Jeremy Corbyn: Imagine an Uber run co-operatively by their drivers
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The next morning I get a call from a rather rude operator - just minutes before they were scheduled to pick me up - telling me that I haven't paid the full amount for the ride. I told them that I booked using their website and paid online with PayPal. He replied that he doesn't know why the website didn't show the correct amount but if I don't pay an additional £30 to the driver they won't give me a ride. I agreed because I just wanted to get to the airport asap and not deal with finding another company.
The lesson I learned here was: I don't trust minicab companies to be able to deal with the tech behind something like Uber. Of course, this was just one bad experience with a single company but it did leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Capitalism has plenty of problems, but let's not pretend it doesn't have advantages too.
It's frankly a bit concerning that Corbyn doesn't realise this.
This is, btw., how coops work all the time. People form a coop that does something. Raiffeisen in germany started as a farmers cooperative, Rewe started as a cooperative of food stores, the various Coop supermarket chains (Italy, Switzerland, ...) started or are still organized as cooperative. There’s no particular reason the drivers could not band together and form a Taxi cooperative that develops and maintains an app. All it takes is the will to organize.
It was always kind of fascinating to me that other industries did not try to apply the concept of open-source more widely to different problems, despite the clear benefits it has shown in software.
From the outside, it looks like few other industries are willing to sink in the time/effort for the benefit of the community as a whole, with no clear, short-term financial incentive for doing so.
[1] - http://libretaxi.org
But it's obviously risky and someone has to bear the risk, without investors, you can't really do that. Uber didn't bootstrap their own business, they got millions of dollars from big shots from the Silicon Valley to get started. Individual cabs can't do that.
There were plenty of ride hailing apps before Uber all of them sorta failed becuase of bad tech, business model or both.
Uber made it with millions if not billions of funding and sure now it’s more easy to copy since the model and the tech is better understood but that’s just it it too capitalism to refine the model and now they want to effectively socialize it. This might sound cool but in reality it won’t work since this is a chicken and the egg problem and while you can socialize the chicken some one had to design the hen and optimize it before hand.
Taxi unions had no intention to take the risks Uber did despite likely having just as much access to funds with 40-50,000 cab drivers each could’ve easily funded a mini Uber with a few 100s to a few 1000s £s over several years but they chose not too.
Im pretty sure their plan from was to build a large enough user base to be in a leading position to switch to robotaxis as soon as they are available and I think that’s what many of their backers are funding.
With robotaxis being likely about 5 year or so from being approved in major metropolitan areas without any shenanigans from the cab cartels Uber can afford to bleed money until then and then just switch.
Audi is releasing L4 cars in Europe this year which will allow you to take the back seat during traffic.
While I don’t think anyone will be releasing L5 before 2020 I wouldn’t bet against that for a 2022-2023 time frame.
Don’t get me wrong I dislike Uber and AirB&B with passion for their predatory practices but I also don’t like cartels the cab and car hire companies in London had a decade to get their shit together when the ride hailing apps / websites began popping up in the late 2000s and in all honesty they only turned worse.
NVIDIA is set to deliver their L5 platform in mid 2018, they have the automotive safety certification and compute power (300> TOPs of int8 inference) to meet expected L5 requirements.
And they aren’t alone in this game.
Beyond this it’s a legal issue once a precedent will be set however I think it will open the flood gates.
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/business-and-commercial/innovati...
It's been widely reported that its mature markets are already profitable, which means that it's not cheap because of VC dollars. The VC dollars are only being used to supplement growth into new immature markets. The profitable markets are also being used for the same purpose. Enough markets should be mature enough for Uber to be profitable by sometime in mid to late 2018 at the rate they've been reducing their losses relative to gross bookings.
That's a problem you see again and again, I think. No matter what your intentions, it's incredibly difficult to compete when a company with huge pockets comes to town and subsidises rides.
This is a great example of capitalism not being able to generate the best solution. In an alternate universe there would be a regulated exchange with ~0 cut of the profits, instead making sure drivers get the money since they're doing most of the work. Uber does handle pricing, but even then it has "cheated" to get a bigger slice of the pie.
Imagine the NYSE taking even 5% of trades.
Of course they could. All the regulations you mentioned are only there because the Taxi companies lobbied hard for them. Had they lobbied half as hard to have the regulations loosened they could have gotten any regulations they wanted. The taxi companies bet big on using regulation to entrench their position and avoid competition rather than on improving their product. History will tell if it was a good bet or not, but so far it isn't looking too good.
