HAAS Act '37

NYC TLC '71

Operation Refusal '98

Not that NY has it exactly right, but at least there was some structure.

The entire business model of Uber is regulation avoidance. They did not "distrupt" any business they just did as you said and stole all the profitable easy routes/riders, avoided pricing regulations, and driver compensation regulations.

I see this complaint all the time and I truly can't wrap my mind around it based on my own experience. The difference between yellow cabs and Ubers is night and day. I've had countless cabs drive away and refuse to pick me up because they didn't like where I was going, and that's never once happened with Uber (I'm sure it happens some behind the scenes but once I get matched with a driver it's very reliable).

There's even an entire industry in NYC of "gypsy cabs" in some of the outer boroughs, because the limited number of medallioned yellow cabs never go out there since it's not profitable enough.

If I'm going to take uber to the airport, I'm careful now to leave an extra 30 min over the two hours I would normally plan for.

now it doesn't make sense because they know where you're going before they accept.

some have told me that if they reject too many rides the algorithm punishes them.

There's a lot of institutional knowledge baked into the cab industry and Uber/Lyft thought they could figuratively reimplement the whole deal in a weekend.

We impose a lot of duties on people who are employed in the service of the general public. Humans are messy, unpredictable, inconsistent beings with unique needs so, yes, it is possible that two humans will be a mismatch for each other in the public sphere.

The law, and society in making that law, has generally decided that the right of a person with particular needs--such as a service animal or a carseat--outweigh the rights of someone to ply a trade in a customer-facing role. And, given the level of discrimination that people with those needs experience on a daily basis, I happen to think this is a fair trade-off. The person with the needs may not have a choice, or may have fewer choices, than the service provider.

What should happen is allow drivers to get a doctor's note that marks their car as unstable for allergies (that way they can't make it up to discriminate). Also allow customers to mark themselves as needing to avoid animals or needing animal-friendly cars. You don't even have to show this information to either party: Uber can automatically choose the right car.

The law doesn't say every single driver has to pick up people that need service animals. It just says reasonable accommodations must be made.

[0] https://www.aafa.org/asthma-allergies-and-the-american-with-...

Of course, a simpler solution would be to have Uber choose an appropriate car that was willing to give rides to service animals.

I also think it should be fine to have a "no children" policy, we have all kinds of business we do not allow children in, and personally i would like to see more business adopt a no children policy.

Rather, Uber needs to offer accommodations to drivers. Modification of the vehicle so that the driver and passenger areas are separate and the there is sufficient air filtration.

This way, Uber would be handling both disabilities appropriately with the ADA by providing the respective accommodations.

But what about a more common and realistic scenario, where the driver doesn't have the allergy, but the next Uber passenger does (the one who gets into the car after the passenger with a dog leaves)? Do you propose to perform full sterilization of the vehicle after every passenger with a dog (and I mean an actual full sterilization, not just wiping the seats clean)? Because otherwise, the dog dander particles will still be present in the vehicle in some capacity, thus causing an allergic reaction in the next passenger who has allergies.

Blind passengers need to have reasonable access to cars. If Uber wants to play in that market, they need to figure out how to accommodate those passengers. If the driver needs a screen, or a stack of N95 masks, to avoid allergies, that should be Uber's responsibility to provide.

Ideally that premium should mostly go to the driver, minus the regular Uber cut.

Should drivers with life-threatening allergies be expected to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars extracting a deposition from a medical professional to avoid being killed by a dog?

Until we do, are there any other forms of work that you feel that an employee/contractor/etc. should be able to shirk by claiming that they have a medical condition, without providing a shred of evidence thereof?

A medical note for a chronic, life-threatening condition is a sufficient, and reasonable requirement, and is good from years to decades.

But my thoughts drifted to what if a driver without allergies picked up a passenger with a service dog, that driver would then presumably need to spend time vacuuming the car such that another passenger with allergies isn't also impacted?

