 19th century --- sure. other people have been enthused about technology and claimed it would have benefits. i'm referring more narrowly to a particular attitude emerging at a particular moment which specifically has to do with ideas about how technology and management would align to solve the obvious social problems of capitalism in america, eliminating waste and inefficiency and more properly linking up supply to demand.

but yeah like even within the history of americans enthusiastic about technology this kind of attitude doesn't emerge (indeed, wouldn't make sense) until after the civil war. the antebellum period, in most of the conventional histories (john kasson, alan trachtenberg, leo marx, david nye --- to be fair there's a lot of cross-pollination there), is characterized by wayy more ambivalence, people fretting over whether there's something fundamentally un-american or un-democratic about the direction of technology, people looking over at england and going oh god the satanic mills, i hope we never have factories here! etc. at a certain point the mainstream bourgeois opinion flips over to progress, progress, progress, and specifically: trust the engineers and the other stuff i'm babbling about above. and maybe it is a strained analogy but i do feel like there's more of a connection between the bellamyite enthusiasm and the libertarian tech-bro strawman than there is between either of those and the seventeenth century alchemist. i mean then the concern is macro-scale supply/demand, this awareness that the economy, more decades than not, was completely fouled up by crises brought on by overcapitalization and overproduction (particularly by the railroads). that's not at all what the app people are promising to solve! i dunno i guess none of this is really crucial to understanding uber, i'm just trying to find new ways to dislike libertarian tech bro strawmen. carry on, everyone.

idk i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates and that ultimately no one person or group of people are powerful enough to control it, and that general attempts to thwart it are misguided.

others are dealing with the "solves more problems than it creates" but i do feel obliged to defend the truism about social control of technology. decades of scholarship have basically established that this happens all the time and we just take it for granted that the forms of technologies that are familiar to us, that established an early edge for example and get locked in, are the inevitable/natural results of innovation. but this isn't really the case.

like, edison didn't just sit down and tinker with things and figure out the light bulb, he sat down to invent something that specifically would be viable competition for the existing gas light companies, and would basically work along the same business model, which meant his inventing activity would be driven by ways of reducing the transmission medium (copper wire), so he needed not just a light bulb, but a light bulb that would produce adequate light with an amount of current suited to an economically viable amount of wire. (see the work of thomas hughes here.) or, later on, maybe more clearly: the development of electrical appliances from the 1920s on is basically in the hands of westinghouse and general electric. they have all the relevant patents and they are so huge they can buy up anybody else's. so the appliances we got are the ones they found it worth their time to develop, which are a combination of the ones that seemed marketable at whatever time, and the ones that would generate the most usage of electric power, since that was what those companies made their money on. being a national duopoly, they were also more unified than gas companies, thus able to drive gas-driven refrigerator compressors off the market even though the latter are arguably technologically superior (no loud obnoxious motor, no moving parts to suffer breakdowns). (see the work of ruth cowan here.)

tons of other examples, and honestly i'm just kinda recapping articles i've read in recent times; this isn't my field but i've been kinda geeking out on it. the development of computer-controlled machine tools being driven by management's interest in reducing the power of skilled machine-tool operators. the shitty, defective first-generation M-16s being basically the result of sabotage by the army in order to win an obscure and confusing turf war over weapons development. (weapons in general present a vast field of technologies developed because just ungodly sums of money were thrown at them by a few, easily enumerated agencies. there's nothing inevitable about humans arriving at the atomic bomb or the joint strike fighter or whatever.) or, going back to sewers --- the choice of whether to get more clean water by the technology of filtering, or the technology of damming another river and flooding out more hamlets, would seem to favor the former, but historically, boston chose the latter again and again because it was what they'd already done once, and it enabled them to get more water without having to make adjustments to the system they were already used to, or to implement metering to reduce demand, which some of the engineers would have said was more rational.

these are social choices, these are political choices: what technology to develop, what it's for, who gets to use it, etc. etc. that's not to say that sinister super-powers decide all our fates and manipulate the technological chessboard etc... just that to treat "technology" like it's some kind of protean and willful force wending its way through history, beyond our ken or control, is not maybe the most useful model. not to say we need to "thwart" it either -- just that we shouldn't confuse ourselves about the inevitability of this or that technology, or this or that use of a technology.

sorry i've also been drinking a bit btw

others are dealing with the "solves more problems than it creates"

they didn't do a particularly good job besides calling me dumb tbh ;-)

i like your examples, it's a very interesting history. one of my favourite economics blogs is by a guy working in a field that's basically trying to understand invention, he writes papers about like the early airplane industry and stuff. i agree that the direction of invention isn't inevitable and is highly path dependent. some people with a lot of power may have been able to turn the tides are certain moments as your gas-driven refrigerator example beautifully illustrates, but i think the technologies that succeed and get adopted are highly sensitive to demand, and that the gains largely accrue to consumers (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=820309)

i have joel mokyr gifts of athena out from the library but haven't read yet. have you read anything by him?

but it's hard to model or tell anything more than isolated anecdotes about because while yes there is some social political economic stuff we may understand every invention is not only different, but kind of by definition a surprise? seems like an inherently difficult thing to generalize about.

lol @ pretending not to know what neoliberalism means A+ troll

re the deindustrialization of the US, as I said before, real jobs, families, and communities can't be waved away because of global economic changes (or presumed "progress"). People in Detroit live in a rich country, but the murder rate there is higher than Malaysia, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala. If you believe Todd Clear, mass incarceration drives up poverty and crime rates, which further compound problems in the region.

Jobs aren't exported for the sake of the global economy, anyway, and that's a totally baffling way of looking at what has been a catastrophe for people living in the Rust Belt.

Re uberx, cities, states, and counties can regulate prices, maintenance, driver background checks and licensing, the number of cabs on the road, the ability to refuse a destination or a passenger, and a general code of conduct for drivers. Yes, taxis are regulated like a public good in these respects.

Uber's drivers are treated like contractors but Uberx drivers don't have the ability to negotiate their contracts and their code of conduct is determined by Uber as if Uber were their employer.

I don't really have an opinion on tech in general bc of this lack of 'pure' technology divorced from the market and its social implementation. I do think the combined effect has often exacerbated inequality as well as increased global wealth. just as there's no a priori reason why industry is in east asia rather than boston (though of course the economic reasons are crucial), there's no a priori, or purely-market derived (neoliberal if you like) reason for redistribution, and without that it seems hard to have faith. I can imagine some people from detroit not being too thrilled to be told they still live in a rich country. relative wealth is crucial. the idea that in some absolute terms an unemployed person in the west in 2015 is richer than a sumerian noble or whatever is not really meaningful

haven't read any joel mokyr, will take a look though! my bibliography has this "theories of technology grab-bag" section, trying to arm myself with different lenses but don't want to end up accidentally pursuing too much of the one S-T-S/"social shaping of technology" way of looking at things.