In reality, modern taxi regulations date back to the 1930s, when the prevailing view was that consumer protection was best served by a combination of limiting competition and government price regulation. This was all happening at around the same time as the government rate-regulated other transportation industries: busses, freight trucking, and airlines.
I think where a co-op would fail is that it would have to charge higher prices as the drivers wouldn't want to sustain (and pay for) losses for many years. If the co-op owned company charged 20-80% more than Uber, but offered drivers ownership and/or other benefits, would it bleed enough drivers from Uber or would enough drivers stick with Uber that it would be a viable and cheaper alternative for riders?
This isn't a new idea. Juno planned to have drivers own 50% of equity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(company)) and someone tried to create a driver-owned Uber named Swift (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/swift-uber-lyft-driver-app/). However, given the costs associated with effectively competing are high - especially as Uber subsidizes rides.
In the long run, there won't be drivers and Uber has mentioned a bleak future for its company if it doesn't get to driver-less cars sooner rather than later. A solution with drivers won't compete against a driver-less solution regardless of ownership.
Even in the medium term where Uber will be using drivers, they have a large pile of money to use as a weapon against alternatives - and there are more driver-focused alternatives. Fasten has launched in two cities and takes $1 per ride rather than 20-30% of the fare. But Uber has a lot of money to encourage riders to use Uber and encourage drivers they might worry about switching.
Corbyn is taking the attitude that a company like Uber is making all the money while the workers aren't getting their fair share. But Uber isn't profitable and it's unclear how much of that is expansion into new markets and how much of that is the marketing and subsidies needed to keep the business rolling in current markets. Would ridership decline significantly with 20% higher fares? Would you be able to retain enough drivers without the constant marketing to get new drivers? Uber launched in 2009 during the peak in unemployment. Today, unemployment is near all-time lows which makes recruiting and retaining drivers much more challenging.
Ultimately, a driver-owned co-op sounds great, but where would the money come from? Would drivers be willing to take home less for share of the company? Would riders be willing to pay more knowing that it was a "good" company?
I understand your questions are probably rhetorical, but
> Ultimately, a driver-owned co-op sounds great, but where would the money come from?
I could imagine banks and governments being interested in funding a good proposal.
> Would drivers be willing to take home less for share of the company?
I’m not sure if they would need to take home less. But, being a driver is a more enterprising job than you might imagine. Most drivers work for themselves, and commonly minicab companies in London are put together by (ex) drivers clubbing together. Even drivers who have only worked for Uber have to think relatively in a relatively entrepreneurial fashion to make it work for them.
> Would riders be willing to pay more knowing that it was a "good" company?
If the rest of the consumer-facing economy is anything to go by, the answer is quite possibly yes.
Organic food, fair trade, paying a premium for domestic manufacture etc. are all doing rather well (though of course, cheap stuff made by monopolies will do better).
I think a large part of the reason Lyft exist (also VC funded and subsidized!) is that they’re less toxic than Uber, and pay drivers slightly more.
Also, what would happen to bad drivers on the system, would they get fired like Uber fires them? What if a ride is in a spot they don’t want to go to, what happens if they don’t go? What happens when a driver takes a bad route for extra fare? What happens if they get told their car smells bad or is unsafe or they’re driving aggressively or are using the phone to talk to some random person during the trip?
The first time I got in an Uber the driver gave me candy and a bottle of water, charged my phone. Will the taxi co op do that?
Uber is so much more than just an app to order a taxi. It created a new economy with new incentives around ride sharing. It’s not just better because it’s an app, and it’s not just better because it’s private. It also forces drivers to do things taxis don’t want to when it’s netter for the customer.
Does anyone seriously think a co-operative Uber would be able to compete with Uber without making Uber illegal?
Is that really the desired end game? Everyone being micro-optimied under threats of losing their jobs, like Wal-Mart and Amazon employees?
You're talking as if this were some bizarre new thought-experiment that no-one's properly thought through. Co-operative supermarkets exist. Co-operative department stores exist. Bad employees at Waitrose can get fired like at any other supermarket (though obviously they're generally better treated than at privately-owned ones).
You seem to be imagining a cooperative as a collection of free agents who have complete autonomy and can never be fired. That model probably exists, but that's not what people typically mean when they talk about cooperatives, especially in the context of the UK, as the politician in the OP is.
