Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

I like how all of those giant pink mustaches lasted like a month on the front end of cars in Chicago weather before being demoted to the dashboards.

whats wrong with a taxi

My one experience with Uber was a mixed bag; basically, don't use them for transportation away from big events unless you are made out of money.

Uber and Lyft just launched in Cleveland this month. Haven't tried them, and can't imagine any circumstance where I would.

hey, taxi

TAXI!!!!

it amazes me that nouveau tech people are so credulous as to willingly throw away decades of accumulated consumer protections and regulations for the novelty of calling an unlicensed cab with an iphone app.

yeah but you can do it with your phone

And you don't have to accidentally touch some peon by handing them money.

everyone who drives for lyft looks like they're pomplamoose roadies

let's all move to our own islands and have no government

whats wrong with a taxi

taxis are great if you can get one

you can say the same about Uber tho, and depending on where/when you contact them it can end up being ten times more expensive

I know some people who drive for Lyft, I would never set foot in a car with them behind the wheel.

ny doesn't have $1m taxi medallions because consumer protections just cost so much - so it's great that the pretty terrible industry (which just did its best to prevent people from the outer boroughs from getting *regulated* taxis) is getting ""disrupted""

otoh I generally don't have trouble finding a taxi the rare times that I do need to get one (even more true thanks to the green cabs) so I have no desire to dl an app so I can pay more money for the privilege.

My one experience with Uber (after a wedding on St. Patrick's Day), the poor guy got pulled over by a cop as he was pulling up to the bar to pick us up.

I'm going to be irritatingly pedantic for a minute. This is at least how it works in Chicago. Taxi regulations are very locally specific:

Hailo isn't a ride share service. It's basically a decentralized, app-based dispatching service for legal, licensed taxicabs. It's another way to call a cab that isn't cab company-specific and leaves out the middle-person dispatcher. It's also a convenient, hassle-free way to pay for a cab with a credit card. Also safer to use a credit card this way since taxi CC machines are sketchy as heck.

Uber has three components - a decentralized, app-based dispatching service through which you can call licensed taxis; a private car service, like a chauffer service; and a private car ride share service called Uber X.

Lyft is just a private ride share service.

So I like the Hailo and Uber taxi-hailing apps a lot. It's not impossible to hail a cab on the street where we live, but you could end up standing around for ten minutes or so or fighting with people on other corners so it's really nice to be able to get a guaranteed taxi. I have had problems with availability of cabs through both apps, and I've had drivers cancel on me for no reason, which is frustrating.

I've never used Uber's black car service because that shit's expensive and I'm not a rock star.

I used Uber X twice - once by accident because I had a credit and thought it was for the cab hailing part, and once with Jeff on purpose because he had the same credit. I never would have used it by myself if I'd realized what was going on. Call me paranoid, but fuck getting into some stranger's unregulated, unlicensed personal car for a god damn ride somewhere. I feel the same way about Lyft. I think there are also some major labor issues to consider with Uber X and Lyft as far as the drivers being classified as independent contractors and not having workers' comp coverage or being covered by wage and hour or overtime laws. Basically they can be paid exploitation rates of pay for what they do, and would have to drive A LOT to make a living.

iatee, in NYC you can only hail yellow cabs on the street, right? And if you want to call for a ride you've got to call a chauffeur service like Uber's black car?

The one person I know who drives for Lyft only does it for a few hours a night a couple nights a week and on one weekend night—purely for supplemental income.

There's also potentially massive liability issues with Lyft and Uber X drivers, just because of the unlicensed and unregulated nature of the services.

