Yeah, I'm mostly not a fan, now that we're a few years in. Waves of people inexperienced, untrained in shuttling people around a major metro have resulted in downtown Chicago being an utter mess compared to only a few years ago. Chicago forced cab drivers to go through a training and certification course that at least forced them to understand the major routes and grid system we're on, and every time I've been in an uber they are completely tethered to their phones nav systems.

So, now we've got an army of drivers who can't drive, don't know where they are going, playing with their phones all day. It makes for an unpleasant experience whether you're on a bike, driving you car, or sometimes just walking across the street.

I used to think cabs were terrible drivers, but most of them (especially in heavily regulated markets) are very experienced drivers and simply disregard rules of the road that are inconvenient for them.

In contrast, 'ride sharing' drivers seem to have no sense of direction, and are genuinely oblivious to the rules of the road.

In short, when in either type of car, I fear for my life.

That's interesting. I wonder if this is a regional thing, or just different personal experiences. For me, I've never had a particularly bad Uber driver, but I've had incredibly bad taxi drivers. (My favorite was the guy who decided that driving down I-395 in Arlington was a good time to catch up on some paperwork. He kept the cab on the road, but only by using all three lanes. Thankfully it was about 2AM and nobody else was using them.)

While driving, I tend to fear for my life when taxis are around, but whenever I spot an Uber or Lyft car, they seem to behave unremarkably.

There's also the other side of the problem that you don't get to see as a passenger. Uber/Lyft drivers in a rush to get to their pickups drive like maniacs here in SF. I'm from a developing country and I'm used to drivers who disregard rules but even those pay attention to the surroundings - you can read them and know if they are going to yield or not. But having gotten used to the polite driving of SF a few years ago, I find it quite dangerous to walk my dog out now. I stick to interior roads and wait till I know for sure that the car would yield for me before I cross. Driving and Biking have become usually miserable as well.

My only request is that passengers don't encourage this by blindly rating everyone 5 stars. Take at least two star off for unsafe driving - not stopping at a stop sign, not yielding to pedestrians, not giving enough space while passing a bicyclist and at least one star for not following the rules - driving on the bus lane, double parking in the middle of a busy road, driving too fast on a 25Mph zone, not waiting long enough for the pedestrians to pass safe ...etc.

If the economics don't work out for the drivers, the fare has to go up. By keeping the fare artificially low and pushing drivers to accommodate too many trips Uber and Lyft are ruining the experience for everyone and in doing so are perpetuating the need for more people to use them instead of considering alternate transport modes. This, sooner or later, will ruin it for everyone.

Take it from me, America cannot handle a developing country style traffic. It requires a different set of skills. People here are used to predictable traffic.

Never had an Uber driver driving like maniac. To be sure, I live to the south of SF and try to never drive into SF unless I absolutely have to, and when I do, I pretty much expect developing-country-type driving environment. But I may just be spoiled by suburbia-type traffic patterns. In any case, even SF Uber drivers has always been excellent for me. I realize that's anecdata, so I wonder if somebody did any kind of robust survey of this.

Seconding that. I took a half-dozen Uber rides in Las Vegas two weekends ago. My biggest concern was trying to figure out how to use the app to tip them.

All drivers were cordial, polite, had no problem with routing (admittedly, it's pretty simple in Vegas). One driver was a smoker and the car smelled and that was the only negative in 6 rides.

Overall, it's the end-to-end experience. Call up the app, type in a destination, head to the curb. The car shows up about the same time I get there, I hop in, chat a bit on the way, hop out at the destination, rate & tip via the app and go on my way. The seamless experience, so far, makes up for the (so far mild) idiosyncrasies of drivers and cars.

We all have sampling bias since the number of rides we take is so small compared to the number of ride givers. I'm sure most taxi drivers and most Uber drivers are perfectly normal, safe drivers, with the outliers being the problem.

I've personally been driven by awful taxi and awful Uber drivers, though Uber so far has the distinction of being the only one to genuinely scare me driving 3x the speed he should have on a twisty road, with tires screeching the whole way.

> simply disregard rules of the road that are inconvenient for them.

There is a bit of a natural selection process to it.

If you're a cab driver, and you keep getting into accidents, you won't be a cab driver for long. If you take no risks and are constantly late, you won't be a cab driver for long. If you have a poor sense of direction, or spacial awareness when driving, you probably won't be a driver for very long.

After decades of this process, most professional cab drivers are just reckless enough to get away with it.

