"Only in the last few months it has been established that 14,000 Uber journeys have involved fraudulent drivers uploading their photos to other driver accounts - with passengers' safety potentially put at risk getting into cars with unlicensed and suspended drivers."
This seems, from a technical perspective, an easy problem to solve with the resources of a public company.
Is it the desperation of people who need the money so badly they will constantly cheat the system? Can you design for that?
I wonder what we could do, let's think...maybe...a taxi medalion with a public exam ? :D
They tried to solve the problem from the wrong angle, and it turns out that the high cost of taxis, while suboptimal for sure, might not be entirely for no reason.
That is for the "black cab" taxis, the ones you can hail by waving on the street.
For a private hire vehicle (the kind you telephone or use an app to book), the price is under £700 (under £500 if the driver speaks English).
That doesn't seem unreasonable. The GP comment was referring to the American system where the license are traded at very high costs (tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars).
Those are the prices for becoming a black cab driver (allowed to respond to street hails and use taxi ranks) - to drive for Uber only requires a "private hire driver" license.
The private hire license avoids the need for "the knowledge" and to have the traditional London black cab. There are still fees involved, of course - but becoming an Uber driver is much less demanding than becoming a black cab driver.
I think a better solution to a lot of problems would be to hand out licenses quickly and revoke them quickly. The value of posessing a license can often be questionable but the ability to stop rule breakers is incredibly useful.
This seems, from a technical perspective, an easy problem to solve with the resources of a public company.
Is it the desperation of people who need the money so badly they will constantly cheat the system? Can you design for that?
I don't think the motivation on the part of the drivers who do this is very important. They're intentionally deceiving Uber customers, and in some cases endangering them. That just has to stop, even if the driver is desperate. The point here is that it's Uber's responsibility to stop it happening, and Uber has apparently chosen not to (like you, it's not that hard). That will be very hard to justify, especially as Uber were running TV ads about how they do background checks on all their drivers here in the UK recently.
Other than constant facial recognition via camera pointed at the driver, how does anyone (not just Uber), guarantee that an approved driver doesn’t get out of the car and a non approved driver get in and start driving?
Perhaps a selfie with the driver taken by the passengers during the drive would also suffice.
In my opinion, Uber has done enough. They provide the passenger with the drivers name and photo. It’s up to the passenger to verify, but Uber should make violations easy to report.
Fingerprint on a phone (either iOS or Android) only authenticates the local phone user, it doesn't really expose any mean of unique identification to the app. So, basically even if you enforce fingerprinting to use the app, it would just authenticate/match whatever fingerprint was registered in the underlying OS.
>It’s up to the passenger to verify, but Uber should make violations easy to report.
They are. Click a trip, scroll down, click "my driver was unprofessional", click "my driver didnt match the profile in my app".
The problem is most people dont report stuff to uber. I hear stories all the time from people and everytime I ask if they reported the driver they say no.
I'm an Uber driver in the U.S. midwest (so I'm not sure if they're operating the same way in London), but every so often they make me take a live selfie within their app or I cannot accept new rides.
It's a pain in the ass to have to pull over and do this sometimes, but it does seem like they're trying to do the right thing with it. I will say that at first it made me pretty angry, but when I realized the implication - that someone has probably already tried to fraudulently hand control to a different driver - it gave me chills and I realized they may not have many other options.
Surely a decent solution would be for the uber driver having to use their fingerprint to initialise the app before every journey (as long as they're not using a galaxy s10)
How do you stop one person signing up, doing the whole verification process correctly and then someone else using the app/driving the car? The only safeguard that springs to mind is providing a photo of the driver to the user, but that's already implemented.
You could also do spot checks (no idea if they do or not), but that's not going to eliminate the problem just reduce it.
They have had this since 2016[0]. The problem is you have uber logic behind it. The only time it asks me to verify is when I'm on the highway and turn the app off and back on. I guess they think I'm tossing the phone to the car next to me while going 65?
Which is the exact problem. Ubers smaller competitors have no incentive for heavy regulatory features because they can get away with it. That in turn pushes Uber to not implement them either, until the very last moment.
The article doesn't really explain... their current temporary license (they have been on a temp one since last year) expires at 11.59 tonight, TFL won't give them a new permanent one. This will be in the courts today and they will probably be granted another temporary one before the day is out.
> Legislation means that Uber now has 21 days to appeal, during which it can continue to operate pending any appeal and throughout any potential appeals process. Uber may seek to implement changes to demonstrate to a magistrate that it is fit and proper by the time of the appeal.
I know this opinion is not popular but I'm so happy everytime I see bad news for Uber and all these companies that only exist thanks to basically exploiting THEIR workers.
Private transporting is not sustainable and it is not something that has to be affordable for everyone, even less by lowering workers wages or playing with the tariffs by demand. Taxi regulations gives us passengers safety and fair prices. There are taxi apps that work exactly like Uber's like 'Free-now' where you can see your trip, its aproximate cost, the driver's rating...
We have to promote governments that support affordable and good quality public transport, even though I love driving alone in my car.
I hope Deliveroo, Glovo and other companies are also punished for their labour rights abuses. Make sure your delivery guy is payed fairly or either go to the restaurant yourself.
So many years of labour rights fights being attacked by these startups that do not invent anything but base their business model on lower wages.
I can agree with you on worker treatment but I take issue with
"So many years of labour rights fights being attacked by these startups that do not invent anything but base their business model on lower wages."
The only reason ANY of the taxi companies have improved service with new apps and lower prices is because of the competition introduced by ride sharing companies.
Let's not conflate Uber with ride sharing/app-taxi in general. Uber wasn't the first company of its type, it's only the one that became most known. It also wasn't like all the other ride share companies, it was well-known for utter disregard for laws and deeply sociopathic management. And it's not like this behavior was necessary to bring in all the innovation; disruption of the taxi space by private companies was happening for a while now. Uber only used its antisocial behavior to gain market dominance, and as a side effect it legitimized such dishonorable practices in the startup scene.
Personally, I like and use this "new breed" of app-based taxi services (except Uber). I just want to see Uber finally die. It should have died years ago.
My favorite example is iCar - a private company that successfully broke into the taxi market in my city (Kraków, Poland) some 15 years ago. AFAIR, they exploited a legal loophole that, coupled with increasing popularity of GPS car navigation, let them run with a single taxi license for the entire company (vs. each driver). Legacy taxi drivers were pissed, there were few cases of tire slashing on both sides, then the courts got involved, taxi regulations got clarified, and the company is alive to this very day. I switched to them the moment I first heard of them, and rode with them up until MyTaxi came, offering an app that could be used not just to order a ride, but also pay for it.
> And the mafia connected taxi regime isn't sociopathic?
That's quite an accusation (going from "taxi mafia" to taxis connected to actual mafia), though I suppose it's true in some parts of the world.
Either way, sure, plenty of cities had their taxi services thoroughly broken. However, that doesn't justify fighting the bad with the worse. Despite the PR narrative they pushed, Uber wasn't some tiny upstart bravely fighting against the great taxi mafia - it was a VC backed corporation (later on, a multinational) fighting individual taxi networks in a divide-and-conquer fashion. And when I call Uber sociopathic, I don't just mean I don't like them - this particular company has a long documented history of antisocial behavior.
> If we're going to judge Uber for breaking this monopoly, let's also turn that same critical eye on the monopoly it broke.
Again, multinational corporation breaking city after city, in isolation? Also, I'm not judging Uber for being a monopoly. I'm judging them for being a morally bankrupt company that achieved market domination by breaking the law and only got away with it because they moved fast and burned through lots of investor money.
Typically i'd agree with your sentiment. Unfortunately I remember what getting around was like pre-Uber and that unregulated minicab companies are no better for workers exploitation or working rights and passenger safety...where is TfL(Transport for Londons) action on those firms? or the many uber clones that have popped up recently (Bolt, Kapten et al.) Uber is really an easy target for them. The alternative is the black cabs who are apparently the safer/regulated option however the number of times in my early 20s catching black cabs and not seeing any driver registration and having their card machines constantly not working and paying sky high prices in order to pay for their obsolescent knowledge test and fume producing diesel chugging machine makes me really sad at the thought of returning to this.
Hopefully uber can clean up their act and get something sorted as seems to me the consumer is the loser in all of this.
It seems pretty common for public policy (in your example, minicab provision and regulation) to first fail and then for the rise of Uber to be promoted by the faithful as an alternative solution.
In reality, Uber’s existence, no matter what the company or its supporters might say, is simply a different way of highlighting the very same failure in public policy.
The poor have no bread? Let them eat cake. The citizens need an out of hours ride home from the pub? Page a Prius.
Funny, I remember London black cabs as mainly being a reliable service with reliable drivers. I'd rather have a driver with their route knowledge in their head than one blindly relying on GPS. At least they can make intelligent choices when problems crop up.
Not that it was completely without problems, but compared to say NYC cabs they were worlds apart. Sure, there was a problem for a while with rogue unregistered cabs, though IIRC that was mainly minicabs and relied on intercepting despatch radio messages, but there were some black cabs. The cliche of not going south of the river held up to some scrutiny too. Uber of course go with phone you then just don't show if they don't like the route and waste half and hour of yours. At least it was a two way conversation with a cabbie.
That London hasn't put a blanket ban on diesel cabs in the low emission zone isn't really the cab's fault - that's firmly on the authorities...
Yeah I know, that's why I pointed out that it was mainly private hire. Yet it wasn't solely them as most black cab firms also took calls and bookings and despatched just like minicabs, opening them up to the same scam. Genuine street hire only black cabs still exist, but they're pretty damn rare now.
>Genuine street hire only black cabs still exist, but they're pretty damn rare now.
They are not rare in city centres, which is their natural habitat eg. take a trip into Central London/Westend/City of London etc., you will find them everywhere. Unless, you are talking about the suburbs, where they have always been as rare as hens teeth.
it costs 100 quid to go from heathrow to zone 3 via black cab, and about 35 for uber.
"Uber of course go with phone you then just don't show if they don't like the route and waste half and hour of yours. At least it was a two way conversation with a cabbie."
I completely disagree. The uber app shows the route the driver is taking and offers way more transparency than a black cab.
It doesn't matter if it shows the route. Uber in my experience will side with the driver if they take a bad route. I was swindled for triple the price because of a fictitious gas leak. Driver took a very circuitous route that just so happened to take in some very fast roads to increase distance and price. When I complained to Uber they just said it was a normal route. On the map the route looks like a sickle. How can anyone look at that as normal?
I feel like you're not giving us all the details of this case. What do you mean by fast roads? Uber calculates price on both distance and time, so fast rides can also be to your advantage. How do you know the gas leak was fictitious?
>I remember London black cabs as mainly being a reliable service with reliable drivers >The cliche of not going south of the river held up to some scrutiny too. >At least it was a two way conversation with a cabbie.
It seems that you rode a black cab very occasionally, if you never experienced a cabbie getting lost. Much has been made of the knowledge, which was dense where the routes being traversed were frequent but it was already deteriorating by the time Uber arrived. I have had the misfortune of having to rely on black cabs, on some of my past gigs, on a daily basis and spent a small fortune/part of my life on these rides, especially when they were the only choice in a rush. I can assure you that the cliché of not going south of the river was 100% true, amongst many others, although it doesn't matter so much anymore. As for romanticising the 'two-way conversation' ─ it was not a dialogue but usually an unsolicited diatribe of regurgitated opinions, gathered from the daily rags and caustic radio chat shows ─ which you were bullied into agreeing with, just to journey in some relative peace and quiet. I will take an Uber et al. every single time, for the very reasons you mentioned.
Considerable spell of using a London black cab twice daily, whilst I was contracting in London. I explicitly said the cliche of south of the river held up to some scrutiny, i.e. was based on fact. Far from universal though, unless you caught a street cab - the hail only black cabs without possibility of radio despatch. They wanted to stay central. Choose cab firm accordingly.
I've had cabbies get lost twice, that I can remember - once he was claiming to be new, and he was stressing like crazy about it. The other time I went a fair way out of local area. Both times resolved amicably. Sure, I've also had a fair selection of less than perfect routing - but overall, far less than some of the games Uber drivers have tried.