There are big problems with the way cabs are licensed and regulated (Chicago fares are some of the lowest urban fares in the nation and drivers don't get paid shit, making it really difficult for them to make a living as well, plus there has been reams of litigation about whether drivers are independent contractors or employees and thus afforded certain legal protections) so I get the appeal of something like Lyft or Uber X disrupting all of that (and again, I'm looking at this from a Chicago perspective, which is a different taxi setup than in other cities) but the whole thing is just too potentially sketchy and fraught for me to trust it.

the idea of being an occasional Lyft driver crossed my mind solely because the idea of putting that horrific mustache on the front of my car cracked me up

legally yeah but in the outer boroughs the lack of yellow cabs meant that hailing black cabs was the norm not the exception. bloomberg created green cabs (which can only be hailed in the outer boroughs / upper manhattan) to legalize/regulate what was already happening and the taxi industry fought it in courts, but eventually lost.

black cabs still exist and still get hailed tho, both in the boroughs and in manhattan.

xp

and while some drivers might make more money w/ uber atm than they do in places w/ fucked up regulations, in the long term the price/wages are gonna be driven down...though I guess soon enough they'll be replaced by google car so

if you mean the driverless car that will never happen

The one person I know who drives for Lyft only does it for a few hours a night a couple nights a week and on one weekend night—purely for supplemental income.

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, April 23, 2014 11:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is what the people I know do. They also use it to drive drunk people around and find out where the party is, then park their cars and get fucked up until the morning comes.

whats wrong with a taxi

taxis are great if you can get one

Flywheel

the day upworthy breaks the story of the lyft murderer who drove his victims to an airbnb death dungeon is the day u know ur paradigm has truly been disrupted

"Please rate your driver"

Echoing that taxis are fine if you can get them -- in SF, depending on where you are and what time it is, sometimes you might as well walk. Lyft has the app and the ease of taking care of everything that way. However, the drivers don't generally know the city as well as taxi cab drivers (though they also don't typically drive as recklessly).

1. there was a big taxi protest in DC today:

Drivers in and around downtown D.C. were gridlocked in traffic Wednesday as a caravan of angry taxi drivers made its way from East Potomac Park to Freedom Plaza — in a protest against app-based ride sharing services such as UberX.

the taxis all honked constantly for about 2-3 hours outside of my work. they weren't little short honks but rather of the HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK, HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK, HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK variety. one one hand, the drivers achieved their goal of getting people to think about the Uber/Lyft/Sidecar issue and to talk about it. on the other hand, the most common thing i heard among pedestrians and workers in the area was "SHUT THE FUCK UP! GODDAMIT, SHUT THE FUCK UP!!"

i want to be sympathetic toward the taxi drivers. but even though i've never used Uber-like services as i don't use taxis very often at all, they clearly seem to be better on a technological level. when a rottweiler munched on my shin and calf a few weeks ago, it took calls to 3 different taxi companies before someone was able to pick up the phone and then agree to send someone to my house. 40 minutes passed before it finally arrived, and i live in DC proper, not way out in the suburbs or something. when the driver showed up, he refused to shut the fuck up even though i made it clear that i was bleeding and in a great deal of pain. he was physically unable to shut the fuck up. then he refused to take me to the nearest hospital (howard university) because "that's not a good hospital". instead he took me to a hospital across town, during rush hour, so the ride took forever. the entire time he talked about how much he loved money and also gave me advice about dog bites. he also, of course, spent a good chunk of time complaining about Uber.

anywhere, clearly an anecdote about a terrible taxi ride doesn't build a very strong case against taxi drivers, but pretty much every time i take a taxi i end up with the most terrible human beings of all time. i haven't used Uber but i've heard that they actually show up, you can tell when they'll arrive using an app, and that they don't talk much. sounds heavenly.

My god, Karl, I hope you called to complain about that driver! The delay is absurd and part of why I am in favor of the decentralized dispatch services provided by Uber and Hailo, but him not taking you to your requested destination is not only straight up awful but must violate some kind of DC consumer services regulation. Is there a complaint number to call? That guy is a god damn menace.

when a rottweiler munched on my shin and calf a few weeks ago, it took calls to 3 different taxi companies before someone was able to pick up the phone and then agree to send someone to my house. 40 minutes passed before it finally arrived, and i live in DC proper, not way out in the suburbs or something. when the driver showed up, he refused to shut the fuck up even though i made it clear that i was bleeding and in a great deal of pain.

sounds like a shitty situation and i feel for you karl malone but you didn't want to call an ambulance?

i was more concerned about the pulsing pain and shooting blood from my leg then taking his taxi ID number or whatever. i kept saying "yeah i'm in a lot of pain right now" as my response to his running monologue about how much he loved money that was occasionally sprinkled with questions to confirm that i agreed that money was awesome as well.