These Uber drivers haven't spent decades going through that process. Everyone's a newbie. The difference this time is that the risk isn't being undertaken by the company, it's being undertaken by the drivers themselves.

> Everyone's a newbie.

Not really. A newbie at being paid to drive, but in many cases, not new to driving. In my area, I can predict to the minute when I'll arrive at my destination, and what route is best at that time of day, even for a 20 mile trip and without software support. That's because I've been driving 24k miles+ annually here for nearly 30 years.

Not to mention, the driver's app has the same real-time mapping features that smart phones have. So they can avoid grid locked areas, accidents, etc. even without years of cab driving experience.

Yes, an experienced cab driver will be a better cab driver, in general, than a new Uber driver. But not enough better to keep the masses away from Uber/Lyft. Cab companies are getting slaughtered, cab drivers are panicking and two-timing or jumping to Uber/Lyft, and this is happening globally.

Are you driving for Uber/Lyft? I was hoping I would get more drivers like you, with deep experience of the area, etc; but the drivers I've had, at least during normal working hours seem to be people who don't have a lot of experience driving in general, and for example have a hard time navigating around the mountain view train station, despite google maps giving them reasonable directions.

I always tell folks in my car if we witness someone doing something daring and crazy on the road "hey, they did pull it off after all"

In my personal experiences, local drivers (ones who grew up in the city) know where they're going on Uber. Sadly I can't request for a driver who won't take 3 wrong turns before they even get to me...

I never get local drivers. Here in Austin everyone drives in from San Antonio or one of the little suburbs and tries to navigate downtown and can't figure it out at all. Don't even try to go to an event down the back roads. They won't know them so hopefully you do.

downvote drivers who make poor navigation decisions!

Wouldn't these guys get enough low rankings because of that to be kicked off the platform?

That almost makes it worse, it keeps the ratio of brand new drivers high. There's only so many people who know the city and want to drive for Uber, and they're outnumbered by those who don't know the city and want to drive.

A number of studies conclude that taxi drivers have fewer accidents, per mile, than the general population - at least in the US. I've not seen studies for elsewhere, though they probably exist.

My anecdotal experiences are not the same. The majority of taxi drivers and ride-sharing drivers have been good, with a few exceptions of actual bad drivers.

And I think the disregard for rules applies to a lot of public drivers. The Port Authority buses in Pittsburgh think they own the road.

I guess it depends on where you live? I'm in Boston, and all of my Uber and Lyft drivers have been great.

I recently went on vacation where the only option available was a taxi cab. Within 5 minutes I remembered why Uber and Lyft have become so popular. Our driver was a complete asshole, honking at everyone and almost running down a bicyclist. Plus, the A/C in the van was broken. And because it was a van, you couldn't even roll the windows down. It was a miserable ride.

I live in Chicago, and my experience with rideshare drivers has been uniformly good. Many of them genuinely enjoy driving. Some can be opportunistic but I guess my baseline for city driving was shaped in cities where the traffic is much worse than Chicago's (try Sao Paulo). I actually think Chicago drivers are ok.

The worst drivers are cab drivers in the Loop during rush hour who will honk at the slightest provocation, who don't use turn signals, and will suddenly stop in front of you. If Chicago cab drivers are trained, that training certainly isn't evident.

On the other hand, Lyft drivers have stars docked if they exhibit unsafe driving behaviors, and they are deactivated if their rating gets too low (4.6 stars is the threshold I believe).

Many non-casual Lyft drivers actually try not to crash their ratings. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-real-reason-Uber-and-Lyft-us...

Cabs don't have this feedback loop. Only accidents will get them off the road.

Edit: I speak as a driver and a passenger. I imagine things have gotten worse for bicyclists. Also, I don't use Uber, only Lyft. I've heard Uber drivers are worse because Uber is more liberal with their rating system.

Yea my experience with biking in Chicago is that at least cabs are clearly marked as such so you know they might cut you off at any moment and you'll cuss at each other. Uber drivers will just stealthily swerve into your lane and full stop.

Plus the GPS systems here will take you down these speed bump residential roads and do crazy contortions to drop off on a one-way road.

On the flip side though, when I first moved here a cab was like $20 each way just from like Broadway to Kimball. Now it's...$4.

In NYC, Uber drivers are required to be licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and you can report their dangerous driving to the commission, who will fine them.

It seems like a much better system.

It's almost like people have been through this problem before and devised regulations to fix it.

Don't get me wrong, I always use Uber or Lyft over a cab. Taxi regulations are often cited as awful. But this particular one is a good one.

