Obvious in hindsight. This sort of thing is inevitable any time you have dumb software on one side and humans on the other side.
I'm mostly a fan of these non-taxi "taxi" services, but it seems like they are slowly and painfully rediscovering why taxis ended up so regulated in the first place.
Yeah, I'm mostly not a fan, now that we're a few years in. Waves of people inexperienced, untrained in shuttling people around a major metro have resulted in downtown Chicago being an utter mess compared to only a few years ago. Chicago forced cab drivers to go through a training and certification course that at least forced them to understand the major routes and grid system we're on, and every time I've been in an uber they are completely tethered to their phones nav systems.
So, now we've got an army of drivers who can't drive, don't know where they are going, playing with their phones all day. It makes for an unpleasant experience whether you're on a bike, driving you car, or sometimes just walking across the street.
I used to think cabs were terrible drivers, but most of them (especially in heavily regulated markets) are very experienced drivers and simply disregard rules of the road that are inconvenient for them.
In contrast, 'ride sharing' drivers seem to have no sense of direction, and are genuinely oblivious to the rules of the road.
In short, when in either type of car, I fear for my life.
That's interesting. I wonder if this is a regional thing, or just different personal experiences. For me, I've never had a particularly bad Uber driver, but I've had incredibly bad taxi drivers. (My favorite was the guy who decided that driving down I-395 in Arlington was a good time to catch up on some paperwork. He kept the cab on the road, but only by using all three lanes. Thankfully it was about 2AM and nobody else was using them.)
While driving, I tend to fear for my life when taxis are around, but whenever I spot an Uber or Lyft car, they seem to behave unremarkably.
There's also the other side of the problem that you don't get to see as a passenger. Uber/Lyft drivers in a rush to get to their pickups drive like maniacs here in SF. I'm from a developing country and I'm used to drivers who disregard rules but even those pay attention to the surroundings - you can read them and know if they are going to yield or not. But having gotten used to the polite driving of SF a few years ago, I find it quite dangerous to walk my dog out now. I stick to interior roads and wait till I know for sure that the car would yield for me before I cross. Driving and Biking have become usually miserable as well.
My only request is that passengers don't encourage this by blindly rating everyone 5 stars. Take at least two star off for unsafe driving - not stopping at a stop sign, not yielding to pedestrians, not giving enough space while passing a bicyclist and at least one star for not following the rules - driving on the bus lane, double parking in the middle of a busy road, driving too fast on a 25Mph zone, not waiting long enough for the pedestrians to pass safe ...etc.
If the economics don't work out for the drivers, the fare has to go up. By keeping the fare artificially low and pushing drivers to accommodate too many trips Uber and Lyft are ruining the experience for everyone and in doing so are perpetuating the need for more people to use them instead of considering alternate transport modes. This, sooner or later, will ruin it for everyone.
Take it from me, America cannot handle a developing country style traffic. It requires a different set of skills. People here are used to predictable traffic.
Never had an Uber driver driving like maniac. To be sure, I live to the south of SF and try to never drive into SF unless I absolutely have to, and when I do, I pretty much expect developing-country-type driving environment. But I may just be spoiled by suburbia-type traffic patterns. In any case, even SF Uber drivers has always been excellent for me. I realize that's anecdata, so I wonder if somebody did any kind of robust survey of this.
Seconding that. I took a half-dozen Uber rides in Las Vegas two weekends ago. My biggest concern was trying to figure out how to use the app to tip them.
All drivers were cordial, polite, had no problem with routing (admittedly, it's pretty simple in Vegas). One driver was a smoker and the car smelled and that was the only negative in 6 rides.
Overall, it's the end-to-end experience. Call up the app, type in a destination, head to the curb. The car shows up about the same time I get there, I hop in, chat a bit on the way, hop out at the destination, rate & tip via the app and go on my way. The seamless experience, so far, makes up for the (so far mild) idiosyncrasies of drivers and cars.
We all have sampling bias since the number of rides we take is so small compared to the number of ride givers. I'm sure most taxi drivers and most Uber drivers are perfectly normal, safe drivers, with the outliers being the problem.
I've personally been driven by awful taxi and awful Uber drivers, though Uber so far has the distinction of being the only one to genuinely scare me driving 3x the speed he should have on a twisty road, with tires screeching the whole way.
> simply disregard rules of the road that are inconvenient for them.
