It depends where you are. In many cities, taxis are plentiful so Uber doesn’t offer an advantage. At my house in the suburbs, there are no taxis unless you call one specifically, and then it takes 20 minutes for one to arrive, at least. With Uber, a car is there in about 5 minutes.
GreasyJack,
Interesting article in the Daily Star today. Seems to me like there is another news story about Uber every few days.
The headline is, “Aviva to offer insurance for Uber Drivers”.
The question that comes to my mind is, “If Uber provides some kind of insurance, why does Aviva think they can sell additional insurance to Uber Drivers”?
I am not trying to quarrel with the point you made about Uber having its own insurance. I’d just like to understand what is going on with this because I’d like to know just how risky it would be for me to drive for Uber part-time if I should ever have an accident.
In DC:
Taxi
$2.98 Base fare and fees
$0.42 per min
$2.16 per mile
Uber
$3.45 Base fare and fees
$0.20 per min
$1.02 per mile
It’s not quite a direct comparison because the taxi wait fee is only charged when slow or stopped for more than a minute. I subtracted the normal eighth-mile rate from the first eighth-mile fee.
Ruken’s post:
In DC:
Taxi
$2.98 Base fare and fees
$0.42 per min
$2.16 per mile
Uber
$3.45 Base fare and fees
$0.20 per min
$1.02 per mile
[/quote]
It’s not quite a direct comparison because the taxi wait fee is only charged when slow or stopped for more than a minute. I subtracted the normal eighth-mile rate from the first eighth-mile fee.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ruken,
Thank you for posting that info. It would be good to know what those numbers might be in a few other cities. I wonder if I can use Google to find out.
Well, how about that? It appears you can do that. Here is a site that enables you to estimate the cost of taking a taxi from any one place to another in Toronto (Canadian Dollars).
Unfortunately, it does not seem to contain the info in the same way as your post. I probably just can’t see it. I would guess that info must be somewhere. If anyone can find it, I’d sure like to see it.
One other important point: Taxis don’t have “surge” pricing. Here is a story of a person who got charged 8.9 times the normal Uber rate during the New Year’s Eve surge.
I have no sympathy for that guy. The uber app tells you the surge multiplier before you even hit the conjure button. If I saw a surge of 2 or more, I call/hail a cab. If Im that drunk that I can’t make sense of the numbers, I probably couldn’t even work the app at all.
Often the local taxi commission publishes rates on a website. Note that Uber didn’t mention the $0.10 DC taxi commission fee on their website. I did add that. There are also often airport fees. Leaving DCA I paid $4 IIRC. I think the taxi fee there might be a little lower, but I’d have to look.
Right. DC does allow some sort of snowstorm surcharge, but it’s not the same thing.
With Uber surge, I always have to acknowledge by clicking a popup, that I’ll be paying a surge charge, so it’s not like I wasn’t aware of it before booking the ride.
I have never seen or heard anything to indicate there is something called “surge” pricing.
But the last time I took an Uber car was about six months ago. Maybe this is a recent phenomenon? That really discourages me from taking an Uber car again. Also, the quality of the driving is extremely erratic. I got one excellent driver. I got two that were average. But I also got one that seriously scared me. He was not at all friendly or forthcoming with information about himself and the ride was akin to riding a bucking bronco in the rodeo - if you can imagine.
It’s also highly possible that you simply can’t get a cab, because they’re all on fares. That happened to my cousin last New Year’s Eve. (He reserved a cab three hours early to get to a party, and it never showed. He called two other cab companies, and they never showed. Eventually, the cab companies just told him there weren’t any cabs available. Unfortunately, he was completely unaware of Uber.) At least with Uber, you might have to pay more, but at least you can get one if you desperately need it.
Uber is dancing in the streets about bankrupting the SF Yellow Cab.
If they are doing “surge” pricing when a taxi is available, what kind of price structure do you think they will have when they have eliminated the competition?
I really want to see the Courts declare the drivers as employees, the service as a public taxi, and let the pricing reflect real cost of the service.
(then there is the problem of “you don’t have a smart phone? you can find a bus” - as opposed to old days when there were public phones and the phone numbers of the cab companies were posted near phones).
In my experience it’s about half the cost to use Uber. Some places Uber operates they’ve made a deal to charge the same as, or close to, taxi services.
As for how much money drivers make, I have a co-worker who drives for Uber and it’s a nice way to make a little extra money. The only people I’ve heard of doing it as a full time job and doing well are luxury car drivers.
As I understand that article, the situation is that Aviva is a regular car insurance company that up to this point dropped customers if they learned they were driving for Uber. Now they’re saying their customers can drive for Uber so long as the pay an extra fee. It’s not extra insurance aimed at Uber drivers, it’s just paying extra so they don’t kick you off your regular policy for doing it.
As I understand it, most (but not all) US insurance companies are okay with you driving for Uber, so paying for the “extra coverage” wouldn’t be necessary. It sounds like maybe the Canadian insurance companies have been less okay with it, though, so this one company deciding to allow it (albeit with extra cost) is a welcome development for Uber.
Although apropos to this thread, note that Yellow Cab is primarily going bankrupt not because they’re losing riders to Uber but because they’re losing drivers to them. I think that tends to undermine the whole narrative of how Uber drivers are so exploited and would be better off as employees.
And the whole point of the surge pricing is that it happens when taxis aren’t available. During periods of peak demand, with a traditional taxi service you just wait forever for the finite number of cabs to get around to you, whereas the surge pricing gets more cars in service.
The whole point of surge pricing, if implemented honestly, is to do as you say.
As long as surge pricing is controlled by a secret algorithm there will be massive incentive by the guys who control the algorithm to cheat. It costs them nothing to activate surge rates that encourage too many drivers out chasing too few fares, while simultaneously gouging the customers they do have. All the risks are on the drivers and customers, while all the benefit accrues to the algorithm owners.
If Uber was required to pay a flat hourly rate to all logged-on drivers (in addition to the driver’s percentage of the fares they collect) that would get them some skin in the game and discourage that kind of cheating. Fairness the other way would also require that Uber be able to meter the number of logged-on drivers so drivers can’t cheat the system by logging on when demand doesn’t exist.
In the Seattle area ( and I suspect, everywhere) taxi drivers are horribly exploited by the car owners and the company. I can’t speak for Uber drivers, but I can say without hesitation, after using Uber in about 10 different cities, I always get a better car, a better driver, and a better experience than I would in a cab. I usually opt for black car or SUV service, so I’m in a town car or a navigator, and it’s clean, quiet and efficient. The drivers are never on their phones (in some cities, the taxi drivers barely stop their conversation long enough to ask you where you want to go)
My sense is that Uber cost a little less than cabs in most places, but I would galdly pay double to avoid a yellow cab experience in NYC, Vegas, or SF.
Yeah the difference between a cab and Uber is stark. I haven’t yet had a bad Uber experience and if I had a good DC cab experience I’d probably start a thread about it. I think it works best if its something people are doing on the side to makes some extra money; I haven’t had a drive yet who seemed just absolutely miserable like most cab drivers I meet.
What will keep them from exploiting the surge pricing is competition from other, similar services. If prices go too high, someone will undercut them.
No, surge pricing isn’t new. It was around at least 2 years ago, when I first looked into being an Uber driver. At the time my car was too old (they won’t let you use a car older than 10 years). Since then I’ve got a newer car but found some other reasons not to drive for them. They get a lot of press about sketchy business practices – hard to say for sure how much is true, but I’m not that desperate for extra money.
When I looked into it (about one year ago) the car could not be more than 7 years old.