I almost always got conversation or quiet and can't ever remember an unsolicited diatribe. I'd steer conversation away from the political, and if that's what the driver wanted to chat about, I'd ask them to shut up.
I would take the overall service received every time over the comparative service from Uber. Neither was or is perfect. Uber's cheap, and it shows in what and how they deliver, and the complete lack of quality and standards for drivers. It's essentially the only selling point. I'm a long way out of London now, but I've gone back to exclusively using cabs and private hire.
> you can see your trip, its aproximate cost, the driver's rating
Here's the thing: I don't want to rate my driver. I want to be able to rely on a third party that all available drivers are punctual and competent. It is not a choice I want to make.
Too much responsibility is already dumped on consumers under the guise of choice. Quality control of services I utilize is something I expect to pay for.
Has centralised quality control for taxi drivers worked somewhere?
Our "grand old" taxi company in my town who advertises for being the only reliable option with professional drivers failed on me five times on a row. On successive rides I got a standard neo-nazi lecture about immigrants, my Visa credit card was refused apparently for transaction costs, two of my drivers got lost and one tried to drive to my destination using mostly sidewalks for driving on.
I sent feedback each time to only receive a generic "we are sorry, we have failed our quality controls and this will never happen again" copy-pasted message. Maybe it's more straightforward to advertise than getting rid of drivers who can't behave.
With Uber I know my bad ranking (I have always rated my drivers 5 stars, so far) has at least some effect on the misbehaving driver.
It's also produced cabs with very high pollution [1], up to 30x that of a regular car.
Here in New York we don't have the same kind of unusual taxicabs, but we do strictly regulate taxi and Uber drivers.
I personally find taxis here insufferable. I live in Queens and regularly had to help them "remember" where Queens is. Or remember the TLC regulations about accepting a credit card.
I've not had the same song and dance with Uber.
If this is the quality that the regulations enforce, count me out.
Some points about my personal experience with Uber in my city:
1. Drivers listening to evangelical stations very loudly, spewing hate between musics. Most get angry if you tell to lower the sound. God forbid you ask to change the station;
2. Many drivers trying to rig the system, which in turn costs me money. Uber gives me credit for most complaints, but I can only use it with Uber, so my lost money is good for them either way;
3. I've rated many drivers negatively. Whatever happened to them? Who can tell?
I think the driver ratings could be largely derived from app data. How close to pickup do they get on average? How close to drop off do they get on average? How erratic is their driving? Do they speed a lot? Other traffic violations? A lot can be gleaned from the GPS and other data. The only remaining factor would be the human side of things: are they nice, is their car nice to sit in?
Given that there are something like 20,000 black cabs in London, I'm seeing your one outlier from 10 years ago as a pretty solid argument in favor of them. And that's before we start debating about the merits of driver vetting processes and vehicle maintenance requirements.
What difference in vetting is there between Black Cab drivers and Minicab drivers in London?
What difference in vehicle maintenence?
The vetting process may be flawed, but it's flawed in both hackney carriage and phv licensing. This was acknowleged by say Milton Keynes, which gave a Hackney + PHV license to an applicant with convictions for rape and other serious sexual offences [0]
I have no confidence in London that the vetting process works, and the authorities are far more interested in retaining an obsolete cartel. Rather than fix their vetting procedure (which has always allowed dodgy minicab firms, which were never a threat to the powerful black cab industry), they concentrate on Uber.
And this is why Uber lots it's license. It wasn't properly vetting private hire drivers. It's not hard. Follow the rules and they'll get their license back.
I'm just perplexed. What are you even commenting on? Uber isnt the one vetting private drivers, they just check if they have the private driver license or not. This is up to tfl.
Uber lost the license because they were 'not fit or proper', nothing to do with vetting, seemingly because of a feature of the website that seemingly allows drivers to upload new photos and get other people to drive for them
> A key issue identified was that a change to Uber's systems allowed unauthorised drivers to upload their photos to other Uber driver accounts.
Other minicab firms of course don't have a photo on an app, and the passenger has to check the photo once they've got in the car (I believe PHV drivers have to show their PHV license from TFL), which puts passengers in a far worse situation when the driver doesn't match. I wonder how many small minicab firms have been determined to be not fit or proper.
I relentlessly give an average delivery or ride 3 stars, but feel bad every time. When the ride is quite good, 4 stars, and exceptional, 5 stars. Exceptional is the exception.
Three stars doesn’t make you a bad rider or a bad driver, just average. If it’s not the bulk of the ratings you give, you’re an unreliable rater and not helping the ratings anyway.
I used to think like this (and still do for movies and such), but recall reading that a driver under 4.6 or 4.7 rating will barely get any clients matched any more.
Maybe they should scale your ratings based on your rating pattern. I don't know how to do it mathematically but there must be some way to normalize scores if you have enough data. Anybody knows how to do this?
I’d start with assuming everyone’s experience is normal distributed.
Someone who always voted 3 stars probably had the same experience as someone who always voted 5 stars. I’d try out computing the normal distribution of the rater and see where on the distribution this particular vote fell.
Your inability to follow the cultural norm is actually at fault here, not the rating system. What you’re doing is akin to tipping 5% in restaurants in the US and only tipping 15% when you have an outstanding experience. In reality, restaurants workers in the USA would expect 15% to 20% unless they dramatically fucked up. I don’t like the tipping system either, but I’m also not going to be that asshole who tries to change the system all on my own without anyone else agreeing to it.
Just use the rating system like everyone else and get over it:
If the driver was great it’s 5 stars with all the “what did I do great” options checked and a note for the driver.
If the driver didn’t fuck up it’s five stars.
If you don’t want to be matched with the same driver again but they didn’t do anything egregious it’s three stars.
If you were outright disgusted at your ride it’s 1 Star.
That’s it. It’s simple. Your own personal usage of the ratings system is not helpful.
Actually, for another example of why your ratings method is bad, let’s compare three stars to grades in school. Three out of five stars would be 60%, which is a D- in most schools. That’s not an average grade. Someone who completes all the homework and does an average job would expect a B, which would be 4 stars. Someone who didn’t get any questions wrong would get an A, 5 stars.
If your Uber driver took you to your destination with a reasonably clean car that’s an A. There’s no such thing as exceptional. It’s a car ride not a physics exam, what do you want exactly?
Uber wants a driver to maintain over a 4 rating, something like 4.5 or 4.2. When you give that driver a 3 rating you’re not saying “thanks, you were acceptable and average.” You are saying “you kind of suck” and Uber won’t actually even match the driver with you again. So if you continue to give all your drivers 3 stars just because you wish the rating system worked a different way than it does, you’re even screwing yourself by reducing the number of drivers that can match with you.
While that's on point, the US school grades are even more obscure and meaningless than the taxi rating to the rest of the world. Many countries are using numbers like out of 10 or 100 and doing an average job on the homework will land you the average like 5 or 50.
It's kinda funny how everything is connected: school grades, restaurant tips, taxi ratings.
From what I have heard from drivers, anything less than 5 stars is bad. Not only with Uber, but with all those companies pushing customers to review their employees. The system is counterintuitive and most people get it wrong at the beginning. Compare what makes you rate 5 stars when you buy a product to your Uber rating system.
However, the think that irks me the most is that rating everyday experiences is just dumb. Most taxi drives will be average and that's it, because we all just want it to be good enough. It's as if my local supermarket made me rate the cashier with 1 to 5 stars. I don't want to do that, because that person just needs to do their job. Anything above "good enough" is unnecessary. Significantly bad experiences should be a "reported to the manager" (or any similar mechanism), filtering out trivial complaints that you'd get in a 5-star scale and getting actual useful information on how to improve the system.
The US restaurant example is funny because the problem is the same. Instead of paying by default fair wages and paying attention to customers that complain about workers, they delegate the 'rating' part to customers, which means that there's no feedback on which they can improve and that their salary is determined by arbitrary people judgements.
> What you’re doing is akin to tipping 5% in restaurants in the US and only tipping 15% when you have an outstanding experience. In reality, restaurants workers in the USA would expect 15% to 20% unless they dramatically fucked up.
This is actually the sole reason I don't go to restaurants/diners. These rules aren't what I grew up with (yes, in the US, I've never left the country), seem to be different every time I hear them, and usually keep creeping higher. I just never know what to tip, so it's either fast food and no tip, or go a bit hungry until I can get home.
That’s kind of an unreasonable solution to this problem. I don’t think the 15% rate has changed any in the last multiple decades. I think many people tip 20% because the math is easier.
Tipping doesn’t need to be a source of anxiety. If the act of figuring out your tip is the sole reason you don’t go out for a nice meal on a special occasion, I think this is something to talk to a therapist or confidant about.
That very much depends on which country you're talking about. That's the case in the US, but try telling a teacher in France you deserve 16/20 because you did an average job!
If enough people make the right choice instead of the herd behavior, the commons will be less tragic.
“If the driver didn’t fuck up it’s five stars” is aggressively harmful to any above average or excellent drivers out there, with no reward for trying to be either.
That's exactly what bugs me so much about Trip Advisor ratings. Even then, when they still had some utility.
When you have a 5* scale for rating a restaurant my description would be:
* A disaster level lousy place
** Sub par. Probably wouldn't visit again
*** Quite OK. Probably not my fave anytime soon, but
fine
**** Above average. Excellent food, service and
atmosphere
***** An out of this world dining experience. Perfect in
every aspect
I realise that there is a certain amount of relativity and subjectivity and that a 5* Trip Advisor review is not necessarily equal to three stars by Guide Michelin.
But it should mean something and when most restaurants have something between 4 and 5 stars (Let alone that the #1 rated restaurant in London was one, which didn't exist[1]) the value of such ratings become very questionable.
You can see the exact same with Airbnb ratings where 4 -, or 5 star does not mean that you will have a great experience.
"regulations gives us passengers safety and fair prices." - We had these before Uber, and it was worse.
Uber has pushed up quality in general. Market pressure is often a better way of doing these things rather trying to have a central inspector who can't see everything all of the time.
On the spectrum of healthcare (NHS private partnerships) to municipal transport (Uber) to food delivery (Deliveroo) to casual labor (Task Rabbit), it feels like there are different levels of expectation for governments to fulfill needs, as opposed to leaving it to the free market, ranging respectively from total provision to no involvement at all.
Even when society decides it’s up to the private sector to fulfill its needs there needs to be regulation to avoid the “race to the bottom” from meaning an actual race to rock bottom.
Uber surely provides an amazing service to consumers but at what cost to labor rights, road traffic, and in this case, public safety?
* Deregulate halfway, by promising that things will be better in the free market
* Wait for trust erosion in the public institutions and regulations
* Remove remaining regulations, because obviously, regulation is not working, and the "free" market will take care of things
* Create an effective monopoly because it is not economic to maintain two or more infrastructures in parallel. After that, raise prices.
If only we really had people lobbying for a truly free market. I.e. a market where rules are imposed and maintained. Where umpires make sure everyone is playing fairly. Where businesses can compete and where customers have a choice.
You know if you are a butcher, you should be pretty pleased with a central inspector touring your shop's front and back, making sure that hygiene is well-maintained. What needs to be made sure though is, that EVERY business competing with you is held to the same standards.
So for uber, I'd be super happy if they'd pay their drivers an agreed standard/union wage (or more) and compensated maintenance costs for their private vehicles they are using for the profit of the company accordingly. It's not much to ask really.
Thats about as honest as saying: Democrat playbook; strawman all other belief systems into being immoral, while not bothering to form a basic understanding of them.
Please, take some time to understand why people have different ideas. It is seldom if ever, malice. If you cannot relate, keep your mouth shut, or ask questions.
What Uber did have nothing to do with market pressure because all that competition is not driven by the market, but enormous amounts of VC money dumped into it in attempt to capture some market share.
PS: I'm not pushing for government regulation in any way though. UK have enough of totalitarianism-like regulations already.
The UK definitely does not have “full employment” unless you have a very stretched meaning of the word “full”. Even if you think the level of unemployment is okay, the level of underemployment reveals things are very far from rosy.
Above you said "they're doing it because they like working for Uber". Now you say it's just the best option they have. That's quite different
> If uber wasn't their best option they simply move to a better job.
