Hey, great, you don’t give a fuck about what harms others may be going thru because the situation benefits you; got it.
No, sorry; that’s just their business model all over again: coin a word that obfuscates and deflects from our actual business model. I ask again: are restaurants engaged in “foodsharing”? No; they are not. And Uber isn’t in the business of “ridesharing” they are a taxi/livery service.
Who is being harmed?
It doesn’t matter, to Grrr!.
It doesn’t matter in the specific case of Uber because no one is being harmed.
Either learn to read for comprehension or don’t twist my words Bo.
It makes no difference whatsoever to my point. My point is if you want to regulate them, then regulate them and classify them as taxi/livery services subject to regulation. This is not doing that. This is a half-ass measure that will, I suspect, hurt taxis even more by lowering the price of the competition.
Not necessarily. That arbitration applies to Uber customers / drivers. If you’re the victim of an accident caused by an Uber driver you could still sue them.
Question for the lawyers: If I sometimes use Uber as a passenger & have therefore signed their arbitration agreement but am in an accident with one of their vehicles while driving my own car can I still sue them or am I limited to arbitration?
As a resident of Boston, I can attest that what you describe is very very common, even when there isn’t a big event or confluence of events going on. Taxis are too scarce for us to be able to rely on getting one when we need one, there is no centralized dispatch so you have to call each company hoping they 1) have someone to send within a reasonable time frame and 2) aren’t lying to you when they say they are sending a car.
Since the advent of Uber and Lyft the only time I am ever in a cab is home from the airport when I’m too tired to take the T, and then only because the process for connecting with your Lyft or Uber driver at Logan is a clusterfuck.
To the airport and around town? Lyft, with Uber as a backup.
Why do I use Lyft & Uber almost exclusively? For all the reasons people always articulate when debating ridesharing:
[ul]
[li]Availability/timeliness[/li][li]Clean cars[/li][li]Cars in good repair[/li][li]Non-scary driving (in my experience so far)[/li][li]Non-rude drivers who don’t seem to be angry they’re being forced to drive me somewhere[/li][li]Fewer creepy drivers who hit on me and/or tell me that a woman’s place is at home and not going on business trips[/li][li]Willingness to take short fares[/li][/ul]
The price is an attractive element, but price is way down the list. If traditional taxis can fix their problems, I’ll happily add them back into the mix of services I use.
ETA - when I’m travelling I don’t have to figure out how to contact a local taxi, I fire up the apps. If that locale has Lyft or Uber I’m good to go. Literally.
There’s no way to avoid passing off the cost to consumers without reducing profit - and Uber already doesn’t make a profit. The average cost of a ride would have to go up if you are going to pay drivers more during peak hours - would your pricing still be competitive during non-peak hours if that was the case? People are free to start up their own competitor to Uber offering flat pricing and variable pay to drivers based on surge hours - we’ll see if that ends up being viable.
As despicable as Uber is in some ways, they have brought a number of innovations that I think greatly benefits consumers - how seamless the app works, the driver/passenger rating system, automated dispatch, and IMO surge pricing. I don’t understand why people feel that surge pricing is gouging when you can easily choose to wait for a cab instead.
And, even better, at least Uber lets you track where you’re going. One of my last horrible cab experiences involved a massively delayed flight, arriving at Midway after the Orange line had stopped running, the cab driver long hauling, pulling the ‘credit card machine doesn’t work’ crap, and then trying to strong arm me for a higher tip once the credit card machine miraculously got fixed.
The only times I’ve had problems with Uber is when drivers come into Chicago from out of town to drive during busy summer weekends. You will lose the GPS signal if you’re in the tunnel for Lower Wacker and it is very easy to end up on the expressway if you’re not familiar with Chicago.
Since perhaps you weren’t quite clear on the train of thought I went back a post for you. What was “broken” was Uber NOT requiring their [del]employees[/del] independent contractors to carry proper insurance for commercial operations in their vehicle, leaving a big liability hole for both the drivers and the riders. Apparently, that has changed with Uber now providing insurance. Which is all to the good. But the original situation was a bad thing for people injured in accidents and for any property damage caused by an accident.
Absolutely, Uber/Lyft/Etc.s should be regulated despite the wailing of the free-market worshipers. The issue of insurance is just one point. Another is who the hell is doing the driving - do they have a criminal record in some area that should disqualify them (such as a rape conviction - I’m not so worried about an Uber driver having passed a few bad checks in the past but I do not want someone violent as my driver)? Do they have a proper license? (Yes, I think people who drive for money should get a chauffeur’s license like everyone else who drives for money). Is there vehicle mechanically sound and safe to operate? That sort of thing.
Not all regulation and licensing requirements are bad. Many were instituted for the protection of customers who are simply not going to be able to run a background check and evaluate their Uber driver before stepping into the vehicle.
Question: how do you know the immigration status of your taxi driver(s)? I mean, I’ve taken a lot of taxis with drivers who clearly were born and grew up outside of the US, but I can’t ever recall quizzing them about their immigration/greencard/visa status. Is that something you do regularly?
I definitely think something like that would be appropriate with companies like Uber and Lyft. I wouldn’t think either would be too difficult to implement and, as far as I understand it, it’s not really much of a hurdle to get a chauffeur’s license. It’ll at least weed out the people too lazy to go about doing it. (And many states don’t even require chauffeur’s licenses to drive a taxi or limo.) Some basic regulations like that are fine with me.
I’d like to hear from Bo and others supporting the regulation who is being gouged in this story:
I completely agree. On the flip side not all regulation is good, either. The “anti-gouging” regulation is terrible for reasons already enumerated.
I did.
YOU are certainly trying to spin your words now, but you said them yourself.
There is always harm done to an existing industry when a startup skirts the rules in a mad dash to gain capitol so they REALLY displace the existing industry, and those industries are composed of people who work to support themselves and others. Calling what you do by a different name doesn’t mean it’s a different thing: restaurants are not “foodsharing”, book stores are not “booksharing”, farmers are not “landsharers” ffs :rolleyes:. And the introduction of a new tool doesn’t change the business either: farmers with hoes and donkeys were farmers and farmers with combines and tractors are farmers.
IMO Uber has been deliberately dishonest in nearly every way: from how much their drivers make, to whether or not they are employees, to whether or not they harassed women, to whether or not they were a taxi/livery service (they are), etc. They stole Google’s auto tech and then covered that up. Then their auto killed a lady.
At every step, their policy is to deceive until caught. Recently they changed their policy so that they mostly stop deceiving once they’ve been caught, but that’s a new corporate culture taking place, I guess. :dubious:
So let me know when they are a company that starts off with some honesty and integrity, and maybe I’ll change my mind. But for now, they aren’t that company and I don’t often support liars and thieves with my money if I don’t have to. And I don’t have to.
Except the thing Hawaii outlawed is one of the best ways for drivers to make more income: by getting out there when there’s high demand. It’s also what keeps Uber more reliable than everyone else. I remember the taxi only days. You could wait an hour, or just never get a car. Ever.
That hasn’t been true for a while now. The price has been steadily falling. According to a recent “Planet Money” story, you can get one for less than $200K now:
I thought the new rule outlawed increasing the price beyond a certain level - it says nothing about how many drivers are out there. There’s nothing stopping the drivers from going out when there is high demand, they just can’t charge more than a certain amount during those times. If there is sufficient profit in going out when it’s not “surge time” then there is still profit during high demand times. You just can’t gouge people.