There is a bit of a natural selection process to it.
If you're a cab driver, and you keep getting into accidents, you won't be a cab driver for long. If you take no risks and are constantly late, you won't be a cab driver for long. If you have a poor sense of direction, or spacial awareness when driving, you probably won't be a driver for very long.
After decades of this process, most professional cab drivers are just reckless enough to get away with it.
These Uber drivers haven't spent decades going through that process. Everyone's a newbie. The difference this time is that the risk isn't being undertaken by the company, it's being undertaken by the drivers themselves.
Not really. A newbie at being paid to drive, but in many cases, not new to driving. In my area, I can predict to the minute when I'll arrive at my destination, and what route is best at that time of day, even for a 20 mile trip and without software support. That's because I've been driving 24k miles+ annually here for nearly 30 years.
Not to mention, the driver's app has the same real-time mapping features that smart phones have. So they can avoid grid locked areas, accidents, etc. even without years of cab driving experience.
Yes, an experienced cab driver will be a better cab driver, in general, than a new Uber driver. But not enough better to keep the masses away from Uber/Lyft. Cab companies are getting slaughtered, cab drivers are panicking and two-timing or jumping to Uber/Lyft, and this is happening globally.
Are you driving for Uber/Lyft? I was hoping I would get more drivers like you, with deep experience of the area, etc; but the drivers I've had, at least during normal working hours seem to be people who don't have a lot of experience driving in general, and for example have a hard time navigating around the mountain view train station, despite google maps giving them reasonable directions.
In my personal experiences, local drivers (ones who grew up in the city) know where they're going on Uber. Sadly I can't request for a driver who won't take 3 wrong turns before they even get to me...
I never get local drivers. Here in Austin everyone drives in from San Antonio or one of the little suburbs and tries to navigate downtown and can't figure it out at all. Don't even try to go to an event down the back roads. They won't know them so hopefully you do.
That almost makes it worse, it keeps the ratio of brand new drivers high. There's only so many people who know the city and want to drive for Uber, and they're outnumbered by those who don't know the city and want to drive.
A number of studies conclude that taxi drivers have fewer accidents, per mile, than the general population - at least in the US. I've not seen studies for elsewhere, though they probably exist.
My anecdotal experiences are not the same. The majority of taxi drivers and ride-sharing drivers have been good, with a few exceptions of actual bad drivers.
And I think the disregard for rules applies to a lot of public drivers. The Port Authority buses in Pittsburgh think they own the road.
I guess it depends on where you live? I'm in Boston, and all of my Uber and Lyft drivers have been great.
I recently went on vacation where the only option available was a taxi cab. Within 5 minutes I remembered why Uber and Lyft have become so popular. Our driver was a complete asshole, honking at everyone and almost running down a bicyclist. Plus, the A/C in the van was broken. And because it was a van, you couldn't even roll the windows down. It was a miserable ride.
I live in Chicago, and my experience with rideshare drivers has been uniformly good. Many of them genuinely enjoy driving. Some can be opportunistic but I guess my baseline for city driving was shaped in cities where the traffic is much worse than Chicago's (try Sao Paulo). I actually think Chicago drivers are ok.
The worst drivers are cab drivers in the Loop during rush hour who will honk at the slightest provocation, who don't use turn signals, and will suddenly stop in front of you. If Chicago cab drivers are trained, that training certainly isn't evident.
On the other hand, Lyft drivers have stars docked if they exhibit unsafe driving behaviors, and they are deactivated if their rating gets too low (4.6 stars is the threshold I believe).
Cabs don't have this feedback loop. Only accidents will get them off the road.
Edit: I speak as a driver and a passenger. I imagine things have gotten worse for bicyclists. Also, I don't use Uber, only Lyft. I've heard Uber drivers are worse because Uber is more liberal with their rating system.
Yea my experience with biking in Chicago is that at least cabs are clearly marked as such so you know they might cut you off at any moment and you'll cuss at each other. Uber drivers will just stealthily swerve into your lane and full stop.
Plus the GPS systems here will take you down these speed bump residential roads and do crazy contortions to drop off on a one-way road.
On the flip side though, when I first moved here a cab was like $20 each way just from like Broadway to Kimball. Now it's...$4.
In NYC, Uber drivers are required to be licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and you can report their dangerous driving to the commission, who will fine them.
