Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

DC, you know we're still in the country where the chair of the DNC is stumping for payday loan establishments, right?

ppl love to support predatory lending and pretend they're giving someone a foot up

sure, but the employer itself providing the payday loans really is basically indenture and not too far removed from sharecropping.

This strikes me as a novel means of exploitation, yes -- the combination of this non-employment-employment structure with all these horrible financing schemes, where you also have the automatic deductions from your earnings.

most definitely, predatory employment terms are marginally worse than predatory lending, but it's all predatory and exploitative of the people least likely to get out of financial duress

although it all sounds a bit like being in hock to the company store

but you don't even have to own a company store and all that involves! and the predatory lending rights are sold to another company, so uber or whoever probably gets a cut of the lending interest

Or maybe just an origination fee, even. Cash on the table, no worry about future inability to pay.

I mean if they act anything like other subprime originators, they probably get paid up front and wash their hands of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT08yzbC-s8&feature=share

This was cute.

Uber has simply stopped working for me. The app gives a driver an inaccurate pick-up point. One driver told me this has to do with the latest Google Maps update (I highly doubt Uber's business model is predicated on Google Maps) which now places you at the nearest fixed address rather than precise geographic coordinates. Anyway this has been the case the last 4-5 times I've tried Uber. So gotta try Lyft I reckon. Anyone else experiencing this?

Surprise: Uber's lawyers are scum too!

http://www.sdnyblog.com/judge-rakoff-authorizes-discovery-from-uber-counsel-to-probe-potentially-improper-investigation-of-adversary-and-opposing-counsel/

A memorandum order released today reveals that, in an antitrust case against Uber’s CEO (covered here), Judge Rakoff became concerned over improper investigative techniques that Uber (or its agents) employed. Specifically, Uber hired an firm called Ergo to investigate the plaintiff and plaintiff’s counsel, and, in doing so, Ergo’s investigator allegedly made various misrepresentations to gain information, such as claiming that he was a reporter writing a profile of plaintiff’s counsel.

So gotta try Lyft I reckon. Anyone else experiencing this?

I've had this problem sometimes with Lyft, too. Just the nature of the beast, I think.

Pooling with people late at night can be a good way to meet strangers, for better or worse. Last night two drunk women and I shared a car and they grilled me on my job for a half hour. No escape...

Imagine if you were pooling with some kids coming home from the bar with their parents!

http://i.imgur.com/GTS6u8O.jpg

so this happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oih1Yf7l-c0

https://twitter.com/UberUK/status/753881231662645248

http://gothamist.com/2016/07/27/in_soviet_russia_taxi_meters_you.php

loool

Uber's bleeding money

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-25/uber-loses-at-least-1-2-billion-in-first-half-of-2016

I have to say, while I think the advent of app technology for cab/ride hailing is a good development, and I like the fact that they have kid carseats, I hate p much everything else about this company and hope it dies before it can hatch its plan to kill public transit with self-driving cars.

Have been hearing about Juno in the ''they're a less evil Uber'' vein - anyone know anything?

i explained to my 10-year-old how companies like this, propped up by venture capital, can lose money for a long time until they're able to outlast their competitors and take over the market, and he was like "that's mean daddy" and i couldn't really disagree

xp i thought lyft was the less evil uber! that's what i use

afaik lyft is pretty much floating their business as the alt-uber right now and have been not so steathily looking for a buyer

I've been thinking about just using the Taxi-approved app instead (Gett?), except that I do sometimes need the child seat. But I probably only take like 2-3 Ubers a year with the family, plus a couple more for work. For work I think I'm going to shift my business away from them.

Does Lyft really have better practices though? Do they compensate drivers better and do less to rope them into bad financing arrangements?

I didn't dig into it too deeply but I saw an article about my city floating the idea of subsidizing low income residents with bus credit and/or uber credit. afaik the bus system is utilized but expanding routes and doing off-hours transport isn't in the cards for lack of riders but there's enough of a lack of transport among those who most need it, they'd consider offering credit for people to use uber

I have heard that Juno actually *does* treat its drivers better, but they're also pretty small right now right? Maybe I'll download the app just to see if there are drivers available.

what I'm thinking is that the demand for an uber-like business is out there, but they're still looking for the money in the wrong place and falling down on the job when it comes to finding allies in the groups that organize city transportation

i have been told by drivers (who seem to always use both) that lyft is better. i mean "better" may not mean good. Lyft doesn't do financing for drivers the way Uber does. (They have a rental program joint with GM, whether that's a scam I don't know.)