i like your examples, it's a very interesting history. one of my favourite economics blogs is by a guy working in a field that's basically trying to understand invention, he writes papers about like the early airplane industry and stuff. i agree that the direction of invention isn't inevitable and is highly path dependent. some people with a lot of power may have been able to turn the tides are certain moments as your gas-driven refrigerator example beautifully illustrates, but i think the technologies that succeed and get adopted are highly sensitive to demand, and that the gains largely accrue to consumers (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=820309)

well, the thing about technology's success being "sensitive to demand" is that demand is also socially constructed, and what constitutes a "gain" to consumers is basically subjective and up for debate (as in this thread). i'm thinking here of something like superhighways in the US - many or even most consumers saw them as a definite "gain" at the time and they made possible the adoption or expansion of many other technologies, most obviously the rapid proliferation of the detached single-family house (itself plugged into, driving, and being driven by, other technological systems like the plywood industry). but of course as i think we all realize, the adoption of superhighway infrastructure was not just a response to a neutral and innate "demand" for automobile-ready transportation to the boonies; it was more or less a free gift from the federal government, bonded out and financed by the general tax purse, while other alternative transportation and residential technologies were left adrift. thanks to racial red-lining, technocratic assumptions about the evils of the city, and other socially-driven biases, the FHA/GI Bill cash and financing-guarantee options were not available for building or renovating in the inner city, and mass transit was effectively abandoned as a capital spending priority. from 1921 to 1971, the federal government spent $72 billion on highways versus $65 million on rail. armed with the one technology (or really, technological system: the highways, the plywood, the means of accounting and other logistical techniques for efficiently putting the builders on the sites etc.) we built a suburban country.

to some people looking back it's pretty straightforward: americans Just Wanted suburbia and that is what they consumed - the technologies and infrastructure responded to their demands. but other people who wanted other things didn't get them, and now if we survey the state of the country's land use, transportation infrastructure, economic mobility, housing stock, etc. etc. it becomes apparent that automobile suburbia can't be read as simply a "gain." at best, a really mixed bag. the way we used the technologies we chose had some consequences that were probably pretty nice for some people and a lot of others that may have been really destructive and shitty and not easily reversible. see also pollution and global warming as others have pointed out. the planet's ecology has already been dramatically, perhaps catastrophically altered. dunno how or whether i would begin to determine whether on balance that was "worth it" for all the technologies and applications that brought that about.

was thinking about the atom bomb in the shower, too. i mean there's nothing inevitable about that one by any means --- the idea was thought up before the implementation, and it was decided to spend years and an absolutely ungodly amount of money and logistical force to develop it. los alamos, oak ridge, everything, and this is a blank check made to order deal: "at the end of this, give us an atomic bomb." but there's so many alternate universe scenarios. a country that wasn't facing war might have read the einstein/szilárd letter and said "gtfo with this crackpot idea." or if we'd won the war earlier, budget-cutters might have shut down the lab and we'd now know the bomb only as an item in a funny list of "ten crazy superweapons the government actually tried to build in WW2!" or if it so happened that the US didn't actually have easy access to any quantities of uranium, it would have just sat in a file collecting dust. or different leadership might have built one bomb, tested it, and decided not to use it. or in peacetime with a less developed Pentagon, this might have been a decision subject to public debate, like reagan's SDI, and some hypothetical publics would have voted for it, and others would have said "a weapon suited only for genocide? count me out!" or maybe it would have been first developed in the context of peaceful uses, like the (hopeless) plowshares program, bombs for digging canals, and only a century later someone said "hey we could use this super-dynamite as a weapon of war!" who knows. the way it happened is the way it happened and so it just seems like a game of Civilization where yup, after you develop the rocket and mass production, the next thing you're going to discover is the atom bomb. sorry if i'm beating a dead horse here -- partly just talking myself through my own notes as a way of reinforcing my memory of the stuff i've been reading! obviously, uber is much worse than the atom bomb but maybe we can extrapolate.

"inevitability" is one of silicon valley's great ideological cudgels

http://ariamythe.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/inevitability1.jpg

the way it happened is the way it happened and so it just seems like a game of Civilization where yup, after you develop the rocket and mass production, the next thing you're going to discover is the atom bomb.

haha pretty sure i fucked up the tech tree though, don't you need something kind of off-topic like mechanized infantry units or something?

looked it up, you need Electronics

bummer that it cancels out isaac newton's college though

my favorites are how discovering electronics means shakespeare no longer impresses anybody, and communism cancels out both the pyramids and michelangelo. i mean i can see what they were going for but what a wonderfully arbitrary and schematic model of world history. great game obv.

War economy has been around for thousands of years, its one of the most sustained economies on the planet. Weapons since the dawn of man have gotten more and more devastating in response to heavy spending on war R&D.

Crooked warlords have spent thousands of years trying to make a planet-destroying ultra weapon. The only thing that made it inevitable was technology/physics going WE THINK WE CAN TECHNICALLY DO THIS and the war market reacting in kind by protecting their futures betting on a runaway train of supply and demand.

but, like, sweden didn't undertake the manhattan project. and really, how many crooked warlords, if any, ever made a planet-destroying ultra weapon their goal? it's really nit an innate feature of the human condition... and that kind of industrially-scaled r&d effort had barely been around for fifty years at that time. another legacy of gilded-age attitudes about the relationship between 'science' and 'technology.' even the idea of the dedicated, product/results-oriented research lab was pretty new. the paradigm up until the civil war or so was 'the inventor' (as flawed and incomplete an understanding of invention as that gives us).

the point though is that the money could have just as easily been spent on something else, and ta-da, no bomb. or a bomb that comes around at a time in history when nobody feels it's pressing to use it, hence no fear of the bomb and no sense of urgency around developing the h-bomb. anyway it was, i think, the biggest research effor ever undertaken for anything in history, so it's not hard to imagine circumstances or tiny shifts that would have made that seem like a less compelling use of the government's resources than -- even sticking within the military-- funneling the same resources into ongoing projects for submarines, jet propulsion, electromechanical computers. lots of these things feed each other obv. or if things hadn't looked so dire in europe or einstein's letter had gotten lost in the mail, maybe it would have all gone into the TVA. who knows?

thanks for your posts itt doctor casino, and i would say this but it needs more STS not less, which you're happily doing. these forces aren't arbitrary, demand isn't a black box, we have a choice, etc.

ugh, inevitable, not arbitrary

shucks, thanks.

to bring it back to uber i would just say, forget the 1890s tech bros, just remember we can resist the 2010s tech bros and that no invention is a "genie that's out of the bottle" or a horse that's left the stable. lots of arguably good ideas die on the vine, lots of bad ones don't "take" in the market, lots of both can be controlled in many ways. uber and their ilk, i think, count on us seeing all technologies as idea-goods on a free consumer marketplace, in which case they will win out with the people who want to buy them, whatever the consequences that poses for them or anybody else. but we have plenty of models for other ways we might receive new technologies or new ways of using technology, from los angeles banning the jitney buses, to our accepting canned meat but requiring FDA inspectors in the plants.

andrew feenberg pushes this a little further, arguing for a democratization of technological decisions (though being perhaps fatally vague about how we'd get to that point), arguing by analogy to other once-"free" areas that have become subject to some forms of public decision-making, like education. for technology, he gives the example of steam boilers on riverboats: they used to explode, kind of frightfully often, killing people left and right. that, the manufacturers would have said, was just the nature of the technology. don't want your decapitated head landing a mile away from your riverboat poker game? don't ride a steamboat! it's just what the technology does. but in fact this became subject to regulation and standards, and eventually, for all practical purposes, a steamboat boiler of insufficient thickness and reliability wasn't just a normal boiler, or even a bad boiler - it was definitionally not a steamboat boiler because you couldn't use it to power a steamboat. we don't have to assume from the get go that the particular form that taxi-coordination software currently takes is going to be its final form and that everything else has to get out of the way.

