Uber is a tinder box
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Lots of those platforms have a simple business model: Outsource the risk to individual partakers, with that, lowers the price for consumers, but market it as"disrupting".
As long as the individuals to whom the risk is deferred to, are either locked in, or can cover their risks easy enough, there is no problem.
In this, Uber seems to be really pushing the envolope on the amount of risk they can externalize, before their individual risk-takers form a union or walk away.
I think this is why.
Hard to say. Uber seems to employ large numbers of extremely expensive silicon valley engineers doing god-knows-what. Maybe those are necessary to run a successful ride dispatching app?
On the other hand, groups like Lyft, Ride Austin, and Curb seem to have cloned Uber's main app.
A driver can easily switch to Lyft (many already drive for both Uber and Lyft), or to whatever new platform comes along tomorrow and offers better terms to the driver than Uber does.
Realistically, I could see a MVP-grade ordering/dispatch/registration/billing/accounting platform costing well less than a million dollars.
Hell, open source it and each community's drivers can spin up its own locally-owned Lyft/Uber clone. It makes sense as a geographical natural monopoly, and building at that level may avoid some scale-to-infinity technical problems. The New York co-op can build clever features and share them with Chicago without worrying that undermines their viability.
This is the same talking point people use when arguing against raising wages for retail or fast food workers.
Reality shows that, like retail jobs, gig economy jobs are many Americans' bread and butter. Pandora's box has already been opened.
> Also if the price went up much people wouldn't pay for it anymore.
Doubt it. Investor money allows gig economy companies to undercut their competition. Five years ago I could get across town for $5 via Uber or Lyft. Now, the costs average to about $18 for the same trip. I doubt that my driver's compensation more than tripled during that time like my trip's cost did.
There's plenty of room for gig economy workers to increase their pay. Companies that take poverty-level pay for their workers as a given, like Uber, might not survive, but other players will pop up in that space to eat their lunch.
Why do so many people always default to "the government will fix it" instead of expecting people to take responsibility for themselves?
Everyone has the same 168 hours each week. Even with 12 hour days, 8 hours of sleep, 3 hours for meals, 7 days a week, that still leaves 21 hours to do things to change your circumstances. You only need to keep that up long enough to get into better circumstances that buy you more time.
I worked a few years under similar circumstances. It's totally doable, but you have to plan and have to budget your time.
Also, you need the ability to plan and budget your time. These are real skills, and if you don't have them, nobody's going to teach you, so you're also out of luck there.
community > government
The drivers certainly deserve better, however, I think the toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to what consumers expect and are willing to pay.
At some point their chickens will come home to roost. If you take a price that's too low and multiply it by tremendous numbers of units sold, way more than the competition even, you [still end up with not enough money][0].
It's better to have an Uber idling at some corner than a traditional taxi driving furiously while trying to find a new ride.
That's what the Uber drivers do in the cities I have lived or visited.
Taxi drivers are the most aggressive and dangerous drivers ever. Almost all crashes I have seen involve one or two taxis.
You can't ignore that externality when discussing the only alternative to taxis we have now.
Even if the cars are fully electric, they're still dangerous as you point out (until the time they become fully self-driving). So it's best to eliminate as many of them as possible. And a simple tool to do so is to increase taxes on all for-hire vehicle rides, thus targeting taxis and rideshares equally.
It also requires to rebuild some cities, something that is way too expensive.
With that in mind, revisit page 8 of uber's S1 document(link below), where their momentum towards profitability depends of a circle of arrows where
more drivers/driver availability → lower fares/wait times → more riders → more driver opportunity/earning potential → more drivers
Now just turn the arrows backwards and swap out less/more lower/higher ; if something like unionization occurs that's the path through which uber will (according to their own rubric) spiral down to 0.
The only way they could prevent hemorrhaging drivers and users once that spiral started would be to burn through VC money at a faster rate.
S1 document - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...
If you can't pay your first world employees a first world living wage, Bye Felica.
Can we also complain about Mechanical Turk? I'd like to earn first-world wages classifying pictures of cats full-time.
Neither scenario is what the gig economy is supposed to be about. If a job doesn't pay sustainably, don't do it.
We tried to regulate taxis such that driving one paid wages on par with costs of living, but then some asshole company undermined that with a populist smartphone app.
EDIT: I do see the problem, and still believe regulation is the answer (in this case, California legislation [1]).
"If signed into law, the legislation will codify a landmark April 2018 California Supreme Court ruling, which introduced a three-part test to determine which workers businesses can reasonably classify as independent contractors and which must be treated as genuine employees. Workers considered employees are entitled to key labor protections and benefits—such as a minimum wage, overtime pay, and protections under antidiscrimination laws—which many gig-economy companies have long resisted."
