And heavens to Betsy, Taxi companies AND the cabbies themselves are outright *ferocious *at guarding their turf, everywhere!
That California employee/contractor case is a not uncommon situation in recent labor cases. Seems that at least in California, Uber drivers may now find themselves in the same litigation boat as strip club dancers…
It’s not like taxis are going to be out of business tomorrow. By the time there’s no way to hire a car by picking up a telephone and calling someone, smartphone penetration will be well in excess of 95%. And the remaining people probably aren’t taking a lot of cab rides.
Whatever phone those people have, it’s not going to last forever. And when they replace it, it will be a smartphone. Hell, you can buy a phone that will run Uber’s app for $15 today, without a contract.
It’s as silly to worry about people being unable to get a car because they don’t have a smartphone as it is to be concerned that I can’t schedule my milkman’s deliveries by telegram anymore.
Edited to add: Looks like your 1/3 figure is out of date. It’s 1/4 as of February. And by the end of the year, it’ll be about 1/6. cite. This is really a non-issue.
Far as I can see no one is really answering your question. As you say, the discussion has been very much side tracked off the point.
First off I have spent eight years of my life as a taxi driver. I used to drive in the large community of Orange County which has a sports stadium, convention center, major airport, and Disneyland. Currently I drive in a community of 45K people which increases to 65K people when the local university is in session. There isn’t much I don’t know about the taxi business and I’ve very much investigated Uber both as my competition and as a potential source of income.
I can give you the answer to your question for here in the State of California:
In California Ubers (and the six other rideshare apps) are solely under the jurisdiction of the California Public Utilities Commission. Cities and Counties can’t regulate these rideshare apps. As the letter of the law is written, Uber-type apps are rideshare apps, therefore the cars are not taxis and the drivers are not any type of entity covered by any type of professional driver regulations. Also the drivers are technically (by the letter of the law) not operating a business and therefore not subject to any other regulations like needing to possess a business license nor any business associated fees or obligations or standards. Only Uber regulates Uber drivers and their vehicles.
So what is the California Public Utilities Commission been doing all this time? Like any other large entrenched bureaucracy it is conducting studies and moving super slow negotiating what they can legally do.
Now I’ll give you my predictions on rideshare apps. Down the line they will be regulated like ALL businesses are. Is there anything that is 100% not regulated in America???
When you said, “Seems odd that the bureaucracy would be willing to forgo the revenue and the opportunity to regulate.” you were 100% correct.
There are tons of regulators, bureaucrats, and tax collectors who are burning furious that every time they even bring up applying their craft to Uber that the Uber CEOs and their expensive lawyers tell the government boys to f*** off because Uber is above the law and untouchable. Don’t even begin to suspect that this situation will last forever.
And in today’s news (sorry if this was mentioned already; didn’t see it but the thread is tee-ell-dee-arring) - California is challenging Uber’s position that drivers are not employees.
Again, it’s one of those rather self-serving distinctions by the tech-wonder crowd: they can make this new service work by claiming the huge matter of being an employer is Somebody Else’s. Cherry-picking again. Their smartphone app brilliance only works if they get to define the playing field (sort of like Apple’s whole business plan, but never mind that now).
Once these San Jose genius types have to accommodate the real world, with people who aren’t Just Like Them, it’s no fun anymore, they sell out to a megacorp that picks one or two useful innovations from the mix (prediction: taxi apps, already on the way) and discards the unusable matrix, and move on to some new idea that’s incredibly brilliant and innovative and world-changing… as long as you get to define “world” in your own terms.
If you’re right, I’ll enjoy the equal service and much better prices while it lasts, and mourn it when it’s gone, as will (I presume) the Uber drivers to whom I’ve spoken, who uniformly have expressed that they enjoy making money with their own car and setting their own hours for work.
Do you see the difference between “you can make up to $X!” and “our average salesperson makes X!”? Because I’ve had commission based jobs, and I’ve heard the former plenty of times and never once heard the latter.
Post #77 and others afterwards, including mine two posts up from yours.
The “not really an employee, but we tell them where and when to work and how and they can only collect payment through us” business model has been challenged so often and so many ways it’s a bit odd it takes a court to say that sticking an “e-” in front of it or doing it through an app does not change the applicable labor law.
One of the thing that Stinky Pete mentions, is that for reasons of how the respective legislations evolved over time, Taxis most often get regulated all the way down to the individual municipality/county level, while other carriers get regulated at statewide level. As a rule, not just in this but in many other fields, local regs are narrower and tighter and statewide looser and more general (because you don’t want to screw over a locality with special needs due to population or geography), unless preemption is explicitly invoked.
Don’t get me wrong. I really love it when new thinking really does change an outdated or outmoded model. There are so *many *things that do need changing.
But I’ve been on too many turns of the merry-go-round to get very excited because someone comes up with a fabulous (and usually techy-tech driven, these days) solution that works incredibly well in their lab, and outside in their parking lot, and therefore will change the world if those mean old bureaucrats don’t stomp all over it.
Reality effing bites. If your brilliant idea isn’t bite-proof, keep it in the nice safe yard of people and situations Just Like You, and not out where the dog packs roam. And most especially, don’t expect all the dogs to be chained up or neutered to make the world safe for your idea (mostly so you can become another smug billionaire and sit on global panels with Bono).
The “taxi” business is the way it is for a lot of reasons - good and bad, but mostly a century’s worth of them. If your solution isn’t going to address all of those reasons… don’t expect the business and infrastructure to suddenly change all the rules for you. Especially the ones that exist for good reason, like labor protection and passenger safety laws.