Yeah inevitable sort of a bad word to use here anyways. Something a Bond villain would say. Or out of a Herzog commentary.

I think the thought that humanity is at root a violent animal is mostly pro-war propaganda. We have tools at our disposal and it is up to each person to use them with respect.

how many crooked warlords, if any, ever made a planet-destroying ultra weapon their goal?

Considering the world-view at the time, much of humanity has not had a full view of the planet as a globe in space. Even discounting ancient cosmologies the simple fact that travelling was slow and out of reach for 99.9% of the population, most people not knowing more than their village and the surrounding woods. To destroy everything they knew would not require a globe-demolishing nuclear bomb, it would have been smaller in scale, because the world was smaller to the pre-industrial mind.

anyway it was, i think, the biggest research effor ever undertaken for anything in history, so it's not hard to imagine circumstances or tiny shifts that would have made that seem like a less compelling use of the government's resources than -- even sticking within the military-- funneling the same resources into ongoing projects for submarines, jet propulsion, electromechanical computers.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/SpaceRace.jpg

yeah i meant to throw in a "as of that date" in there, sorry

okay, saw this cover on the newsstand on my way home and, after this thread, had to chuckle a bit

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/issues/2015/06/09/0715_Cover/large.jpg

oh man

that's economist-level "will this do?" cover artwork

Got an Uber-X ride home the other week and the driver looks at me when he picks me up and says, "Do you know you only have a passenger rating of 4.5 stars? I would have expected higher from you." I'm like, I don't know dude, I just get the rides, never had any issues. Then he says, "Well some drivers are just assholes. I give everyone 5 stars. Everyone! Unless they slam my door."

A few weeks ago an out of town friend really wanted me to come hang out with him and his sister down in sunset park (where he was staying), and the subways were massively fucked up plus it's already hard as hell to get there from queens, so I wound up taking the train like 3/4 of the way there, then taking an Uber for the last leg, which was only $8.

This struck me as kind of remarkable, I got out of the subway in some neighborhood of brooklyn that I don't know at all and where I certainly would not easily have found a cab, hit the button on my phone and the guy was there in 2-3 minutes.

OTOH that's a pretty unusual use, and I still rarely use Uber (or cabs).

I used one in Fort Wayne last week because it started raining after dinner, I felt bad for the guy who picked me up because it was only a $5 fare, I didn't have any cash and Uber doesn't even give the option of tipping extra. That's some bullshit.

As awful as I find Uber the company, I think the drivers are quite valuable in non-mass transit heavy cities for curbing drunk driving if nothing else. In the DFW area everyone plans a $20+ Uber at the end of the night into their drinking budget.

yeah my brother in LA has been using them for way longer than me and says it's been a standard part of LA nightlife for a long time now.

the amount of drunk driving i witnessed/was privy to in pre-rideshare LA was ghastly

and Miami. I've noticed my hangovers increasing again.

Same in pretty much every non-major city I've ever lived.

I went to a wedding in Milwaukee over Labor Day weekend and my companions called an Uber driver who showed up in a fancy ass BMW SUV. Presumably Uber was working out well for her. Or she's in deep financial shit rn.

fuck uber

apparently one of my college roommates drives for uber now

Did I already mention that my Uber driver for a school run the other week was HORRID?? He was so bad I actually gave him a terrible review and I never bother with that kind of thing or want to mark anyone down usually.

Among other things he insisted on opening his and my front windows because the smell of fresh bagels, including some onion bagels, was going to "ruin" the car.

I had an uber driver who smelled pretty bad once, but I gave him five stars because I figured there was a good chance he smelled bad from working a really long shift and/or multiple jobs.

the only time i gave a driver less than 5 stars was when he made me late for a date after bragging about how he'd been a professional limo driver for decades and knew the city like the back of his hand and then proceeded to take me on the slowest, dumbest, most cumbersome route, literally avoiding an overpass designed to skip a busy intersection, to then go wait at a red light to make a right turn (where there was no signage prohibiting a right on red)

i gave him 3 stars

how many stars did you give the date

I've enjoyed the few times I've used Lyft.

My Lyft driver has played nothing but The Wailers' "Burnin' and Looting" on loop for my whole drive.

Just finished the third go-round...

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2015/12/01/shooting-draws-attention-downtown-police-presence/76565344/

weird trickle-down effect from uber? taxi stand used to have two off-duty cops in the entertainment district. uber becomes popular, they abolish the practice of having a standing queue of cabs. shooting happens right next to where the security used to be

yep I'll buy that as another aspect of uber's contribution to increased antisocial insularity

Uber's just been declared as operating illegally in Melbourne. They've been ignoring the govt on it up til now.

Making the rounds, here for future reference: http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/uber-hangover#.fq0jbeDVa NYE surge multipliers of up to 9.9x. sad lol.

eh trying to get a cab on nye is hell, it took us an hour to get a ride home last nite, would easily have paid 10x more at peak of desperation

considering how much bars/clubs/restaurants jack up their prices for NYE, it really doesn't make uber look particularly evil in comparison

If you go out on NYE you've already lost

otm × 3

i went to bed at 10 last night and slept for 11 hours, jackpot

we actually ended up paying normal fare... in quebec city though

friend took a Lyft out of Baltimore to the 'burbs at like 1:30 am on new years and it cost him $25. like a 20 minute drive. uber woulda been around 80 bux. good to shop around.

Dunno why people complain about surge pricing, apparently you have to re-type the surge multiplier in before you proceed? Some friends are arguing is this consent if you're pissed. but ehhhh...

http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/travel/perth-man-lodges-complaint-after-copping-massive-uber-bill-on-new-years-eve/news-story/2a9d9f2596f19d7ba0f38a569b3fe574

Me, I'd never put myself into a position to rely on cabs on NYE at all, and I live in a big city. But tbf here they have allnight free trams on NYE.

yeah uber multipliers for high demand times that are like, not related to a natural disaster are pretty understandable, and you have to agree to the fare before you finalize anyway. get over it imo

The weird situation is when people (like Gawker writers) simultaneously attack Uber for being hostile to its workers (fair) and throw a fit about surge pricing - I know that not all of that surge pricing goes to the drivers but some does and shouldn't you be happy when those workers who are putting in time when they could be asleep/partying get some extra cash out of it?

I got a 3.8 surge before heading out on NYE, waited a few minutes before it dropped to 1.5 and decided that was good as it was gonna get. A few minutes before midnight I checked and no surge at all. When I left for home 15 mins later, the surge was for 1.3, which, again, struck me as pretty good. My driver said I had chosen well -- he'd just dropped off a dude a few minutes earlier who paid the 8.2 surge for what is normally a $9 ride.

fwiw the issue as i see it is still the one i was groping towards in my long post on june 29 - suppose uber can ruin the taxis but not replace them, by cream-skimming the customers who constitute the profit margin. then all of a sudden it's not just the new year's eve investment bankers getting stuck with surge pricing whenever the fuck uber feels like it - it's everybody. first they came for the app-hungry twitter bros and i LOLed because i was not a, etc.