Simply? You know there are costs and risks associated with changing jobs, right?
> If you ban uber you simply remove the current best option for most people working for uber
This is blackmail and using workers as hostages. If Uber were a decent company, it would have hired the workers they need instead of the fraud that is the partner scheme. In this situation of Uber losing license to operate, the drivers would either be still employed or be fired and get severance packages and unemployment benefits.
This is why a lot of people dislike and want the "gig economy startups" gone: they ignore the rules in the name of "user experience", exploit their workers to keep prices down and eat up the market, and then use the position they have to force their views on public policy. Governments must stop them and make them pay what they should have paid if they were operating correctly.
People who want Uber banned are often middle-class people following their left-wing ideology pretending to be on side of the working class worker. That or black cab drivers.
If you actually listen to vast majority workers working Uber they're ok with it. They enjoy the flexibility and the lack of obligations. If people want more fixed work they can get it at the moment.
Essentially you are taking the choice away from these people to work for uber, based on your own version of your morals and not theirs.
Your imposing your own morals on people who don't want your morals. That can be dangerous.
They seem very happy indeed. So happy they have recently striked over pay and conditions [1]. A MIT study also showed the big profits they have (26% make more than minimum wage in the US!) [2].
>Your imposing your own morals on people who don't want your morals.
You are wrong. It is not morals. It is the law. Uber is bypassing laws, full stop.
According to a government report[1] 68% of workers are satisfied working for ride-sharing services. Which admittingly isn't super high, but not awful either. But the most important thing like is the independence it gives.
They like the independence it gives? Only 52% are satisfied with it according to the same report.
By the way, the report shows in appendix table 7 that only 23% of the sample reported more than 50% income from the gig economy. Don't you find it weird?
> The laws are created by a minority of people who don't always vote in favour of the public.
And Uber has the interest of the public in mind, right?
> You regulate it like a normal job, and the thing they like about it most will be removed.
Hiring someone as a freelancer to do a regular job (that is, a job where Uber decides fares, conditions and tools for the job and the worker mainly does what it's told) is fraud. And I'm not the one saying this, the courts are saying it in the UK [1] and other countries are following suit.
What a ridiculous position - the UK only has full employment right now in part because of the tactics of companies like Uber. Gig-economy companies pump the "self-employed" figures with poor wages, hidden costs, and no employment benefits.
You could pay the whole country a penny a day if all you cared about was boosting a number metric. It wouldn't somehow translate to worker satisfaction.
As was pointed out in the other reply - if you claim that full employment means that people always have other opportunities than Uber, then there is no harm in axing Uber. That there are worse actors than Uber in the job market is a terrible defense of it.
Says who? Just because you say it, doesn't make it true. Private transporting has been with humanity since ancient times. It's not going away and it's sustainable.
> and it is not something that has to be affordable for everyone, even less by lowering workers wages or playing with the tariffs by demand.
It's nice that you aren't price conscious when taking 'private transport'. And you're right, uber opened up the market to people that could not afford (or could not justify) taking a taxi before. You see that as a detriment, because you have money but others may disagree. That was certainly me in Uni when I walked home in the middle of night, through sketchy neighbourhoods, because my city's public transport ended at 2am, and I wasn't about to pay $40-$60 for a cab ride (assuming it showed up at all).
I actually started using Uber when during a trip to Chicago I got shafted by several taxi companies who simply wouldn't pick me up from (I guess) the neighbourhood I was in .. in the middle of November. That was the reality of taxis pre-uber. Everybody hated them. They were openly discriminating by geogrpahy and ethnicity. They were expensive. They were also unreliable. And you had no options.
>Taxi regulations gives us passengers safety and fair prices.
Tax regulations, especially in cities like New York, protected taxi cab companies (and the private equity firms that owned the medallions) and created a medalion bubble which made running an independent taxi almost impossible and benefited only the medallion owners.
It's also a false choice. Muncipalities can (and do) certainly set safety standards on Uber and Lyft.
And by the way, many of the regulations that Taxis operate under came as a result of taxis scamming and cheating people (especially tourists and forgeiners) out of money. And it still happens if you travel abroad ... speaking of which, when I'm abroad and Uber is available, it really does remove the language barrier and is immensely helpful in navigating a non-english speaking city.
>We have to promote governments that support affordable and good quality public transport,
'Private transport' is public transport. It is part of the mix of public transportation. Every option you provide that disincentives car ownership is a benefit.
> I know this opinion is not popular but I'm so happy everytime I see bad news for Uber and all these companies that only exist thanks to basically exploiting THEIR workers.
Yes comrade! All companies only exist by exploiting their workers, viva la revolution!
Misrepresentation. The comment was clearly talking about this company with it's toxic history and the worker abuse problems by it and within its sector.
NYer here: you should read how the taxi companies exploited their workers. And NYC was at least regulated.
Moreover, the cabs were filthy, they often refused passengers due to race, disability or other illegal prejudice, refused certain destinations, spoke little English, didn't know the city, would drive inefficiently to drive up costs and on and on.
Oh, and cellphones arrived and they did NOTHING until Uber pushed them to accept mobile payments. You STILL can't see your ETA or share the ride, and there's no ratings/reputation system.
So between the demons, I'll take the ride-sharing companies.
Also good luck getting reasonable (or any) cab service outside of Manhattan and NW Brooklyn. It was even worse pre rideshare days. Those are the areas that would need something like rideshare more since they're both less dense with less expansive public transit.
I don't know if private transport is ultimately unsustainable. That's something people much smarter than me will have to figure out how to measure. But I do know rideshare is objectively a better product for consumers across the board than the services it replaced.
I still think having a network of drivers all around you and being able to track the status of your ride both pre-arrival and during the ride itself makes rideshare a better product. Depending where you are those dispatched drivers can take a while to get to you.
Of course you can just have a bunch of black car services in your phonebook that are dispersed around the city but.. at that point why not just use rideshare?
Not really. I had a very dumpy car service by my home in south queens. You had these retired neighborhood riff raff drivers, some who I knew were coke heads because they did it right off the toilet tank in the local dive bar. They're all dead now. Wonder why. The best was when we got a car to run down to brooklyn one night and "frankie" pulls up all coked up and I got to enjoy him snorting his spit while I'm sitting next to him. As fucked up as they were, they got you to your destination. Green cabs didn't exist and yellow cabs were only found in people's driveways and because JFK is nearby.
Now with Lyft I can get a car in just a few minutes, hop in, get driven to my destination, and get out. No worrying about cash or tipping. Just go. A lot nicer.
It is unpopular, because the premise is so completely wrong. What exploration? You want to drive for Uber, drive for Uber. You do not want to drive for it, don't. As simple as that.
What I heard from drivers is Uber has by far the best tech for predicting/connecting routes. And I am really tired of of screaming "workers rights" all the time.
>> There are taxi apps that work exactly like Uber's like 'Free-now' where you can see your trip, its aproximate cost, the driver's rating...
Pre uber hailing a cab from a location other than the airport in Atlanta where I live was impossible. You'd have to call their 1-800 number hours in advance with no guarantee of it being serviced. Even if such apps exist now it might be due to uber pushing the envelope. Uber and other ride sharing service might not be relevant in the NYCs, Chicagos and Londons of the world but for cities like ours they were a godsend.
Yes, super exploiting their drivers is a necessity for their success. But there are others. Governments have been intentionally crippling public transportation for the past 40 years or so in many western countries. And they have been shifting resources to private transportation. Liberalizing labor law - or more precisely: transferring authority over labor law to unaccountable private tyrannies - is another. And the UK was pretty much leading this assault. Even now the German government is working aggressively towards scrapping the Passenger Transportation Act which they are refusing to enforce consistently anyway and which at least in theory puts a cap on the life span of this horrible business model.
Uber at the end of a day is just a private enterprise operating (mostly) consistent with the law and with it's function as a private enterprise which is to make money for its shareholders. Blaming them for this is akin to blaming the puppy eating monster for eating the puppies we give them. Who the f- thought that would be a good idea to begin with?
Name one market where Taxi Regulation ensure fair prices. Please, entertain me.
You're conflating how Uber works in certain countries to how it works in London. The relationship between Uber and the driver can vary so much depending on what market you are talking about.
Most cab authorities, and many of the drivers under them, are scum. It is hard to express just how corrupt and unprofessional Uber would have to be to come anywhere near being worse than them. I personally prefer Lyft, the app is less broken and the prices are pretty similar here in Southern Ontario. In Toronto, the transit authorities even have a cross-promotional relationship with Lyft, and I think it increases ridership noticeably. Public transit can only get you so far, even if it's as extensive as anyone can afford to run.
Uber isn't exploiting anyone: it is extremely simple to register with them, you can work whenever you please, and you can stop at any point; they pay on time and give you transparent access to their managerial infrastructure to see how you can align yourself with their business, or that you're unwilling to do that. Just because your system isn't set up to particularly support independent contractors doesn't mean that Uber's drivers fall outside that category.
In Toronto, when the cabbies were fed up with being out-competed by Uber contractors (and Uber's subsidies at the time), they decided to block all the roads surrounding a major hospital, including the emergency vehicle routes. To my mind, all of them should have lost not only their taxi licenses, but their driver's licenses as well.
The authorities promised to professionalize cabs, but in reality they did the exact opposite, and the same story has repeated itself across North America.
1. Remember to get the cab medallion number during your ride.
2. Go online to submit a fairly lengthy report to TLC, alongside your contact info.
3. Nothing for 2 months
4. Someone calls you asking you for details. You may even have to show up to a hearing. By this point you forget almost the entire issue.
5. The cabbie who ignored you, drove dangerously, scammed you has been driving for months without a registered complaint and nothing will happen.
New York Yellow Cab is the best too—cabs in the Bay Area, for instance, were absolutely awful before Uber. I also cannot imagine Taxi companies were stewards of fair labor practices before Uber either.
The taxi service in London is generally quite robust. Drivers have to pass a rigorous exam prior to certification, and the cars used are just awesome. Visiting there from the states and using their taxis was quite a pleasant experience I wish we could replicate.
The market has spoken. Uber as a service has shown itself to be wildly better and more loved than traditional cab services in every city where it's gone head to head in open competition with traditional taxi services.
Unfortunately people are morons that don't know how to make the "right" choice. We will be conveniently layering bureaucracy and laws on top of all of this to make sure the clearly inferior product wins by fiat of the government.
You would all thank us but you're obviously too stupid to know what's best for you.
You don't think its worth protecting the trade of taxi-driving? Used to be the case you could make good tradesman money to be able to afford a house and a family on a taxi salary. Post-Uber that wont be so.
Is it "stupid" to want jobs that arguably require "less-skill" to not pay out a decent wage? Are we going to try to force more and more into university and leave those that don't fit in that box to work towards minimum wage? Taxi driving in London has long been a way of making a working class individual's life much better in exchange for the investment of the cost of the cab and licence.
First your argument is does one have a right to make money doing something the same way it was done yesterday? Or 10 or 20 years ago?
At one time you could make good money operating an elevator. Do we ban buttons in elevators to protect these jobs?
So no. No I don't think it's on societies best interest to outlaw buttons in elevators. New technology is happening that fundamentally de-values what a driver now does. It's unfair but it's maybe time for new jobs. That's simply best for society as a whole. The amount we all collectively save will vastly dwarf anything these few get by holding back the tide.
Two - the old system sucked. It was terrible. It still is. Taxis in NYC were already a cesspool of con-men and corruption. Lives were ruined in the buying and selling of medallions. The cars sucked, the drivers refused to go places, the ONLY reason it survived at all was the government forced it down our throats.
Uber won because people like it better. No matter what you say about any of it - people decided they VASTLY prefer pressing their own button in the elevator. It's sad but it's life.
So yes, it is "stupid" to fight this when everyone using these services has so clearly said the new way is better.
> You don't think its worth protecting the trade of taxi-driving? Used to be the case you could make good tradesman money to be able to afford a house and a family on a taxi salary.
No. Regulated taxis used to be a racket; of course they provided (somewhat) decent living for those who participated, although most money went to the medallion ownert.
