Uber to suspend operations in Hungary due to govt legislation
reuters.com
reuters.com
They like to call it Disruptive Innovation or some other fancy term.
The problem with Uber is they think every country is the same and welcomes them. I under that might be the case with U.S, but it doesn't mean taxi system in every country is broken and they are welcomed to "fix it".
Uber moves all these responsibilities to the owner of the car, now you are your own business man you face the majority of risks and Uber still gets a big chunk of profit. Uber doesn't care about your maintenance costs.
Sometimes it works, often this encourages dangerous behavior to still have profits e.g. skipping maintenance, safe working times, vacation... Uber doesn't care that much about this. A lot of people work almost full time without enough compensation to warrant the stress.
Besides that European countries - at least the bigger cities - have often excellent public transport that is inexpensive and mostly works. Taxis supplement that and Uber is trying to compete on price there, something that abuses the drivers in the long run.
I hope Uber is kept out of Europe or is regulated to protect the drivers and users.
The are less likely to rip you off, easier to catch (just press a button), to keep a record on for reimbursements, to pay (by cc), etc.
In Germany all this is provided by regular taxi services.
Assuming I take an Uber, exactly what costs are paid for by someone other than myself, the driver and Uber?
It's not Uber who's providing the knowledge, but Google or whatever (freely available) mapping backend the drivers / Uber App use.
> requires maintenance of cars
Do they require it, or do they "require" it like proper insurance?
> Assuming I take an Uber, exactly what costs are paid for by someone other than myself, the driver and Uber?
The risk of uninsured driver getting himself (and you) in an accident in an improperly maintained car.
Secondary costs of disruption (the negative kind) of transportation market due to one player outcompeting other by acting illegally and getting away with it.
Destruction of provisions for those "worse off" in said market - i.e. it's fine if you're young and live in the middle of the city, but try getting an Uber as a grandma living on the outskirts. Drivers will refuse such unprofitable rides.
Weakening of social trust in rule of law as a successful business keeps being successful by ignoring the law and attracts copycat (you could say the authorities are to blame for not reacting swiftly enough, but then again you need a criminal doing crime to show inadequacy of the law).
Uber pays a significant amount of licensing fees to Google for use of it's data. Further - Why would making use of a freely available mapping backend be 'socializing the cost' in a way that is unfair competition to taxis?
Taxis refuse unprofitable rides. Uber hides your destination until the driver picks you up, and keeps track of drivers that cancel. Ever tried to get a taxi in the slums? Wasn't possible before Uber. Ever try to get a taxi as a black man? Was pretty hard. Uber is imperfect, and your questions of how good their insurance is are valid, but everything else you've pointed out is a problem that the Taxis had, generally worse, not one that is new to uber.
This is circular logic. Your only argument seems to be that uber may not actually require insurance. That may be true, but it's also easy to fix.
>try getting an Uber as a grandma living on the outskirts
Where I live (Warsaw), they just introduced a "leaving the city" fee, which means the drivers are incentivised to take those trips. And it still probably comes out about as much as a taxi.
This should be addressed regardless of Uber's existence. In Poland we have an Insurance Guarantee Fund (Ubezpieczeniowy Fundusz Gwarancyjny[1]), an institution which pays out judgements to people harmed by drivers without proper insurance.
[1] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubezpieczeniowy_Fundusz_Gwaran...
Yes, Uber does pay other third parties for services. That's not socializing the costs. Similarly, a bar paying Kingfisher to manufacture beer is not "socializing the costs" of providing me with entertainment.
Do they require it, or do they "require" it like proper insurance?
I've only used Uber across 3 separate continents, but I've never rode a poorly maintained Uber.
Also, even if they didn't, this isn't "socializing the costs". The cost of poor maintenance is born by the driver and the passenger.
Destruction of provisions for those "worse off" in said market - i.e. it's fine if you're young and live in the middle of the city, but try getting an Uber as a grandma living on the outskirts.
That's not "socializing the costs". At most, that's privatizing something that you would prefer to be surreptitiously socialized. Also, Uber makes it easier rather than harder for said Grandma to get a ride.
As for "Weakening of social trust in rule of law", many things do this. For example, black Americans and others violating unjust laws as part of civil disobedience has the same effect. Is protecting respect for the law truly an important value when the underlying law is unjust?
I don't know that that's the case. In other places, it seems to manage to be net good for the customers, good for society, and mostly only bad for existing taxi companies. But "people are using Uber" is far from sufficient evidence to say that taxis are crap.