>"Waves of people inexperienced, untrained in shuttling people around a major metro have resulted in downtown Chicago being an utter mess compared to only a few years ago."
Has the city published any traffic impact studies? NYC showed concerned for Uber impact on traffic and made an attempt to get data and it turned into a political kerfuffle with accusations of protecting the taxi industry etc. I don't like the title of this blog post but it points to similar of what you are stating about downtown Chicago:
I think it'd be hard to actually quantify the impact. Chicago's also constantly under construction, the downtown area has had major bus route redesigns with the "JUMP" routes, and that's caused a lot of congestion too.
I'm not really familiar with new york's streets, but ours have been over capacity forever and now with uber/lyft there's a lot more single passenger car traffic in the business areas. Much more so than cabs, because getting them is much more convenient than cabs ever were here - calling a cab in chicago is a joke, honestly, and if you weren't in an area they pass by frequently you were out of luck. I feel like more people choose the uber option for short trips that would have been transit in the past. The convenience of it is the model, after all.
>"I think it'd be hard to actually quantify the impact."
You would need Uber/Lyft's help I believe. But I think if you combined the Uber/Lyft data with data that the DOT keeps it would be pretty easy to quantify the impact. I think that was NYC's point as well. But unfortunately the mayor had received money from a taxi lobbying effort which allowed Uber to cry foul and make accusations of protectionism.[1]
One metric used is average travel speed which according to this recent article is down 12% to 8.1 miles compared to 2010[2]
I would think the incentive would be to play nice with the city and the TLC that regulates the industry. I think they will have to do so eventually anyway.
I'd think making a nav system work properly with given map once is more efficient than making hundreds of drivers to constantly learn it over and over.
> It makes for an unpleasant experience whether you're on a bike, driving you car, or sometimes just walking across the street.
How drivers guided by a nav system is worse for streetwalkers than any other drivers? And, from my experience, long-term commercial driving doesn't always make a driver a model road citizen - in fact, in many places taxi drivers are kinda notorious for being less than model co-roaders.
Uber was actually a little too early into the game. They are going to have legacy issues transitioning into self-driving taxis. The whole end-game with this is to have self-driving cars and get rid of drivers, this was the stated goal at least 4 years ago.
This is where Tesla is going to have an advantage. They're going to start with self-driving, no need to deal with pissed off drivers and other problems that come with a transition. Same thing with their dealerships - they didn't have to deal with the dealer-franchise system.
I've had the occasional Lyft driver who could have made better choices. However, the one thing I've only had with taxis is a driver who is actively malicious and makes one turns clearly on purpose to drive up the bill. Lyft cars also have been consistently much cleaner. The skankyness of some taxis I've been in is just without competition.
I've literally had cab drivers on airport pickups ask me "Do you know the best way?" I can only assume that's an overt sizing up to determine whether I know anything about the city or whether they can take me for a figurative ride.
Those cab drivers can't get starved out of business fast enough as far as I'm concerned.
I am so naive. I've been asked that before by a Taxi driver in NYC I believe on my way to the airport and just said "Uh, shouldn't you?" I never realized what they were up to.
Chicago cab drivers were the worst. Uber drivers are leagues better.
Last time I was in a cab in Chicago the driver ran a man over in the street and just kept going. When I jumped out to see if the victim was okay the driver yelled to me that I was fare dodging before he sped away....
That might explain the two red light runners I've seen in the last two days with Uber stickers on their windshield. One nearly struck me and would have if I didn't slow down my approach.
I've had a leg immobilizer and crutches for a bit now. People keep telling me I should uber/lyft around to be more mobile but I can't easily do that. My two choices are to sit lengthwise across the back seat after a lot of work scooting in or to get in the front with the seat all the way back. Both will annoy a lot of drivers and trash my rating.
This is just the first step. The ultimate goal is driverless taxi fleets. Whether that's achievable ( technologically, legally, etc ) is another story.
You may see it as funny, I see it as refactoring. If we try it in a different way and end up with the same solution, we know it's there not because somebody 60 years ago wanted to make a quick buck out of it and then it stuck because regulations are forever.
Well, if you talk about Bitcoin etc., it's a gold rush situation - high risk/high reward situation which is strictly voluntary, so I see zero issue with that, on the contrary, I see it as excellent experiment which, unlike many other social experiments, won't bother you at all unless you opt in.