What they mean is a structure like the John Lewis Partnership (which has been around since 1929), wholly owned by a trust whose employees are its beneficiaries. Which means any profits are distributed among its employees, who also get a say in the running of the business. But it's still a limited company, so it's still run by its executive team (albeit one which is ultimately accountable to the employees), and risk, losses etc. all work as normal for a limited company.
Successful large co-ops often allow customers to become members. When done right, it’s like a bonus system on steroids. There’s no reason why this would not work for an Uber competitor. As a rider, I would feel comfortable in a system where both I and the driver are owners of a co-op.
The collective, which will be set up as a coop, and have assets, etc?
>Also, what would happen to bad drivers on the system, would they get fired like Uber fires them? What if a ride is in a spot they don’t want to go to, what happens if they don’t go? What happens when a driver takes a bad route for extra fare? What happens if they get told their car smells bad or is unsafe or they’re driving aggressively or are using the phone to talk to some random person during the trip?
All those things happen under Uber as well. Also, by which mechanism would those be more difficult to handle in co-op? It's not like co-ops don't have rules.
>The first time I got in an Uber the driver gave me candy and a bottle of water, charged my phone. Will the taxi co op do that?
If they want to superficially charm the customer, I don't see why not.
>Does anyone seriously think a co-operative Uber would be able to compete with Uber without making Uber illegal?
Sure -- there are some huge co-ops out there competing just fine with traditional businesses.
(Though Uber should be made illegal anyway).
All said, I do believe that ride sharing transportation should be treated like a utility with some regulations to ensure fairness; but this is not the time. This is the growth phase of the industry. Any regulations at this time will just slow them down and hurt society at large.
I'm picturing this service being unique per region, so the co-opers are all locals who grok their region.
Give the drivers these data and they will naturally find balance. They're intelligent people who are motivated by efficiency. You just need an organizational core to supply the right data and infrastructure.
I feel frustrated by this idea that we need to replace the best source of wisdom we have: our drivers, with expensive technologies. It makes a simple problem complex. Feels like silicon valley is putting my juice in a bag to squeeze.
Any regulations? Can you explain what you mean by reducing fairness to help society at large?
I am thinking of regulations like better employee protection, more benefits, constraint on margins, forcing use of environmentally friendly cars, etc.,
Taxi drivers had years to do what uber did. They didn't, they were often horrible - all manner of dirty tricks to keep prices artificially high whilst sneering at customers who didn't go on a long enough journey. You'd book a Minicab and be told they're '2 minutes away' and still find yourself waiting after 30 minutes.
Co-operatives can be trusted to look after their own interests - to an extent that might even pass the definition of racketeering. They can't be relied upon to make a compelling proposition to customers.
Not saying private companies like uber are the answer either, but it's hard to judge which is worse.
Owned by the drivers. Has about 1/2 the traditional taxi drivers in Austin after launching which Uber/Lyft left.
They were trying to get an app built but without the deep pockets of the VCs they appear to have abandoned it. You call them and they dispatch. I miss the payment side more than the ordering side but I only use them to go to the airport of it isn't really the core case where Uber/Lyft excels.
There is a sense of pride and ownership among the drivers. Feels better than both Uber/Lyft and other taxi companies. Doesn't have that desperate feel about it.
Co-Ops do work. They have a different set of owners and thus a different set of incentives.
I co-own a cooperative grocery store with about 17,000 others; we do about $50MM in revenue annually. We are all owners / workers / shoppers.
That being said, there is zero guarantee collective ownership would lead to better behaved company. Collective ownership can be quite ugly.
Imagine a Black Cab driver willing to drive further than an imaginary 1.5 mile radius around Paddington*
*Airports and Cannary Wharf excluded.
Stallman's initial realisation was a reaction to crony capitalism: he could not modify the printer due to IP rules. Essentially, a deal is done between government and big business (the manufacturer and possibly the university), at the expense of hackers (individuals).
The justifications for copyright are rooted in common-good arguments. The state limits individual freedom, claiming that it should because of (undemonstrated) common-good advantages. Hayek explores this, and takes a position against IP in _The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism_.
A better political analogy for free software is a conflict from early US history: between landowner and state rights advocates (Jefferson) vs big-business visions (Hamilton).
1. A government regulating a market is one thing while a company regulating a market is yet another thing.
2. As Stallman puts it: "We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility."