Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

When you open the meters app it asks you for a number, it can be called a "hack license number" which you also get from the government, it means you're not a felon and you're competent to drive strangers all around town

It's good but it's lacking a certain race to the bottom.

After a year of price gouging, threat cutting, screaming and formal complaints, the government can put a "rate" in the "meters" app and everybody has to abide by it

idk if i'm missing something but in the UK we have GETT which lets you order black cabs from wherever on your phone & it seems fine

except black cabs cost a small fortune???

also there's hailo? and for minicabs kabbee? a friend of mine used to swear by the latter

think those are all uk-only tho

Well, the UK isn't Silicon Valley, it's not their way to assume that their solutions work everywhere, or try to take over the wait hang on.

I don't disagree with this idea though

wait, why did you say 'wtf flops on itt' and 'microeconomics isn't grand unified theory' if you like my idea?? idgi

hailo went out of business in north america in 2014
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/10/14/taxi-app-hailo-pulls-out-north-america/ZybacZCWurM1GuQ5Qy3dwL/story.html

fasten, a russian company, has tried to establish a footing here. it started in boston and went to austin shortly after uber and lyft pulled out. i don't seem to remember boston getting a party
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/fasten-fest-celebrating-one-year-in-austin/449992201

wait, why did you say 'wtf flops on itt' and 'microeconomics isn't grand unified theory' if you like my idea?? idgi

read the subsequent posts and realize you're being made fun of for reinventing taxis

No it's v different from taxis in fact

however you're right that it tries to bring us closer to the decentralization under taxis. basically Uber has a better platform than telephone numbers and hailing cabs, but they have a monopoly on that platform. since there's an obvious network externality (drivers and users aren't going to sign up for dozens of different apps) you replace it with an open platform. drivers could form cartels like the previous system, but there would be free entry so they'd always compete with independent drivers

an open platform/api would be ideal, yeah

You can't just let anybody drive passengers around. no barriers to entry creates unsustainable conditions for full-time drivers, including people just carpooling or commuting, because of the anarchic congestion situations a couple folks described above. It's not safe and it's not smart. A free platform, overseen by an entity that already has additional oversight systems forcing it to pay attention to customer feedback (we'll call this system "elections") should still require the "hack license number" and set ceilings on the number of "hack licenses" made available, as well as floors and ceilings on pricing.

The advantage of having the cab commissions operate this is that they would have much better data on peak times, availability, what kinds of surge pricing might actually be appropriate, and set rates and issue licenses in a much more reasonable and informed fashion, perhaps even injecting some oh my god transparency into the system. The disadvantage is cab commissions are probably all very terrible at IT.

in my ill-informed opinion this is like when subways were all being built and operated by private companies before municipal governments had to step in to actually run them sustainably and safely

tombot otm. except that the early subways were actually still more regulated, because they were contracted out to said companies by said municipal governments. it was the late 19th century so of course this was also rife with graft and crooked deals and deaths in construction and more, but the subways got built to the stated requirements of cities. how specific these were i'm not sure, and probably varied - where it had to run, how frequent service had to be, how close the stops had to be together... lots of stuff you could have specified without even getting into the price.

flopson your idea is getting mildly clowned here b/c there are hundreds of posts over the last two years of this thread critiquing uber and the uber model for reasons that aren't really addressed by your new scheme. you've been involved in a bunch of those conversations; fine if you don't agree with all the arguments, but acknowledging them might make your vision seem less ~silicon valley naive~ if you will. the thing is i'd be with you on some version of the uber technology being useful and not evil, for example if it were integrated into a more conventionally regulated taxi market, one that doesn't rely on prices so low the drivers can barely afford to drive the cars (whether through the manipulations of the monopoly tech company or brutal price competition on a wide-open market).

ok Doc, forget about the specifics of my idea, it was more of a sketch anyways, as the multiple concessions i made to mh demonstrate. do you at least agree with the desirability of an open platform app to overcome the winner-take-all network externality? regulated however you wish

while you all make good points, i think you and Tom and mh are all to some degree coming up with post-hoc justifications for (pre)existing regulations that created the cartelized pre-Uber taxi industry where a license costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and the market doesn't clear (this was shown by the size of the overall taxi + rideshare market growing like threefold as Uber and Lyft entered cities). it's not clear to me that those regulations were put in place for the noble reasons you attribute to them, or more importantly that they are the most effective in advancing those goals. my guess is that they kind of accrete over time as special interests and lobbyists opportunistically influence legislation. put yourself in the perspective of a policymaker in a city in crisis with urgent need to rip up existing laws and write it up carte blanche; would you really just reimpose the status quo?

