Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

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