How Uber conquered London
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Its really not. Uber isn't actually a new idea in london, we've had app bookable minicabs for a long time, through addison lee(and others).
Now, Addison Lee are almost as odious to their staff as Uber are. However the genius of AL is the finance agreement between the drivers and the company. The company lease you a car, and you have the option to work when ever you want. But you have to get booking through their master system. and it only costs you 25% of each fair. Plus the £300 a week rental of the branded vehicle.
This means that the have 100% control of their employees, and if a driver under performs, they are still liable for rental of the Addison Lee branded car.
As a business model its awesome. As a moral proposition its pretty shitty. Drivers are contractors, liable for inflated costs and because they have no employment rights are forced to work round the clock to break even.
Uber just goes one step further cutting overheads and offloading risk onto the user instead. Car not road worthy? just 1-star it! got raped by the driver? just 1-star it! got kicked off because your disabled? just 1-star it (but don't do it too often, remember in uber's Randian vision, its your fault for being weak and holding back the strong.)
Fortunately the minicab rules are quite comprehensive in london: you need to have a clean record, ID, and a road worthy car. Anything less and its finesville and jail for you.
35 years ago I did some motorbike dispatch for them for my summer job. So many fake deductions, charges to take jobs via them, and discrepancies at the end of the week. Not forgetting rental of the compulsory branding. Same for all the couriers. I left for a smaller firm after a couple of weeks, and for broadly similar amount of work, took home roughly double.
They have had a shit reputation for decades, yet seem to go from strength to strength.
The large number of drivers who refuse dogs, especially guide dogs for registered blind people is appalling.
The London transport regulator wanted to bring uber under reasonable regulation, uber bugged their users to go and annoy the regulator to back off.
An Uber-XL will happily carry a bicycle or large amounts of luggage. And I've not once experienced an Uber driver refusing to take me anywhere. "South of the river? Not at this time of night guv". Pffff.
Black cabs are now campaigning and many rally behind the slogan "the safest ride with the greatest guide" (from memory). This betrays how fundamentally they have failed to understand the trouble they're in.
Safety: Uber purport to address this with registrations and reviews. (This may be fallible, but no more than black cab registration).
"The greatest guide"?? Puh-lease. Nobody but nobody wants their cabby to be a guide, nor to offer their opinions on anything. Perhaps a tiny minority of tourists may feign interest for a few minutes. Perhaps.
Unfortunately for black cab drivers, it seems that the current generation have sat cosily on the monopoly they inherited, and they've been caught napping.
None of this is intended as an anti-black cab rant, I simply think they're failing to deal with the primary issue: the times they are a-changing.
Edit: typo.
That's not just wrong, but unimaginative.
Black-cab taxi tours of London are apparently very high quality [0] although I'm uncertain of how much in-demand they are.
I was envisaging the passengers who book a cab to travel from A to B, not explicit tour bookings. I find it odd that cabbies are rallying behind the "safest ride with the greatest guide" slogan when Uber appear to do a reasonable job regarding background investigations [1], and the "greatest guide" is only required for a minority (I presume) of bookings.
To me, it feels that black-cabs have had a monopoly on being able to pick up passengers and charge high fares. They're now being undercut by Uber, and they're fighting back by emphasising their current business model. Surely their business is suffering precisely because their operating model has failed to predict and adapt to change?
[0] https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g186338-d188...
[1] See footnote in this article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11608878/I-said-...
As they say: once you've been surge priced (by uber), you never go back (to uber)
None of this is intended as an anti-uber rant, I simply think they're failing to deal with the primary issue: regulations and real service are not just for breakfast.
I actually had to catch a cab from Earl's Court to Kew Gardens because District Line had issues. I got in and told the driver, an elderly man, my destination of Victoria Gate, Kew Gardens. First red flag, he wasn't sure where that was. Second red flag, he pulls out a paper map book, like the kind I haven't seen for 10 years. Third red flag he doesn't even know which lane to exit the roundabout to go towards Kew.
I proceeded to watch on my smartphone how he went completely the wrong way and added 20 minutes to the trip getting stuck in heavy traffic. I'm well familiar with The Knowledge, and I can tell you without a doubt, someone lent this old codger his black cab. Whatever idiot cabbie did that did far more damage to the cause of the traditional black cabs than anything Uber could ever do.
I guess the "primary issue" differs depending on one's perspective. The black-cab drivers are highly concerned about loss of business, and personally I think they're addressing this concern in the wrong way. I guess time will tell.
No doubt that black-cab regulation is stringent, although I'm unconvinced that they're the safer ride. I have no way of determining if my black-cab driver has a history of unpleasant behaviour. Uber's rating system gives me some hint toward that -- although of course it is less than perfect.
Regarding price-surging... surely we've all been there, and yet still gone back to Uber another time?