Fellow Chicagoan here. I agree. Used to be that cabs were the most annoying, unpredictable cars on the road. Now it's the Ubers and Lyfts.

I'm incredibly glad they forced them to display the logo. Now you can tell it was the bad uber driver that just tried to hit you.

They're still bad.

>"Waves of people inexperienced, untrained in shuttling people around a major metro have resulted in downtown Chicago being an utter mess compared to only a few years ago."

Has the city published any traffic impact studies? NYC showed concerned for Uber impact on traffic and made an attempt to get data and it turned into a political kerfuffle with accusations of protecting the taxi industry etc. I don't like the title of this blog post but it points to similar of what you are stating about downtown Chicago:

http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/02/27/its-settled-uber-is-ma...

I think it'd be hard to actually quantify the impact. Chicago's also constantly under construction, the downtown area has had major bus route redesigns with the "JUMP" routes, and that's caused a lot of congestion too.

I'm not really familiar with new york's streets, but ours have been over capacity forever and now with uber/lyft there's a lot more single passenger car traffic in the business areas. Much more so than cabs, because getting them is much more convenient than cabs ever were here - calling a cab in chicago is a joke, honestly, and if you weren't in an area they pass by frequently you were out of luck. I feel like more people choose the uber option for short trips that would have been transit in the past. The convenience of it is the model, after all.

>"I think it'd be hard to actually quantify the impact."

You would need Uber/Lyft's help I believe. But I think if you combined the Uber/Lyft data with data that the DOT keeps it would be pretty easy to quantify the impact. I think that was NYC's point as well. But unfortunately the mayor had received money from a taxi lobbying effort which allowed Uber to cry foul and make accusations of protectionism.[1]

One metric used is average travel speed which according to this recent article is down 12% to 8.1 miles compared to 2010[2]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/nyregion/de-blasio-reaps-b...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/nyregion/uber-ride-hailin...

Well... what incentive do they have to hand it over?

I would think the incentive would be to play nice with the city and the TLC that regulates the industry. I think they will have to do so eventually anyway.

Yeah but if it's not flattering that might not be worth it.

I'd think making a nav system work properly with given map once is more efficient than making hundreds of drivers to constantly learn it over and over.

> It makes for an unpleasant experience whether you're on a bike, driving you car, or sometimes just walking across the street.

How drivers guided by a nav system is worse for streetwalkers than any other drivers? And, from my experience, long-term commercial driving doesn't always make a driver a model road citizen - in fact, in many places taxi drivers are kinda notorious for being less than model co-roaders.

Uber was actually a little too early into the game. They are going to have legacy issues transitioning into self-driving taxis. The whole end-game with this is to have self-driving cars and get rid of drivers, this was the stated goal at least 4 years ago.

This is where Tesla is going to have an advantage. They're going to start with self-driving, no need to deal with pissed off drivers and other problems that come with a transition. Same thing with their dealerships - they didn't have to deal with the dealer-franchise system.

I've had the occasional Lyft driver who could have made better choices. However, the one thing I've only had with taxis is a driver who is actively malicious and makes one turns clearly on purpose to drive up the bill. Lyft cars also have been consistently much cleaner. The skankyness of some taxis I've been in is just without competition.

I've literally had cab drivers on airport pickups ask me "Do you know the best way?" I can only assume that's an overt sizing up to determine whether I know anything about the city or whether they can take me for a figurative ride.

Those cab drivers can't get starved out of business fast enough as far as I'm concerned.

I am so naive. I've been asked that before by a Taxi driver in NYC I believe on my way to the airport and just said "Uh, shouldn't you?" I never realized what they were up to.

In many places there are fixed prices for rides between major points, like city center->airport, etc. Not the case in NYC?

There are for certain airports. A yellow cab will be cheaper than an Uber in some cases especially when surge pricing is in play.

Chicago cab drivers were the worst. Uber drivers are leagues better.

Last time I was in a cab in Chicago the driver ran a man over in the street and just kept going. When I jumped out to see if the victim was okay the driver yelled to me that I was fare dodging before he sped away....

That might explain the two red light runners I've seen in the last two days with Uber stickers on their windshield. One nearly struck me and would have if I didn't slow down my approach.

So true. Good luck getting a driver to pick you up around Wacker. Upper/lower confuses the heck out of the uninitiated.

For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacker_Drive

Chicago has also begotten the most amazingly complicated 3D road diagram in America: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Chicago_...

