Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

we actually ended up paying normal fare... in quebec city though

friend took a Lyft out of Baltimore to the 'burbs at like 1:30 am on new years and it cost him $25. like a 20 minute drive. uber woulda been around 80 bux. good to shop around.

Dunno why people complain about surge pricing, apparently you have to re-type the surge multiplier in before you proceed? Some friends are arguing is this consent if you're pissed. but ehhhh...

http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/travel/perth-man-lodges-complaint-after-copping-massive-uber-bill-on-new-years-eve/news-story/2a9d9f2596f19d7ba0f38a569b3fe574

Me, I'd never put myself into a position to rely on cabs on NYE at all, and I live in a big city. But tbf here they have allnight free trams on NYE.

yeah uber multipliers for high demand times that are like, not related to a natural disaster are pretty understandable, and you have to agree to the fare before you finalize anyway. get over it imo

The weird situation is when people (like Gawker writers) simultaneously attack Uber for being hostile to its workers (fair) and throw a fit about surge pricing - I know that not all of that surge pricing goes to the drivers but some does and shouldn't you be happy when those workers who are putting in time when they could be asleep/partying get some extra cash out of it?

I got a 3.8 surge before heading out on NYE, waited a few minutes before it dropped to 1.5 and decided that was good as it was gonna get. A few minutes before midnight I checked and no surge at all. When I left for home 15 mins later, the surge was for 1.3, which, again, struck me as pretty good. My driver said I had chosen well -- he'd just dropped off a dude a few minutes earlier who paid the 8.2 surge for what is normally a $9 ride.

fwiw the issue as i see it is still the one i was groping towards in my long post on june 29 - suppose uber can ruin the taxis but not replace them, by cream-skimming the customers who constitute the profit margin. then all of a sudden it's not just the new year's eve investment bankers getting stuck with surge pricing whenever the fuck uber feels like it - it's everybody. first they came for the app-hungry twitter bros and i LOLed because i was not a, etc.

The weird situation is when people (like Gawker writers) simultaneously attack Uber for being hostile to its workers (fair) and throw a fit about surge pricing - I know that not all of that surge pricing goes to the drivers but some does and shouldn't you be happy when those workers who are putting in time when they could be asleep/partying get some extra cash out of it?
--Kiarostami bag (milo z)

yeah these complaints seem incoherent to me too. at first i thought the anti-uber idea was to have cabs that charge monopoly price but give more money to drivers. so everyone pays more and less people take cabs but drivers make a higher wage. (not sure if any of those things are true in reality but i could see how a mad-at-technology leftist who believed them to be true would see that as a worthwhile compromise) but then they complain that the competition is driving the wage up and i lose the plot

when i lived in toronto i think i worked every nye and could never get a cab home for anything like a reasonable price. my partner, who worked as a bartender and took cabs home nightly, always had the same xp. like three years ago the two of us ended up walking home in freezing weather because every cab refused to take us west for some reason, for basically any price. another year we ended up paying $50 for whats a $12 cab ride home. and this was at like 4 in the morning. if you asked a cabbie for a metered ride theyd refuse service. the idea that uber is going to somehow going to prevent the economically vulnerable from getting cabs on new years seems deeply stupid to me

again, though, the issue is not NYE but the whole rest of the year once uber puts other cabs out of business.

cabs are a luxury service tho

well, they are, yeah - - - until you break your leg, or the governor arbitrarily decides to shut down the subway system on a snowy day to demonstrate that he is a super-tough guy who Takes Action, or whatever else happens. sometimes there really is no other way home. i don't think this is #1 on the problems facing the world list or anything, but i do think the surge-pricing thing is another reason we should pause at the idea of this zippy new super-company rewriting the rules at will. there may be, like, consequences.

again, though, the issue is not NYE but the whole rest of the year once uber puts other cabs out of business.

yep. or if god forbid Uber starts bedding down with Kochs/ GOP state legislatures to keep decent public transit out of cities blowing up like mad, e.g., Nashville.

ended up walking home in freezing weather because every cab refused to take us west for some reason, for basically any price. another year we ended up paying $50 for whats a $12 cab ride home. and this was at like 4 in the morning. if you asked a cabbie for a metered ride theyd refuse service.

this is illegal in most US cities iirc (but i'm sure it still happens)

NYE surge pricing is so obviously designed to take advantage of drunk riders, and they're sophisticated/black box enough with their algorithms so that it will never be 100% clear how/why they do it and they won't do it to everyone at the same time.

how would the algorithm figure out if you're drunk?

you are looking for uber at the exact bar close time

in that case any demand forecast would gouge drunks

I don’t think the customers should pay the surge bonuses upfront. If the company paid them, then customers could rely on flat rates (as well as surge provision).