Uber claims it’s not a taxi service, partly to avoid taxi regulations and partly because it’s business model is structured different that a service providing company like a taxi service. They claim that their product is their app, and they are getting a piece of the action for connecting passengers to individual owners operators of vehicles that are willing to rent them out. Or something.
How many of them are keeping track of their expenses, depreciating the value of their car, and putting away money for the next vehicle they are going to need?
In my business, I’ve seen people “make money” for years. When what was really happening was very slow losses. They don’t notice it because their cash on hand is the same until their assets start to give out.
… but it’s crap like this that makes YOU sound like the smug one.
Plus there’s all this bullshit that’s further undermining your position, of which I copy-pasted a small sample:
Jesus, man. The world is changing, and that’s scary to you, I get it, but holding your hands over your ears and hollering loudly isn’t going to help you. It just makes you look silly.
… many of which are simply irrelevant today. Others are mired in entrenched corruption.
I realize inertia is less threatening than cleaning house, or pruning away the deadwood, or whatever analogy you prefer, but clinging to regulations that arose in a technology world that no longer exists doesn’t do anybody much good. And before you give in to your knee-jerk reaction to that last statement, consider the post from iamthewalrus(:3= about the milkman and the telegram.
Good questions – I’ll ask the next (talkative) Uber driver I speak to. I would assume that if driving Uber couldn’t be lucrative, then very few drivers would stick around for more than a very short time with Uber, and I don’t think this is the case.
I have been in tech since before it was “tech,” and I’ve been part of or privy to some of the biggest revolutions in functional improvements to our lives. I deeply admire the breakthroughs that add to these improvements and relegate inefficient, costly or laborious things to the historical dustbin.
However, having been in tech since the first big ride to the bust, I have also seen many, many “brilliant ideas,” often VC- or publicly-funded, that were utterly doomed unless the entire world changed around them to make their approach workable. More and more, these “solutions” come out of Google-inspired clones and copycats who think that heating a server room to the boiling point constitutes a workable solution in itself.
A solution has to address the whole problem, as it exists, with real people in the mix and the real, mean, corrupt, nasty, inefficient world jumping up and down on it. The solutions that do often overturn some part of the existing order, change laws, run inefficient businesses out of business, force improvements in collateral practices, and generally make the world a better place.
The solutions that only work if you hold them in your left hand, balance on one foot, wear conductive clothing, stay out of the rain and make sure you’re standing on the intersection of two ley lines… or any equivalent, such as solutions that require major changes in well-established parts of law or regulation, or extensive adaptation of infrastructure, or revolutionary behavior change in the population… well.
And the ones of that second type that try to be the first kind by simply ignoring everything that might be a barrier, and claiming they’re not subject to that law/regulation/custom/need/mode of thought/principle/cost… well, well.
Uber doesn’t simply get to make up the rules that suit its techy-tech based “solution.” It doesn’t get to dismiss three or four whole areas of public law and regulation to permit its “solution” to operate.
By the time Uber matures, if it ever does, it will be nearly indistinguishable from current taxi service - 10% because of bureaucratic stubbornness, but 90% because any form of “taxi” service has to meet certain obligations and standards, and Uber waving those away as someone else’s concern is typical “nonsolution” thinking.
I work in the logging industry and it’s about as far from tech as possible, but the underlying issues are the same. Every once in a while someone comes along with only a small understanding of the industry and has some get-rich-quick scheme that will make them a lot of money while completely missing the point of why and how we do what we do.
The majority of these schemes involve one of three things:
Screwing government regulations. “All of my workers are contractors, so I don’t have to pay worker’s comp.”
Cherry picking the easiest and cheapest aspects of the job. “I can only log areas that are close to existing roads”
Cherry picking the highest profit margin portions of the job. “How about I just log the high grade spruce and leave all the hemlock”
Uber doesn’t tell its drivers when and where to work, though. That’s one of their main arguments that their drivers are not employees.
I don’t know enough about employment law to say on whether drivers are employees or not, but they seem pretty similar to an “independent” sales job I had once upon a time. This was selling Cutco knives. I was responsible for finding my own leads, for setting up appointments. The company did tell me “how” to do my job, in the sense that they trained me (a bit). And I only got paid through them, in commissions for orders I submitted. Seems pretty similar to Uber drivers.
Any taxi companies that still exist in 10 years will look just like Uber. Order a cab via app, see the price and pay via app, GPS in the car, see the driver’s picture before pickup. It will look nothing like pre-Uber taxi service, waiting on the street searching for an unoccupied cab, calling a number and being told “they’re ten minutes out” every time you wait 20 minutes and call back, cabbies carrying hundreds of dollars in cash after a shift.
At best there will be behind the scenes similarities, licensing, insurance, etc. But the customer facing service is going to be Uber-iffic.
The existing system will absorb the Uber/Lyft improvements, not the other way around. Given an established system that meets the endlessly complex real world rules, that can certainly stand some upgrades, and a Completely New System that has several years of being bent to reality ahead of it… I know which way to bet.
It’s all to the good. But the end game is still pretty clear. See you in a couple of years.
I assume that the Uber model could still work even if they ultimately lose the appeal and must treat the drivers as employees. I would think it just means that Uber takes a larger cut of the payment to offset the costs.
I assume Uber will, over time, be more regulated, and that’s perfectly fine with me. I actually do want it to be more regulated, and if it turns into another type of taxi service or gets taxi companies to catch up technologically (as it seems they are starting to do), that’s great, too. Right now, for me as a consumer, Uber and other ridesharing services are far better than traditional taxis. Once taxis become more reliable and timely, I’ll be happy to go back to them. I still use them for street hailing and rides from the airport. Otherwise, I use Uber because I can see where the cars are and they come when they say they’re going to come. I’ve been screwed around by Yellow Cab too much use them for home pickup service anymore.