This will decapitate gig economy companies in California.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/california-lawmakers-move-protec...
We had a regulated industry. Its labor force had collective bargaining power. Its labor pool was capped to limit surplus labor and everyone could get paid fairly.
Uber came along, organized a bunch of scabs willing to work for pennies to undermine all that, devalued the labor the existing industry provided and now those scabs are complaining they're not paid enough.
Do you not see the problem with this?
One negative outcome of that particular regulation will be the games that start getting played to beat around that three-part test, like Walmart delegating hours just a few short of qualifying employees for benefits. We've seen this play out before and I have my doubts about its effectiveness.
I had a couple passengers who'd tried their hands at taxi driving and couldn't make money. It takes a while to figure out the ropes, where to go for the big fares that pay the bills, etc. Being able to deal with problematic people is a challenge too.
> It simply isn't worth much;
Except when you have somewhere you need to go, and no vehicle to get you there. Having someone to drive you home from the bar is invaluable when you're wasted.
> certainly not what its full-time drivers are demanding.
Economic cancer has many symptoms.
App-based dispatch simplifies driving people around for money. It also hides the cost of driving. If people don't keep track of their mileage and expenses, app drivers are probably losing their shirts on their vehicles' depreciation. The taxi company kept most of its vehicles on the road for 400,000 miles. I doubt many ride-share vehicles will make it past 200,000, as parts on cars are always breaking, and it's expensive to pay someone full shop rates ($75+/hour) to fix it for you. Our crew of 3-4 drivers put 100,000+ miles a year on the taxi we shared. That cab had a head gasket replaced, a battery pack, and a used engine was transplanted when the head gasket failed again. It was totaled in an accident at around 475,000 miles (this was after I had to quit), soon after the owner had paid it off.
I wasn't the best at maximizing my income because I was more interested in people and their stories than the bottom line. I made enough to pay my rent and keep afloat, even after the vulture capitalists arrived with their "not-a-taxi" service.
> We tried to regulate taxis such that driving one paid wages on par with costs of living,
Arizona's regulations are for safety (background checks for drivers, basic vehicle maintenance, etc) and consumer protection (calibrated taxi meters).
> but then some asshole company undermined that with a populist smartphone app.
populist subsidized smartphone app.
If the only problem you have with this is that this exposes modern slavery in your back yard then you have a problem.
I highly encourage workers in third world countries to unionize and fight for a living wage locally through activism and political engagement.
That's what needs to happen if Uber is to actually generate a profit instead of burning through other people's money.
They lose money on every ride; they're MoviePass, except they can hang on by dangling the pipe dream of "self-driving" transport in front of investors. A glittering future where they don't have to bother with pesky humans asking for due process when they're dismissed.
However, I suspect a lot of the users of these services are pretty price sensitive, both encouraging a race to the bottom for pricing among the services and leading people to drop them entirely if pricing is too high. And once they're considered more of a luxury service, the supply/demand may well drop to the point where a lot of areas with sufficient density today no longer have.
That said, at least for my travel, I mostly rent when I want the flexibility of renting a car or Uber/Lyft just isn't practical, not based on which is cheapest. And I take ride-share/cabs/private car when rental is inconvenient and doesn't buy me anything. (e.g. just going from airport into a city).
It's hard from the outside to say about price sensitivity (although I'm sure Uber and Lyft have run lots of experiments). Personally, I take Uber, Lyft, taxis, or a private car (or a rental car, public transit etc.) mostly based on what's most convenient to me. But this is predominantly just business travel. I'm sure many daily users have a different calculus.
But there's also the fact that, if Uber doubles their prices tomorrow and Lyft doesn't, a lot of people will presumably shift to the cheaper ride especially given that most of the drivers are the same. (Of course, Lyft could follow suit. At which point, they probably get accused of price fixing.)
I've had a couple friends of the family I've been watching on similar paths. It's not like they're "handing their money over to scammers" or anything catastrophically stupid, but they make a kinda bad decision, then compound it with some other kinda bad decisions about what jobs to take, and then make some more kinda bad decisions, and before you know it, they're losing their house and declaring bankruptcy. The tears might not just be about this particular thing, but the increasingly undeniable recognition they're on a snowball's path down a slope they've done everything in their power to make avalanche-prone.
The people I know aren't screwing up by thinking they can make lots of money by being Uber drivers without running the math for themselves (that is, it may work for some people but you really have to run the math and be sure before doing it), but it's the sort of thing that would fit right in to their life story right now.
Unfortunately, it looks like few other people will see this on HN -- it's already flagged to the second page even though it should easily be the #1 post right now.