With Uber/Lyft it's trickier since while you are welcome to not use it, it may have implications which are beyond direct users of the services. Still, I think the effects are relatively small and not disproportional to what you could encounter without them - i.e. how badly you can be burned there? Surely, you can have a bad driver - same could happen with a Taxi. A bad Uber driver could create a bad situation on the road - so can any other bad driver, nothing new here. So marginal costs are pretty low here. Not to defend bad drivers - those should be dealt with appropriately - but the additional "burn" that would be caused is IMHO pretty low.
I'd say the big externalities affecting non-customers are increased congestion and a questionable insurance arrangement. There are also the handful of cases of sexual assault and similar that have happened that arguably could have been avoided with background checks, but perhaps the incidence of these is small enough that you could write it off.
Is there really big change in congestion? If not Uber, people would take a taxi or drive themselves - that's what I'd do. Both cases don't reduce congestion.
As for insurance, there are tons of people on the road with bad insurance, at least for Uber as I understand you have something to back it up.
As for assaults and other bad apples, that could have happened with taxi too. I don't believe any company of these proportions could have checks that could 100% prevent such cases. I'm not sure it's possible in even in principle...
Yeh, this unpopular view is now becoming popular. I've said it from the start, there is a reason for regulation. We just needed the awesome software to manage real taxi services. The price isn't sustainable, people want the on demand taxis.
Uber coming along has been a good reset for the regulations. There were a lot of ineffective and counterproductive regulations in place and I think wiping them out and starting over is a good thing.
Sarasota, FL is an interesting case to study. The traditional taxi companies complained about Uber in the city and rather than fight Uber, the city removed the regulations on taxi companies. So far, I don't think much has really changed.
As for the gaming of surge pricing, I think that's fixable. Uber just needs to think more carefully about driver incentives.
During a fare, an uber driver told me that when he goes to an area with lots of drivers, he will turn off his app for a minute or so to artificially decrease the number of drivers in the area. If this is practiced by multiple drivers repeatedly, the result can cause a surge. He told me that he does this, and, that he holds training sessions where he teaches this practice to other drivers, among other things. I do not know if this was actually effective or if it still is.
This is easy for Uber to fix. The surge (or the calculation of drivers) just needs to be delayed by 15mins or so. He can still turn off his app, but now he'll have to do it for more than 15mins, thus potentially losing 1 or 2 rides.
Uber presumably takes a fixed cut of the fare, so they have at least some incentive to look the other way during surge collusion. If the drivers do it simultaneously to both Lyft and Uber then both companies will be happy to see this going on.
This is not in Uber's interest. From their perspective the purpose of the surge is to get more cars on the road. They don't care about drivers, they care about fares (riders).
Increasing the latency with which you respond to conditions seems like it comes with real downsides. They should just figure out a way to punish this practice.
Uber drivers have fair wages, considering they are working in a saturated market and competing with people with the qualifications of a 16 years old teen.
There are a lot of people with these qualifications.
It would be pretty easy to build a service to coordinate this. (And of course Uber would whine about it even though that's exactly the kind of thing they do all the time)
I have personally watched Uber drivers (Not in the USA) do exactly this - lots of them in a Whatsapp group all agreeing when to disconnect their apps and turn them back on again.
In front of me. During the ride.
They definitely do this and it happens all the time. I sent my complaint about it to Uber, to only get ignored. The drivers are gaming the system and the customers get hurt. Right now, Uber is still better than taxis where I am, but I tell you the absolute second there is a decent competitor I am switching. I absolutely despise Uber.
It would be so easy to stop this. Prevent someone who turned off their phone prior to a surge, from participating in the surge price for a time window before and after.
Unless I'm mistaken it seems like surge pricing in one area would encourage drivers looking for rides to go there, which would then cause other surges in the previous areas they were in
People game the system. Always. Have learned that for years when it comes to safety systems.
Even uneducated people become very intelligent when it comes to gaming the system to their advantage. It is always a cat and rat game between technical adjustments and when people find a way to game the system again.
People learned the phone company would refund any Denied All Knowledge of a long distance call. Call up, get a credit.
Then phone company said you cant DAK calls 2 months in a row: so customers called in every other month.
Then, they eliminated operator handled calls for small bills. Call in, get an IVR, get a credit.
Phone company caught on and limited credits to $7 per month, every other month.
Customers started crediting <$7...
And on and in...cat and mouse.
