Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

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