(I'm providing context, not wishing to engage in political conversation)
I think Uber made a judgement call that the Hungarian government would likely enforce the laws rather harshly, and did not want to deal with the consequences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_border_barrier
[2] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/hungary
The taxi drivers who remained in business were in for the trade-off of investing into compliance with new regulation but making more money than before. So old school taxi was not simply lingering in its naturally backward state as in other countries, but there was an artificially fortified status quo.
In that situation, when value personal transfer reappeared with Uber, it was therefore even more sore for the taxi companies and drivers, who took their position and the protection of their investment granted by the state. So what happened is nothing else just the taxi maffia enforced this grant and the state complied. Both sticking to decisions that once made (no regard of consequences), and heavy state control is quite to the taste of the government -- thus they complied happily.
And once the government puts its weight into something, there is no question it's gonna happen. The only surprise element is that Uber resisted so far.
uber is just pirate taxi with nice website.
I believe they will prevail in the end.
I had a mild argument with my son about Uber (he is a fireman and a union guy). He thinks that Uber is really unfair to union taxi drivers who jump through some hoops to get licensed, etc. Besides wanting good service, I rate businesses like these on how much profit is captured by the person doing the work vs. the company that they work with. I don't have any data on this, so I am judging Uber based on the low cost of shared ride service and the general friendlyness of the drivers.
I have multiple problems with ridesharing services:
1) They foist the risk off onto the contractors while keeping all the profit themselves. They could have been a well-run national taxi company that serviced suburbs (and would have had STAUNCH defenders), but that won't get you unicorn valuations.
2) Most of them are using VC money to subsidize the ride costs. This is fine--until they run out of money. Then the cities will be left to pick up the pieces when suddenly there aren't enough taxi drivers anymore to service the demand. Uber and Lyft actually tried to use this as leverage in Austin to get their way politically. So, the threat is not theoretical. These companies are not trying to service the customer; they are trying to become the taxi monopoly.
3) Uber/Lyft/etc. drivers often don't comply with local laws surrounding carriage services. This includes licensing and insurance but also includes simple things like "Where in the airport am I allowed to pick someone up?" I have had a not-insignificant fraction of drivers who simply don't know where they are going--especially if "surge pricing" pulled them in from an area outside their usual haunts.
4) I have a problem with Uber, specifically. It seems like it's run by a bunch of nasty, rich, party boys and their treatment of people they regard as beneath them is absolutely disgusting.
I like the fact that the ridesharing services have forced most cities to start issuing more taxi permits. I like the fact that the ridesharing services function in the suburbs where taxis won't go(mostly--I have had some misses). I like the ridesharing services when they lobby for laws attempting to break the taxi monopolies.
So, my verdict is still out.
(Edited: I can haz English. Sheesh, my grammar is starting to suck.)
I certainly would agree that there are companies with leadership teams as you describe, so I'm not opposed to that notion. Just wondering about this specific case.
1) They had a big party a couple of years ago where they had a large display that showed where several famous tech people were at the very moment in Uber cars. They did this without notifying or getting permission from said people[0],[1].
2) They rented the building next to ours for training. We rent several parking spaces in the lot on the other side of our building from the city. They repeatedly parked in our reserved spots and told their drivers to park there even after repeatedly being told they were reserved (purchased by us) and not to park there. They would literally move their cars, wait 5 minutes, then move them back. During breaks they would stand in front of the door to our building smoking and acting surly as if to try to intimidate us. I don't know how high up the management chain our people went, but it was clear they weren't going to do anything about it. Eventually our neighbor kicked them out!
[0] http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/04/opinion/schneier-uber-privacy-... [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/god-view-under-spotlight-as-uber-in...!
3) True, but "hey, let's enforce the regs on the book" is a Pandora's box that most cabbies don't really want to open, because that would mean enforcing the ever-present laws about not rejecting people for having the wrong destination/race, not demanding more than the regulated fare, rejecting credit cards, etc.
Mostly agree on 2) and 4).
So they were forced to jump through ridiculous hoops, so should we force everyone to follow the same stupidity?
If anything, the solution is tear down these bureaucratic barriers and open up the competition for everyone. But you'll never see the taxis supporting this, because they know they'll lose, and would rather have their business propped up artificially using governmental force.
http://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/6471/2016-03-08/uber-ly...
And more to the point - from the story
Competition from Uber and Lyft is so fierce that New York cabbies are going out of their way to be polite, engaging in chatter with riders and being helpful with packages, luggage and giving extra care to senior citizens.
Trust me - that too is a difference.
(It turns out that "having an expensive final product" doesn't mean that every contributor's market value is expensive. Who knew? I mean, other than people familiar with the concept of economic incidence.)