xpost
hard to explain, but i was in enough pain and bleeding enough to need to go to the hospital, but not enough to feel the need to pay several hundred dollars for an ambulance ride.

i (as well as several friends) have been using Uber X and Lyft fairly regularly for months now and they are a thousand times better than your typical taxi service in nearly every conceivable way.

i want to be sympathetic toward the taxi drivers. but even though i've never used Uber-like services as i don't use taxis very often at all, they clearly seem to be better on a technological level. when a rottweiler munched on my shin and calf a few weeks ago, it took calls to 3 different taxi companies before someone was able to pick up the phone and then agree to send someone to my house. 40 minutes passed before it finally arrived, and i live in DC proper, not way out in the suburbs or something.

it took me a while to understand this in my area, being a very infrequent taxi user who never had any of them around growing up, but i think basically taxi companies have a lot of unspoken ways of doing things that they require you to deal with if you want their convenience. factor in having to deal with a lot of demanding erratic customers who don't understand these things and i guess i can understand why they can get kind of fuck-you sometimes.

i'm thinking things like expectations about when people travel, under what circumstances it's reasonable to expect a fast pickup, where they expect you to go (wrt taxis being around you and finding fares wherever they end up).

recently i had an injury and had to take more taxis than i could afford because i didn't have any other way, and i got quite a range of service. some drivers had very slick smartphone apps, a square thingy. some knew where they were going. some couldn't find me standing at the opposite corner from where they expected. one guy had to fill out a card charge on fuckin carbon-copied slips by hand, but when i saw the phone he was working with, and figured what he must be making driving the cab, i really couldn't be irritated at him - anyone who could afford it would leap at the conveniences that would probably help them pull down more tips and other desirables. once i got picked up on a street corner by a passing cabbie i flagged down (apparently this does not really work much) who was ok with dumping me in the front seat with another fare in the back, only to have the actual cab i had called (there were a LOT driving past that night) swoop in and get irritated at the other one, and at me, for taking the fare he had oked. but how was i to know?? i was just standing in a snowstorm with a bum foot miles from home! etc.

i was more concerned about the pulsing pain and shooting blood from my leg then taking his taxi ID number or whatever. i kept saying "yeah i'm in a lot of pain right now" as my response to his running monologue about how much he loved money that was occasionally sprinkled with questions to confirm that i agreed that money was awesome as well.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you had any sort of responsibility to report this guy. It was more of a "Justice for Karl Malone!" kind of thing. I get that way when I get angry at something on someone's behalf.

Oh no, it's cool! Believe me, as I sat I sat in the backseat I thought "what would a more direct person do here? Most people wouldn't stand for this." It's totally reasonable. People's thresholds for bullshit change over time, and I hope that when I'm an older man I'll have the courage to call out bullshit like that.

anyone used relayrides? looks pretty sweet.

this is probably a dumb question but if you get pulled over what are you supposed to show for insurance?

I use Uber and Hailo for calling real cabs. I don't use the ride sharing services, probably because I just use the real cabs, they always seem more plentiful. But I like the idea of them and fully support them.

relayrides = car rental

cab drivers i'm sentimental about but i truly hope car rental companies get disrupted out of existence by this thing

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists

what exactly did this guy say? I can't track it down anywhere, just reactions to it.

fuck these services

no way in hell am I entrusting the lives of my children with some unlicensed uninsured asshole with a handlebar mustache

A pink handlebar mustache pasted to the front of his car, even.

had way more shady shit pulled on me by cab drivers than i have ever received while using uber/lyft.

^

lol shakey wtf are you talking about unlicensed uninsured

cabdrivers are not wasting gas roaming around looking for fares. This also means fewer available for dispatch.

rideshare drivers can park until a fare pops up.

I guess I would have thought you just can't make enough money unless you're spending most of your time actually driving fares but my grasp of how the economics of this works on the driver's side is not that strong.

