The incentives for drivers have always been fucked. I'd rather the drivers not accept my ride than try to play a weird game of chicken to get me to cancel when I'm trying to get somewhere.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3907475/taxi-driver-refuses-to-dr...
Medallion-taxis are comprehensively awful, and California seems determined to regress to where they're the only choice for riders again.
Uber was, and remains, a huge improvement over the pre-Uber status quo.
Taxi companies are monopolies allowed by the state, it sucks for the last ones who paid $300,000 for a license to operate just before Uber took off, but technology finds its way.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/postever...
In a competitive market, this should happen much less. And the big innovation of ride sharing is it gives a valuable tool to drivers judge potential fares with besides their appearance or pickup location, specifically their rating.
And if a woman for some sexist reason can refuse a fare, why can't a man refuse a fare if, e.g., he does not like the destination area because it is riddled with crime and he is exponentially more likely to be robbed?
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/12/interracial...
Yes, it can absolutely happen that you pick someone up and they end up raping you. The opposite happens too, you order up an Uber when you're drunk and end up the raped one yourself. While the app might possibly offer information that makes it easier to get justice in the future, and while that may dissuade some folks, in the end crimes of opportunity like this will continue to happen.
Intelligent, self-preserving people will always use their own personal heuristics for risk management regardless of political correctness. If this ends up looking prejudiced, the problem to solve is the input information (in the form of observed events and news) that causes the prejudice, not to tell the person to just pretend that there's no reason to have such a risk calculation.
Apparently it's possible for a rather slow week to happen, in combination with rides that mean a loss for the driver.
I can't help but think that the business is quite tough.
But part of the social contract is that employees, having given up that autonomy, need someone else to advocate for them collectively. Thus... labor rights and benefits legislation.
Frankly this whole thing seems silly. They knew where this was going when AB5 was passed. Those features aren't a good faith attempt to comply with the law, they were an attempt to evade it (something very much in keeping with Uber's culture).
The only real surprise here was that the final reckoning came sooner than expected via injunction.
> Those features aren't a good faith attempt to comply with the law
There can be no good attempt to comply with this (completely terrible) law from Uber, since this law was meant to outlaw the whole business model Uber is using. Uber was founded on creating a novel working model, which didn't exist before. California decided to outlaw this model wholesale. The only "good faith attempt" from Uber to deal with it can be to stop operating in California completely. Of course the same goes for Lyft and any other company which uses "freelance employee" model.
Actually, it's very simple: treat them as employees, including granting required benefits and paying them at least minimum wage for time worked (presumably at the higher of either minimum wage or per-trip earnings for the time period).
Nothing about this is incompatible with allowing employees to pick their own working hours.
Also restaurants refuse to deliver to poor neighborhoods after their delivery person gets robbed there once or twice. I've seen this problem in New York.
The employee debate has near uniformly turned into dialing back rider protections, removing up front costs and handing drivers more control. The employee requirements will unquestionably increase ride costs and decrease driver availability. This is going to worsen access to poor neighborhoods and add costs on people who cannot afford to pay them, making ride share further restricted to "good" neighborhoods and higher income folks.
Well no, it's just the opposite. When everyone is a "contractor" you can get a ride in a poor neighborhood, you just have to pay the market rate for getting a ride there.
When you try to legislate it, then you get avoidance. The driver gets assigned and then suddenly has "car trouble" or becomes ill. You summon a ride but it doesn't show up for 45 minutes because all of the drivers avoid being anywhere near that area if it means they could be forced to go there.
Whereas if you just pay the market rate then a driver shows up right away because they're getting paid extra to do it. And if you don't like that rides cost more in poor neighborhoods then the government could subsidize it explicitly, instead of creating all of these perverse incentives by trying to force people to do something they otherwise wouldn't be willing to do for that amount of money.
Which also puts a dollar value on the subsidy and makes it explicit, so that we can see how much we're paying in order to get it, instead of sweeping it under the rug by making the cost implicit even though it's still there.