The weird situation is when people (like Gawker writers) simultaneously attack Uber for being hostile to its workers (fair) and throw a fit about surge pricing - I know that not all of that surge pricing goes to the drivers but some does and shouldn't you be happy when those workers who are putting in time when they could be asleep/partying get some extra cash out of it?
--Kiarostami bag (milo z)

yeah these complaints seem incoherent to me too. at first i thought the anti-uber idea was to have cabs that charge monopoly price but give more money to drivers. so everyone pays more and less people take cabs but drivers make a higher wage. (not sure if any of those things are true in reality but i could see how a mad-at-technology leftist who believed them to be true would see that as a worthwhile compromise) but then they complain that the competition is driving the wage up and i lose the plot

when i lived in toronto i think i worked every nye and could never get a cab home for anything like a reasonable price. my partner, who worked as a bartender and took cabs home nightly, always had the same xp. like three years ago the two of us ended up walking home in freezing weather because every cab refused to take us west for some reason, for basically any price. another year we ended up paying $50 for whats a $12 cab ride home. and this was at like 4 in the morning. if you asked a cabbie for a metered ride theyd refuse service. the idea that uber is going to somehow going to prevent the economically vulnerable from getting cabs on new years seems deeply stupid to me

again, though, the issue is not NYE but the whole rest of the year once uber puts other cabs out of business.

cabs are a luxury service tho

well, they are, yeah - - - until you break your leg, or the governor arbitrarily decides to shut down the subway system on a snowy day to demonstrate that he is a super-tough guy who Takes Action, or whatever else happens. sometimes there really is no other way home. i don't think this is #1 on the problems facing the world list or anything, but i do think the surge-pricing thing is another reason we should pause at the idea of this zippy new super-company rewriting the rules at will. there may be, like, consequences.

again, though, the issue is not NYE but the whole rest of the year once uber puts other cabs out of business.

yep. or if god forbid Uber starts bedding down with Kochs/ GOP state legislatures to keep decent public transit out of cities blowing up like mad, e.g., Nashville.

ended up walking home in freezing weather because every cab refused to take us west for some reason, for basically any price. another year we ended up paying $50 for whats a $12 cab ride home. and this was at like 4 in the morning. if you asked a cabbie for a metered ride theyd refuse service.

this is illegal in most US cities iirc (but i'm sure it still happens)

NYE surge pricing is so obviously designed to take advantage of drunk riders, and they're sophisticated/black box enough with their algorithms so that it will never be 100% clear how/why they do it and they won't do it to everyone at the same time.

how would the algorithm figure out if you're drunk?

you are looking for uber at the exact bar close time

in that case any demand forecast would gouge drunks

I don’t think the customers should pay the surge bonuses upfront. If the company paid them, then customers could rely on flat rates (as well as surge provision).

Some people would say that this means non-surge users subsidise surge users, but I don’t really think that matters. It would be a problem that uber would then no longer have a direct incentive to pay large bonuses. Also, they would never give up the opportunity to skim the bonuses, as they do now.

no that doesn't work

say uber takes 20% of the fare, 80% goes to cab (made up numbers, actual magnitudes don't matter)

then under your system with flat fares, the most uber can surge by is a factor of 1.25, give it all to the driver. but then the company makes zero money, at exactly the time that they have the highest demand

The company would lose money on surge fares, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t just raise the basic rate to recoup this.

Then it would be Lyft, right? (Lyft does have some variation in prices but my sense is it's nothing like Uber in this respect.) Some people, me included, like Lyft better, in part for this reason; you don't feel like you're haggling at the shuk, you're just getting a ride at the price you expect.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/gm-invests-500-million-in-lyft-plans-system-for-self-driving-cars-1451914204

higher average non variable fare is what cabs do. except a lot of the $ from higher average fare goes to licenses and i don't know where that money goes

Doctor Casino's worried that Uber will take over cabs and then have a monopoly and can surge charge us up the waz 365 days a year. that would be bad, but what's stopping people from just downloading Uber and Lyft onto their phones and checking both for which is cheapest/closest? do drivers have to sign non-compete agreements? (that might actually be a downside to the formalization of work they are pursuing in some states). if not i don't see why they couldn't just have both and flip back and forth depending on where the demand is. could eventually even see a single app, like padmapper style, that gives you the price and position of all rideshare services

standard cabs with internet booking and surge algorhythms (hidden from customer) would be ideal.

afaik uber and lyft do both have public programming interfaces to some extent -- I've used an aggregated transportation app (in montreal, even) to see what's available, but it was more:
- this bus will be at this location near you, it'll take 15 minutes between walk/wait/ride
- uber would take approximately x minutes and be approximately x dollars
- zipcar (or whatever instant rental) is x blocks away

the problem is that there's no incentive for cooperation and if lyft or uber decided sharing even limited data was costing them traffic, they'd pull the plug on public data and fluff their availability stats even more. there's already uber's denial that there are "ghost cars" showing up on their map, but there's no reason they wouldn't resort to that practice. it's not a market that rewards transparency, and won't be unless passengers note a firm discrepancy and quit using a service. there's no indication right now that opening both apps and checking for price/distance is actually going to give you the right data.

The complaints with uber et al aren't strictly about wages or competition. They're about deregulation of what is currently regulated somewhat like a public good. Cabs provide a standard service that the public needs and they should be regulated as such. It's fine that companies compete, and it's fine that they innovate with e.g. an app for finding a cab, but I don't think some hand-wavey invisible hand should be an excuse to allow a company to violate laws that dictate who has what kind of insurance, who is an employee and who is a contractor, which maintenance jobs happen how often, what regions a cab serves and under which conditions, and (as in some states, including Florida iirc, with its historically conservative legislature) the maximum rate a driver can charge.

but haven't we kind of learned through uber & lyft existing and being pretty dece that those regulations maybe weren't so important after all? like what is an important thing that was regulated that will now be much worse for consumers?

they're really outdated and taxi companies have kind of benefited from being entrenched in the system to the detriment of consumers, and I would argue, their own detriment when it comes to delivering a product people want

as for what was regulated and important:
laws that dictate who has what kind of insurance, who is an employee and who is a contractor, which maintenance jobs happen how often, what regions a cab serves and under which conditions, and (as in some states, including Florida iirc, with its historically conservative legislature) the maximum rate a driver can charge

(thanks bam)

I'm guessing part of it is due dilligence on the part of drivers, but the mostly-ridiculous reddit legal questions board had a question from a dude who was in an accident while he didn't have an uber fare, but was theoretically looking for fares. uber said "no fare, no insurance" and his own company instantly bounced him once they found out he used his car for business purposes. I'm guessing there are a fair number of drivers trying to game the system in that way, though.

right, but the absence of which of those regulations make consumers worse off taking Uber/Lyft? maybe the insurance and the maintenance ones? BUT now that we've had 2 years of unregulated + cheaper rideshares we should update our prior as to whether the price of these regulations (or the pass through to price of licenses) were really worth it. we can quibble about details, answer seems to me obviously 'it was not worth it, we were paying too much.'