From my limited experience, most rideshare drivers have pivoted to restaurant delivery and personal shopping.

another anecdote:
I stopped by a grocery store that prepandemic had serviced a downtown/financial neighborhood, and it had been converted almost entirely into a personal shopper depot. My wife and I were pretty much the only customers who weren't messengers/couriers/delivery drivers. There was a line for their pickup/checkout that was like 25 deep and not a single soul in the regular line. It was pretty bizarre, but I'd probably go back based on how quickly I was able to get in/out of there.

Kara swisher was a good get for the times

“We’ll see how it goes for you in California,” @karaswisher says

“Wish us luck,” Dara says.

“No,” Swisher responds.

— Andrew J. Hawkins 🚇🚌🚲🛴 (@andyjayhawk) August 19, 2020

So can someone in Cali explain how the prop 22 vote went down as it did?

$

^^^^^

That and labor is relatively weak in California. I might live to regret saying this, but I don’t think it’s going to be so easy (just spend $) for them to repeat this in all other Democratic states.

In other words

I've seen a lot of autopsies about Prop 22 that focused on the historic spending and the flood of mailers/ads/messaging that it bought. But at some point, I think it's worth taking a look at what labor did (or didn't do) to fight for the No campaign. https://t.co/J4rLcsZwRk

— o...k (@kateconger) November 5, 2020

If you think labor came out swinging to support No on 22, its worth revisiting @noamscheiber's reporting on the AB 5 negotiations last summer and seeing how fractious it was, even then: https://t.co/FcQSEVXfNZ

— o...k (@kateconger) November 5, 2020

Prop 22 exists because a new stricter labor law went into effect in CA as of Jan 2020 (AB5) which made it so there were very few exceptions for employers to avoid having to pay workers as employees (which include payroll taxes, workers comp, minimum wage requirements, and health benefits, potentially). I would not be surprised if a larger percentage of workers in California were paid as independent contractors compared to workers in other states. The state agencies that enforce worker classification (employee vs contractor) are very underfunded and there are a lot of employers paying workers as contractors that no way would they "pass" even the loosest test of worker classification.

There was a lot of pushback to AB5 and not just from the Uber/Lyft/Doordash companies. A lot of musicians, writers, and other arts and media workers were going to have to be classified as employees, and a lot of them didn't like that, and their employers liked that even less.

But Uber/Lyft/Doordash spent a very large amount of money to put Prop 22 on the ballot as an endrun around AB5 and lot of that was spent on advertising that emphasized that workers preferred to be contractors, and that regulating their employment by classifying them as employees would make them suffer. A lot of the "drivers" in the ads were POC and likely encouraged on-the-fence centrists and liberals to vote for Prop 22.

Whether the folks who had problems with AB5 who are "gig workers" of other types voted for Prop 22, idk, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Very helpful, thank you!

yeah thx sarahell

How much of AB5 did P22 gut? was it just a carve-out or did it defang the new labor law more broadly?

lol it was just for them --

Classifies drivers for app-based transportation (rideshare) and delivery companies as “independent contractors,” not “employees,” unless company: sets drivers’ hours, requires acceptance of specific ride and delivery requests, or restricts working for other companies.

prop 22 was a response to AB5, but they won't wait for other states to pass an ab5 to try to do similar things elsewhere.

oh of course not -- they are "on a roll" ... ugh.

Never bumped for this but seems appropriate to bump
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/7/22158745/uber-selling-autonomous-vehicle-business-aurora-innovation

I thought I heard a funny quote from the Uber CEO about throwing away a couple of billion on the autonomous cars but all I can find are rah rah quotes about the spinoff deal.

HA ha

smart money on this is to buy the dip because DOL won't be able to make this happen anyways https://t.co/bvD5A549A9

— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) April 29, 2021

Let's hope DOL actually follows through, I won't hold my breath

at the least they're in trouble in the short term because the job market is tight and no one wants these shitty jobs https://www.businessinsider.com/why-uber-lyft-expensive-taking-long-driver-shortage-2021-4?op=1

The Prop 22 campaign drew attention to the harsh working conditions and meager wages drivers can face on the job. And for some drivers, it exhausted any goodwill they might have toward the apps, which are now in need of workers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/07/uber-lyft-drivers/

I probably said this upthread somewhere, but I remain baffled by this company whose entire business model is based on underpaying cab drivers and not covering any of their expenses and still can't come remotely close to making a profit when all they actually do is provide an app and skim money off the top. Like if cab companies and car services earn a profit how the fuck do these guys not?