Some people would say that this means non-surge users subsidise surge users, but I don’t really think that matters. It would be a problem that uber would then no longer have a direct incentive to pay large bonuses. Also, they would never give up the opportunity to skim the bonuses, as they do now.

no that doesn't work

say uber takes 20% of the fare, 80% goes to cab (made up numbers, actual magnitudes don't matter)

then under your system with flat fares, the most uber can surge by is a factor of 1.25, give it all to the driver. but then the company makes zero money, at exactly the time that they have the highest demand

The company would lose money on surge fares, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t just raise the basic rate to recoup this.

Then it would be Lyft, right? (Lyft does have some variation in prices but my sense is it's nothing like Uber in this respect.) Some people, me included, like Lyft better, in part for this reason; you don't feel like you're haggling at the shuk, you're just getting a ride at the price you expect.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/gm-invests-500-million-in-lyft-plans-system-for-self-driving-cars-1451914204

higher average non variable fare is what cabs do. except a lot of the $ from higher average fare goes to licenses and i don't know where that money goes

Doctor Casino's worried that Uber will take over cabs and then have a monopoly and can surge charge us up the waz 365 days a year. that would be bad, but what's stopping people from just downloading Uber and Lyft onto their phones and checking both for which is cheapest/closest? do drivers have to sign non-compete agreements? (that might actually be a downside to the formalization of work they are pursuing in some states). if not i don't see why they couldn't just have both and flip back and forth depending on where the demand is. could eventually even see a single app, like padmapper style, that gives you the price and position of all rideshare services

standard cabs with internet booking and surge algorhythms (hidden from customer) would be ideal.

afaik uber and lyft do both have public programming interfaces to some extent -- I've used an aggregated transportation app (in montreal, even) to see what's available, but it was more:
- this bus will be at this location near you, it'll take 15 minutes between walk/wait/ride
- uber would take approximately x minutes and be approximately x dollars
- zipcar (or whatever instant rental) is x blocks away

the problem is that there's no incentive for cooperation and if lyft or uber decided sharing even limited data was costing them traffic, they'd pull the plug on public data and fluff their availability stats even more. there's already uber's denial that there are "ghost cars" showing up on their map, but there's no reason they wouldn't resort to that practice. it's not a market that rewards transparency, and won't be unless passengers note a firm discrepancy and quit using a service. there's no indication right now that opening both apps and checking for price/distance is actually going to give you the right data.

The complaints with uber et al aren't strictly about wages or competition. They're about deregulation of what is currently regulated somewhat like a public good. Cabs provide a standard service that the public needs and they should be regulated as such. It's fine that companies compete, and it's fine that they innovate with e.g. an app for finding a cab, but I don't think some hand-wavey invisible hand should be an excuse to allow a company to violate laws that dictate who has what kind of insurance, who is an employee and who is a contractor, which maintenance jobs happen how often, what regions a cab serves and under which conditions, and (as in some states, including Florida iirc, with its historically conservative legislature) the maximum rate a driver can charge.

but haven't we kind of learned through uber & lyft existing and being pretty dece that those regulations maybe weren't so important after all? like what is an important thing that was regulated that will now be much worse for consumers?

they're really outdated and taxi companies have kind of benefited from being entrenched in the system to the detriment of consumers, and I would argue, their own detriment when it comes to delivering a product people want

as for what was regulated and important:
laws that dictate who has what kind of insurance, who is an employee and who is a contractor, which maintenance jobs happen how often, what regions a cab serves and under which conditions, and (as in some states, including Florida iirc, with its historically conservative legislature) the maximum rate a driver can charge

(thanks bam)

I'm guessing part of it is due dilligence on the part of drivers, but the mostly-ridiculous reddit legal questions board had a question from a dude who was in an accident while he didn't have an uber fare, but was theoretically looking for fares. uber said "no fare, no insurance" and his own company instantly bounced him once they found out he used his car for business purposes. I'm guessing there are a fair number of drivers trying to game the system in that way, though.

right, but the absence of which of those regulations make consumers worse off taking Uber/Lyft? maybe the insurance and the maintenance ones? BUT now that we've had 2 years of unregulated + cheaper rideshares we should update our prior as to whether the price of these regulations (or the pass through to price of licenses) were really worth it. we can quibble about details, answer seems to me obviously 'it was not worth it, we were paying too much.'

I think the base argument is that yeah, the system was broken, but it's still broken but there are at least some rides now

Who was paying too much for what? Is this an issue of drunk urbanites being unable to hail a taxi? Or fares that were marginally too expensive? Whether in the suburbs or the city, I've always been able to call a cab as a contingency plan when train, bus, feet, or bike couldn't do the job, and I've always paid a price I thought was fair.