Imagine if the Uber driver himself had a dog, and showed up to pick an allergic passenger up. What would the reasonable accommodation be in that case? Depending on how severe an allergy is, no amount of vacuuming is going to make a ride in such a car pleasant for the passenger.

My local council's guidance on the topic:

https://www.bristol.gov.uk/licences-permits/exemption-wheelc...

I try to make up for this by telling the driver to start the ride the moment I arrive and not end until I leave, but not everyone does that.

Holy red herring, Batman. Are you serious equating drunk people with disabled people who need physical accommodations? The ADA does not have anything to say about mandating accommodations for drunk people.

Separately, people who are incontinent actually, you know, do things to manage their condition (like wear adult diapers as necessary). They aren't just randomly shitting everywhere. Your contrived examples are just downright offensive.

1. It was in response to the poster that put forward a proposition that any and all passengers must at all times be taken; let's not take the response fully out of context just to attack it with outrage.

Similarly, I charitably assumed by "drunk & incontinent" they mean, literally and as written, "those who are irresponsibly drunk to the point of losing control over their bodily functions"; not those who may have a permanent and manageable/managed medical issue.

2. In practical terms, if I may be blunt and practical for a second, a e.g. service animal shepherd: a) Legally and morally SHOULD be allowed b) ...Yet is absolutely equivalent to a vomiting drunk in terms of cleanup expenses (and in some ways worse - follow-up passengers may have severe allergy issues, or even the driver themselves!)

There's no easy "win" here. We have to acknowledge the necessity of regulating/providing for all; but also the non-zero impact on the actual real live person driving the car. They are human too!

I know which I'd rather clean up after

I may rather clean up after a service animal; but it might well take me far longer, and thus incur a higher real cost on business - it's all very circumstantial. There are shepherds (a common service animal) that will saturate a closed vehicle with hair in 2 minutes - front, back, between the seats, under the carpet, on the ceiling, everywhere. And the hair gets tangled in the fabric weave so you need special rotary brushes or hours of painstaking manual work to remove. Whereas some vomits, disgusting as they are, are 3 min with a cloth and bucket.

Anyhoo - point being, there are desirable things we as society want to see; but we shouldn't be blind as to impact/cost that those goals have on those who are on point to actually enact them; and at the very least they should have our empathy, if not ideally an attempt to compensate/accommodate/compromise.

There are many time I have Uber driver cancelling my ride from the airport because my destination is not the big metro center, rather, just outside of it. The driver was quick to accept the request, then called and then cancel the ride. Of course, the driver would said the customer "request the cancellation".

This wasted so much of people's time.

Please don't tell with all those smart people Uber have in their payroll couldn't figure out this. Or they simply ignore it.

We should not let ride sharing services just gut this aspect of hired car service.

"The free market" isn't an answer to everything. We decide as a society that some forms of market pricing are not allowed. For instance, I can not pay children to work for me. I can not pay a woman less than a man. I can not pay an old person less than a younger one. I can not refuse service to someone who has a disability. These are social choices that we make, and I would argue that we SHOULD make, to restrict the free market in ways that benefit society as a whole.

If someone is drunk enough that he's going to piss and throw up in the car, it might be a better idea to call an ambulance instead.

But to be honest, if you are in the transportation business, someone is going to fuck up your car sooner or later, and you really need to take potential cleaning costs into account. That's just part of the job.

Don't want your car to get dirty from driving people? Then don't offer to drive people.

I must have read your comment wrong. Sorry if I misrepresented you, but I can’t figure out where I’ve gone wrong.

The problem is that Uber is getting work from the driver in order to meet Uber's obligations but without compensating the driver. The extra work required to e.g. clean the interior of the car after a service dog has been transported should be paid by Uber to the driver.

Uber does provide training that says drivers must accept service dogs. However, if there are issues, they are uncommon enough and the likelihood of a driver getting sued is low enough that a driver may just drive away.