going through Tombot's post cuz it was somewhat substantive

no barriers to entry creates unsustainable conditions for full-time drivers, including people just carpooling or commuting, because of the anarchic congestion situations a couple folks described above.

putting congestion aside for 5 sentences, why would free entry create unsustainable conditions for full-time drivers? in my proposal you work for yourself aside from a small maintenance fee for the platform, and take home all the money; you own the capital and the labour. why privilege full-time drivers over prospective drivers (not to mention passengers) who would like to enter the market, in that context? the reason free entry is limited in the current system is that bosses/cartels want the profits generated by restricted supply at the corresponding oligopolistic price. whether they split some of that with drivers or not, surely it's better if we let drivers compete but keep everything. the reason we have minimum wages in wage work is that bosses have monopsony power and can pay low-skill workers below their value to the company; if you euthanise the boss as my proposal does all the value flows directly to the worker herself

traffic: i do have some sympathy with Shakey, and in a world with a free entry open rideshare app congestion pricing (toll roads, etc) would be much more important. again I don't think restrictions on numbers of taxis exist because of congestion concerns; they exist because it creates rents for the special interest, not because they are the best way to manage traffic. congestion pricing is both more equitable and efficient anyways; why should people who don't own cars internalize the cost of traffic through higher fares but not regular drivers? the targeted ad-hoc restriction is not the ideal policy to solve the purported problem

A free platform, overseen by an entity that already has additional oversight systems forcing it to pay attention to customer feedback (we'll call this system "elections") should still require the "hack license number" and set ceilings on the number of "hack licenses" made available, as well as floors and ceilings on pricing.

don't totally understand what this words mean, but why floors and ceilings? the point of my proposal is to take Uber's (baldly disingenuous) claim that its drivers are independent contractors seriously, and therefore to cut Uber out of the picture in the process. are there floors and ceilings for what other independent contractors can charge? if there are, should there be? it's not clear to me why you'd want to do that. current (pre)existing floors were likely influenced by taxi lobbies to increase profits

i don't particularly mind if workers voluntarily form co-ops within the platform. they would just have to compete, which means they would likely need to differentiate themselves along some margin; reliability, safety, nicer cars, good service, something like that

I don't think a lot of existing regulations are justified, I think they're outmoded and need major retooling. Most cities, like NYC, with a taxi medallion system should buy them all out at fair market rate, kill the speculation and ridiculous inflation, and come up with new licensing and regulations that fit with the current market state

For what it's worth, when the Harvard Business Review, which is incredibly pro-business, finds major fault, you probably are fucked:
https://hbr.org/2017/06/uber-cant-be-fixed-its-time-for-regulators-to-shut-it-down

They make the main points we've missed that pre-arranged rides for hire fit outside of taxi systems and the ability to arrange for-hire rides on an immediate basis are an example of regulation not keeping up with technological capability. Also, the point about Uber complaining about Lyft using non-commercial drivers on an opt-in basis, to the extent they agreed it violated all kinds of legal and ethical issues, followed by them jumping fully into that market is incredibly telling!

imo if they're independent contractors, they should be commercial drivers and not individuals using this as a pay-for-rideshare thing. if you're actually providing transport as a part or full time job, you need to be regulated

then again, you have the Kochs on the other side (and I have no idea if they've weighed in on this type of transport) who will pay to sponsor bills deregulating all kinds of shit. They're seriously all about pushing to deregulate everything from barber licenses up to and maybe including food safety.

to some degree coming up with post-hoc justifications for (pre)existing regulations that created the cartelized pre-Uber taxi industry

i understand where you're coming from here, so i do want to re-emphasize (as i think i have upthread but memory is hazy!) that this isn't me trying to say that the existing setup is some wonderland, but rather that, however flawed it might be, it does flow from a public process and is about as 'democratic' as anything else in municipal governance. that of course means "a totally flawed process rife with entrenched interests," sure, but is it really better to just wipe all of it out and assume it was all just there to benefit the entrenched interests? this basically grants the inventor of new apps a kind of retroactive dictatorial power over the law, conceptually: if your invention makes it easy to wreck a regulated market, it's time to go ahead and assume that the regulations were all a scam. as i've said, there is something odious about law-flouting systems just coming in and establishing themselves --- even if many would agree the lawfully-enacted system has flaws! --- because now we're stuck arguing from the premise that the regulated system has to be aggressively defended as some kind of aberration from a free market which is presumed to be the natural and just state of things.