Then, few realized you only had to pay 91% of the past due balance to not get shut off..
Others finally realized that if your account gets associated with a elected federal official or a PUC complaint you account will never get treated for collections.
---
Another simple one: having to press "0" 3 times to get to an agent on some IVRs..
The first guy to log back in (or the guy who doesn't log off at all) wins the game to the detriment of the others, limiting the extent of this practice.
You can't have a successful oligopoly when there's no barrier to entry.
The post seems to make clear that once the surge pricing becomes active more than on person can capture customers at that price level, meaning their earnings are likely higher by doing this.
Surge pricing - at least on Uber - is only re-evaluated at a fixed frequency. Which is to say even if the supply rushes in to fill the void there is still a certain amount of time before the surge is turned off.
I imagine multiple people (heck, many people) can win the game in this period.
It takes more than one ride dispatch to quell the surge. I've watched bar/club closings stay in surge for 30 minutes while cars stream in to pick up riders. I personally have given 5 surge rides in a row, albeit short rides, just by picking up at a particular hot spot, getting a local, drop them off, go offline, return to hot spot, wash, rinse, repeat.
Actually it's the opposite. When I drop off outside of the surge zone and go back to that zone to make a pickup inside, that helps quell the surge in that hot spot. I've never noticed surging in the neighborhoods I just left when I go back online. If I stayed online in the neighborhoods, I would likely get dispatched around the drop off point, prolonging the surge at the bar.
That's not entirely true. In our market, there aren't many Uber drivers and it's easy to game the system.
A few weeks ago I took a ride with someone who was trying very hard not to "join the uber mafia". He said that most of the time he also has to turn off his phone, otherwise he gets screwed over.
The reason is that when there are no more drivers, he'll get matched with people on the other side of town. He doesn't get paid for the drive out, and sometimes people still cancel after waiting 20 minutes for an uber to show up after ordering. Even with surge pricing it didn't make financial sense, so he'll turn off his phone too or switch to Lyft during these periods.
Sounds like a nice little loophole the drivers found to make a few extra bucks. It's always interesting to me when people find little tricks they can do the bend an algo their direction.
This reminds me a lot of the LinkedIn algo hacks that's driving me nuts right now. If you post super long form, cheesy, generic paragraphs of text with no links/visuals - you get massive exposure. The result has been superficial posts filling up my feed talking about who knows what.
Much like the nuisance of a pricing surge on Uber, these algo hacks can be a real pain.
"Separate research at Northeastern University has previously found passengers can game surge pricing with simple tricks such as waiting five minutes or crossing the road."
I know I've waited out twenty minutes or so to bypass the surge or at least dampen the surge to a rate I was comfortable with. Sort of becomes an auction experience at that point.
I am currently talking with Warren Mosler about implementing Unconditional Basic Income in local communities (Hi @sama! :)
Cartels is the main danger with unconditional basic income. If you make sure everyone can eat, you create a moral hazard, where the insured are not sensitive to price anymore. Having said that, we already have means-tested welfare and food stamps, and cartels of fruit stores don't spontaneously appear everywhere. However, they may appear in food deserts and other places where there aren't a lot of participants. Competition is the only factor I can think of to combat this. But in some areas with few participants, this collusion can ultimately happen.
Does anyone here have constructive thoughts on how to overcome this problem? Price controls and collective bargaining via single payer is all I can think of besides competition.
Competition in this case is really a proxy for choice. UBI should rationally be about promoting the ability for consumers to choose how to spend money, rather than being constrained to have no choices due to lack of resource. to solve the problem you are describing, people still need to have the self-interest to make good decisions, and the willingness to carry them out.
If consumers won't shop around, or make price sensitive decisions, then the market for the good in question becomes price insensitive. But, I think UBI is attractive primarily because it doesn't seek to tell people how to spend their money, or tell them what the right choices are. As an alternative to welfare, it should allow consumer preferences to play a greater part in the market.
The problem with UBI versus, let's say, single payer, is that buyers compete and therefore drive up price. In short they "defect" from the price the other buyers pay.
Think about patio and his posts in the past about increasing your rates. That's how it happens.
When you have insurance, then the buyer and seller can join forces to raise prices - that's called a moral hazard.
buyers competing is OK, though, right? I was under the impression that the justification for UBI was to attack the ability to pay, which some people lack, rather than the outcome of what they pay for.
