I do agree that Uber’s response to Hurricane Katrina was abysmal. As was its reaction to 9/11 and the Cuban Missile crisis.
I agree that what-about-disasters is a tangent, but having the infrastructure of Uber in place could be something that is useful… imagine FEMA working with Uber to set up a quick-evacuation-protocol. Something that would be activated only very rarely, in Sandy-like-situations, but in which Uber drivers are offered peak-level-fares to carpool as many people who want out of the danger zone, being reimbursed by FEMA, or something like that. Having Uber around certainly doesn’t make things WORSE in a catastrophe and it provides a lot of the infrastructure that would be necessary to make things better.
It’s win-win-win. Any uber driver who wants to can be very well paid for their driving. Lots of people get evacuated. Uber gets good publicity. And even paying high-volume-uber-prices is probably still cheaper for the federal government than trying to build up that kind of infrastructure from scratch.
Yeah, well, if they only have $5 and the driver wants $50 they’re still not going anywhere, are they?
I don’t have a problem with appropriate fee increases, but there needs to be an upper limit of some sort. Something like “will never exceed 4x standard rate” or whatever which would enable people to plan to attend events like post-sports-championship rallys or just the bar-closing time on Saturday night when interest in rides will peak.
You are correct, it is not Uber’s job to evacuate a city under threat of [fill in the blank]. On the other hand, it’s a resource to aid in such an evacuation, just as school buses, mass transit buses, light rail, and any other sort of transport would be. Under such circumstances, what is reasonable?
Heck, I’m sure there are people who would pay for an Uber ride and pick up others along the way out of town in such a situation, but charity can be a spotty thing.
Uber isn’t going to be of much help in a disaster dire enough to call for an urban evacuation. Regular taxis won’t either. Both sets of drivers will be trying to save themselves and their families.
I’m really not sure what this has to do with Uber’s day to day operations, when there aren’t mega-storms and Godzilla attacks.
Depends if there’s anyone about prepared to pay more that $5.
Those two statements contradict each other. The appropriate fee increase is the one that matches supply to demand.
Keeping the fares artificially low won’t enable people to plan to do that, because there won’t be the drivers to take them. You just want people to pay an unfairly low rate to travel in someone’s private car. You can’t force people to drive people out of town at 3am for a low amount of money, and if you try to force them to charge the same at 3am as 3pm you’ll end up with not enough drivers.
Or you could arrange taxpayer funded public transportation, if you think people have a right to low-cost transport.
If the riders only have $5 and the driver won’t move for less than $50, the driver is not getting paid either. He’s going to have to lower his prices if he wants to get paid at all.
The situation of, “product X is so expensive that no one can afford it” never happens. What happens is “product X is so expensive that it is only being sold to people who are willing to pay more than I am”.
So all of you about Uber raising their prices during high demand times. How many of you realize airlines have done the same thing for decades during holiday seasons?
It does happen, but pretty quickly the expensive product is no longer made. Then people start bitching about it not being produced anymore, despite not having bought it for years because there’s a cheaper alternative.
I doubt this is relevant to Uber, as they’re expanding rapidly.
So those who can afford to own their own private car may evacuate that way. Those who can afford to may evacuate using Uber or taxis. Those who can afford neither have the option of the school buses and mass transit buses that will be provided by the authorities. It’s silly to discuss what’s “reasonable” for Uber to charge in an event in which they are one of many options available for people to evacuate.
For those confused about how we got here.
- Uber shouldn’t raise prices when there’s a terrorist attack
- I pointed out that “price gouging” is a bad name for a (generally) useful market adjustment, using the example of gasoline sales before a hurricane.
- Many of us started talking about whether to use Uber to evacuate in advance of a hurricane. Which it’s probably not suited for.
But the last few that come off the production line get sold in liquidation at a loss for something someone will pay for them.
The thing that really grinds my gears is people who say, “Rent/Real Estate in Manhattan is so expensive no one can afford it!”. The place seems pretty crowded for a place where no one can afford to live, with all those empty apartment buildings about.
I don’t think anyone is bitching about that, other than the people discussing the emergency sidetrack. A few people complained earlier in the thread that you might get stuck somewhere because you didn’t know how much a ride home would cost.
::shakes fist at the sky::
If only Uber had existed back then, at least the rich would’ve made it out safe a and sound!
That was addressed at the notion that the city was rescuing the poor and downtrodden. It wasn’t. As usual, they were left to drown.
Grayhound Bus lines offered their services; plus the city had thousands of school buses. the city government screwed up-there was plenty of time to evacuate; it just wasn’t ordered.
I’m sure Napoleon was miffed at Lyft’s botched response to the retreat from Moscow. I’m sure at least the officers in the Grande Armée could have afforded surge pricing.
OTOH, if “rideshare” services HAD [del]existed and[/del] worked correctly, we wouldn’t have gotten one of the coolest infographic depiction ever.
Uber was the fuckin Tory taxi service during the Revolution.
They need to get their act together on boats as well, look how many people died when the Titanic sank.
Oh man, they could have made a killing with surge pricing.
If you want to know the actual nuts & bolts process that Uber goes through to not be regulated like a cab, Bloomberg has a piece on Uber entering Portland that, as far as I can gather, appears to be reasonably accurate about the backroom deals that Uber routinely puts in place to try and win these fights.