so i think tombot is right to point back to governments: if something like your system were to be set up, it would appropriately be the business of municipalities to decide on adopting the platform, weighing the pros and cons of it versus other interest and needs.

why would free entry create unsustainable conditions for full-time drivers? in my proposal you work for yourself aside from a small maintenance fee for the platform, and take home all the money

many have pointed out, and you've previously acknowledged, that the uberization of the economy, where nobody has a 'job' and everybody is an 'independent contractor' has serious flaws. broadly speaking it is very convenient for consumers, who only pay for services they're using right that second, perhaps not ultimately in the public interest (in the same way that ready access to cheap unfiltered cigarettes is convenient for a smoker), and potentially very bad for workers themselves. like working at a factory but you show up at 9:00 and they're like "oh we're not getting the steel in til 3:00, so don't clock in til then." taxi service obviously has always worked differently than a 9-to-5 but still, aren't there some risks for the workers in this gig/platform model?

like suppose there are a large nubmer of drivers willing to pitch their prices ridiculously low, so low that other people (who might present a better fleet of cars and drivers) can't actually make a living if they lower their prices that low? maybe a bunch of teenagers who aren't thinking about saving for the future, or the wear-and-tear this is going to put on the vehicle long term. or retirees who just like having a little pocket money or someone to talk to, or whatever. the people actually most serious about taxi service and what it costs to make your living in this way and maintain your vehicle could be priced out of the market, especially if some third party (let's call them "floober") steps in to consolidate the cheapie drivers as a bloc, promising them promotional advantages, hyping them under some shared banner ("floober: the fun, cheap ride! when you're using CabApp, choose a Floober driver!") or spamming the platform with clever algorithms or whatever, to basically push the price-undercutting drivers forward. that's great for the price-undercutting drivers but it might not be great for the public at large.

this is maybe another way of picking up your "the reason we have minimum wages in wage work" line. actually i would say "the reason we have minimum wages in wage work" is that without them, some people would be willing to work for less than minimum wage, but that's actually bad for everybody (except bosses, customers, and people who profiteer on poverty, like slumlords and payday lenders).

the reason free entry is limited in the current system is that bosses/cartels want the profits

this is not "the" reason though! this is why i feel like you're not acknowledging that other arguments have been made itt. yes of course they want the profits. but what about all the other things people have said here over two years about what kind of benefits flow from a regulated market? benefits to the riding public as well as to the drivers? in NYC the medallion system is obviously broken and needs a re-do as mh suggests. but it also incorporates a number of regulations which are obviously there out of public interest and cannot be reduced to the scheming of medallion owners to cement their control. you have to use certain models of cars approved for safety. there are maximum hours you can work per week to protect passengers from driver fatigue. the fares are regulated, which means drivers miss out on big payoffs when there might seem a chance to 'surge price' (aka gouge) while the public benefits from not being gouged. drivers have to get drug tests. drivers with too many points on their licenses can be barred from driving. and yes there is this whole 'insurance' thing which is Kind of a Big Deal. bamcquern is still OTM here:

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.

and here also:

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.

I was recently digging into some local history and found this section on public transportation illuminating. Suburban sprawl (glossed over here under the "everyone wants a house" rationale) takes a lot of the blame, but by that point public transport in many areas was under corporate influence

In the 1930s, with the Great Depression reducing the market for personal automobiles, General Motors Corp. made a push to convert all U.S. transit systems to rubber-tired diesel buses. This effort was supported by Congress, which, in 1935, passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act, requiring most power companies to divest themselves of public transit operations. General Motors purchased transit systems across the nation through its subsidiary, National City Lines. They quickly turned around and bought diesel buses from the parent company and discontinued rail service. The rails were abandoned, often paved over in the city streets, although many ended up being salvaged for their steel once World War II began.