I don't see why the needs of a few thousand cabbies (per city) should trump the needs of the millions who clearly prefer Uber.
^^ which is kinda my point and also arguably reasons for shit like Brexit. If we, the intelligentsia make "no subsidies" arguments for taking away well paying jobs for the working classes while allowing other (lobbied) industries to accept subsidies then we're making ourselves complicit in the hypocrisy.
It's pretty amazing how consistently Uber fails to abide by even the most basic regulations. How many times does a billion dollar company get a second chance? Every time this happens people talk about how the Mayor will get in trouble for this, but let's face it, ride hailing apps are 10 a penny. Lyft, Taxify, MyTaxi? No one in London is going to miss Uber.
Free Now for instance, previously MyTaxi, previously Hailo.
How many time will this thing get rebranded? How many times will my data be shared with new entities?
It's legit. They just got bought or partnered or something with BMW, and the business is intended to consolidate with bike sharing and some other stuffs in Europe.
I ride with FreeNow in my city, just as I did with MyTaxi before. Same drivers, same app, same prices, just different colors (and slightly less favorable terms of employment, from what I've heard from the drivers during the time of transition).
Do you even live in London? I love when people talk about a whole city in general terms like they can speak for millions of people.
Well get this, I live in London and I love Uber and I would definitely miss Uber if they stopped operating here. So your statement is wrong. In fact, our general slack channel at work had a ton of people posting sad faces about this news. But yeah sure I guess you know what every Londoner thinks...
Bolt is funded by Chinese money. They're heavily subsidizing rides with that money to capture some of the market and they will have to raise prices eventually.
I saw few acquaintances trying Bolt (in London) and the main argument is the first rides are free, then the next rides are free too if you refer a friend.
Yes, thanks I do "even live in London". In fact, I've lived in and around London all my life. Uber is fine, it's about as great as any of the other identical apps, and frankly, is far worse than being familiar with the local public transport 99% of the time inside London.
Uber exited our market of Southeast Asia and we are left with a giant monopoly (Grab) that intends to become a SuperApp a-la WeChat in China. That is a scary prospect.
Their race to the bottom was absolutely beneficial to consumers while it was going on. Smaller rivals have nowhere near the resources of Uber when competing with Grab.
London and the UK has plenty of other taxi companies with an app for consumers to choose from (which are following the rules one assumes). So your experience in Southeast Asia although depressing is irrelevant.
Deliveroo should suffer a reckoning too, if there’s any sense in the world.
Have you ever seen a bunch of Deliveroo riders clogging up the public space outside a restaurant or other public space? Why should one business get to exploit pavements for profit, without regulation. Private companies shouldn’t be able to co-opt public space without scrutiny or permission.
Or maybe I’m too ethical and not being enough of a hustler, and I should move my team into the desk space at the local library?
You’re right, I suppose it is a narrow concern and the solution you highlight would be an appropriate one for that particular problem.
It feels though like the delivery driver loitering problem is a red flag for a much larger problem of corporate appropriation being acceptable, without being challenged by those we entrust to look after our public spaces and roads.
It’s why a solution like “delivery drivers shouldn’t loiter in public spaces” is a poor solution, and why “private business should not be conducted in public without a license” might be a better and more general message.
I've never seen them, they don't operate in my area. That said, your complaint was unclear.
Did they go beyond simple parking into more egregious use of public space, like parking on the sidewalk or blocking traffic?
Or is it about public parking? Would it be okay if they were customers instead of delivery workers? How much of a difference does it make that a corporation is involved?
TFL should actually provide a reliable service if they want to start pointing fingers. They talk about security and safety but it's not safe to have to wait around hoping for the off chance a scammy black cab will spot you after your TFL train gets cancelled for whatever reason.
I live in London mate, I was making a distinction between a train that is operated by TFL and a train that is not. I also didn't call it a tube because I was referring more to the overground.
TFL Rail is the name for TFL's temporary services either side of what will be Crossrail. Once Crossrail opens to the public it will all become Crossrail / The Elizabeth Line even those services that don't actually go under London.
So TFL do operate trains, even ignoring London Overground which is in effect also TFL.
I'd be very happy to see uber kicked out of London long enough for a competitor to take hold.
I simply do not trust the company.
I accept that the market pressure uber has brought has improved transportation. I do not accept that uber and its repeated atrocious behaviors required for this.
Its a shame that uber can so easily bypass tfl with appeals and minor changes.
If uber gets kicked out, the rest of its modern competitors will follow (Uber is big enough to litigate succesfully, but not all are), and you'll be back to the black cabs.
90% of the time, uber is being kicked not because of any concern for safety, but because of traditional taxi company lobbying.
This is actually completely wrong. TFL in the summer granted several licenses for Uber competitors which have now been growing fast inside the city. It's definitely not a take against ridehailing, just against Uber.
I don't usually use Uber —we live in a place where it just doesn't exist— but I've been exposed to it a couple of times this last weekend. It's private hire but worse.
A family member booked. A driver committed. The wait got shorter. Then it got longer. And longer. And then our trip was cancelled without reason. Another was booked. Same gig. We had no opportunity to 1-star those drivers for being dicks. The third arrived but we didn't get the fabled offer of foot massages, nor were we plied with snacks or drinks. It was just a cab ride with the awkward "You've been great passengers, I'll rate you five stars!" exchange at the end. "Err, thanks mate?"
The return trip was pretty similar. It's 1am. Want to go home. One dropped. It's getting really cold now. Second arrives. Again, an entirely standard private hire experience with the added convenience of being asked to rate at the other end.
But this lack of recompense for crappy initial service isn't good. If a real private hire did that, you'd use another company and would never use that one again. You'd tell friends and family not to use it. You'd be able to complain to the council about the company. With Uber, you just huddle up and hope the next is better.
This is by far one of the more benign complaints you hear about (versus deliberately slow routes to push the top end of the range, or surge pricing) but it absolutely undermines the purported convenience factor. Being able to talk to a manned rank in actual contact with their drivers is so much better in practice.
It sounds like you had a bad experience. Almost everyone I know uses Uber regularly and almost every experience is positive. If it's 3am sometimes it takes longer, if you just got out of a bar and there's 50 other people next to you trying to get an uber you might have to walk a bit, if you're in a remote place sometimes they cancel. It's annoying. But mostly I can have a taxi outside my house in 3 minutes. I know exactly when they'll get there and there's no cash needed.
It's a hugely better process than the old phone-a-number and hope minicabs and taxi services. That would take 15 minutes minimum, often much longer, and you had no idea when it would arrive.
>A driver committed. The wait got shorter. Then it got longer. And longer. And then our trip was cancelled without reason
has happened to me a lot too. I wish they would fix that some how. I'm not sure what it's about. You'd think the drivers would either come get you or not rather than say they are coming and then flake.
Similar to the Airbnb tales recently on HN we forgive them these bad experiences. Where in the past we would never use the companies again if we had bad experiences now we just discount them "oh, but it's worth it and its so useful now regardless of the minor pain", "most of the time it Just Works", "you had a bad experience with an individual but the service as a whole is great"
I think it's partly because of the ease of use - usability, partly because of brand investment and loyaly, but with Uber and Airbnb, there are no direct competitors that have the same user experience. That people are willing to put up with hosts cancelling their uber stays or swapping them for something dodgy and that people are willing to put up with bad Uber experiences speaks volumes. I also think it might be because when things go wrong, we users will blame the driver not the company, we will blame the airbnb host, not the company.
> Being able to talk to a manned rank in actual contact with their drivers is so much better in practice.
The counterpoint seems obvious here. That’s more expensive. Even more than hypothetical unsubsidized Uber. There’s lots of valid complaints against Uber. These feel like the lowest priority ones available. Uber is about cheap prices and secondly low interaction costs.
Is HN really the place to conflate a single digit amount of personal anecdotes into a reason why someone should not use an app?
What year was this? Where was this? This comment is worth absolutely nothing without specifics, and even then its a tiny data point which cannot offer any real perspective on the current news about Uber in London.
What are you on about? Even if both "sides" use anecdotes how does that in any way justify you conflating them with the overall business?
Same can be said about the tfl note. Uber is basically a franchise company, locations rarely have strong interactions with eachother. Not to mention the reaction from tfl is in the end minor. Uber doesn't even need to stop operations.
I said it was "this weekend" and the complaint, that two drivers, one after another can ditch you at the eleventh hour and you get no compensation, no indication of what happened, no ability to rate that driver for letting you down.
Those issues are all systemic. They apply to Uber everywhere today just as much as they did six days ago when this happened.
The fact that you're being downvoted shows how much of a socialist hell-hole HN has become.
No one is forcing people to drive for uber and no one is forcing the rider to use uber. In my city, Accra, Taxis were so expensive until uber came to the market and forced down the price.
The only system that puts the consumer (read: common man) first is the free market (if and only if politicians would allow it to work).
Let's see how much of a capitalist you are. Why do you believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis? What evidence do you have in its favor?
I humbly suggest to you that, if P!=NP, then the Efficient Market Hypothesis (any flavor!) cannot be true, as otherwise we could program markets to solve NP-complete problems in P time.
Edit: Remember, downvote means "you are right and I must hide your argument lest it show others my folly". That's how the free marketplace of comments works.
No, let's look at it from a more philosophically objective point of view.
Why do you think that the millions of Londoners who voluntarily chose Uber over traditional taxi services should be denied the freedom to choose what taxi services to use?
If tfl sees Uber not operating by the same standards as others do, then of course they should be punished. Londoners are ofcourse free to use any other other app based ridehailing companies that so comply with tfls regulations.
For the same reason that they should be denied e.g. the freedom to choose to take loads of cheap antibiotics. Sometimes there are bigger network effects that, despite appearing good for every individual, actually turn out to be a collective bad.
Why do you think that "socialist hell-hole" is an appropriate description of HN? Because you don't get to spout your capitalist talking points unchallenged?
Also, with the tactics Uber has historically used - in a "proper" free market, would they not become a monopoly? And then they could charge what they please, ending up in the same position that previous taxi companies have been in.
> I disagree. The UK could be viewed as more "socialist" than Ghana...
Yes, Ghana has been through a lot of dictatorship rule until recently when we saw the light of reducing government involvement in people's lives. But why does that matter here?
>Also, with the tactics Uber has historically used - in a "proper" free market, would they not become a monopoly?
How so? it's very easy to start a ride-hailing service. In fact, I've lost count of how many of them we have here in Accra. Uber itself has been forced to reduce its charges by other competitors like Yango[1], Bolt(Taxify) and even ironically the traditional taxi providers.
These days, I don't even bother to order uber or Yango or Taxify because the taxis are responding to the competition.
My favorite cab experiences have been in London, but I'm not gonna lie: my favoritest favorite experience was a cabbie in Tijuana forty years ago who pulled out a bottle of tequila, took a long swig from it and offered the bottle to my mother, father, aunt, and uncle, while driving like he was in a Dukes of Hazard screen test.
I tried to use Uber three times in my life, including once in London, and every time I get all the way to try the point where it is looking for nearby cars then it stops and says my phone number is invalid. Contacted their support, sent them a screen shot of my iPhone screen showing my number, they said it was fixed. A few months later I tried to book a car again and exact same thing happened. So I don’t have a lot of sympathy when they fall on hard times. I eventually gave up on Uber and tried Lyft, works painlessly and reliably, a little extra comfort when I’m in a unfamiliar city.
A few things going on here. This is a continuation of an ongoing battle between Tfl and Uber. Last year Tfl threatened to revoke Ubers' license unless it complied with regulations involving basic safety checks and coorporated with British Transport Police over crimes committed by drivers.
Well, one year on and Uber has not been able to get its house in order. This move will doubtless be extremely unpopular with Londoners, many of whom will suspect that the black cab unions are behind it. Uber called Tfl's bluff last year knowing there would be a public backlash if their services were withdrawn. It will be interesting to see how it plays out this time.
Regardless of your opinion of Uber and their labour practices, they offer an incredibly valuable service to millions of people. They have massively increased the availability of minicabs, made booking them incredibly easy and safe (not to mentioned with far better coverage than was previously possible) and affordable to more people. Not only that, thousands of people now make a living driving Ubers whom before wouldn't have been able to get a job as a minicab driver at all, as the firms would artificially limit numbers to keep fares high.