I think the base argument is that yeah, the system was broken, but it's still broken but there are at least some rides now

Who was paying too much for what? Is this an issue of drunk urbanites being unable to hail a taxi? Or fares that were marginally too expensive? Whether in the suburbs or the city, I've always been able to call a cab as a contingency plan when train, bus, feet, or bike couldn't do the job, and I've always paid a price I thought was fair.

Insurance isn't there for cab customers; it's for people in accidents. Obviously due to the nature of their occupation, insurers would want drivers to have a different class of insurance. This protects not only them, but also anyone they might get in an accident with. I also don't see a problem with stricter licensing for anyone but your average driver, that is, for trailer truck drivers, commercial drivers, taxi drivers, etc. Their jobs revolve around driving, so they should demonstrate to the states they operate in that they can competently perform their jobs, particularly because motor vehicles are a common cause of injury and death.

State regulations regarding employees and contractors potentially affect every worker in the state, so I don't see why any one company should be excepted from them, though whole categories of employment might be expressly excepted.

If taxis fail as something benefitting the public as well as lawmakers feel they should, then regulations can be revised, and at that time we can thank uber et al if they've pressured states to improve their regulations (so that more drivers can get on the road, I guess? I don't really give a shit about that. I actually have a lot of antipathy toward the idea), but the costs of deregulation aren't as clear cut as the average price of fares and the average wage of drivers, and unless the cost of ensuring safety and reasonable levels of liability are spiraling out of control due to regulations, you can't convince me that these basic regulatory safeguards are unreasonable.

And two years is too short a time to evaluate the outcome of this experiment. Did it take two years for virtually every trolley company in cities across America to be replaced by buses, taxis, private cars, urban sprawl, congestion, and smog? Did it take two years to deindustrialize the Midwest, leaving scars like East St Louis, Detroit, and Gary? The deregulation of the taxi industry isn't as dire as all that, but it's also nontrivial, and it has implications for policy-making in other sectors, eg housing, where airbnb is far more insidious than uber could ever hope to be.

Booming

aye

^^^ thanks, bamcquern.

imo these services came along at a very opportune time where, in a number of cities that lacked a good taxi service or public transportation, the attitude that driving is more of a burden than a freedom started to become part of the public consciousness.

off topic right now, but there's a (purported) startup competitor called "dryvyng" run by a guy who got popped by the feds for running a revenge porn website. he's one of the funniest and most deluded lunatics on social media. if you like that kind of thing. i don't think the company is running yet, or ever will.

Who was paying too much for what? Is this an issue of drunk urbanites being unable to hail a taxi? Or fares that were marginally too expensive? Whether in the suburbs or the city, I've always been able to call a cab as a contingency plan when train, bus, feet, or bike couldn't do the job, and I've always paid a price I thought was fair.

Imo one of the appeals of Uber is being able to get a local car quickly even in the very large parts of the city not served by taxis? Which maybe became a more appealing market when a wider range of areas gentrified with people who all want to get to Williamsburg or w/e. Both my home and all the places I go for work are basically not served at all by yellow cabs, so it's either Uber or an undependable livery cab service that has no accountability whatsoever, only takes cash, can't give you a receipt, can be v shady, etc. And sometimes even when I call those places they say flatly that they have no cars in the area, and hang up.

The last time I took Uber my driver was a dick though, and the easy access to my credit card allowed Uber to charge me a "cleaning" fee of 4x my fare, with no recourse for me if I objected. So I can't use them for work trips anymore.

the dryvyng guy is a social media treat

The last time I took Uber my driver was a dick though, and the easy access to my credit card allowed Uber to charge me a "cleaning" fee of 4x my fare, with no recourse for me if I objected. So I can't use them for work trips anymore.

Did you contact support? I've found them to be very responsive for issues like that. For every issue I've had, they've immediately refunded my money.

I objected and shared my concerns about the driver's behavior, but the $$ had already been deducted and they didn't offer to refund it. Maybe I should have protested harder? In any case.

Cleaning? Like a fee if you yack in their car?

Or if some cream cheese gets on the leather seat while you're transporting food for 100 people, apparently.

Cleaning? Like a fee if you yack in their car?

― Hammer Smashed Bagels,

Yep. Drivers like to share horror stories about picking up couples on the beach, watching them sway as they enter the back seat, and yak a few minutes later. If the driver send Uber the photos, they get $300 in cleaning expenses.

Last experience with Uber was pretty bad -- first guy went to the wrong place then cancelled when I refused to walk to him with my toddler in 15-degree weather. Second guy didn't bother to install the car seat (by the time we got out of my building and to the car and he's still just sitting there, not going to wait in 15-degree weather while he installs it for what is ultimately a short trip). Was charged anyway, no response when I complained to Uber about it.

I kind of doubt they can maintain a high volume of quality drivers and reasonable rates at the profit margins they seem to want. And their customer service is shit, and their rating system is useless (I don't want to give my driver 2 stars, I want to send a message to Uber that they should instruct their drivers to install the carseat when it is requested).

Well actually they just emailed me and refunded me for the carseat, so at least there's that.

They're responsive on Twitter as well. Just use the word uber and something negative about a trip then they'll contact you asking for more details.

At least in my experiences. Maybe I'm just good at tweet-plaining

https://twitter.com/THEKIDMERO/status/684521559952855041

lmao

I objected and shared my concerns about the driver's behavior, but the $$ had already been deducted and they didn't offer to refund it. Maybe I should have protested harder? In any case.

ime theyve always been super responsive to any complaints and will refund p much any ride ive had a complaint abt even when i didnt request one.

Yea sometimes their response time varies. I got charged for a trip I didn't take (cancelled almost immediately cos guy kept going the wrong way en route and was taking forever) and he charged me anyway and I sent a drunk email that said "WOT? I DID NOT I'LL BURY YOU COCKROACHES" and had a refund by morning

Then the next time I cancelled cos dude literally claimed he'd arrived three times and was nowhere to be found and I found a cab that was ready to go NOW and it was cold out.

They charged me cos I cancelled within .1 miles and I explained that I did so cos he kept getting lost and kept me waiting...nothing for about a week and then poof, refund after I'd forgotten about it.

I imagine getting cleaning fees back is harder.

and on the cleaning fee note!

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1983851-uber-drivers-under-focus-after-nyc-passenger-claims-driver-used-fake-vomit-to-charge-her-cleaning-fees/

This whole Uber Rush thing makes no sense to me -- why would I pay $5 extra for delivery when there are already plenty of places with free delivery? And why would anyone want to do the work if they're going to make so little?

this is pretty hilarious. looks like the whole independent contractor thing set them up for an anti-trust/price-fixing law-suit:

http://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ubercomplaint.pdf

Kalanick designed Uber to be a price fixer. Kalanick has long insisted that Uber is not a transportation company and that it does not employ drivers. Instead, Uber is a technology company, whose chief product is a smartphone app. The app matches riders with drivers. The app also provides a standard fare formula, the Uber pricing algorithm. Drivers using the Uber app do not compete on price. Rather, drivers charge the fares set by the Uber algorithm. Those fares surge at times to extraordinary levels, which are uniformly charged by drivers using the Uber app. Uber takes a cut of those price-fixed fares. Kalanick’s business plan thus generates profit through price fixing.

if the guy would've just said "yeah we employ drivers and use an algorithm to determine the pricing" this whole argument would fall apart

Yeah I've been following that -- it's sort of a crazy but brilliant lawsuit. While I think it will ultimately fail, I'm really enjoying seeing the stupid "we're not an employer" argument getting thrown back in their faces.