> And if you don't like that rides cost more in poor neighborhoods then the government could subsidize it explicitly
OK, how does that work? How do you write such a law such that it can't be exploited? Are there any examples of this kind of regulation you can point to from other markets or other legal regimes or nations or whatever?
I mean, this seems crazy to me, but it's also an opportunity to get you to engage on a genuine issue of social justice (c.f. "it shouldn't cost money to be poor"), so I'm willing to make the effort.
Calculating the amount is finicky because the subsidy itself is going to affect the market pricing. But in the end, as long as there is a competitive market for both drivers and ride share companies, you know whether the subsidy is too high or too low because the subsidized cost of a ride there will be more or less than it is in other places (rather than exactly the same as you're trying to make it).
Because if the subsidy was too high then there would be "too many" drivers and the subsidized price would fall below what's required, and if the subsidy was too low then the opposite.
That often even stays the case when the mail service gets privatized.
I’ve never heard of such services to originally be privatized, though, or of the service to be privatized to multiple providers (say with one company serving the large cities and another the countryside, or one doing half the country, and another doing the other half)
Also: are you sure this is libertarianism? I would think subsidies can’t exist in a libertarian world because the government doesn’t exist there.
This is a relatively new model, although makes a lot of sense (lower cost and more flexibility to operate uber pools vs empty buses late at night). It is not a stretch to assume you could get income based "discount cards" for uber usage.
Boston is incredibly segregated and in the area I live in is less than 10% white. It's not a coincidence that this is the only area in the city I've ever had trouble getting a ride to (roughly 200 total rides).
Uber eliminated that problem. It would be terrible to go back to that system where drivers can just refuse you based on where you are going or what you look like.
But in reality, that's just innumeracy.
Or any "drop me off within the ongoing protest" ride, really.
'Getting dragged out of your car and beaten'? No, unless the police do it (https://www.newsbreak.com/georgia/atlanta/news/1577488884462...).
The one where a man drove into protestors and shot one of them, or one of the four non-related-to-protest shootings in a neighborhood that had been suddenly abandoned by police and already had a high violent crime rate compared to the rest of the city?
> people beat up the car as it drives through
That's an inevitable result of somebody trying to push through a crowd that won't move. If you sit there, nobody moves out of the way, and you hit the gas anyway, people will inevitably try to damage the car to make you stop again, because you could kill somebody doing that.
I was thinking specifically of the "two black teenagers shot, one killed" incident that made the news everywhere. The fact that there were others is itself a great reason for Uber drivers to not want to drive there. (Protester's fault or something else, it's still dangerous)
> That's an inevitable result of somebody trying to push through a crowd that won't move. If you sit there, nobody moves out of the way, and you hit the gas anyway, people will inevitably try to damage the car to make you stop again, because you could kill somebody doing that.
It's an inevitable consequence on both sides. The driver sitting still who gets spooked by people banging on their windows and floors it is also a predictable outcome. (There's reasons that protests normally have streets closed off, and it's not just for the protesters containment) Personally I'd put both driving up to a crowd AND surrounding a car on foot as "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" - for exactly this reason.
Portland, Seattle and Chicago are examples of the cities which had recently well-documented examples of some areas being dangerous and carrying risk of violent encounters.
Pretending this isn't a reality or that it doesn't have an impact on someone driving for a living is pretty asinine.
Are HN posters really so sheltered that they don't know that this is a reality in many major American cities?
The incidents reported are reality, however that doesn't mean the picture being painted isn't misleading.
They exaggerate that the mob dragged a man out of his car, and they exaggerate that he was kicked in the head and rendered unconscious. In fact, they exaggerate so much that they had to take him into the ER. To me, it paints a completely misleading picture that in Portland you could be run off the road, dragged out of the car and beaten unconscious. Surely if reported properly, they'd notice there are thousands of people in Portland who weren't beaten senseless that night, so we'd better focus on that.
Not that I want you to have a bad experience. Not that all cities are so bad, or that you're guaranteed a bad time everywhere. There's plenty of good left. But it's easy for someone who doesn't have their wits about them and doesn't know where to avoid to end up in the wrong place and have things go sideways. Don't be that person.