I can see in the best possible scenario we end up with more cities like Austin, Texas that have their own nonprofit ride sharing app. I actually have huge respect for what Austin did in banning Uber and Lyft and making their own app (Ride Austin) that isn't designed to make investors and owners rich, instead just benefit drivers and riders.

1) Austin did not ban Uber or Lyft. The city council passed an ordinance that required a gradually increasing percentage of rideshare drivers pass an FBI-approved fingerprint background check. (These rules are in place in other locales in which Uber operates, such as NYC and Houston.) Uber and Lyft formed a PAC that got a proposition on the next local election ballot that would have overturned the ordinance, then spent $9 million on a massive advertising campaign supporting the proposition. The proposition failed overwhelmingly.

2) Uber and Lyft stopped providing services of their own volition within 48 hours. Considering they abide by the same regulations in other cities, it seems pretty obvious to me that it was done in retaliation in order to show other cities considering doing the same that they will actually pull out.

3) Several upstart ridesharing companies immediately jumped into the market and were fully operational in less than a month and are complying fully with the regulations. (Examples are Fasten, Fare, RideAustin, and GetMe.)

4) RideAustin is registered as a non-profit organization, formed by several local tech entrepreneurs affiliated with Capital Factory, an Austin accelerator/VC firm. It is not owned or operated by the city in any fashion.

They have no moat, no barrier to entry, and a whole lot of hubris just waiting to mature in the form of fierce competitors and negative PR.

Its not an unsolvable problem though. I bet if they could hire more/better engineers and invest in infra for reliability they could be a lot better. And it might actually happen if Uber suddenly raises its prices and people look around for alternatives.

I think Uber and Lyft have made a huge mistake by leaving Austin. First of all they showed drivers and passengers just how little they cared about them; a lot of people in Austin were really angry at them and continue to be. Second, their stunt did not work. There was, obviously, a lot of backlash against the Mayor and local politicians but that has died down and the city has moved on. But lastly, and most importantly, the Austin market became available exclusively to all the other ridesharing apps, giving them a leg up and a source of reliable income and feedback.

I get the feeling that next time this happens in another city, the other apps will similarly step in and take over the market. But this time they will be faster and better prepared.

This is where someone should come in and offer business software that is easily branded to handle the technical aspect of the business, and just sell it to the new entrants. This is a great market for shovels.

Austin's homegrown competitors may not be fearful, but one of the existing majors could single-handedly shatter Uber's image with a half-decent app, esp if it's integrated with something like Google Maps or Apple Wallet or equivalent feed.

This is sort of a fundamental problem with our entire conception of a digital economy. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are fundamentally the only games in town that can compete. Our regulations, laws, and economics are not well set up to deal with the fact that there is a wholly new type of meta-entity that is so overwhelmingly important for modern business.

We can barely regulate (and often fail to regulate) the energy industry appropriately and that's a way more competitive market.

I read a poignant comment on Twitter the other day, about how nowadays public libraries and fire services would never be funded - perhaps we'd give illiterate people tax credits for buying books, and insurance companies would have private fire engines.

The neo-liberal agenda of not allowing any public entity to provide services that could possibly compete with a private corporation has succeeded too well.

Modern conservatism is a cancer.

I pay for fire protection as part of my property taxes. In this case, it's a separate item that must be purchased separately. That's what makes it "a cancer"?

As the morons in the article said: Bell and her boyfriend said they were aware of the policy, but thought a fire would never happen to them.

No sympathy for people who lost their home and possessions over a $75 fee?

I had a friend who had no sympathy for another friend who was diagnosed with throat cancer, because he smoked cigarettes. Didn't matter that the person had cancer, what mattered is that they smoked cigarettes and knew the risks. It was forgivable on the first friend's part because he was also heavily medicated for a psychiatric illness.

Well, yes, sympathy from me as in "sucks to be them". But they were adults and made a voluntary decision to forego paying for fire protection. They made a bet and they lost.

As for cancer, when I was in high school some 40 years ago, I knew a US Army Major (i.e. Gung-ho military) who smoked. Even then, smoking was starting to be frowned upon. So he used to say "any fool can quit smoking. It takes a man to face cancer."

At a personal level, if I ran into that person now and it turned out he indeed had cancer, I would of course have sympathy for him. But perhaps he and I would both agree that adults sometimes make bad decisions, and they then should accept the consequences of those bad decisions.

As Niven and Pournelle explained it back in 1981: "think of it as evolution in action".

Personally, I don't think we should reward people for making bad decisions; you are implicitly punishing the people who made the good ones, which are often hard. However, rewarding is one thing; saving from death/destitution is quite another.

Yes of course families help each other no matter the previous bad choices.

On a societal level we try to help people with cancer even if they don't have health insurance. That's what Medicaid is. Unfortunately that only helps save them from death; destitution probably feels almost as bad and we don't have an easy solution to that.

At the point that someone is diagnosed with cancer, what is gained by saying "I told you so"?