Uber is a parasite and the "nice service" is the parasite's hook.
From http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-... :
> Here is the thing about Uber and Lyft (and much of the “sharing economy”).
> They don’t pay the cost of their capital.
> The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.
> These business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12086041
I have to assume this is just more of their petulance, given local events involving them. Uber and Lyft claimed that servicing Austin would be "impossible" given the horrific demands that their drivers submit to finger-printing and left, claiming all over the place that they were "kicked out."
We have several ride-hailing services that are somehow able to bear these truly onerous and unbearable regulations, and that's without 100 billion in SV funding.
So I would guess that Hungary didn't want to serve themselves up on a silver plate and Uber threw the usual fit.
Edit: To wit, appealing to the Texas legislature to overrule Austin's popular referendum.
This is made clear by the idea that a $60 billion dollar silicon valley company finds it "impossible" to create a seamless, frictionless method of obtaining fingerprints from drivers as part of their on-boarding process. It's ludicrous on its face. I'd be happy to do the project for just what they spent on the failed referendum in Austin.
Having predictable and uniform standards for Texas state-wide seems to make sense to me. Uber should be careful what they wish for, though, because the last quote I heard from one of the legislative committee chairman controlling such a bill was "as long as we get fingerprints I think it's a good thing."
Typically the problems are: a) surge pricing b) rates that do not follow the government set rates c) refusing service to certain customers d) no mandatory insurances e) do not accept cash payments in cars.
For example in Slovakia, the law states quite clearly, that if you provide road transportation for other people as a business, then if your car has more than 9 seats, you are operating a bus service, and if it has 9 or less, you are operating a taxi, and must follow all regulations applied to taxi drivers. But Uber says they are not a taxi, despite operating almost exactly like one. :-)
For example, we have other popular taxi service, which also has a smartphone app working very similarly to Uber, with the one exception, that they only accept professional taxi drivers as their drivers. So if they wanted, Uber could do the same and be perfectly legal, but they apparently don't want to.
I can't talk about Hungary but in Austria an uber driver could not be a licensed taxi driver or at least, it does not matter. However for sure an uber cannot be a taxi because uber has no chance to follow those regulations and restrictions without giving up their business model.
> For example in Slovakia, the law states quite clearly, that if you provide road transportation for other people as a business, then if your car has more than 9 seats, you are operating a bus service, and if it has 9 or less, you are operating a taxi, and must follow all regulations applied to taxi drivers.
That's not how it works in Austria and I'm sure that's not how it works in Hungary. In Austria there are two regulations: taxis and personal drivers. The latter is what uber currently follows. It's a car with a driver that cannot pick up customers from the street who are hailing and it must not be equipped with a taximeter.
> For example, we have other popular taxi service, which also has a smartphone app working very similarly to Uber, with the one exception, that they only accept professional taxi drivers as their drivers.
Uber is not just great because of the app but also because the drivers are rated, the customers are rated and with the surge pricing there is a chance to get a taxi when it's needed. Try getting a taxi in Vienna at rush hour. You can't, because nobody cares extra since you get just as much money there as you do normally but you are stuck in traffic, so there are fewer taxis on the road.
Uber/Lyft/Gett are very useful. Can't imagine why Hungary and Austin don't want them.
Because they operate in violation of local laws.
Maybe it is unusual because it's not common in other cities, but let's not pretend it's onerous. Austin really tried to work with Uber/Lyft on this, such as offering to pay for the fingerprinting or have mobile fingerprinting stations, and Uber/Lyft still didn't like the idea because it would likely mean that other cities would see it as an example. And it's also not fair to say that it's even effectively banned because it's a law that's not difficult to work within.
There is no reason except restraint of trade that Austin would need this fingerprinting when other larger and far more dangerous cities have done fine without it.
By asserting facially false facts (NYC does indeed require fingerprinting[1]), and then attributing malice ("no reason except trade restraint") to Austin's referendum results your reply violates that principle in my opinion.
It is not only taxi and public transportation laws around the country they "disturb"; I still receive spammy emails they continue to send, and even Sendgrid is fully in bed with them.
I forwarded spam to Sendgrid and they said they will follow up with Uber (so apparently they are Uber's customer support at this point - great!) The spamming practice never changed or stopped despite Sendgrid telling me they will send my email to them (!!) to unsubscribe me from their list, when I didn't even subscribe in the first place.
As I received more Uber spam I kept updating Sendgrid ticked (zendesk). Eventually some 2 weeks later they closed it as "resolved" and never replied to my emails again. I still get Uber Spam from Sendgrid. Stay away from them as long as you can (both Uber and Sendgrid)