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/28/uber-cars-alw...
> "It's real time analytics and the cars you see on the app are the cars driving around London,"
> "If we know it's going to be busy we can tell our drivers, but that doesn't affect when people open their app. There might be a ten second delay from their GPS, but it's not that you open up the app and there are three cars around you, and they're not there. That's definitely not correct." (emphasis mine)
Worth noting that ubers in London are all licensed minicabs, it's not like some American cities where they may not be insured for commercial use.
It's a really bad idea for them to do that unless they have a medical exemption (which they can get for dog allergies).
Disability rights activists are vigorous, and would happily book rides with their guide dogs hoping to get denied service so they can then go to court. It's an easy win for them.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0783lhl
> We also hear from Jade Sharp, who complained to Transport For London when a number of Uber drivers refused to take her and her guide dog. Five of them have been successfully prosecuted and fined.
(I have no idea if this BBC Radio 4 programme about visual impairment is available outside the UK. Sorry.)
Submarine advertising strikes again?
Claim -> Headline / Apparent Story
Whats true -> Headline related information
Whats false -> The hidden agenda ( disinformation, ad for CompanyX, repackaged press release )
For personal use, they're just so astonishingly expensive that it's difficult to justify them. As far as I can remember I've used Uber once, to get home after missing the last public transport, and I had to really consider whether it was worth just finding something to do for a few hours until the 5am train.
I live <1h from Central London via train. The fare for that is ~3GBP off peak or 5GBP peak. An Uber costs an order of magnitude more (~30-40GBP).
It would be an extremely notable expense in my budget - probably the largest single item.
I think I'd have to have a home paid off and a fairly high salary before a taxi became anything other than a frivolous luxury, to be honest.
(Business use is excepted here. I've used taxis plenty in my professional life. Uber as a platform doesn't seem focused on business travel, though.)
I used to live in Zone1/2, and had 24 hour bus routes. So still ~an order of magnitude - 10GBP vs 1.50.
I'd forgotten about sharing with friends. Taxis certainly work out well there. Maybe that's it?
It's probably simply that I hate spending money! :)
Given that a meal for two will typically be in the £80 to £200 range for us, the Uber itself is not an enormous sum.
Together we earn over six figures GBP. It may be an earnings level thing too.
I've spent several thousand pounds via work on Uber. This has resulted in 2-3 bad trips (which round out to 0.02%).
- Quick pick up times - Usually responsive and helpful drivers (no complaining) - Helpful carrying heavy items (almost 100% of the time) - Cheap fees - Bill splitting is easy no friction - UberPool does make me slightly nervous
The service works and is default for myself and 100s of business users, personally it works well too esp for date night.
In comparison, London Black Cab drivers are rude, racist, crass, willing to rip you off and take advantage of you. They do not have their cars auditing a lot of the time, refusal to take cash is unacceptable in this day and age and should be in place in ALL taxis. There is no excuse for this.
Anyway, by October this year they will all take cards. [1]
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2016/februa...
Also, at the same time, it is very illustrative for how humans (in this case, drivers) really don't matter very much in such systems. As the one guy says, "Uber don’t see drivers as humans". In that way, it looks they are just one step away from driverless cars.
That step, of course, is actually inventing a working driverless car.
Coincidentally, I am the same number of steps away from writing the great American novel.
Taxis aren't dying nearly fast enough in London
I refuse to use a black cab in London on principle. Their drivers fight against regulations limiting the maximum age of their cars, so filthy, worn-out diesel engines from 15 years ago are still polluting the city.
http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/black-cab-dr...
I understand that diesel engines and particulate emissions are a big problem in London at the moment but cabs are hardly going to be the worst offenders here.
A lot of public buses are now hybrid.
Buses, lorries and other commercial vehicles must comply with the "Low Emission Zone" or pay a hefty charge. Taxis are exempted from this.
All public buses are something like 6 years old or younger, but for taxis it's 15 years.
For other taxis the limit is 10 years: http://www.pcoworld.com/pco-vehicles/what-is-the-age-limit-a...
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/spread_of_ages_of_lon...
Even if we assumed that every engine put out the exact legal max from when it was built, that wouldn't exactly line up with age, and that's a terrible assumption to begin with.
In fact this policy actively discourages making an engine that's efficient enough to meet regulations 20 years down the line. Total waste of money.
Taxis/hire cars are exempted, so the only thing limiting their emissions is the fact that newer cars have been build to meet stricter standards. Black cabs are allowed to be older than other hire cars, so they were build to weaker standards. The age limit does not exist primarily for environmental reasons, but because standards increase it has the side effect of limiting how bad taxis are.
Incidentally, the screen Uber shows at startup with many vehicles near your current location has nothing to do with actual vehicle positions. That's just a screen saver.[1]