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Comment by cookingrobot | Hacker News Reader

Some of that seems right, but I don’t agree with the Uber example. Ride sharing has been a much more convenient and reliable service than taxis, and with less fraud (broken meters or credit card machines) and less discrimination (actually willing to drive me to the neighborhood I want). And with Uber I have a record of who drove me where. This seems pretty different from being picked up by a random person on the street. I haven’t used Upwork etc, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a similar experience.

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problem with uber from a customer perspective is if you are a single woman taking a ride, the drivers are not full time cab employees that can possibly be fired/lose their cab medallion/permits. some women i know are considering switching to licensed cabs due to the harassment they get from uber drivers with no good mechanism to report and avoid those drivers aside from never traveling alone. as a guy, i've only had good experiences (except for the opaque surge pricing which always feels extortionate)

> as a guy, i've only had good experiences (except for the opaque surge pricing which always feels extortionate)

Totally off the main topic here, but I'm also a guy and I've had one ride that was a little hair-raising. I wasn't harassed, mind.

I was riding with two girls (downtown Toronto) in an Uber and the driver was clearly on speed. He was extremely chatty, actually quite friendly, but very frantic. Took many last-second turns, wrong way down one-way streets and driving over curbs to get out of the way of cars on said one-way streets. It was nuts.

That said, all other rides I've had have been just fine. Often better than my experiences with Toronto cabs. There's no cash benefit for them taking the "scenic route" or "making wrong turns" which I've had less-scrupulous cabbies do to drive up the fare. That's a feature I appreciate. But I just make myself deal with transit since removing the app— their privacy measures didn't instill much confidence in me.

FWIW, in the market where I drove, it was very common for taxi drivers who were so bad they lost their taxi jobs (think about that) to just turn around and drive for Uber.

That's a thought that had never occurred to me. Seems like a massive oversight.

If the drivers are in any way even possibly breaking the law, then the riders could go to the police. If the drivers were acting in a completely lawful, but undesirable, way then the riders could give the drivers a low rating. It is very safe to assume that the servers of Uber (and all other ride sharing services) work to opaquely disconnect passengers and drivers when either party has given the other a low rating. It's a good and obvious idea on all levels, including even just optimizing for max profit.

Personally I love Uber and avoid taxis as much as possible. The worst Uber ride was still far better than the best taxi I've taken. A driver might be chatty and you have a great conversation, or they just stay quiet. Either ways a much better experience than the angry cab driver.

I was a little shocked when Uber sent me my stats for last year 1000+ rides.

I've noticed that Uber drivers tend to drive much slower and more cautiously than taxi drivers, and break traffic laws far less often. As a result when I really need to get somewhere quickly I do tend to look for a taxi first.

Question, are Uber drivers penalized for speeding or hard cornering, stopping, etc. that would indicate aggressive driving? I would assume Uber could know this based on GPS and accelerometer readings from the driver's app.

I am highly doubtful. Uber GPS is terrible in general so I'm guessing they don't have that level of granularity. Plus what do you define as aggressive driving? It can vary depending on traffic flow and patterns of the area.

Personally I would say it is a mix. There are some Uber drivers that definitely can be a bit more aggressive but still safe. I suppose it depends on the area/time of day but I'll walk past the line of taxis to get an Uber. If it takes 2 minutes longer to get to my destination, the experience is much better. Hell there have been a few times I wanted the trip to take longer because of the pleasant and engaging conversation.

One pattern I've noticed, taxis honk their horn constantly and obnoxiously. Uber drivers rarely do it. When you hear someone honking their horn for upwards of ten straight seconds, it's a taxi.

This has also been my experience. I think a meta here is that the vast majority of cab drivers don't, and can't, own their cab. Medallion cabs, for instance, are sold based on bids and have gone for upwards of $2 million and as "low" as around $500k. And in some places they have government granted monopolies meaning playing this game is the only way to drive a cab.

So most drivers rent their taxi, often by the day. And since fares are front-loaded (you earn a lot more picking up 100 people for 5 miles, than 1 person for 500 miles) it creates an incentive for taxi drivers to go crazy. Granted that same pressure is ostensibly there for Uber drivers, but I think it's different when your car is your car rather than a temporary asset you just dropped a fair chunk of change to rent for a single day.

Somehow transportation, world wide, always ends up in these sort of scummy monopolistic rackets.

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