My gut tells me that drivers should be employees, or limits should be placed on using single-person independent contractors to provide a service like this. It's not going to solve every problem and the traditional "taxi" mentality is going to remain, but I remember the early days of Uber when drivers could not reject too many rides and stay on the platform, and it did seem to solve some of the management problems with drivers. Heck, maybe the answer is to contract the work out to car management companies with real HR departments like the airlines do with regional jet flying, so that Uber can insist on their high quality product and performance metrics and drivers can be employees.

They're not a charity. If you want to help the less fortunate, then donate directly to them.

Or if you believe that helping the less fortunate should be something people should be required to do, under pain of imprisonment, then advocate taxing people, and using that revenue to directly subsidize the less fortunate.

There's no reason the mandatory charity should fall entirely on service providers. It's not even an efficient way to help the less fortunate. If they received cash subsidies instead, then service providers would crop up that specialize in servicing people who have their disability, and would provide a far higher quality of service per dollar spent.

Uber, Bank of America, and Blue Cross are big enough they can handle mixing the more and less valuable customers themselves, and don't need a government program.

I'm arguing that we shouldn't be forcing private companies, large or otherwise, to fulfill social justice agendas, because it creates an unstable business environment where firms can be encumbered by any conceivable regulatory barrier to participating in the marketplace. It's also mixing concerns, leading to less optimized and well thought out social interventions. For example, forcing banks to lend in high-credit-risk neighbourhoods turned out to be a huge mistake, as this article from 21 years ago presciently warned:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/trillion-dollar-bank-shake...

If we do decide to force society to collectively help the less fortunate, it should be out of general revenue, in the form of cash subsidies.

If a disabled person gets $1,000 a month, they may use it for more rides, or they may find their money can go further if they instead pay to have service providers do home-visits to their place. Or they may rent special exo-suits that let them operate like a non-disabled person. Letting the affected party decide will let them maximize the return they get from the resources being allocated to the cause of helping them.

I stopped using Uber when I got a child. I didn't have the app installed for 4 years now. Simply because they don't offer a service with child seat. I'm not bringing my own child seat, no way. Instead, I'm using bubs taxi in Sydney that will come with child seat and other stuff that may be necessary when you travel with a toddler. They target families with kids. If we to follow you "obligation" on the companies to serve anyone, there would be no bubs taxi for me to use.

What about the incorrect political beliefs, are you saying I have to transport a Republican? or a Nazi?

Perhaps the government could subsidize the lost time. However expecting workers to do more work for less pay is not in line with human nature.

Having children is expensive, and parents should be factoring in paying extra to do things.

The problem you are outlining is that picking up non-special needs customers is the most profitable way to be an uber driver. If there was a bonus for picking up "special needs" passengers, the incentive problem could be fixed. Right now, "special needs" passengers just get worse service, and it will always be this way unless human nature fundamentally changes or they gain a way to signal to drivers that it will be worth the driver's extra time.

Many Uber drivers barely make minimum wage.

Because they're legally allowed to be underpaid contractors. The law should be changed to fix the root cause, not to change this side effect. Uber drivers aren't barely making min wage because they have no incentives to pick up disabled people ...

People seem to have this mythical belief that uber can pay every driver to drive a brand new car, at 100/hr, providing the best service for every customer every time all for 1/2 the price of a taxi

It simply not economically possible

Uber's business model of trying to disrupt the taxi service by ignoring regulations is at issue here. With the ADA, they've encountered an issue that the court is not letting them ignore.

That really depends on the location, and many are not profitable and in some area many only service some parts of the town / city.

Sure if you are in a large city like NYC, LA, Chicago etc, then it would be different but if you start getting out of the top 50 cities the profitability starts to drop

Also clearly taxi's are not providing the service at the value demanded of users or Uber would not exist

Anyone knows that getting to 80% is easy, getting from 80-90 is normally $$$$ and getting to 99.99999999999995% which is what the thread it about is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$