Would you go as far as to say that to someone who got stomach cancer? That they should accept the consequences of eating cured meats while they and their family suffer?

What about prostate cancer? Did you know that the risk of prostate cancer is decreased by 20% - 30% for each of the following: 1) regular prostate massages 2) increased number of orgasms 3) drinking coffee 4) ingesting more lycopene 5) exercising (41% decrease in risk of developing prostate cancer!) 5) consuming more omega-3 fatty acids.

Would you hold the same "I told you so" attitude towards someone diagnosed with prostate cancer because they didn't have enough kinky sex, drink enough coffee, exercise and eat the right foods?

I'm having a hard time differentiating between "didn't pay $75" and "didn't exercise or rub their prostate hard / often enough".

There's a big difference between having "no sympathy" (which is what I said) and "I told you so".

"No sympathy" means indifference. The problems of people who didn't pay for fire service should be a cautionary tale, a warning to society at large. As the article said: by now, everyone should know about the city's fire policy. "After the last situation, I would hope that everybody would be well aware of the rural fire fees, this time"

"I told you so" is much different. It's "rubbing it in" at a personal level. I would never say "I told you so" to friends or to random people. I would, however, say it to my children in the appropriate situation. Pointing out consequences of bad choices helps children learn to make better choices.

I'm having a hard time differentiating

In "didn't pay $75", the people who don't pay but still expect to be covered are making a deliberate choice to freeload off the goodwill of their neighbors who are paying. How does a fire department exist if paying for it is optional? There is no 'fire department tooth fairy' that periodically delivers money to pay for salaries and equipment.

Cancer is much different. As you note, there isn't 100% certainly what causes a cancer. Lung cancer is one that can be closely linked to smoking, but even there it's not absolute. A quick search turns up a CDC web page that links 80% to 90% of the cases to smoking.[1]

In the case of cancer, interestingly enough it's once again an issue of insurance. Even when I was 20 years old and working a shitty no-benefit low paying job I still paid for my own health insurance. I was only being paid $4 per hour but I prioritized insurance highly enough to pay $100 per month for it. (Granted, that was 40 years ago, it's much harder to afford individual insurance today without some sort of subsidy or group policy).

In your hypothetical situations, did the stomach cancer or prostate cancer patient have insurance? If not, how is it once again not a freeloader problem? There's certainly no reason to say "I told you so". That appears to be a strawman you invented to avoid discussing the real issue which IMO is freeloading.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm

This is their first go at this especially crazy rodeo, though.

Doesn't this count as first-mover advantage?

If large chunks of people ditch Uber, Lyft could stand to grab the lion's share of the market.

No the measure passed because Uber and Lyft failed to understand Austin culture and shot themselves in the foot by annoying Austinites with intrusive tactics that made them look bad in the eyes of a local culture that tends to be fiercely anti big business. It's the same type of mistake Airbnb made in SF with their big marketing campaign of 2015 that just offended everyone.

Good riddance.

I don't believe that for a second. Especially because the exact regulations that Austin put into place are followed by Uber in other places.

As discussed upthread, Uber's investors and owners take a 20% loss on every ride. How much more benefit to drivers and riders do you want?

This past Saturday none of the ride sharing services could handle demand and all went down. No riders could request and an no drivers could accept.

Also when the service does work glitches like seeing the login screen when you are already logged in are routine.

Source: I'm in Austin right now for sxsw and I'm a former Austin resident.

Also this whole debacle was a clear and present tax grab for the city please dont pretend it wasn't.

Now on balance Uber and Lyft ran an AWFUL campaign against the regulations when they already do background checks but still that was always about money.

(B) Except for any TNC participating in the Safety Assurance Program, each TNC shall pay an additional fee of one (1) percent of the TNCs annual local gross revenue for the Compliant Driver Education Fund to be used to assist and incent drivers to become compliant."

Also, it was about much more than just fingerprinting. Fingerprinting was emphasized because it would have affected Uber and Lyft's business model the most by reducing the supply of drivers due to higher onboarding friction.

Here's the ordinance: https://www.austintexas.gov/edims/document.cfm%3Fid=245769

Some more interesting parts:

- "A TNC shall establish a driver-training program designed to ensure that each driver safely operates his or her vehicle prior to the driver being able to offer service"

- "during periods of abnormal market disruptions, dynamic pricing shall be prohibited."

- ...and the whole reporting section where they have to hand over all their internal operating data to the city

A tax grab for me implies taking some money from some entity for a completely different reason. Like, paying for a civic ice rink with the money.

For now. I generally prefer for-profit approaches because their motivations are far more transparent. They want to make money for the investors.

Non-profits exist to serve the wishes of the donors, which may be opaque. For instance, the Ride Austin investors might suddenly decide that they really want to focus on transportation to/from low income areas or art festivals. That would degrade service, and there would be no accountability to the customer in that regard.