The "problem" that UBI has vs single payer is that it is not creating a command economy, but leveling the playing field in a capitalist one. If you want a single payer, you don't want a UBI, you want communism. If you want UBI, you are OK with market forces, but are using a single lever to attempt to correct for a market failure in the most "libertarian" way possible.
The only way single payer really succeeds is if you curtail consumer choice in order to achieve efficiency in what you buy - the single payer doesn't understand all the possibilities in the market. This is maybe a reasonable thing to do in sub-markets, like prescription medication, but is not such a great idea if you do it to the entire market.
If all buyers buy the same thing naturally, the price will go up, yes, but in the long run, production should also go up. If you just put a price control on it, there will always be a short supply, and too much unmet demand, even if the price for those who do manage to get the good is a great deal.
Communism is more than just "to everyone according to his need". It is also "from everyone according to his ability." And it talks about collective ownership of the means of production, and other stuff. To a great extent, the public stock market is collective ownership of corporations, which is far better than what Marx had in mind.
BUT
This is not about labels. This is about designing systems that work, vs systems that have major issues.
The major issue with UBI is inflation. There is no way around it. Everyone gets X every day. This X is spent into the economy, primarily on necessities. They are not sensitive to price increases because X is indexed to inflation, otherwise what's the point?
So, stores raise prices and people go ahead and pay anyway. And so every sector competes with every other to raise prices before the other sector takes more of the UBI money than they do.
It is a moral hazard.
Now, with single payer systems, the doctor has a choice: accept Medicare, with the prices it offers, or not. It's attractive to accept Medicare because you get a lot of patients who would otherwise not pay you.
This DOES NOT MEAN the consumer can't choose the doctor, school, or anything else. It just means there is collective bargaining for prices.
And btw you benefit from this all the time. Look at Amazon squeezing publishers - stories on HN all the time about this. Or Apple's App Store having rules for developers. Or Google's rules for web publishers, making them make responsive sites. And so on.
Libertarians think "the government" is just one entity. But every organization has a management structure. Eventually we may have decentralized protocols like scuttlebutt etc. that change this paradigm. But for now, we have organizations all over the place and when most consumers are on Facebook, etc. they do in fact squeeze publishers.
I don't disagree with most of what you wrote, but, IMO UBI is not a moral hazard generator. Just because you get the money doesn't incentivize you to not care about prices. It may make you less sensitive to prices, but it will need to be budgeted nonetheless. If it were infinite UBI, then yes, a free source of infinite money would create a situation where buyers are shielded from rising prices and thus don't care about them.
UBI is NOT insurance, though, and so it is difficult to argue that a limited income, even if free, creates a moral hazard that would truly cause people to no longer budget for things, any more than a salary makes you price insensitive. The quantity of the UBI seems to be the relevant factor, I guess.
My go-to example (of the dangers of cartels extracting the added UBI) is the time they bought out a bridge to remove the tolls and then landlords raised rents by the exact cost of twice-daily crossings. (Of course, I've never researched the purported event itself.)
Any UBI plan needs to come with a firm understanding of this dynamic and how to prevent it.
I remember dealing with the emergency IT issues that popped up with our NYC offices after hurricane Sandy wrought havoc upon much of lower Manhattan's power grid. We were lights out for at least three days. Had to take lots of taxis to move hardware to places with electricity. Even if we wanted to be creative, the subway was certainly not a transportation option and foot was wight prohibitive. The pickup rules for taxi's were suspended during this emergency period. Taxis could pickup fares mid-ride, turn down any rider going to a undesirable destination, & charge whatever they thought they could get. Lucky for me, despite all other storm-born chaos, I was in a sweet spot for where taxis were more than happy to drive. Even so, seeing the number of people who were turned down for their destinations or who in turn declined a ride because of the driver chosen price hike was fascinating; a sort of real-time, impromptu emergent market in infancy rapidly growing into maturity.
So not to say that these ride share services have moved to remove all these kinds of consumer protections that clearly were quickly dropped and exploited once they were removed due to the state of emergency but to a large extent, I feel like I had the chance to experience the larger forces of gamification that would happen if these protections were removed and circumstances were ripe for profit. Overall I am very happy with the changes ride sharing services have brought to supplement transportation options but there are certainly a lot more of these bumps and kinks to be worked out if these businesses hope to avoid a wave of government regulation.