I would normally assume Upper. Where would one pick up passengers on Lower Wacker? (genuinely curious, not being snarky).

Apart from the fact GPSes don't really work on Lower Wacker, so it's hard to nail down the pickup location on the app.

No idea, but many drivers who aren't familiar with the area just follow the GPS and end up getting lost down there.

ADA non-compliant vehicles as well. Disabled passengers cannot ride an Uber most of the time. It has been difficult to sue Uber though.

I've had a leg immobilizer and crutches for a bit now. People keep telling me I should uber/lyft around to be more mobile but I can't easily do that. My two choices are to sit lengthwise across the back seat after a lot of work scooting in or to get in the front with the seat all the way back. Both will annoy a lot of drivers and trash my rating.

It's been pretty eye opening.

I'm tall, and when I use Lyft I typically sit in the front and move the seat back. Hasn't been a problem.

Huh, wonder if someone succeeded. In Seattle we have ADA compliant Uber as an option, and the price is set to zero.

This is just the first step. The ultimate goal is driverless taxi fleets. Whether that's achievable ( technologically, legally, etc ) is another story.

I am often reminded of this tweet:

> Which is funnier: tech bros innovating their way to public transit, or bitcoin folks slowly reinventing financial regulation?

- @PlanetOfFinks, https://twitter.com/planetoffinks/status/850848359392870400?...

You may see it as funny, I see it as refactoring. If we try it in a different way and end up with the same solution, we know it's there not because somebody 60 years ago wanted to make a quick buck out of it and then it stuck because regulations are forever.

And in the meantime a bunch of people get badly burned.

Well, if you talk about Bitcoin etc., it's a gold rush situation - high risk/high reward situation which is strictly voluntary, so I see zero issue with that, on the contrary, I see it as excellent experiment which, unlike many other social experiments, won't bother you at all unless you opt in.

With Uber/Lyft it's trickier since while you are welcome to not use it, it may have implications which are beyond direct users of the services. Still, I think the effects are relatively small and not disproportional to what you could encounter without them - i.e. how badly you can be burned there? Surely, you can have a bad driver - same could happen with a Taxi. A bad Uber driver could create a bad situation on the road - so can any other bad driver, nothing new here. So marginal costs are pretty low here. Not to defend bad drivers - those should be dealt with appropriately - but the additional "burn" that would be caused is IMHO pretty low.

I'd say the big externalities affecting non-customers are increased congestion and a questionable insurance arrangement. There are also the handful of cases of sexual assault and similar that have happened that arguably could have been avoided with background checks, but perhaps the incidence of these is small enough that you could write it off.

Is there really big change in congestion? If not Uber, people would take a taxi or drive themselves - that's what I'd do. Both cases don't reduce congestion.

As for insurance, there are tons of people on the road with bad insurance, at least for Uber as I understand you have something to back it up.

As for assaults and other bad apples, that could have happened with taxi too. I don't believe any company of these proportions could have checks that could 100% prevent such cases. I'm not sure it's possible in even in principle...

The fastest way to advance your career is to switch jobs every 2-3 years.

Have we kept the same regulations because they work incredibly well? Or because we are complacent.

Yeh, this unpopular view is now becoming popular. I've said it from the start, there is a reason for regulation. We just needed the awesome software to manage real taxi services. The price isn't sustainable, people want the on demand taxis.

> there is a reason for regulation

Uber coming along has been a good reset for the regulations. There were a lot of ineffective and counterproductive regulations in place and I think wiping them out and starting over is a good thing.

Sarasota, FL is an interesting case to study. The traditional taxi companies complained about Uber in the city and rather than fight Uber, the city removed the regulations on taxi companies. So far, I don't think much has really changed.

As for the gaming of surge pricing, I think that's fixable. Uber just needs to think more carefully about driver incentives.

When he says the price isn't sustainable I think what he means is that investor money has kept Uber fares below costs, which is not sustainable.

I wonder if getting rid of the drivers would be enough to make Uber profitable? It would at least fix the gaming of surge prices.

That is what they're betting the farm on; the bigger question is whether they'll be able to pull that off (and pull it off fast enough).

There's a lot I don't understand about Uber.

What's the Uber business case?

Is there enough profit in taxi services around the world to justify their valuation and financial losses?

Do they hope to recoup through a future monopoly? Tracking Data? Self-driving vehicle fleets?

Originally it was the idea that an on-demand app was going to revolutionize taxis.

Now it seems to be, avoiding regulation for fun & profit.

Well, minus the profit part.