After the war everyone's first goal was a house of their own. More and more far-flung subdivisions and even new suburbs were built, and because auto ownership was not keeping pace, transit ridership hit a peak. Transit systems in Iowa's ten largest cities carried 105 million riders in 1946. But it was not sustainable. As communities expanded, transit had difficulty meeting all the travel needs efficiently. General Motors was not reinvesting in the bus fleets it owned, it was gearing up to provide massive numbers of automobiles.

fwiw the reason power companies owned transportation was that electric streetcars were the largest user of electricity at the time

i think that the anti-uber argument on regulatory grounds probably has merit but when the current system is so broken as to be actually unworkable, and this new model comes up that i actually like to use and it works and i benefit from, it's v hard for me personally to say "ok let's get rid of the thing that works and go back to the thing that i never got any value out of bc the new thing doesn't follow the very regulatory regime that made the old thing undesirable to use"

literally no one is saying that

I mean, not here. Even most places with Uber banned have newer things.

I think that Harvard Business Review article makes a good point in acknowledging a lot of things have been changed in the last few years in existing taxi systems, and it's getting masked by uber/lyft existing

there are places that don't have uber but where it is easy and not that expensive to get a cab (i live in one)

where i live it is inconvenient and expensive to get a cab

and i live 3 min from a major city

i found it kinda hard to get a cab in vancouver when i was there actually (also im moving there in 6 weeks sup jim) like one time we called a cab that never came, took a long time to hail one downtown. and not cheap?

Dr C i think we agree more than let on; im certainly not opposed to regulations on a platform like the one i proposed. the important thing is the platform is open and not proprietary. as for the free entry of labor stuff, we seem to have different conceptions of the labor market. I'm much more concerned about exploitation by bosses than among workers competing fairly. i just don't think taxi wages would be ground down to subsistence if we let ppl enter freely, and i think that your type of thinking can easily fall prey to a fallacy of composition: each occupation can limit entry and raise prices, but when everyone does we've just eroded real wages, with no guarantee that this was done in an equitable way. but I'm open to the idea that protection could be an ok 'theory of the second-best' kinda policy in an otherwise fucked labor market, i just don't know that argument or any evidence for it. i tend to put more weight on consumers (workers are consumers too, after all) and unemployed workers looking for a job who get the ladder pulled up behind them by entrenched workers. I'm not against co-ops but they should exist in a competitive environment, otherwise we've just put lipstick on the monopoly pig

thx mh for the HBR piece, very interesting

Hrmmm, well, if you don't think this would damage taxi wages, why? Is it specific to the taxi economy in some way, or is this something you would apply to statutory minimum wages generally? And what constitutes "workers competing fairly"? I mean, my suggestion is that this open platform "name your price" type model is not fair competition, and that workers can end up incredibly exploited or discarded by the market even without "bosses." Any regulated economy at all is going to involve ladders being "pulled up behind" - even at the level of requiring people to have licenses or training in what they do, submitting to government safety inspections in the workplace, maintaining accurate records and paying taxes on time... I mean there are just tons of things that people could save big bucks on if only they didn't have to do them.

This is why I'm not sure you can really separate out the regulation question from the fantasy of liberated workers "competing fairly." Once you add back in all the things that are public goods, which these cities have agreed upon as public goods, it's not going to look that different from a city-run taxi platform connecting drivers to legal cab rides. So maybe just to clarify... in the hypothetical "the city is tearing up everything and starting from scratch" scenario, if they implemented the full package of public-good regulations and requirements on drivers (having insurance, keeping up paperwork/inspections on the vehicle, not logging more than legal hours, keeping to the min/max fares where established etc.) alongside a new, city-run ride-hailing platform, would that be "proprietary," or okay by you?

I think one of the main problems I've heard of when it comes to boundary areas, which might be what Mordy is running into, is that licensing doesn't cross city boundaries. If anything, it's yet another argument for consolidation of the governance of metro areas when it comes to shared needs, like transportation, licensing, taxes that contribute to infrastructure, etc

Are there other industries that we regulate the number of employees in the industry? Of course things like electrical require licensing but afaik there's no hard limit on the number of people who can get licensed - it's just limited by how many apprentices current master/licensed electricians are willing to take on. Why should this be the one industry where govt is allowed to say "we have enough people in this industry to protect the current drivers we are not accepting any more"?

cities regulate the number of cars an area can bear, the number that can be parked in an area, and when and where cars can drive on particular streets. there isn't a cap, as far as I know, in NYC on the number of driving licenses that allow you to drive a cab. there is a hard limit on the number of vehicles used for a particular type of transport.

ok i understand that taxi driving is qualitatively different than other industries since they're in the business of driving specifically tho maybe worth noting that there's no cap on the number of vehicles my (non-transit related) company is allowed to own and use on the road. we're a small company but there are larger companies with major fleets that afaik are not number capped at all.

more pertinently maybe - are freight companies limited at all re number of trucks they can put on the road?