I think you're overvaluing Uber's footing in the current London market. During the summer several competitors have been granted licenses, and they are reporting healthy and fast growth. Those millions of people can just switch over to one of the other apps and get a nearly identical (and usually cheaper) service. Same with the drivers, the competitors are offering a hugely better deal than Uber is.
The problem with Black Cabs in London is that the drivers go around like they are god's gift to Earth.
Sure "The Knowledge" is an impressive feat of learning, but more often than not the drivers don't make use of it because the best route is not the most profitable one for the driver.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been subjected to the "tourist tax" where the driver heads straight for the major artery roads with their traffic jams (e.g. Kings Road, Strand, Embankment etc.) so you get to sit there watching the meter clock up whilst you move nowhere. Or the number of times the quickest and least-traffic route is South of the river but the driver sticks religiously to the Northen route.
Or the number of times the driver fumbles slowly getting the change, in the expectation that you say "oh forget it, keep the change" ... even if that change is £4 or more !
Or when I've been driving around London only for the Black Cab in front of me to stop on a double-red line to drop off a passenger. Or make a U-Turn in the middle of a busy street.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not fond of Uber either. Their standard of driving is pretty poor, and I hate the way they sit at the Heathrow DROP-OFF area waiting for their next job.
What I am saying is that the London cabbies are in dire need of some stiff competition. Yes I would rather that competition come from someone of better quality than Uber.
Uber competes against local cab firms more than it does 'Black Cabs', which tend to be significantly more expensive. Since Uber came to prominence, two local cab firms that I used to rely on a lot have ceased trading, leaving me with only app-based entities such as Uber.
Uber has its advantages, but as I've moaned about here on HN in the past, its drivers tend to slavishly follow whatever automatatically-derived route it is that Uber spoon feeds them, often meaning they set off in the wrong direction (based upon which side of the road they pick up from) or use routes that anyone who knows the local area (or has The Knowledge) would do their utmost to avoid.
Black Cab drivers seem to think it is somehow their birth right to have a job that charges outrageous amounts, like they are some sort of vital service like the police or ambulance service that needs to be protected no matter what. Bullshit - I bet if they all disappeared tomorrow most non-tourists wouldn't even notice apart from the lack of traffic and diesel pollution near stations.
And "The Knowledge"? yeah yeah yeah...whatever. Most of us had to study full-time and/or in evenings & weekends in order to pass exams to get our jobs too, but that doesn't mean our out-dated and largely obsolete knowledge should be put on a pedestal and protected against more efficient modern tech (1).
The sad reality is that they have TfL by the balls, and that is why this action against Uber is happening. Just as a reminder, the UK's most prolific rapist was a black cab driver who picked people up in his cab then drugged and raped them - they think he raped up to 100 people (2) so it is clear that the vetting for black cab drivers does not actually work (3). Yet despite this, and the obvious parallels of anyone being able to borrow their mates black cab just the same as anyone can borrow their mate's uber login & car - TfL do nothing about Black Cabs.
1 - "the knowledge" only memorises fixed routes. It does not provide information about traffic, road works, accidents etc, but google maps API as used by Uber et al does, so the knowledge is obsolete there.
3 - this guy was not just a "one off" that slipped through the vetting process through a moment of madness or a "who could tell that one day this man would rape someone?" He was a maniac who raped up to ONE HUNDRED people - the UK's most prolific serial rapist in fact - yet the vetting process failed to detect the worst rapist the UK has ever seen and approved him to be a black cab driver. You have to wonder how many small-time rapists also got through the vetting...
There is stiff competition, if uber is banned from london permanently, the drivers will be going to one of the three+ alternatives.
Uber's idea isn't new in london, Addison Lee had a "app based booking" since at least 2013. The _only_ thing going for it is that its ubiquitous. Its not even the cheapest.
I rarely get taxis anymore, because frankly its pointless unless you're drunk. However when I have been forced to (wife in hospital, post tube closing time) The fastest, cheapest and most comfortable was the black cab.
Failing that there was a really good minicab firm round the corner from my old house.
>>> Uber initially lost its licence in 2017 but was granted two extensions, the most recent of which expired on Sunday. The firm will appeal and can continue to operate during that process.
What a time to be alive. Don't have and don't need a license.
London resident here. I would like to see Uber compared to the existing mini cab companies and black cabs rather than some perfect vision of a taxi company.
Uber took off here easily because existing minicabs were all really really crap. Not just expensive but often rude or incompetent drivers. I would guess a lot of them were unregistered and uninsured and their cars barely road legal.
Black cabs are Better but very expensive and still rip off tourists all the tine by charging without the meter. Even with the meter it was impossible to get any idea how much a trip would cost before you took it. And you needed cash.
Example: One time I got a minicab, it took the guy over half an hour to arrive, then he had to actually find me which took even longer. Then I realised the back seats of the car were full of vomit and he made me ride up front with the windows wide open - it was winter and cold. Then he didn’t know where he was going and got lost and then he charged me £30 for what would have cost £10 on Uber.
hopefully it gets resolved, Uber is much more convenient than traditional taxis, I love that you pay via the app and know the route you're taking, however the issue around unauthorised drivers using regular drivers' profiles is worrying
On one hand i am glad that a transnational company is getting stopped like that, especially when breaking the rules. they are basically a giant money hoover that comes in and sucks the money offshore with offshore interests as #1 priority.
on the other hand, often it often takes an outsider to disrupt a well established and corrupt market in order to move it forward.
In Canada's national capital region (Ottawa/Gatineau), where I travel to frequently, I've used Uber extensively even though it's more expensive and less convenient (taxi is right in front of hotel, Uber I have to call and wait for), simply because all cars were in good shape and all drivers were polite and reasonable.
For some reason in that region, majority of taxi drivers:
a) Have cars that are falling apart. Not just significant rust on the car, but frequently wonky suspension, brakes, bearings, etc.
b) They strongly believe they are rally drivers, and traffic lights, pedestrians, let alone bicycles, are their mortal enemies.
Further, all Uber drivers were happy to be Uber drivers, and 70%+ of Taxi drivers were profoundly, existentially unhappy to be Taxi drivers, and would spend entirety of their ride letting me know why.
----
Now, in principle, just from theory and articles, I'd agree that Uber feels it is / should be more exploitative of drivers and less safe for riders. I personally just haven't found it that way in practice... :-/
My god, the number of times I sat in a cab with the driver loudly honking and/or swearing at cyclists in the pre-Uber era... And all too often the awkward “conversations” where I had to um, hmm, yeah all the way...
Uber drivers are actually refreshingly polite, I even enjoyed the conversation a few times. Out of my more than a hundred rides there was only one bad experience (other than occasionally waiting for a driver that’s motionless or moving away from me): obviously new driver, didn’t know where the fuck he was going, couldn’t seem to follow GPS, asked for tip at the end of the exceptionally bad, twice as long trip.
> Well, Uber is more exploitative for the drivers and less safe for the riders, so the choice seems clear.
Have you ever driven for a taxi company as an independent contractor? Taxi companies exploit. People talking about drivers being “exploited” by Uber have never driven for a “normal” taxi company. There is a reason that many taxi drivers now drive for Uber. The taxi business is filthy. Journalists don’t usually write about it because it isn’t sexy like bashing Uber every chance they get.
When I was in London, the ease of ordering a ride with your smartphone was a reliable comfort in a foreign land.
Maybe if I hadn't undergone shitty experiences in Paris et al. being swindled by the train operations, I wouldn't be taking Uber's side, but it just is that Uber has just worked for me so many times when other options failed.
Same here. Most of the taxi drivers in the city where I live only take cash, and every time I have ridden with one, they have cheated and taken a detour.
Uber, automatic payment by card and no cheating on the route.
Most people being cheated don’t know it. Taking a little extra detour “because on construction,” or taking a drunk person home the long route — people being cheated generally don’t know it.
That’s cheating their company (and/or setting up for tax evasion), which in my experience is far more common than cheating the customer with a detour, at least when the customer is local (you can show your localness through verbal cues implying or simply indicating you know the route).
Only the other night a Chicago cabbie tried to get my wife to pay with a portable credit card reader not the one installed in the machine. She made a big fuss and he 'discovered' that the built in machine was working after all.
I'm not entirely sure it's fair to say that London's minicab market was particularly corrupt. Uber's real success in London was marketing and investment meaning that it'd could grow rapidly, I believe Addison Lee had a booking app concept at the time, so not even that was particularly new.
As a regular used of "Addy Lee", I've found that's not normally true if you go for the standard cards (the Ford Galaxy): from my home to Euston is about £20 in an Uber, £35 in a black cab, and about £25 in an AL.
Given Addison Lee is not VC subsidised, you have to wonder how they're getting the price down, but I always choose AL when I can.
You’re able to like Uber as a service, but also be upset that they’re failing to meet the regulations that have been put in place to protect everyone.
What it sounds like is that people were able to buy/use/borrow “verified” Uber Driver accounts, and upload their own photo into the app to allow them to drive for Uber without the correct background and license checks. I think it’s fair for a regular to give Uber a slap on the wrist for allowing this to happen, whether in purpose or not.
519 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadThis seems, from a technical perspective, an easy problem to solve with the resources of a public company.
Is it the desperation of people who need the money so badly they will constantly cheat the system? Can you design for that?
They tried to solve the problem from the wrong angle, and it turns out that the high cost of taxis, while suboptimal for sure, might not be entirely for no reason.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
For a private hire vehicle (the kind you telephone or use an app to book), the price is under £700 (under £500 if the driver speaks English).
That doesn't seem unreasonable. The GP comment was referring to the American system where the license are traded at very high costs (tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars).
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
The private hire license avoids the need for "the knowledge" and to have the traditional London black cab. There are still fees involved, of course - but becoming an Uber driver is much less demanding than becoming a black cab driver.
Is it the desperation of people who need the money so badly they will constantly cheat the system? Can you design for that?
I don't think the motivation on the part of the drivers who do this is very important. They're intentionally deceiving Uber customers, and in some cases endangering them. That just has to stop, even if the driver is desperate. The point here is that it's Uber's responsibility to stop it happening, and Uber has apparently chosen not to (like you, it's not that hard). That will be very hard to justify, especially as Uber were running TV ads about how they do background checks on all their drivers here in the UK recently.
Perhaps a selfie with the driver taken by the passengers during the drive would also suffice.
In my opinion, Uber has done enough. They provide the passenger with the drivers name and photo. It’s up to the passenger to verify, but Uber should make violations easy to report.
They are. Click a trip, scroll down, click "my driver was unprofessional", click "my driver didnt match the profile in my app".
The problem is most people dont report stuff to uber. I hear stories all the time from people and everytime I ask if they reported the driver they say no.
It's a pain in the ass to have to pull over and do this sometimes, but it does seem like they're trying to do the right thing with it. I will say that at first it made me pretty angry, but when I realized the implication - that someone has probably already tried to fraudulently hand control to a different driver - it gave me chills and I realized they may not have many other options.
You could also do spot checks (no idea if they do or not), but that's not going to eliminate the problem just reduce it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
This is the Internet. If you don't design for people cheating you, they will wreck your system as soon as it becomes popular enough to be visible.
Unauthorised drivers who don't match their picture ID driving.
I bet they could go on like this forever.
> Legislation means that Uber now has 21 days to appeal, during which it can continue to operate pending any appeal and throughout any potential appeals process. Uber may seek to implement changes to demonstrate to a magistrate that it is fit and proper by the time of the appeal.
Private transporting is not sustainable and it is not something that has to be affordable for everyone, even less by lowering workers wages or playing with the tariffs by demand. Taxi regulations gives us passengers safety and fair prices. There are taxi apps that work exactly like Uber's like 'Free-now' where you can see your trip, its aproximate cost, the driver's rating...
We have to promote governments that support affordable and good quality public transport, even though I love driving alone in my car.
I hope Deliveroo, Glovo and other companies are also punished for their labour rights abuses. Make sure your delivery guy is payed fairly or either go to the restaurant yourself.