Main difference being uber is literally the same experience compared to a regular cab (most of the time), whereas a low cost airline is horribly uncomfortable (read: spirit) and charges for everything.
This. As soon as you have an adversarial relationship between buyer/seller (of any good, not just labor) all the bad behaviors come out.
A prime example of this is the airlines. Southwest and Virgin have somehow convinced staff and passengers to be polite to each other, so boarding and other things go smoothly. The same flight for the same price on United or American is a mess of elbowing and passive agressiveness.
A simple solution to this would be to simply limit the number of times one can log in and out per day to something reasonable, or to place limits on the frequency etc.
If you ask Uber drivers if they enjoy it, the #1 thing you'll hear is "it's flexible." They're willing to put up with all the other bullshit -- the low pay, the lack of benefits -- for the feeling of control. Chip away at that and bad things will happen.
How is this unethical? This is the exact point of these marketplaces - The drivers are saying "I won't accept a fare at these levels", Uber is responding by raising the price (and it's pretty transparent to consumers - The whole point of "surge pricing" is to incentivize drivers that would otherwise not be on the road). The multiplier framework is pretty clear upfront when you're paying more.
This sounds like a fix to one of my major complaints about Uber. The prices are too low. I like cheap rides, but I also like knowing that the people who are giving me rides (and providing me services, selling me goods, making those goods, etc) are making living wages.
And, to some level - This is collective bargaining. This is precisely what Unionists want, without all of the mess involved in actual unions. The drivers are collectively demanding higher wages, and Uber is responding.
On the other hand: There's a good reason we're seeing this pushback. Uber is a shitty, predatory company, and has relentlessly worked to drive down driver wages well beyond sustainable rates. (It's also a shitty company to it's full time employees, to which I will attest.)
Yup. Last week I left a Dodgers game in about the eighth inning, and there was a huge parking lot full of Ubers and tons of people were standing around waiting but couldn't find drivers. The drivers wait until the game ends and the masses exit so that the real surge pricing kicks in.
Driving for Lyft/Uber in traffic jams is economically unrewarding, because the fee schedule is tilted towards per-distance-unit and the per-minute fees are a pittance. Raising the per-minute fees would incentivize drivers to take fares which are currently not worthwhile rather than wait for surge pricing.
However, drivers do not set the per-minute pricing -- that's the rideshare company's prerogative.
Surge pricing is technologically archaic, and really has been since the start. Uber should be running instant automated auctions like stock market and webads do.
I use Uber pass fairly regular on my commute to work. One other minor unrelated thing I have seen is if the commute is within < 1-2 miles the drive ends up giving you a bad rating (not that ratings matter to me) but uber has no way to screen this fake rating. I made sure I was at the pick up point well before the car arrived, and minded my own business throughout the ride.
On talking to couple of drivers on a few occasions they confessed that they do this to filter out folks asking for lower mile rides!!
edit: This is obviously not in high uber/lyft density zone like a downtown SF where one can assume most of the rides endup being in the 2 mile radius.
I suspect this happens in London. I always take a "Gett" (fixed price black cab) if so, and it's usually the same price / cheaper and they know how to drive.
Not to mention, cabbies are often socially, ethnically, and even often genetically connected with each other, making the penalties for noncompliance high. If you're spotted driving when you're supposed to be boycotting for a surge, you may find yourself getting dirty looks from your roommates, your friends, and even your family.
This sounds a good control systems approach that provides drivers with an indirect way to influence pricing. If Uber decides to 'out' cheaters somehow, then I'd worry about coercion by other drivers.
And if prices are high, customers will seek alternatives. So it could backfire.
Also, this practice is illegal as it amounts to price fixing/collision. These are all independent businesses conspiring to raise prices. These aren’t employees of the same company – they are independent contractors which means they are separate businuess entities from each other which means they are committing a crime.
Collusion is a crime and that’s exactly what these separate business entities (who happen to have Uber as a customer) are doing.
To the down voters.. is this not collusion? We are all welcome to our own opinions, but facts are what they are: businesses conspiring to force prices higher is the very diffenition of collusion. The size of the entity makes no difference under the law.
I'm not a downvoter, but I see your analysis as extremely uncharitable to drivers. If bringing down the weight of the justice system on individual drivers is a logical consequence of structuring rideshare as individual businesses, that argues for reclassifying them as employees.