Insurance isn't there for cab customers; it's for people in accidents. Obviously due to the nature of their occupation, insurers would want drivers to have a different class of insurance. This protects not only them, but also anyone they might get in an accident with. I also don't see a problem with stricter licensing for anyone but your average driver, that is, for trailer truck drivers, commercial drivers, taxi drivers, etc. Their jobs revolve around driving, so they should demonstrate to the states they operate in that they can competently perform their jobs, particularly because motor vehicles are a common cause of injury and death.

State regulations regarding employees and contractors potentially affect every worker in the state, so I don't see why any one company should be excepted from them, though whole categories of employment might be expressly excepted.

If taxis fail as something benefitting the public as well as lawmakers feel they should, then regulations can be revised, and at that time we can thank uber et al if they've pressured states to improve their regulations (so that more drivers can get on the road, I guess? I don't really give a shit about that. I actually have a lot of antipathy toward the idea), but the costs of deregulation aren't as clear cut as the average price of fares and the average wage of drivers, and unless the cost of ensuring safety and reasonable levels of liability are spiraling out of control due to regulations, you can't convince me that these basic regulatory safeguards are unreasonable.

And two years is too short a time to evaluate the outcome of this experiment. Did it take two years for virtually every trolley company in cities across America to be replaced by buses, taxis, private cars, urban sprawl, congestion, and smog? Did it take two years to deindustrialize the Midwest, leaving scars like East St Louis, Detroit, and Gary? The deregulation of the taxi industry isn't as dire as all that, but it's also nontrivial, and it has implications for policy-making in other sectors, eg housing, where airbnb is far more insidious than uber could ever hope to be.

Booming

aye

^^^ thanks, bamcquern.

imo these services came along at a very opportune time where, in a number of cities that lacked a good taxi service or public transportation, the attitude that driving is more of a burden than a freedom started to become part of the public consciousness.

off topic right now, but there's a (purported) startup competitor called "dryvyng" run by a guy who got popped by the feds for running a revenge porn website. he's one of the funniest and most deluded lunatics on social media. if you like that kind of thing. i don't think the company is running yet, or ever will.

Who was paying too much for what? Is this an issue of drunk urbanites being unable to hail a taxi? Or fares that were marginally too expensive? Whether in the suburbs or the city, I've always been able to call a cab as a contingency plan when train, bus, feet, or bike couldn't do the job, and I've always paid a price I thought was fair.

Imo one of the appeals of Uber is being able to get a local car quickly even in the very large parts of the city not served by taxis? Which maybe became a more appealing market when a wider range of areas gentrified with people who all want to get to Williamsburg or w/e. Both my home and all the places I go for work are basically not served at all by yellow cabs, so it's either Uber or an undependable livery cab service that has no accountability whatsoever, only takes cash, can't give you a receipt, can be v shady, etc. And sometimes even when I call those places they say flatly that they have no cars in the area, and hang up.

The last time I took Uber my driver was a dick though, and the easy access to my credit card allowed Uber to charge me a "cleaning" fee of 4x my fare, with no recourse for me if I objected. So I can't use them for work trips anymore.

the dryvyng guy is a social media treat

The last time I took Uber my driver was a dick though, and the easy access to my credit card allowed Uber to charge me a "cleaning" fee of 4x my fare, with no recourse for me if I objected. So I can't use them for work trips anymore.

Did you contact support? I've found them to be very responsive for issues like that. For every issue I've had, they've immediately refunded my money.

I objected and shared my concerns about the driver's behavior, but the $$ had already been deducted and they didn't offer to refund it. Maybe I should have protested harder? In any case.

Cleaning? Like a fee if you yack in their car?

Or if some cream cheese gets on the leather seat while you're transporting food for 100 people, apparently.

Cleaning? Like a fee if you yack in their car?

― Hammer Smashed Bagels,

Yep. Drivers like to share horror stories about picking up couples on the beach, watching them sway as they enter the back seat, and yak a few minutes later. If the driver send Uber the photos, they get $300 in cleaning expenses.

Last experience with Uber was pretty bad -- first guy went to the wrong place then cancelled when I refused to walk to him with my toddler in 15-degree weather. Second guy didn't bother to install the car seat (by the time we got out of my building and to the car and he's still just sitting there, not going to wait in 15-degree weather while he installs it for what is ultimately a short trip). Was charged anyway, no response when I complained to Uber about it.

I kind of doubt they can maintain a high volume of quality drivers and reasonable rates at the profit margins they seem to want. And their customer service is shit, and their rating system is useless (I don't want to give my driver 2 stars, I want to send a message to Uber that they should instruct their drivers to install the carseat when it is requested).