So many years of labour rights fights being attacked by these startups that do not invent anything but base their business model on lower wages.
The only reason ANY of the taxi companies have improved service with new apps and lower prices is because of the competition introduced by ride sharing companies.
Personally, I like and use this "new breed" of app-based taxi services (except Uber). I just want to see Uber finally die. It should have died years ago.
The government granted a cap on drivers to guarantee its buddies got to earn a lot of money off the backs of taxi drivers.
Here in NYC, drivers rent a medallion to be allowed to drive. They start off the day in the hole.
If we're going to judge Uber for breaking this monopoly, let's also turn that same critical eye on the monopoly it broke.
That's quite an accusation (going from "taxi mafia" to taxis connected to actual mafia), though I suppose it's true in some parts of the world.
Either way, sure, plenty of cities had their taxi services thoroughly broken. However, that doesn't justify fighting the bad with the worse. Despite the PR narrative they pushed, Uber wasn't some tiny upstart bravely fighting against the great taxi mafia - it was a VC backed corporation (later on, a multinational) fighting individual taxi networks in a divide-and-conquer fashion. And when I call Uber sociopathic, I don't just mean I don't like them - this particular company has a long documented history of antisocial behavior.
> If we're going to judge Uber for breaking this monopoly, let's also turn that same critical eye on the monopoly it broke.
Again, multinational corporation breaking city after city, in isolation? Also, I'm not judging Uber for being a monopoly. I'm judging them for being a morally bankrupt company that achieved market domination by breaking the law and only got away with it because they moved fast and burned through lots of investor money.
In reality, Uber’s existence, no matter what the company or its supporters might say, is simply a different way of highlighting the very same failure in public policy.
The poor have no bread? Let them eat cake. The citizens need an out of hours ride home from the pub? Page a Prius.
Not that it was completely without problems, but compared to say NYC cabs they were worlds apart. Sure, there was a problem for a while with rogue unregistered cabs, though IIRC that was mainly minicabs and relied on intercepting despatch radio messages, but there were some black cabs. The cliche of not going south of the river held up to some scrutiny too. Uber of course go with phone you then just don't show if they don't like the route and waste half and hour of yours. At least it was a two way conversation with a cabbie.
That London hasn't put a blanket ban on diesel cabs in the low emission zone isn't really the cab's fault - that's firmly on the authorities...
They are not rare in city centres, which is their natural habitat eg. take a trip into Central London/Westend/City of London etc., you will find them everywhere. Unless, you are talking about the suburbs, where they have always been as rare as hens teeth.
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
"Uber of course go with phone you then just don't show if they don't like the route and waste half and hour of yours. At least it was a two way conversation with a cabbie."
I completely disagree. The uber app shows the route the driver is taking and offers way more transparency than a black cab.
It seems that you rode a black cab very occasionally, if you never experienced a cabbie getting lost. Much has been made of the knowledge, which was dense where the routes being traversed were frequent but it was already deteriorating by the time Uber arrived. I have had the misfortune of having to rely on black cabs, on some of my past gigs, on a daily basis and spent a small fortune/part of my life on these rides, especially when they were the only choice in a rush. I can assure you that the cliché of not going south of the river was 100% true, amongst many others, although it doesn't matter so much anymore. As for romanticising the 'two-way conversation' ─ it was not a dialogue but usually an unsolicited diatribe of regurgitated opinions, gathered from the daily rags and caustic radio chat shows ─ which you were bullied into agreeing with, just to journey in some relative peace and quiet. I will take an Uber et al. every single time, for the very reasons you mentioned.
I've had cabbies get lost twice, that I can remember - once he was claiming to be new, and he was stressing like crazy about it. The other time I went a fair way out of local area. Both times resolved amicably. Sure, I've also had a fair selection of less than perfect routing - but overall, far less than some of the games Uber drivers have tried.
I almost always got conversation or quiet and can't ever remember an unsolicited diatribe. I'd steer conversation away from the political, and if that's what the driver wanted to chat about, I'd ask them to shut up.
I would take the overall service received every time over the comparative service from Uber. Neither was or is perfect. Uber's cheap, and it shows in what and how they deliver, and the complete lack of quality and standards for drivers. It's essentially the only selling point. I'm a long way out of London now, but I've gone back to exclusively using cabs and private hire.
Here's the thing: I don't want to rate my driver. I want to be able to rely on a third party that all available drivers are punctual and competent. It is not a choice I want to make.
Too much responsibility is already dumped on consumers under the guise of choice. Quality control of services I utilize is something I expect to pay for.
Our "grand old" taxi company in my town who advertises for being the only reliable option with professional drivers failed on me five times on a row. On successive rides I got a standard neo-nazi lecture about immigrants, my Visa credit card was refused apparently for transaction costs, two of my drivers got lost and one tried to drive to my destination using mostly sidewalks for driving on.
I sent feedback each time to only receive a generic "we are sorry, we have failed our quality controls and this will never happen again" copy-pasted message. Maybe it's more straightforward to advertise than getting rid of drivers who can't behave.
With Uber I know my bad ranking (I have always rated my drivers 5 stars, so far) has at least some effect on the misbehaving driver.
From what I hear.... London !
Here in New York we don't have the same kind of unusual taxicabs, but we do strictly regulate taxi and Uber drivers.
I personally find taxis here insufferable. I live in Queens and regularly had to help them "remember" where Queens is. Or remember the TLC regulations about accepting a credit card.
I've not had the same song and dance with Uber.
If this is the quality that the regulations enforce, count me out.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/black-cabs-taxis-a...
Yes. I can provide you with multiple examples.
Use a cab in Singapore or anywhere in Japan and be amazed.
The "cabs are terrible" argument seems to me to be a very localized view.
Terrible cabs exist. So does fantastic service via the most efficient route by a driver who actually knows the city.
What difference in vehicle maintenence?
The vetting process may be flawed, but it's flawed in both hackney carriage and phv licensing. This was acknowleged by say Milton Keynes, which gave a Hackney + PHV license to an applicant with convictions for rape and other serious sexual offences [0]
I have no confidence in London that the vetting process works, and the authorities are far more interested in retaining an obsolete cartel. Rather than fix their vetting procedure (which has always allowed dodgy minicab firms, which were never a threat to the powerful black cab industry), they concentrate on Uber.
[0] https://www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/pressreleases/2014/aug/taxi...
Uber lost the license because they were 'not fit or proper', nothing to do with vetting, seemingly because of a feature of the website that seemingly allows drivers to upload new photos and get other people to drive for them
> A key issue identified was that a change to Uber's systems allowed unauthorised drivers to upload their photos to other Uber driver accounts.
Other minicab firms of course don't have a photo on an app, and the passenger has to check the photo once they've got in the car (I believe PHV drivers have to show their PHV license from TFL), which puts passengers in a far worse situation when the driver doesn't match. I wonder how many small minicab firms have been determined to be not fit or proper.
You sure can’t rely on the Uber, Lyft, Juno ratings. It’s 5 stars or bust. The social pressure on 5 stars is enormous.
Netflix moved to thumbs up, thumbs down. YouTube did the same, after showing a graph of the 5s and 1s:
https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/youtube-comes-to-a-5-star-...
I relentlessly give an average delivery or ride 3 stars, but feel bad every time. When the ride is quite good, 4 stars, and exceptional, 5 stars. Exceptional is the exception.
Three stars doesn’t make you a bad rider or a bad driver, just average. If it’s not the bulk of the ratings you give, you’re an unreliable rater and not helping the ratings anyway.
Just use the rating system like everyone else and get over it:
If the driver was great it’s 5 stars with all the “what did I do great” options checked and a note for the driver.
If the driver didn’t fuck up it’s five stars.
If you don’t want to be matched with the same driver again but they didn’t do anything egregious it’s three stars.
If you were outright disgusted at your ride it’s 1 Star.
That’s it. It’s simple. Your own personal usage of the ratings system is not helpful.
Actually, for another example of why your ratings method is bad, let’s compare three stars to grades in school. Three out of five stars would be 60%, which is a D- in most schools. That’s not an average grade. Someone who completes all the homework and does an average job would expect a B, which would be 4 stars. Someone who didn’t get any questions wrong would get an A, 5 stars.
If your Uber driver took you to your destination with a reasonably clean car that’s an A. There’s no such thing as exceptional. It’s a car ride not a physics exam, what do you want exactly?
Uber wants a driver to maintain over a 4 rating, something like 4.5 or 4.2. When you give that driver a 3 rating you’re not saying “thanks, you were acceptable and average.” You are saying “you kind of suck” and Uber won’t actually even match the driver with you again. So if you continue to give all your drivers 3 stars just because you wish the rating system worked a different way than it does, you’re even screwing yourself by reducing the number of drivers that can match with you.
It's kinda funny how everything is connected: school grades, restaurant tips, taxi ratings.
However, the think that irks me the most is that rating everyday experiences is just dumb. Most taxi drives will be average and that's it, because we all just want it to be good enough. It's as if my local supermarket made me rate the cashier with 1 to 5 stars. I don't want to do that, because that person just needs to do their job. Anything above "good enough" is unnecessary. Significantly bad experiences should be a "reported to the manager" (or any similar mechanism), filtering out trivial complaints that you'd get in a 5-star scale and getting actual useful information on how to improve the system.
The US restaurant example is funny because the problem is the same. Instead of paying by default fair wages and paying attention to customers that complain about workers, they delegate the 'rating' part to customers, which means that there's no feedback on which they can improve and that their salary is determined by arbitrary people judgements.
This is actually the sole reason I don't go to restaurants/diners. These rules aren't what I grew up with (yes, in the US, I've never left the country), seem to be different every time I hear them, and usually keep creeping higher. I just never know what to tip, so it's either fast food and no tip, or go a bit hungry until I can get home.
Tipping doesn’t need to be a source of anxiety. If the act of figuring out your tip is the sole reason you don’t go out for a nice meal on a special occasion, I think this is something to talk to a therapist or confidant about.
That very much depends on which country you're talking about. That's the case in the US, but try telling a teacher in France you deserve 16/20 because you did an average job!
If enough people make the right choice instead of the herd behavior, the commons will be less tragic.
“If the driver didn’t fuck up it’s five stars” is aggressively harmful to any above average or excellent drivers out there, with no reward for trying to be either.
When you have a 5* scale for rating a restaurant my description would be:
I realise that there is a certain amount of relativity and subjectivity and that a 5* Trip Advisor review is not necessarily equal to three stars by Guide Michelin.But it should mean something and when most restaurants have something between 4 and 5 stars (Let alone that the #1 rated restaurant in London was one, which didn't exist[1]) the value of such ratings become very questionable.
You can see the exact same with Airbnb ratings where 4 -, or 5 star does not mean that you will have a great experience.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich
Uber has pushed up quality in general. Market pressure is often a better way of doing these things rather trying to have a central inspector who can't see everything all of the time.
Even when society decides it’s up to the private sector to fulfill its needs there needs to be regulation to avoid the “race to the bottom” from meaning an actual race to rock bottom.
Uber surely provides an amazing service to consumers but at what cost to labor rights, road traffic, and in this case, public safety?
* Deregulate halfway, by promising that things will be better in the free market
* Wait for trust erosion in the public institutions and regulations
* Remove remaining regulations, because obviously, regulation is not working, and the "free" market will take care of things
* Create an effective monopoly because it is not economic to maintain two or more infrastructures in parallel. After that, raise prices.
If only we really had people lobbying for a truly free market. I.e. a market where rules are imposed and maintained. Where umpires make sure everyone is playing fairly. Where businesses can compete and where customers have a choice.
You know if you are a butcher, you should be pretty pleased with a central inspector touring your shop's front and back, making sure that hygiene is well-maintained. What needs to be made sure though is, that EVERY business competing with you is held to the same standards.
So for uber, I'd be super happy if they'd pay their drivers an agreed standard/union wage (or more) and compensated maintenance costs for their private vehicles they are using for the profit of the company accordingly. It's not much to ask really.
Please, take some time to understand why people have different ideas. It is seldom if ever, malice. If you cannot relate, keep your mouth shut, or ask questions.
PS: I'm not pushing for government regulation in any way though. UK have enough of totalitarianism-like regulations already.