Hmm, Juno has 25% off rides here now, fare estimates are actually much cheaper than Uber. Gonna use this next time.

I think I remember hearing that, unlike Uber, they don't reduce driver's rates when they do promotional pricing.

I guess in a place where everyone drives alone everywhere, an army of self-driving cars that do pools would be a sort of improvement. In NYC it would just make things 10x worse, although I can't imagine people abandoning the subway unless Uber is like really successful at lobbying to defund the MTA.

NYC worldview of mass transit or even trivially moving people around is not the context to view Uber or any of the other services.

my city floating the idea of subsidizing low income residents with bus credit and/or uber credit

i feel silly even saying this but the uber version of this is, like, man what a classic case of neoliberalism finding a new social guarantee to lop off of the state's obligations to provide a service, replaced with the promise that you can become a consumer of a service whose actual provision is nobody's obligation. it also seems mathematically insane - how much does a bus ticket cost versus an uber ride?

last night we called for an uber from the bar and the guy not only didn't pick us up but he marked us as being passengers so i got to watch myself on the app gps drive home while i was waiting in the town over to actually be picked up. anyway someone else came later and they gave me a refund. idk wtf was going on with that first driver tho.

maybe picked up some other drunk dude who just nodded when asked if he was "Mordy"

I've also never been able to get the pool function to work in a useful way fwiw

haha that has happened to me at least twice. what either happened is someone else ordered an Uber in the same area and the passengers thought your Uber was theirs and the dumb driver didn't verify, or the driver hit a wrong button, or he was trying to pull a scam (kinda unlikely since they know it won't work).

it happened to me on my birthday last year while I was drunk and I got the email confirming my trip and I wrote back drunk "WTF, no I didn't" and probably accused them of being prejudiced against half-Italians. Got a refund before I went to sleep.

I've also had the local cab service do the latter when they "couldn't find my condo complex" (despite having my number and not calling me once to get help). After I called the dispatch to complain and they sent another guy, he almost did the same thing until I actually saw him flying by and frantically waved at him. This was a trip to the Megabus station where there is no parking available, otherwise I woulda said "fuck it" and drove myself.

I kind of wonder about that -- what's the ideal Uber city from their business standpoint? It'd be a city with a pool of people interested in being drivers, where the demand is relatively even across the area (you don't want drivers to be doing all A->B trips, ideally when they arrive at B there are customers who want to go to A or another analogous locale) to ensure a flow of business, with public transport either being nonexistent or loose enough to have a lot of needs it fails to cover.

I have the feeling they're looking at the bay area when making a lot of decisions, but that's heavily weighted due to the high adoption rate and a consumer class that's willing to spend. NYC has transportation but their target there is to disrupt and supplant the taxi system, which is probably the case for Chicago as well. Los Angeles might be a good target in that it's very car-centric but idk?

Yeah I would imagine you want some kind of balance between density and sprawl, plus not very good public transit options. It's notable that LA was an early adopter of Uber, for example -- my brother who lives there was telling me that like everyone was using it back when I barely even knew what it was.

Plus LA of course has a huge pool of ideal candidates to be Uber drivers -- the same hopefuls who wait tables and such.

I can tell you that it's essential in Miami.

Passengers try to game the Uber Pool concept, which has unpredictable results. Ask a driver about it sometime.

Uber initially solved a huge aggravation point that consumers had with taxis, granting accountability, reliability and supply to an industry that was in dire need of those three things.

lol there is not accountability with uber!

like the most that is going to happen is someone gets a bad score or reported and they're not an uber driver anymore, but if a driver does anything to a passenger or vice versa then uber washes their hands of the whole thing

self-driving car Uber would not replace public transit

xpost hell I just had a friend get a bogus $80 charge for 'water damage' to a vehicle that the driver apparently staged

accountability

re: Juno - on cue, my best friend just posted this: A New Ride-Hail App Is Disrupting The Industry By Treating Drivers Like People