It's like losing money on a protection racket.

part of the answer is that they spend an average of $500,000 per engineer per year (https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Uber,Lyft&track=Software%20Engineer, and you can double those numbers to account for benefits and real estate and organizational overheads), and in uber's case they have an engineering headcount of about 5000. so that's 2.5bn a year on engineering. for an iphone app.

ya i've always been confused about uber's unit economics because of stuff like that

i’ve said it before but my local minicab company has an app and it basically looks like uber’s and it works great. you see the little picture of the car coming towards you and everything. i mean it wouldn’t work in LA but how often am i in LA.

Yes but does your local minicab company have a self driving division

neither does Uber, they sold it

They spend a lot on lobbying too, no?

That's another great thing about my minicab company - lobbying costs are very low.

neither does Uber, they sold it

things seem to be going well here

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/16/tech/uber-software-bug-drivers-charged/index.html

Fares have been bonkers in Chicago. City cabs, which used to seem expensive, have fares at about half the price.

Same in NY. Easily 5 x what they were pre COVID.

(Cue someone to explain why like we’re all 10 years old…zzzzz)

wow https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/659150190242054144/end-of-the-line-for-uber

Might have been mentioned upthread but while Uber et al ultimately can fuck off, one thing I've consistently seen for years in mentions on social media -- predominantly but not solely from Black posters here in America, and very consistently from them, NYC being a key focus but not the sole -- is that, at the least anecdotally but likely more systematically, before the basic innovation of smartphone car service ordering happened calling for a taxi, per said posters, was at best sporadic especially if the calls were from 'bad' neighborhoods, real or imagined. I have no reason to doubt that at all, and essentially by Uber et al becoming huge and forcing the official industries to adapt -- Flywheel, YoTaxi, etc -- that broke that pattern. So the legacy will always have to be nuanced at the least; the collapse in subsidization and more that Doctorow identifies is clear and much of the overall legacy eats, and yet.

That would be a worthy legacy for sure; the post does address it: "It’s true that Uber had upsides, like bringing transport to underserved communities of color — but because Uber was always doomed, this was a temporary mirage that would strand those communities again."

On that front, while I understand his pessimism, I'm also willing to bet that said formal taxi companies are more on the 'uh let's not leave obvious money on the table here' tip now. We'll have to see.

The rideshares may have fucked up by ensuring that the legislature couldn't legislate

Breaking: CA Superior Court judge finds Prop 22 UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!! pic.twitter.com/R4gFoDrs0n

— Veena Dubal (@veenadubal) August 21, 2021

Lmao

Spending $200m to buy a law and having it struck down as unconstitutional bc you tried to make it impossible for the legislature to ever amend it couldn’t have happened to a nicer industry

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) August 21, 2021

The last two times I had to use Uber, my drivers were seething about ways in which the company had actively been ripping them off of late.

This was … maybe 4-5 weeks ago

https://sfstandard.com/technology/san-francisco-birthplace-of-ridehailing-becomes-the-center-of-its-decline/

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-three-uber-isnt-really-profitable-yet-but-is-getting-closer-the-antitrust-case-against-uber.html

“The third factor, the delinking of passenger fares and driver compensation was a major driver of this labor to capital wealth transfer. Prior to 2022, driver payments were a function of what passengers paid, with adjustments for incentive programs and peak period demand. Uber has developed algorithms for tailoring customer prices based on what they believe individual customers would be willing to pay and tailoring payments to individual drivers so they are as low as possible to get them to accept trips.

This is fundamentally different from Uber’s pre-pandemic price discrimination, where it could apply Surge Pricing during periods of high customer demand (or driver shortages) but any customer in a given zone requesting the same trip at the same time would see the same price, and drivers would receive the same payment for those trips. Now different passengers/drivers making the same trip can see very different fares/payments. System average revenue per trip goes up, average driver payments per trip go down. Airlines have decades of experience changing fares depending on demand but have no ability to discriminate between passengers booking the same flight at the same time. [5]“

Love drunken conversations with drivers. Best part