I mean I think the right answer is that they are an employer, not that they are an antitrust conspiracy. But since we haven't been able to pin them down yet as an employer, it's fun to watch them get snagged by their own disingenuousness.

Actually I think the right answer may be that a new category may need to be created for regulatory purposes, since there are certain ways they are a lot like an employer and certain ways they are not.

xp- exactly, it's an amazing troll but also a legit legal argument based on their stated position

Actually I think the right answer may be that a new category may need to be created for regulatory purposes, since there are certain ways they are a lot like an employer and certain ways they are not.

― human life won't become a cat (man alive), Tuesday, April 5, 2016 12:31 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21697861-third-category-worker-could-benefit-gig-economy-category-error?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/categoryerror

also

Uber drivers in New York form labor association

May 1 Uber drivers in New York state have formed an association to strengthen their hand in dealing with the ride-sharing service, labor leaders said on Sunday, days after the company agreed to a $100 million settlement with drivers in two other states.

More than 1,000 Uber drivers signed membership cards with the association, known as the Amalgamated Local of Livery Employees in Solidarity, or Alles, the association said in a statement.

http://www.reuters.com/article/new-york-uber-idUSL2N17Y0H7

wow best name ever?

otm

iswtdt

lol that's great

we were in denver this last week and as an experiment in trying to conserve funds (and also bc rampant intoxication) i didn't rent a car and we ubered everywhere. i have to do final maths but i'm like 90% sure we saved a good amount of money not renting a car. they introduced this car pool feature which brought cost of transport down even further and since we weren't going on any long trips out of the city (longest 30 min to and from the airport) it was all v convenient. there was always a car within 5-7 minutes to pickup and all drivers were super friendly. on one hand i can't help but be aware of the lengthy critiques being drawn up of uber and the share economy in general and while i don't see my participation / use of the service as somehow validating every negative element i could not help but wonder about the ethical implications. otoh it's a better experience in every way than conventional taxi services so idk. is it impossible to deliver the better prices and the amazing services (w/ the app, the ratings, the carpooling) w/out taking better care of the employees?

I think I'm going to wait until at least one kid is out of a car seat before I try that.

FWIW I tried to uber pool from the San Diego airport to downtown when I was there for work and it did not work well - I waited 20 mins for the guy to find another rider and finally gave up.

none of our drivers waited longer than 2 minutes before giving up on a pickup

Friend who drove for Uber and Lyft in Austin has been throwing a fit about the vote they had on rideshares and now the city putting up laws for short-term rentals (Airbnb). I don't like local taxi companies and the way they've bought off local government on the cheap but Silicon Valley libertarians are just going to have to accept that there will be some regulation and that their hostility to workers (and in Airbnb's case, other property owners) isn't going to win over young liberals when push comes to shove on this stuff.

https://twitter.com/groditi/status/732417874627678210

from that link -
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CioSEDKUUAMVsSa.jpg
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CioSEDEVAAAcT7H.jpg

that's terrible.

Holy fuck, how is that legal?

Nuke Silicon Valley from orbit.

Don't they have all kinds of fishy financing arrangements for vehicle purchases too? Fuck Uber.

DC, you know we're still in the country where the chair of the DNC is stumping for payday loan establishments, right?

ppl love to support predatory lending and pretend they're giving someone a foot up

sure, but the employer itself providing the payday loans really is basically indenture and not too far removed from sharecropping.

This strikes me as a novel means of exploitation, yes -- the combination of this non-employment-employment structure with all these horrible financing schemes, where you also have the automatic deductions from your earnings.

most definitely, predatory employment terms are marginally worse than predatory lending, but it's all predatory and exploitative of the people least likely to get out of financial duress

although it all sounds a bit like being in hock to the company store

but you don't even have to own a company store and all that involves! and the predatory lending rights are sold to another company, so uber or whoever probably gets a cut of the lending interest

Or maybe just an origination fee, even. Cash on the table, no worry about future inability to pay.

I mean if they act anything like other subprime originators, they probably get paid up front and wash their hands of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT08yzbC-s8&feature=share

This was cute.

Uber has simply stopped working for me. The app gives a driver an inaccurate pick-up point. One driver told me this has to do with the latest Google Maps update (I highly doubt Uber's business model is predicated on Google Maps) which now places you at the nearest fixed address rather than precise geographic coordinates. Anyway this has been the case the last 4-5 times I've tried Uber. So gotta try Lyft I reckon. Anyone else experiencing this?

Surprise: Uber's lawyers are scum too!

http://www.sdnyblog.com/judge-rakoff-authorizes-discovery-from-uber-counsel-to-probe-potentially-improper-investigation-of-adversary-and-opposing-counsel/

A memorandum order released today reveals that, in an antitrust case against Uber’s CEO (covered here), Judge Rakoff became concerned over improper investigative techniques that Uber (or its agents) employed. Specifically, Uber hired an firm called Ergo to investigate the plaintiff and plaintiff’s counsel, and, in doing so, Ergo’s investigator allegedly made various misrepresentations to gain information, such as claiming that he was a reporter writing a profile of plaintiff’s counsel.

So gotta try Lyft I reckon. Anyone else experiencing this?

I've had this problem sometimes with Lyft, too. Just the nature of the beast, I think.

Pooling with people late at night can be a good way to meet strangers, for better or worse. Last night two drunk women and I shared a car and they grilled me on my job for a half hour. No escape...

Imagine if you were pooling with some kids coming home from the bar with their parents!

http://i.imgur.com/GTS6u8O.jpg

so this happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oih1Yf7l-c0

https://twitter.com/UberUK/status/753881231662645248

http://gothamist.com/2016/07/27/in_soviet_russia_taxi_meters_you.php

loool

Uber's bleeding money

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-25/uber-loses-at-least-1-2-billion-in-first-half-of-2016

I have to say, while I think the advent of app technology for cab/ride hailing is a good development, and I like the fact that they have kid carseats, I hate p much everything else about this company and hope it dies before it can hatch its plan to kill public transit with self-driving cars.

Have been hearing about Juno in the ''they're a less evil Uber'' vein - anyone know anything?

i explained to my 10-year-old how companies like this, propped up by venture capital, can lose money for a long time until they're able to outlast their competitors and take over the market, and he was like "that's mean daddy" and i couldn't really disagree

xp i thought lyft was the less evil uber! that's what i use

afaik lyft is pretty much floating their business as the alt-uber right now and have been not so steathily looking for a buyer

I've been thinking about just using the Taxi-approved app instead (Gett?), except that I do sometimes need the child seat. But I probably only take like 2-3 Ubers a year with the family, plus a couple more for work. For work I think I'm going to shift my business away from them.