Also you have to remember that people work for best option they have right now. If uber wasn't their best option they simply move to a better job.
If you ban uber you simply remove the current best option for most people working for uber.
> If uber wasn't their best option they simply move to a better job.
Simply? You know there are costs and risks associated with changing jobs, right?
> If you ban uber you simply remove the current best option for most people working for uber
This is blackmail and using workers as hostages. If Uber were a decent company, it would have hired the workers they need instead of the fraud that is the partner scheme. In this situation of Uber losing license to operate, the drivers would either be still employed or be fired and get severance packages and unemployment benefits.
This is why a lot of people dislike and want the "gig economy startups" gone: they ignore the rules in the name of "user experience", exploit their workers to keep prices down and eat up the market, and then use the position they have to force their views on public policy. Governments must stop them and make them pay what they should have paid if they were operating correctly.
If you actually listen to vast majority workers working Uber they're ok with it. They enjoy the flexibility and the lack of obligations. If people want more fixed work they can get it at the moment.
Essentially you are taking the choice away from these people to work for uber, based on your own version of your morals and not theirs.
Your imposing your own morals on people who don't want your morals. That can be dangerous.
>Your imposing your own morals on people who don't want your morals.
You are wrong. It is not morals. It is the law. Uber is bypassing laws, full stop.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/08/uber-driv... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/02/mit-study-shows-how-much-d...
1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The laws are created by a minority of people who don't always vote in favour of the public.
You regulate it like a normal job, and the thing they like about it most will be removed.
By the way, the report shows in appendix table 7 that only 23% of the sample reported more than 50% income from the gig economy. Don't you find it weird?
> The laws are created by a minority of people who don't always vote in favour of the public.
And Uber has the interest of the public in mind, right?
> You regulate it like a normal job, and the thing they like about it most will be removed.
Hiring someone as a freelancer to do a regular job (that is, a job where Uber decides fares, conditions and tools for the job and the worker mainly does what it's told) is fraud. And I'm not the one saying this, the courts are saying it in the UK [1] and other countries are following suit.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/uber-lose...
You could pay the whole country a penny a day if all you cared about was boosting a number metric. It wouldn't somehow translate to worker satisfaction.
If you ban uber you simply remove the current best option for most people working for uber. You would worsen the conditions for them.
Says who? Just because you say it, doesn't make it true. Private transporting has been with humanity since ancient times. It's not going away and it's sustainable.
> and it is not something that has to be affordable for everyone, even less by lowering workers wages or playing with the tariffs by demand.
It's nice that you aren't price conscious when taking 'private transport'. And you're right, uber opened up the market to people that could not afford (or could not justify) taking a taxi before. You see that as a detriment, because you have money but others may disagree. That was certainly me in Uni when I walked home in the middle of night, through sketchy neighbourhoods, because my city's public transport ended at 2am, and I wasn't about to pay $40-$60 for a cab ride (assuming it showed up at all).
I actually started using Uber when during a trip to Chicago I got shafted by several taxi companies who simply wouldn't pick me up from (I guess) the neighbourhood I was in .. in the middle of November. That was the reality of taxis pre-uber. Everybody hated them. They were openly discriminating by geogrpahy and ethnicity. They were expensive. They were also unreliable. And you had no options.
>Taxi regulations gives us passengers safety and fair prices.
Tax regulations, especially in cities like New York, protected taxi cab companies (and the private equity firms that owned the medallions) and created a medalion bubble which made running an independent taxi almost impossible and benefited only the medallion owners.
It's also a false choice. Muncipalities can (and do) certainly set safety standards on Uber and Lyft.
And by the way, many of the regulations that Taxis operate under came as a result of taxis scamming and cheating people (especially tourists and forgeiners) out of money. And it still happens if you travel abroad ... speaking of which, when I'm abroad and Uber is available, it really does remove the language barrier and is immensely helpful in navigating a non-english speaking city.
>We have to promote governments that support affordable and good quality public transport,
'Private transport' is public transport. It is part of the mix of public transportation. Every option you provide that disincentives car ownership is a benefit.
In most cases, the person laying flat on the pavement was a delivery driver (with an "L" printed on the bike).
Amazon's subcontracting model is not much different in that regard, imo.
Wait, what?
Yes comrade! All companies only exist by exploiting their workers, viva la revolution!
Moreover, the cabs were filthy, they often refused passengers due to race, disability or other illegal prejudice, refused certain destinations, spoke little English, didn't know the city, would drive inefficiently to drive up costs and on and on.
Oh, and cellphones arrived and they did NOTHING until Uber pushed them to accept mobile payments. You STILL can't see your ETA or share the ride, and there's no ratings/reputation system.
So between the demons, I'll take the ride-sharing companies.
I don't know if private transport is ultimately unsustainable. That's something people much smarter than me will have to figure out how to measure. But I do know rideshare is objectively a better product for consumers across the board than the services it replaced.
Of course you can just have a bunch of black car services in your phonebook that are dispersed around the city but.. at that point why not just use rideshare?
Now with Lyft I can get a car in just a few minutes, hop in, get driven to my destination, and get out. No worrying about cash or tipping. Just go. A lot nicer.
What I heard from drivers is Uber has by far the best tech for predicting/connecting routes. And I am really tired of of screaming "workers rights" all the time.
That line sums up this entire site. Talking about workers rights is politics, and we can't talk about that.
Let's just invent things and concentrate on that shall we?
It doesn't matter what effect it has on people or society, that's for other people to think about.
This place is full of politics.
> Let's just invent things and concentrate on that shall we?
I wish! But, for better of for worse, that's not what you'll find here.
Pre uber hailing a cab from a location other than the airport in Atlanta where I live was impossible. You'd have to call their 1-800 number hours in advance with no guarantee of it being serviced. Even if such apps exist now it might be due to uber pushing the envelope. Uber and other ride sharing service might not be relevant in the NYCs, Chicagos and Londons of the world but for cities like ours they were a godsend.
Uber at the end of a day is just a private enterprise operating (mostly) consistent with the law and with it's function as a private enterprise which is to make money for its shareholders. Blaming them for this is akin to blaming the puppy eating monster for eating the puppies we give them. Who the f- thought that would be a good idea to begin with?
You're conflating how Uber works in certain countries to how it works in London. The relationship between Uber and the driver can vary so much depending on what market you are talking about.
Uber isn't exploiting anyone: it is extremely simple to register with them, you can work whenever you please, and you can stop at any point; they pay on time and give you transparent access to their managerial infrastructure to see how you can align yourself with their business, or that you're unwilling to do that. Just because your system isn't set up to particularly support independent contractors doesn't mean that Uber's drivers fall outside that category.
In Toronto, when the cabbies were fed up with being out-competed by Uber contractors (and Uber's subsidies at the time), they decided to block all the roads surrounding a major hospital, including the emergency vehicle routes. To my mind, all of them should have lost not only their taxi licenses, but their driver's licenses as well.
The authorities promised to professionalize cabs, but in reality they did the exact opposite, and the same story has repeated itself across North America.
1. Remember to get the cab medallion number during your ride.
2. Go online to submit a fairly lengthy report to TLC, alongside your contact info.
3. Nothing for 2 months
4. Someone calls you asking you for details. You may even have to show up to a hearing. By this point you forget almost the entire issue.
5. The cabbie who ignored you, drove dangerously, scammed you has been driving for months without a registered complaint and nothing will happen.
New York Yellow Cab is the best too—cabs in the Bay Area, for instance, were absolutely awful before Uber. I also cannot imagine Taxi companies were stewards of fair labor practices before Uber either.
Unfortunately people are morons that don't know how to make the "right" choice. We will be conveniently layering bureaucracy and laws on top of all of this to make sure the clearly inferior product wins by fiat of the government.
You would all thank us but you're obviously too stupid to know what's best for you.
Is it "stupid" to want jobs that arguably require "less-skill" to not pay out a decent wage? Are we going to try to force more and more into university and leave those that don't fit in that box to work towards minimum wage? Taxi driving in London has long been a way of making a working class individual's life much better in exchange for the investment of the cost of the cab and licence.
First your argument is does one have a right to make money doing something the same way it was done yesterday? Or 10 or 20 years ago?
At one time you could make good money operating an elevator. Do we ban buttons in elevators to protect these jobs?
So no. No I don't think it's on societies best interest to outlaw buttons in elevators. New technology is happening that fundamentally de-values what a driver now does. It's unfair but it's maybe time for new jobs. That's simply best for society as a whole. The amount we all collectively save will vastly dwarf anything these few get by holding back the tide.
Two - the old system sucked. It was terrible. It still is. Taxis in NYC were already a cesspool of con-men and corruption. Lives were ruined in the buying and selling of medallions. The cars sucked, the drivers refused to go places, the ONLY reason it survived at all was the government forced it down our throats.
Uber won because people like it better. No matter what you say about any of it - people decided they VASTLY prefer pressing their own button in the elevator. It's sad but it's life.
So yes, it is "stupid" to fight this when everyone using these services has so clearly said the new way is better.
The EU's CAP is huge protection and in the US I'm sure there are all sorts of subsidises industries that "don't deserve it".
From the perspective of the working man this argument just seems to push down their wages but not allow other industries to pop.
No. Regulated taxis used to be a racket; of course they provided (somewhat) decent living for those who participated, although most money went to the medallion ownert.
I don't see why the needs of a few thousand cabbies (per city) should trump the needs of the millions who clearly prefer Uber.
also, don't call me 'intelligetsia', it is insulting
* https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2019/novemb...
I'd assume, this will be resolved like the last time, just a minor hitch.
At worst (for Uber) it's just some free organic traffic for their competitors.
Bolt
> MyTaxi
FREE NOW
:)
Free Now for instance, previously MyTaxi, previously Hailo. How many time will this thing get rebranded? How many times will my data be shared with new entities?
I ride with FreeNow in my city, just as I did with MyTaxi before. Same drivers, same app, same prices, just different colors (and slightly less favorable terms of employment, from what I've heard from the drivers during the time of transition).
Well get this, I live in London and I love Uber and I would definitely miss Uber if they stopped operating here. So your statement is wrong. In fact, our general slack channel at work had a ton of people posting sad faces about this news. But yeah sure I guess you know what every Londoner thinks...
I saw few acquaintances trying Bolt (in London) and the main argument is the first rides are free, then the next rides are free too if you refer a friend.
Their race to the bottom was absolutely beneficial to consumers while it was going on. Smaller rivals have nowhere near the resources of Uber when competing with Grab.
We surely missed Uber when it left.
Have you ever seen a bunch of Deliveroo riders clogging up the public space outside a restaurant or other public space? Why should one business get to exploit pavements for profit, without regulation. Private companies shouldn’t be able to co-opt public space without scrutiny or permission.
Or maybe I’m too ethical and not being enough of a hustler, and I should move my team into the desk space at the local library?
Maybe the restaurant should pay for the use of that public space of they want to offer delivery?
It feels though like the delivery driver loitering problem is a red flag for a much larger problem of corporate appropriation being acceptable, without being challenged by those we entrust to look after our public spaces and roads.
It’s why a solution like “delivery drivers shouldn’t loiter in public spaces” is a poor solution, and why “private business should not be conducted in public without a license” might be a better and more general message.
Did they go beyond simple parking into more egregious use of public space, like parking on the sidewalk or blocking traffic?
Or is it about public parking? Would it be okay if they were customers instead of delivery workers? How much of a difference does it make that a corporation is involved?
The Overground has always worked well for me, it’s unreliable for you?
So TFL do operate trains, even ignoring London Overground which is in effect also TFL.
I simply do not trust the company.
I accept that the market pressure uber has brought has improved transportation. I do not accept that uber and its repeated atrocious behaviors required for this.
Its a shame that uber can so easily bypass tfl with appeals and minor changes.
90% of the time, uber is being kicked not because of any concern for safety, but because of traditional taxi company lobbying.
Source: personal experience in 2 cities.