Not only are food coops a pretty big deal in Austin, but when I lived in Austin even the electricity company that I got my power from was a coop (https://www.pec.coop/) and if the coop made too much money it redistributed the profits back out as credits to member accounts. I generally ended up with one out of twelve months effectively being free because of profit credits being redistributed back out to my account.

The whole culture of coops and nonprofit service organizations is something I really miss about Austin now that I no longer live there.

Non profits, you can get a lot of people arguing about how to best fulfill the intents of the non-profit. In that situation, whoever argues the most persuasively or loudly wins, and it's the customers that suffer.

This is great and all, but wouldn't that money be more effectively utilized maintaining or upgrading the grid or investing in renewable energy? Seems like the co-op model never really invests in progress.

I am very interested to see if aggressive pricing and cost/route optimisation can unlock enough demand to make pooling actually viable economically, which none of the Uber/Lyft alternatives really seem willing to try.

I don't see what's the problem with that.

Dispatch via app is a solid improvement over the old phonecalls or street pickup, automatic credit card billing is an improvement over cash, and in cities with shady taxi drivers, GPS tracking is an improvement over potentially hacked taxi meters.

So there is an obviously valuable business model for "taxi dispatch app" here even without a moonshot - just perhaps smaller than Uber's dream of being the only provider of personal transportation in the world.

Uber would need to start understanding how ordering of goods works, returns, and service/quality complaints.

They could do it, but there are a whole lot of domain specific problems and approaches to resolve and it's not clear that's it's long-term viable.

It's also the easiest part to copy, most taxi companies have already. Now try asking they investors why the spent so many billions of dollars to break into the taxi business?

I disagree: they don't make cars. That's a huge impediment. The prime position company is surely Tesla. Or, really, any car manufacturer.

If you are retrofitting existing cars you are wasting a ton of money and getting a half baked solution to a dedicated provider.

Actually developing self-driving tech and then deploying it is almost entirely unrelated to the business that Uber has developed thus far. It's an enormous undertaking, and they were starting from almost zero.

A taxi company has well understood financials and valuation and would never be given a crack at VC Lotto.

In addition, the kind of quality control that Uber/Lyft exert over drivers almost certainly places the drivers in the position of being employees which makes things even more unprofitable.

Being a good taxi company in the 21st century will mean good at self-driving cars.

What is a startup? Poised for explosive growth. Are commodity businesses poised for that growth? No.

Not to mention that transportation-as-a-service would also be a lot more convenient than car ownership. No need to refuel, repair, or otherwise maintain your vehicle; just grab whichever one happens to be nearby. You can have as many or as few cars as you need at any particular moment, and get a car of any model or paint color you want at the push of a button.

Not relevant to my assertion. I said when they become the norm, as in, when they're no more expensive as other cars.

> ... transportation-as-a-service would also be a lot more convenient than car ownership.

This means I can share a car with several friends, neighbors, or room-mates with little fuss. The problem with sharing a car today is licensing, insurance, and the inconvenience of the car being stuck somewhere when in use. If it acted, instead, as your own personal driver it can handle multiple trips concurrently. Two people go to the movies, so they're committed for X hours, and in that interim instead of sitting in a parking lot the car can deal with other things.

Uber's business model arbitrages the difficulty and expense of owning a car vs. the expense of buying a cab ride. If the car becomes more cost effective because of personal ride-sharing their margin evaporates.

Today a decent car would cost me about $600/mo. all-in. If I could buy a 1/6th share in a car for $100/mo. and be able to use it in short stints with little contention that's going to be cheaper than Uber if I use it more than a handful of times.

My point is that self-driving cars will become the norm long before they're "no more expensive as other cars" precisely because of transportation-as-a-service companies like Uber. By the time we start getting anywhere near the point where self-driving cars are "no more expensive as other cars", car ownership will already have been largely supplanted by transportation-as-a-service.

> If I could buy a 1/6th share in a car for $100/mo. and be able to use it in short stints with little contention that's going to be cheaper than Uber if I use it more than a handful of times.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. It sounds like you're describing transportation-as-a-service, but with the additional restriction of you only being able to use one particular car that you "own" 1/6th of instead of any car that happens to be nearby at the time when you request it.

That sounds like a needless restriction, and negates many of the advantages of transportation-as-a-service (no need to refuel, repair, or otherwise maintain your vehicle, the flexibility to obtain as many cars as you want at any particular moment, the ability to use a pickup truck one day and a minivan the next, etc).

Also, why would that be cheaper than Uber? I think a service like Uber is likely to be far more efficient with the usage of their self-driving fleet than you could ever be with any one, individual car, even if that car _is_ shared between multiple people.

If you're used to taking an Uber on occasion, taking an AutoUber isn't a big deal, just like trying a new coffee at Starbucks.

Even if GM is selling L5 autonomous cars to everybody in 2025, they're going to cost as much as a car does. Why buy it when you can pay by the ride? And Uber wants to be the name you think of when summoning a ride.