I'm not a fan of Kalanick, personally, but I was prepared to have been wrong about him when I saw his Facebook post about taking care of the drivers who were stranded by this idiocy.
Then, I saw they were taking fares to JFK during the taxi strike — effectively breaking it. To my eyes, and those of many others, that is an ugly repudiation of the gesture.
It was one hour. Having someone on the president's Business Council thing take a public stand like that in solidarity with the very industry he's trying to destroy would have sent a powerful message, and pretty cheaply.
More to the point, turning off surge pricing hours after the strike — that was announced to last one hour — was over is moot.
All I'm saying is that it would really suck to be someone caught at the airport in the mess, maybe with a few kids you've had to endure protecting/managing for a 5-10 hour flight, and the cabs aren't going. I'd be pretty upset at the cabs, even if I stood with the protesters (which I do). (Keep in mind, this would also include people coming from the many other countries not called out in the EO.)
Side note: I think it's crazy how quickly so many different SIGNIFICANT articles are hitting #1 on HN and Reddit. The ban, the judicial pushback, the firing...I think I'm all caught up, I sit down at home, throw open HN, and there's an entire sub-story that went down about cabs, Uber, and Lyft sitting at a new #1. It's all too much for me...
Then imagine how it must feel to be one of the people affected by the ban.
That's the point of the strike: "Oh you think this is inconvenient?"
Yeah, didn't think so. This conversation is getting absurd at this point.
Either way, this is not going to solve anything.
Immigration and customs officials refusing to follow the ban order would be actual disobedience and far more effectual in signal and lives changed.
This happens all the time with people unused to protest. "Protests doesn't do anything", "Other things are more efficient", "Their demands are vague", "People should work on making policy instead of protesting", etc.
Network effects, people, network effects.
There were no ideal options on the table. Joining the strike would have meant hurting a sizable number of immigrants and hurting the protests.
I mean, c'mon. During the time of the strike, people needed transportation to and from the airport more than ever, given the protesters coming in and out. And hell, if detainees had been able to clear CBP during the strike, the strike would have actively made it harder for those poor people to get home. I'd say the taxi workers union should be ashamed for picking that time to strike.
Without the lipservice they paid, I'd have actually believed the taxi union was rallying against the the protesters.
For me it wasn't the bad messaging around the JFK thing, it was that this incident brought focus to the fact that Uber had earlier expressed sympathy for Trump. This is more than enough for me to switch my business to a competitor.
I believe this might have been the case for others too. They had simply been closet Trump supporters in my view, but suddenly they were called out as such.
They could collect an extra few cents from normal fares and store it to compensate drivers during peak time, without fluctuating the fare price for customers. It would work like insurance, and have the same effect with surge pricing while not generating bad PR.
The thing that I like about dynamic pricing is that it forces people to think about what they are doing in a broader context. "maybe it's selfish of me to expect a $3 ride home at 1AM on Jan 1st"
Why not take the "insurance policy" style and average out these surges?
Being an Uber customer and complaining about surge prices is beyond hypocrite.
This is all a consequence of bad messaging on Uber's part here; they're not in the wrong.
Uber's Surge system is all automatic--if demand goes way up, and supply doesn't follow suit, prices will increase in the app. Unfortunately, demand goes way up during catastrophes like terror attacks, so Uber has had a few bad instances where, in the wake of a crisis, surge goes up, simply because of the way the system is set up.
People who don't know about how Surge works might assume that Uber is deliberately raising prices in these crisis zones to gouge people in peril, which obviously isn't the case. To address cases like this, Uber put into place a surge shutoff system so that people in these positions aren't charged extra.
What happened here was that Uber, in the interest of avoiding another PR disaster, turned off surge to allow protesters (identifying with a cause which their CEO has openly supported) to get to the venue without extra charge. This backfired because that wasn't made clear in their announcement, and they instead came off as strike busters because the NYC taxi firms stupidly chose to express solidarity by shutting down the ability of protesters (not to mention uninvolved travelers) to get to and from the airport via their services.
I don't envy Uber--they're in a damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don't position. It's maddening to see the #deleteUber hashtag get this much traction, especially given that Lyft also continued to operate during the strike, but c'est la vie.