Does Lyft really have better practices though? Do they compensate drivers better and do less to rope them into bad financing arrangements?

I didn't dig into it too deeply but I saw an article about my city floating the idea of subsidizing low income residents with bus credit and/or uber credit. afaik the bus system is utilized but expanding routes and doing off-hours transport isn't in the cards for lack of riders but there's enough of a lack of transport among those who most need it, they'd consider offering credit for people to use uber

I have heard that Juno actually *does* treat its drivers better, but they're also pretty small right now right? Maybe I'll download the app just to see if there are drivers available.

what I'm thinking is that the demand for an uber-like business is out there, but they're still looking for the money in the wrong place and falling down on the job when it comes to finding allies in the groups that organize city transportation

i have been told by drivers (who seem to always use both) that lyft is better. i mean "better" may not mean good. Lyft doesn't do financing for drivers the way Uber does. (They have a rental program joint with GM, whether that's a scam I don't know.)

Hmm, Juno has 25% off rides here now, fare estimates are actually much cheaper than Uber. Gonna use this next time.

I think I remember hearing that, unlike Uber, they don't reduce driver's rates when they do promotional pricing.

I guess in a place where everyone drives alone everywhere, an army of self-driving cars that do pools would be a sort of improvement. In NYC it would just make things 10x worse, although I can't imagine people abandoning the subway unless Uber is like really successful at lobbying to defund the MTA.

NYC worldview of mass transit or even trivially moving people around is not the context to view Uber or any of the other services.

my city floating the idea of subsidizing low income residents with bus credit and/or uber credit

i feel silly even saying this but the uber version of this is, like, man what a classic case of neoliberalism finding a new social guarantee to lop off of the state's obligations to provide a service, replaced with the promise that you can become a consumer of a service whose actual provision is nobody's obligation. it also seems mathematically insane - how much does a bus ticket cost versus an uber ride?

last night we called for an uber from the bar and the guy not only didn't pick us up but he marked us as being passengers so i got to watch myself on the app gps drive home while i was waiting in the town over to actually be picked up. anyway someone else came later and they gave me a refund. idk wtf was going on with that first driver tho.

maybe picked up some other drunk dude who just nodded when asked if he was "Mordy"

I've also never been able to get the pool function to work in a useful way fwiw

haha that has happened to me at least twice. what either happened is someone else ordered an Uber in the same area and the passengers thought your Uber was theirs and the dumb driver didn't verify, or the driver hit a wrong button, or he was trying to pull a scam (kinda unlikely since they know it won't work).

it happened to me on my birthday last year while I was drunk and I got the email confirming my trip and I wrote back drunk "WTF, no I didn't" and probably accused them of being prejudiced against half-Italians. Got a refund before I went to sleep.

I've also had the local cab service do the latter when they "couldn't find my condo complex" (despite having my number and not calling me once to get help). After I called the dispatch to complain and they sent another guy, he almost did the same thing until I actually saw him flying by and frantically waved at him. This was a trip to the Megabus station where there is no parking available, otherwise I woulda said "fuck it" and drove myself.

I kind of wonder about that -- what's the ideal Uber city from their business standpoint? It'd be a city with a pool of people interested in being drivers, where the demand is relatively even across the area (you don't want drivers to be doing all A->B trips, ideally when they arrive at B there are customers who want to go to A or another analogous locale) to ensure a flow of business, with public transport either being nonexistent or loose enough to have a lot of needs it fails to cover.

I have the feeling they're looking at the bay area when making a lot of decisions, but that's heavily weighted due to the high adoption rate and a consumer class that's willing to spend. NYC has transportation but their target there is to disrupt and supplant the taxi system, which is probably the case for Chicago as well. Los Angeles might be a good target in that it's very car-centric but idk?

Yeah I would imagine you want some kind of balance between density and sprawl, plus not very good public transit options. It's notable that LA was an early adopter of Uber, for example -- my brother who lives there was telling me that like everyone was using it back when I barely even knew what it was.

Plus LA of course has a huge pool of ideal candidates to be Uber drivers -- the same hopefuls who wait tables and such.

I can tell you that it's essential in Miami.

Passengers try to game the Uber Pool concept, which has unpredictable results. Ask a driver about it sometime.

Uber initially solved a huge aggravation point that consumers had with taxis, granting accountability, reliability and supply to an industry that was in dire need of those three things.

lol there is not accountability with uber!

like the most that is going to happen is someone gets a bad score or reported and they're not an uber driver anymore, but if a driver does anything to a passenger or vice versa then uber washes their hands of the whole thing

self-driving car Uber would not replace public transit

xpost hell I just had a friend get a bogus $80 charge for 'water damage' to a vehicle that the driver apparently staged

accountability

re: Juno - on cue, my best friend just posted this: A New Ride-Hail App Is Disrupting The Industry By Treating Drivers Like People

There's significantly more accountability with Uber than with a taxi. It's not perfect by any means, but it's way better. Taxi companies wash their hands of bad incidents all the time and until Uber came along, it was commonplace for taxi drivers to treat their customers poorly.

I've had several bad/subpar experiences with Uber drivers and my money has always been refunded immediately when I complained. I've found their customer service is way more responsive.

The self driving car fantasy/let's eliminate pesky drivers/machines can drive better is among the worst thing tech people have ever foisted upon us.

was kidnapping passengers a regular thing pre-Uber?

Is it a regular thing with Uber?

I don't think Uber can replace effective public transit either, but they have expressly put out statements that they intend to try. I don't see how it happens without them lobbying to damage public transit though, a la the auto and oil industries conspiring against streetcars.

I suspect the main problem with 'customer service' with taxi companies has to do with the fact that cabs from differing companies all look alike, and whenever you hail one, whether you use *TAXI on your phone, or just the old-fashioned method, you could get any one of a billion companies, you probably aren't paying attention to the name on the side of the cab, and then if/when an incident happens, you've already forgotten the name of your driver, the company, where you were picked up, etc. when I lost my cell phone (while drunk) in a cab in Maryland, it was pretty much a lost cause getting it back, mostly because I couldn't tell them the name of the driver as by the time I'd noticed it was gone, I had forgotten it, so I just wrote it off and got a new one. That and a lot of cab companies have very low-fi websites - I have yet to be on one that looked like it was created beyond 1998.

but, if you go straight through a cab company to book, it often goes better. I use Mears in Orlando and I've had a few incidents to report (nothing ever serious, just like "hey driver is late" or "guy left without me"), and their customer service has been decent. Uber's is better, yeah, but there have also been recent reportings of manufactured damage claims, where the driver makes it appear someone puked in/damaged their car, submits the photos, and the money is deducted from the victim's account before they know what happened (and then it's difficult to get back). Also less regulation w/ Uber too.

I've also a few times had Uber drivers do weird things with pickup where I almost feel like they want me to cancel, like just refusing to be in a logical, visible place and then not communicating clearly about where they are.

I was reading about the factors that led to Uber's ultimate retreat from China. Two things that stood out: they relied on Google Maps for a long time (which is apparently garbage wrt navigating China) and they relied on credit card payments in a country that largely uses a very popular app for most of their cash- and plastic-free payments. Way to research your market, dudes. But kind of in keeping with their 'fly by the seat of your pants' business model. More like Guber if you ask me!