EDIT: Full disclosure -- I drive for Lyft part-time. I have not participated in the gaming described in this article.
The article implies that this is an active, coordinated effort; but I have to wonder if any of this is/could be an emergent phenomenon based on the existence of the surge pricing algorithm.
I think some of the surge times are built in. At WDW it's on the dot when the parks close. There will be tons of drivers on the map too. Uber (and Lyft) know that a all the people they shuttled in for cheap in the morning will need a ride home and didn't plan an alternative.
I suspect it's less hard-coded and more a case of the algorithm realizing that there's a huge influx of riders every day at X location at Y time, and just auto-surges until there are a number of days without said influx. It's important to build a surging algorithm this way, as otherwise you'll have an awkward period of low prices with high demand that ends up losing you money in the long run.
I see it more as an economic thing: surge incentives drivers when demand outweighs supply -> drivers manipulate supply to increase price. Kind of fascinating
I haven’t seen any proof but it seems like Lyft does this. I almost never accept surge prices and I absolutely will never accept anything beyond 1.5x. Often if I leave the app open or check back 30 seconds later it will lower the surge rate.
It makes sense if you think about it: giving people who won’t pay surge prices a ride anyway makes drivers scarcer for those who will pay, raising surge prices even further.
I’m pretty sure that surge pricing outside a narrow range will eventually be made illegal. It makes too many people too angry and they’d rather get on a car waiting list than see a 3x price. You can argue the economics all you like but people are irrational.
I drive part time and it definitely covers costs and then some. I gross something like $0.90/km and my costs including gas, maintenance, and depreciation are around $0.30/km. Net is something a little more than minimum wage ($11/h).
Until you get in an accident. The rideshare companies have offloaded lots of aggregate risk onto individual drivers. What would be a line-item cost to the umbrella company is now often a life-wrenching crisis for a driver.
It’s voluntary. If it becomes unprofitable, drivers leave. If they lose money, they won’t do it.
They give a share to Uber because Uber is their lead generation. Many businesses give a share of their money to Google because Google brings them business.
An Uber driver can market their own business and keep all the money if they want just like a business could go out and market without using AdWords.
If you are unhappy with the pay Uber drivers make, you are welcome to pay whatever you want. It’s called a tip. Hand the driver cash for whatever amount you think compensates for the “exploitation” you imply (and are enabling by your own admission.) Otherwise, choose another transportation option and the market will respond.
I rarely hear anti-Uber people demand that supermarkets charge more for tomatoes despite those that pick tomatoes working in extremely tough conditions for low pay. I used to drive a taxi for a summer and I know it’s a non-stop hustle and not the best job, but I was at least in an air conditioned car listening to the radio all day and not out in the fields picking fruits and vegetables. It ended up being a low profit pursuit, so I ended up moving on to something else.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for people that do jobs like Uber because they, with some moderate ambition, could improve their lot – they already own a car, they could make deals with local companies that send lots of people to airports, for example. They could work on building an actual business while they pay the bills with their Uber income – just as an example. Still other drivers might start a mobile car wash service for other Uber drivers, etc. There are plenty of ways to evolve past depending on Uber as one’s sole income. But most people aren’t ambitious at all – they just want to just do what they’re told and collect a check no matter how meager. Other drivers use Uber for extra income or it’s a transitional job.
Any driver thinking they will make a career out of Uber is a fool. If they don’t like the conditions, they should be working hard and to create something of their own. It doesn’t take much money, but it takes ambition.
It also takes sufficient life-situation stability, good health, and so on. Shaming people for lacking "ambition" is neither universally appropriate nor universally effective.
EDIT: I didn't originally upvote the parent comment, but I now have. I think there's a very interesting debate to be had when we consider individuals as economic actors. Disadvantaging individual participants in the "gig economy" too aggressively (e.g. by prosecuting Uber drivers for collusion) forces us towards solutions like unionization by dividing us into privileged capital and downtrodden labor. I'd like to talk more about we might empower individual actors (e.g. by improving the social "safety net" and making the job market more fluid).
I know someone who drives for Uber due to the lead generation but also does jitney service on her own for people that she already knows. That way, no one else gets a cut of the revenue for leads that she had produced herself.
It's my understanding that a lot of people operate in a similar manner.
I'm mostly a fan of these non-taxi "taxi" services, but it seems like they are slowly and painfully rediscovering why taxis ended up so regulated in the first place.