There are other histories of industries with a limited number of players, just usually the number is 'one' cause it's a utility or other 'natural monopoly.' Sometimes that theory is convenient BS but often it makes total sense, e.g. when Bell argued back in the day that having more than one local phone company was insanity since it meant that two people couldn't necessarily call each other. We were just talking about the contracts awarded to specific companies to build and operate subway lines back in the day. Etc.

Things like use-based zoning also effectively limit what kinds of businesses can set up shop, or create entities that do that (e.g. boards that say ''there are enough pollution-creating dry cleaning establishments on Main Street and we don't want another"). Plus there's employment by the government itself, which is an enormous sector of the economy where I can't just hang up my shingle and declare myself a public school principal, even if I think my district is foolish to go with a few large schools instead of many small ones. That's not to say those are all universally good things or that the taxi medallion system is great --- again I'm not sure anybody in this thread has made such a claim --- but it's not wildly unprecedented or really that exceptional.

In the context of this thread about Uber though, for me, it's like... if a city wants to scrap its medallion system and replace it with an app platform for any driver who meets requirements x y and z, that makes sense to me. If a city wants to scrap its medallion system and replace it with an app platform, and simultaneously scrap all requirements in the name of free labor and say anybody with a car is a cab driver, that to me would be really strange... but if that's the market their riders and drivers really want, then the most I could probably say is "good luck with that. I bet it's a disaster and look forward to saying I told you so."

Uber has preempted both of these scenarios by just ignoring the existing laws on a massive scale, generating a crisis where no one got to have the conversation about what was really desirable before this new player established itself and cultivated a customer/lobbyist base. And now we're arguing within precisely the frame Uber wants and has propagated, where the greatest problem in taxi service is that it's subject to government control at all, and critics of Uber are called upon to justify the regulations rather than Uber having to justify its flouting of them.

sorry, definitely repeating myself and maybe losing the thread... new phone makes it too easy to type too much

uber is a lawbreaking company but maybe this makes me a reactionary but i think critics should always justify regulations. both things could be true - uber broke the law and also the law was dumb.

that's the thing, we're acting like this is a situation with two sides, but I think we're all in agreement there are some essential things they're just ignoring, and some regulation frameworks that technology is challenging, and there needs to be systematic change

the main point of disagreement, to me, is whether there's an actual, useful business with all of uber's aspects or if they're perpetually fudging the numbers or legalities on one area every time they fall behind in another

yeah, I kinda think the actual useful form of what they invented/perfected isn't a business at all (because no way does Uber itself do enough to justify its cut of every ride), but a tool that gets incorporated into the regulated cab market. like, to imagine an example without the evil disruptive company angle: in a world where, say, subways didn't come up with maps of themselves, it'd be a useful invention to create maps. like hey this makes this thing way more useful! but once the idea is out there, the logical end point is for the subway system to make maps and post them on the trains; that's more beneficial to society than it being a separate product offered by a private company. in techland, I believe some real world subways have created route-finding and service-update apps modeled on things like HopStop. makes sense to me.

I think this might be the common ground between me and flopson - where I get out of the cab is where this flows into additional transformations of all these taxi systems into free-market laboratory experiments in 'independent contractor' economies, which to me seems like a non-sequitur from the discussion of what the app platform has to offer.

@ Mordy, re: critics always having to justify regulations - is that really how you mean to put it? everybody prosecuting a murder case has to rejustify the statutes criminalizing murder? if you think it's a bad law, cool, write an op-ed, no laws are final, but it's a high obligation to place on anybody who criticizes criminal conduct. which is what uber wants and why they muddy the conversation by going down this route in the first place, imho.

there are true rebels out there who just do whatever they want, probably don't even know or care what the laws are, and just accept getting sued as being part of business. it's a popular stance in executive groups and government branches.

This doesn't look good (sorry for aesthetic)

https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2017/06/14.html

I use Uber Eats much more than I use Uber.

you monster

They're the only service one my my favorite sandwich shop uses! Also we have ample public transit.

heh https://www.axios.com/benchmark-capital-sues-travis-kalanick-for-fraud-2471455477.html

omg so good

huh, wonder who owns the rest

I mean, 10%? 13% is a large enough stake they have them by the balls? is it all a split between founders and venture capital groups all holding less than 10?