I've had that happen before. Where the guy literally said he was down the street and I was like "where I can't see you" for about 5 minutes and then a guy driving a cab said "hey I'll take you home". they tried to charge me cos I cancelled within 5 miles and I complained "I tried to find the guy for over five minutes and it was getting ridiculous, I even told him what cross-streets I was on".

I really don't like that Uber has access to your paypal/bank info though, for the reason I stated above. when I put that on file, it's so I can pay for the current ride, not so you can arbitrarily decide that I damaged someone's ride based on grainy pics they sent you and deduct $200 from my account without warning or giving me a chance to rebut the claims. Yeah, you can get it back, but it's a pain in the ass (my friend in question couldn't make her car insurance payment due to the debit until they finally reversed it).

but I use Uber a lot cos I travel a lot for pleasure and when you're in a strange area of town at 2 am, it's easy to get a quick ride and usually affordable. I outright relied on it in Maryland a few months ago.

xpost

And the thing is Uber merely creates the incentive for bad behavior but avoids responsibility for it by not being an "employer" according to itself.

I thought uber lets you put in a credit card? I mean, that's a prob in itself in that someone without means might have cash for one ride but not a credit card, but the main benefit of credit cards is that you can dispute charges

i'm not personally bothered by Kalanuk's libertarian asshole rhetoric; whatever his ideology he's just another exec. it's the converse of not believing firms when they talk about corporate social responsibility

Lately it seems like my Uber drivers--and this is in a half dozen large cities over the past few months--seem like they talk CONSTANTLY. And not that they are entirely uninteresting, but it's reminiscent of that person on the plane sitting next to you who won't shut up.

I'm totally bothered by Kalanuk because he strikes me as a consummate asshole and the world needs less of those.

oh yeah – seven out of 10 times I bring a book or mag the drive wants to chat, which I suppose is cool cuz I practice my Spanish.

I once asked a driver what kind of training uber gives them for dealing with crazy ass passengers. he said they dont give them any training whatsoever.

I kind of feel sorry for Uber drivers in some ways because unlike a plastic/vinyl taxi, they can't just hose out the backseat after someone pukes on it. And I always ask Uber drivers if someone has puked in their car, because the number of affirmative responses is shocking.

I would guess over half of the uber traffic in my small city is drunk ppl or people who were drunk getting a ride to their car the next day

I don't see how it happens without them lobbying to damage public transit though

Why would you harbor the slightest doubt they will do exactly this

I have zero doubt! Question is rather whether they will succeed.

Someone should do a study to see how many previously libertarian-leaning Uber drivers are still inclined to lean in that direction after firsthand experience with an unregulated industry.

cognitive dissonance is a thing

Some parent friend of mine is convinced that services like Uber is keeping more high school kids from driving drunk.

That seems reasonable to me and what's more I think it's the single best argument for rideshare services

but hey i'm just some parent

there was some article I didn't bother to read that had a headline about Uber not affecting the number of drunk driver arrests, buuuuut... I would be tempted to say that doesn't mean there are fewer drunk drivers on the road when you consider the number arrested was always a small percentage of the people who were driving intoxicated

lol I have a sixteen year old Eephus, it does seem reasonable so it's kind of a constant discussion. Many parents I know put the Uber/Lyft apps on their kids' phones.

I thought uber lets you put in a credit card?

they do, mine is a debit though. I guess they probably run it as a credit charge though? that would make it a 'credit card' charge dispute, yes, though in my friend's case, she needed the money back ASAP.

On balance I think the general phenomenon of car-hailing apps (I refuse to call them "ridesharing" bc that's fucking stupid and ridiculous and inaccurate) is a good thing, like an example of technology closing a huge gap in a long available service. I just really dislike Uber, and I do think it's a case where the philosophy and personality of the CEO is still reflected in the company in a way beyond just being your average faceless capitalist exec. My hope is just to see at least a few good options thrive in the market and for Uber to lose its dominance before it completely conquers the space.

But I think there's a good chance that they do lose their dominance, because ultimately it's just a fucking app, and it should be getting easier by the day for others to build equally good apps. Plus Uber's insistence on a non-employee model means its drivers can drive for other services at the same time, making it harder for them to hold on to dominance.

i find it odd how yall seem to use ride-hailing sites near-exclusively yet seem to be cheering their demise. it would suck for me if they ceased to exist, i take cabs semi-frequently but usually at off-peak hours and have saved so much dough since getting the apps. also the peace of mind of just seeing the car and knowing it's coming. i took a cab to the airport a few weeks ago and i was shitting bricks waiting for it to show up, which took like 15 mins

Plus Uber's insistence on a non-employee model means its drivers can drive for other services at the same time, making it harder for them to hold on to dominance.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Thursday, August 25, 2016 2:32 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya this is a good thing imo that ppl advocating Full Employee status overlook

i find it odd how yall seem to use ride-hailing sites near-exclusively yet seem to be cheering their demise. it would suck for me if they ceased to exist, i take cabs semi-frequently but usually at off-peak hours and have saved so much dough since getting the apps. also the peace of mind of just seeing the car and knowing it's coming. i took a cab to the airport a few weeks ago and i was shitting bricks waiting for it to show up, which took like 15 mins

― flopson, Thursday, August 25, 2016 1:34 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I neither use them exclusively nor cheer in general for their demise. If I'm coming home from the office late and cab it, a yellow cab is pretty much always a better option since they just stream down my avenue at all hours -- I get a cab instantly instead of waiting a few mins, and the price is usually about the same.

From an airport it's kind of a toss-up and depends on the cab stand line. Sometimes on work travel I use an app just so I have a saved receipt and don't have to worry about losing the little stubby cab receipt. With kids I pretty exclusively use Uber because of the carseat option, although it's an extra $10 per ride which kind of sucks. 95% of my travel is by subway or my own car anyway.

afaik lyft is pretty much floating their business as the alt-uber right now

read this as "alt-right uber" at first

I don't use ride-hailing apps exclusively at all but I definitely use them. I use them when I'm traveling in a city where you can't hail on the street -- that's a lot of cities, so I definitely find the apps useful.

I would never use one at home: the only reason I wouldn't be using my own car or bike is for airport trips. Coming home from the airport, there's cabs sitting right there, so why wait for the app to call one? Going to the airport, I know when I'm going and want to arrange it in advance, and the apps won't let me do that. Yes I know there are cities / cab companies where you book a cab the night before and it doesn't show up; not mine.

My hope is just to see at least a few good options thrive in the market and for Uber to lose its dominance before it completely conquers the space.

When I say "I use them" I mean I use Lyft. In my experience it works exactly as well as Uber -- actually, I would say I have had rare bad experiences with Uber and zero bad experiences with Lyft, and I haven't used Uber in more than a year. There's definitely no good reason to use Uber if you don't like the company.

I've uh never driven buzzed but if I ever had I certainly haven't since learning about uber. Anecdotal totally theoretical example.

fwiw my boss, who is extremely liberal for an ex-vc, likes juno's service, business model and politics. i used it once and the guy was very obsequiously chatty, kind of like uber in its early days. coverage is spotty though, and they won't pick up from the airport which is almost the only time i use cabs.