A family member booked. A driver committed. The wait got shorter. Then it got longer. And longer. And then our trip was cancelled without reason. Another was booked. Same gig. We had no opportunity to 1-star those drivers for being dicks. The third arrived but we didn't get the fabled offer of foot massages, nor were we plied with snacks or drinks. It was just a cab ride with the awkward "You've been great passengers, I'll rate you five stars!" exchange at the end. "Err, thanks mate?"
The return trip was pretty similar. It's 1am. Want to go home. One dropped. It's getting really cold now. Second arrives. Again, an entirely standard private hire experience with the added convenience of being asked to rate at the other end.
But this lack of recompense for crappy initial service isn't good. If a real private hire did that, you'd use another company and would never use that one again. You'd tell friends and family not to use it. You'd be able to complain to the council about the company. With Uber, you just huddle up and hope the next is better.
This is by far one of the more benign complaints you hear about (versus deliberately slow routes to push the top end of the range, or surge pricing) but it absolutely undermines the purported convenience factor. Being able to talk to a manned rank in actual contact with their drivers is so much better in practice.
It's a hugely better process than the old phone-a-number and hope minicabs and taxi services. That would take 15 minutes minimum, often much longer, and you had no idea when it would arrive.
>A driver committed. The wait got shorter. Then it got longer. And longer. And then our trip was cancelled without reason
has happened to me a lot too. I wish they would fix that some how. I'm not sure what it's about. You'd think the drivers would either come get you or not rather than say they are coming and then flake.
Not sure what their penalities are, though.
I've had to be aggressive with drivers sometimes to get them to cancel to avoid charging me.
This is particularly common around airport trips for me. Not sure why.
I think it's partly because of the ease of use - usability, partly because of brand investment and loyaly, but with Uber and Airbnb, there are no direct competitors that have the same user experience. That people are willing to put up with hosts cancelling their uber stays or swapping them for something dodgy and that people are willing to put up with bad Uber experiences speaks volumes. I also think it might be because when things go wrong, we users will blame the driver not the company, we will blame the airbnb host, not the company.
The counterpoint seems obvious here. That’s more expensive. Even more than hypothetical unsubsidized Uber. There’s lots of valid complaints against Uber. These feel like the lowest priority ones available. Uber is about cheap prices and secondly low interaction costs.
What year was this? Where was this? This comment is worth absolutely nothing without specifics, and even then its a tiny data point which cannot offer any real perspective on the current news about Uber in London.
"I rode a black cab once before Uber and it was awful."
I'll trust the research from TFL rather than random anecdotes from either side, thanks.
Same can be said about the tfl note. Uber is basically a franchise company, locations rarely have strong interactions with eachother. Not to mention the reaction from tfl is in the end minor. Uber doesn't even need to stop operations.
Those issues are all systemic. They apply to Uber everywhere today just as much as they did six days ago when this happened.
No one is forcing people to drive for uber and no one is forcing the rider to use uber. In my city, Accra, Taxis were so expensive until uber came to the market and forced down the price.
The only system that puts the consumer (read: common man) first is the free market (if and only if politicians would allow it to work).
I humbly suggest to you that, if P!=NP, then the Efficient Market Hypothesis (any flavor!) cannot be true, as otherwise we could program markets to solve NP-complete problems in P time.
Edit: Remember, downvote means "you are right and I must hide your argument lest it show others my folly". That's how the free marketplace of comments works.
Why do you think that the millions of Londoners who voluntarily chose Uber over traditional taxi services should be denied the freedom to choose what taxi services to use?
Why do you think that "socialist hell-hole" is an appropriate description of HN? Because you don't get to spout your capitalist talking points unchallenged?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, with the tactics Uber has historically used - in a "proper" free market, would they not become a monopoly? And then they could charge what they please, ending up in the same position that previous taxi companies have been in.
Yes, Ghana has been through a lot of dictatorship rule until recently when we saw the light of reducing government involvement in people's lives. But why does that matter here?
>Also, with the tactics Uber has historically used - in a "proper" free market, would they not become a monopoly?
How so? it's very easy to start a ride-hailing service. In fact, I've lost count of how many of them we have here in Accra. Uber itself has been forced to reduce its charges by other competitors like Yango[1], Bolt(Taxify) and even ironically the traditional taxi providers.
These days, I don't even bother to order uber or Yango or Taxify because the taxis are responding to the competition.
[1] https://yango.yandex.com/en_gh/
Well, one year on and Uber has not been able to get its house in order. This move will doubtless be extremely unpopular with Londoners, many of whom will suspect that the black cab unions are behind it. Uber called Tfl's bluff last year knowing there would be a public backlash if their services were withdrawn. It will be interesting to see how it plays out this time.
Regardless of your opinion of Uber and their labour practices, they offer an incredibly valuable service to millions of people. They have massively increased the availability of minicabs, made booking them incredibly easy and safe (not to mentioned with far better coverage than was previously possible) and affordable to more people. Not only that, thousands of people now make a living driving Ubers whom before wouldn't have been able to get a job as a minicab driver at all, as the firms would artificially limit numbers to keep fares high.
Uber and Tfl are both playing a risky game here.
Sure "The Knowledge" is an impressive feat of learning, but more often than not the drivers don't make use of it because the best route is not the most profitable one for the driver.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been subjected to the "tourist tax" where the driver heads straight for the major artery roads with their traffic jams (e.g. Kings Road, Strand, Embankment etc.) so you get to sit there watching the meter clock up whilst you move nowhere. Or the number of times the quickest and least-traffic route is South of the river but the driver sticks religiously to the Northen route.
Or the number of times the driver fumbles slowly getting the change, in the expectation that you say "oh forget it, keep the change" ... even if that change is £4 or more !
Or when I've been driving around London only for the Black Cab in front of me to stop on a double-red line to drop off a passenger. Or make a U-Turn in the middle of a busy street.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not fond of Uber either. Their standard of driving is pretty poor, and I hate the way they sit at the Heathrow DROP-OFF area waiting for their next job.
What I am saying is that the London cabbies are in dire need of some stiff competition. Yes I would rather that competition come from someone of better quality than Uber.
The black cabs have different rules and regulations.
Uber has its advantages, but as I've moaned about here on HN in the past, its drivers tend to slavishly follow whatever automatatically-derived route it is that Uber spoon feeds them, often meaning they set off in the wrong direction (based upon which side of the road they pick up from) or use routes that anyone who knows the local area (or has The Knowledge) would do their utmost to avoid.
Black Cab drivers seem to think it is somehow their birth right to have a job that charges outrageous amounts, like they are some sort of vital service like the police or ambulance service that needs to be protected no matter what. Bullshit - I bet if they all disappeared tomorrow most non-tourists wouldn't even notice apart from the lack of traffic and diesel pollution near stations.
And "The Knowledge"? yeah yeah yeah...whatever. Most of us had to study full-time and/or in evenings & weekends in order to pass exams to get our jobs too, but that doesn't mean our out-dated and largely obsolete knowledge should be put on a pedestal and protected against more efficient modern tech (1).
The sad reality is that they have TfL by the balls, and that is why this action against Uber is happening. Just as a reminder, the UK's most prolific rapist was a black cab driver who picked people up in his cab then drugged and raped them - they think he raped up to 100 people (2) so it is clear that the vetting for black cab drivers does not actually work (3). Yet despite this, and the obvious parallels of anyone being able to borrow their mates black cab just the same as anyone can borrow their mate's uber login & car - TfL do nothing about Black Cabs.
1 - "the knowledge" only memorises fixed routes. It does not provide information about traffic, road works, accidents etc, but google maps API as used by Uber et al does, so the knowledge is obsolete there.
2 - "The Blackcab Rapist" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Worboys
3 - this guy was not just a "one off" that slipped through the vetting process through a moment of madness or a "who could tell that one day this man would rape someone?" He was a maniac who raped up to ONE HUNDRED people - the UK's most prolific serial rapist in fact - yet the vetting process failed to detect the worst rapist the UK has ever seen and approved him to be a black cab driver. You have to wonder how many small-time rapists also got through the vetting...
Minicabs are.
There is stiff competition, if uber is banned from london permanently, the drivers will be going to one of the three+ alternatives.
Uber's idea isn't new in london, Addison Lee had a "app based booking" since at least 2013. The _only_ thing going for it is that its ubiquitous. Its not even the cheapest.
I rarely get taxis anymore, because frankly its pointless unless you're drunk. However when I have been forced to (wife in hospital, post tube closing time) The fastest, cheapest and most comfortable was the black cab.
Failing that there was a really good minicab firm round the corner from my old house.
What a time to be alive. Don't have and don't need a license.
Uber took off here easily because existing minicabs were all really really crap. Not just expensive but often rude or incompetent drivers. I would guess a lot of them were unregistered and uninsured and their cars barely road legal.
Black cabs are Better but very expensive and still rip off tourists all the tine by charging without the meter. Even with the meter it was impossible to get any idea how much a trip would cost before you took it. And you needed cash.
Example: One time I got a minicab, it took the guy over half an hour to arrive, then he had to actually find me which took even longer. Then I realised the back seats of the car were full of vomit and he made me ride up front with the windows wide open - it was winter and cold. Then he didn’t know where he was going and got lost and then he charged me £30 for what would have cost £10 on Uber.
Uber, by comparison is great.
on the other hand, often it often takes an outsider to disrupt a well established and corrupt market in order to move it forward.
On the other hand Uber has a flashy logo and an app and is sometimes cheaper.
In Canada's national capital region (Ottawa/Gatineau), where I travel to frequently, I've used Uber extensively even though it's more expensive and less convenient (taxi is right in front of hotel, Uber I have to call and wait for), simply because all cars were in good shape and all drivers were polite and reasonable.
For some reason in that region, majority of taxi drivers:
a) Have cars that are falling apart. Not just significant rust on the car, but frequently wonky suspension, brakes, bearings, etc.
b) They strongly believe they are rally drivers, and traffic lights, pedestrians, let alone bicycles, are their mortal enemies.
Further, all Uber drivers were happy to be Uber drivers, and 70%+ of Taxi drivers were profoundly, existentially unhappy to be Taxi drivers, and would spend entirety of their ride letting me know why.
----
Now, in principle, just from theory and articles, I'd agree that Uber feels it is / should be more exploitative of drivers and less safe for riders. I personally just haven't found it that way in practice... :-/
Uber drivers are actually refreshingly polite, I even enjoyed the conversation a few times. Out of my more than a hundred rides there was only one bad experience (other than occasionally waiting for a driver that’s motionless or moving away from me): obviously new driver, didn’t know where the fuck he was going, couldn’t seem to follow GPS, asked for tip at the end of the exceptionally bad, twice as long trip.
So maybe _your_ choice is clear; but mine is Uber, 100% of the time.
And if you care so much about poor cabbies, you're free to tip them as much as you want.
Have you ever driven for a taxi company as an independent contractor? Taxi companies exploit. People talking about drivers being “exploited” by Uber have never driven for a “normal” taxi company. There is a reason that many taxi drivers now drive for Uber. The taxi business is filthy. Journalists don’t usually write about it because it isn’t sexy like bashing Uber every chance they get.
When I was in London, the ease of ordering a ride with your smartphone was a reliable comfort in a foreign land.
Maybe if I hadn't undergone shitty experiences in Paris et al. being swindled by the train operations, I wouldn't be taking Uber's side, but it just is that Uber has just worked for me so many times when other options failed.
Uber, automatic payment by card and no cheating on the route.
It is a common thing, to hear stori es that people have of bad experiences with Taxis.
Stories of bad experiences with taxis != stories of taxi drivers cheating locals.
It is common to hear people talk about a "broken" credit card machine, or about a taxi "taking the long way", or the like.
"I'd like to pay with credit card" "Machine is broken." "It's all I have." "Fine."
Given Addison Lee is not VC subsidised, you have to wonder how they're getting the price down, but I always choose AL when I can.
What it sounds like is that people were able to buy/use/borrow “verified” Uber Driver accounts, and upload their own photo into the app to allow them to drive for Uber without the correct background and license checks. I think it’s fair for a regular to give Uber a slap on the wrist for allowing this to happen, whether in purpose or not.
It looks like their offices are still there but when you go in there is an empty room with a phone.
I don't know why on earth that even technical people praise them so much.
The technical innovations to delivering this cheap labour are just an afterthought.