Uber stops upfront ride pricing in response to California worker law

They can give you a quote but there's no telling if it's going to be accurate or not, as the final price is based on a meter for hail taxis in almost all locations within a defined area. When you get to your destination what you were quoted is irrelevant, you just have to pay the price. So what's the point in the quote?

On top of that, with all the tech specialists Uber hires, with all the complex tech they brag about, with all the data they suck in - and given that they know your starting point and your destination - how come that they can't include traffic in the price estimation? It's not like traffic jams materialize suddenly, out of nowhere, and disappear in the flash. With the data it has, Uber could tell in advance that your ride will be stuck in traffic, and price accordingly.

It’s just part of the company’s cost of doing business.

The poster didn't claim to be an American and even if they are American, there are lots of different opinions on what things are important to spend time on and not everyone agrees that it's following the news or reading up on various ways places structure their government.

In CA, there are also a fair number of propositions that are voted on by the general public. It would be interesting if there were some sort of mechanism through which a pending law could be put on hold until after a popular vote, say, if enough voter signatures were gathered within a certain timeframe.

If a driver is always paid x/minute/mile (total X), customer always pays Y dollars as made up by Uber. Uber takes U, 25% of Y, pays the driver X, where does the rest go if Y-U-X > 0?

How can this ever work without Uber sometimes taking a loss?

Variable pricing also doesn't mean the second - it simply limits the amount they take from it. They still have tools like minimum pricing. I'd even say minimum pricing would be more beneficial to drivers and wouldn't seem unreasonable to customers (of course, they might just choose to walk short distances).

What? Uber is getting payed for a transaction. How is 25% of a hundred dollar ride not more than 25% off a three dollar ride?

Uber costs are running the service - if drivers truly are contractors, then payment to drivers isn't a cost for uber?

OTOH, as a passenger, if the provider feels they are not comfortable driving me somewhere - do I really have the right to force them? I am not really much into forcing people to work for me if they don't want to do it. Would you as a services provider want to work in the area you don't feel safe in? I wouldn't.

The point is with this change it is no longer like “complaining to the customer service rep” it is now a whole lot more like “complaining to the independent contractor that his policy is exclusionary”, despite the fact that his contracting agency clearly wishes it weren’t, which is why they hid that information from the ‘contractor’ in the first place.

They’ve removed the “acceptance rate” metric for drivers. There’s no longer a penalty for declining rides for drivers in California.

https://www.uber.com/blog/california/keeping-you-in-the-driv...

The advantage is that since drivers know where a passenger is going before accepting, riders can be assured that the driver wants to take them to the destination they have set.

No more waiting for the driver to arrive to hear they are declining a super long distance trip; they won’t even know they’ve been declined even multiple times.

If it takes one longer to get a rides’ information with Uber, take a look at their rating. Indeed, It is becoming more important.

Try to keep an Uber rating sharp. I’m likely to accept a 4.86 score for $4-6 fare, decline a 4.63 for a $25-30 trip.

>There is no commonly accepted modern definition of feudalism, at least among scholars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

They have very little control over their lives and work, Uber does not let them set prices and they arent making enough money to go retire early. I refer to them as serfs in that they have to answer to Uber with no actual negotiating power on their own.

Edit:

On top of that, I'm not coming into this thinking that this is whats best for all those people in their current situation. This is what I think is best for my society and country. I do not want companies to be able to push off large costs of doing business to their employees by just calling them contractors. I don't think this is good for _me_ in general and so I would support laws like this

The minimum wage in California (the subject of the OP) for companies with more than 25 employees is $13.00. I know you were trying to be conservative in your estimate and I don't know if that $10-20 range you're referencing is for California, the USA, or all Uber drivers. Maybe the real average is higher than that, but it's wrong to present $10-12 as a "perfectly normal" wage for workers in California.

For the 10-minute ride in your example, the upper and lower ranges aren't going to be very far apart.

If you didn't really need that uber, you get back to walking, biking, or busing. Or decide not to take the trip.

That can't be the whole story. Surely the artificial restriction of supply (taxi medallions, etc) must contribute to a higher cost.

"It has to make profits because market forces"

Article is about California passing law that effectively restricts supply

Which is it??? Is the free market mandating the price hike, or are price hikes due to regulation?

That isn't at all the same thing as being unsustainable, because people typically have cars whether or not they drive for Uber. Depreciation comes from both miles and vehicle age, but in general more of it comes from vehicle age. It doesn't matter if the rates can cover the portion of the depreciation attributable to vehicle age because it's not an avoidable cost; you pay it either way.

Critics also like to do these calculations using "average" vehicles and so on, but people aren't stupid. If you're making a living from driving then you buy a car that gets above average mileage and below average maintenance costs. The fact that you can't make a living doing it in a pickup truck is pretty irrelevant when the people doing it are driving hybrid sedans.

The average numbers also get brought down by the people doing it on the side. Some people drive to work every morning and will take a couple of passengers who are going in the same direction. Those people have close to zero incremental costs; they don't have to recover anything. Meanwhile the people doing it full time aren't taking whatever rides they can get at whatever rates they can get along their existing commute, they're working in the places and times that give the best rates, so they need to make more than the part timer but they also do make more.

The whole thing is in balance. If people aren't making enough money to sustain themselves then sooner or later they figure that out and they quit, which makes the price go up because there is less competition. If the price is high enough to be attractive to people then more people start driving and it comes down some. You reach an equilibrium.

Who should we trust to make the calculation on whether it is a fair price for a "human" ? - 1 blogger with potentially an axe to grind - miilions of people who vokuntarily drive their cars and make money in the process

Which is it?

Hint: actions speak louder than words

That's...not how law works. The law doesn't adopt a different meaning in litigation than it has in administrative application; when the Court adopts an interpretration/operationalization of the law (which is what adopting a “test for use in litigation” is), it defines what the law is. That's true in general in common law systems, and it's certainly true in specific in that administrative application if California State Law is controlled by how that law has been interpreted by the State Supreme Court.

As far as market mechanics in healthcare, Singapore has the closest thing to market mechanics in healthcare (albeit heavily subsidized and regulated): https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/25/15356118/s...

> What Singapore shows is that unusual fusions of conservative and liberal ideas in health care really are possible. Singapore is a place where the government acts to keep costs low and then uses those low costs to make a market-driven insurance system possible.

This is a problem that could in principle be solved using price transparency. Most medical procedures are scheduled ahead of time. Emergency services are a small percentage of overall healthcare costs and there is no need to treat everything else the same way.

> Furthermore the entire concept of "price" falls apart when talking about the fundamentally priceless nature of human life.

The high value of the product doesn't break anything as long as there is adequate competition. You die without water but that doesn't mean Evian can charge a million dollars for a bottle.

> The conservative viewpoint is woefully ignorant of the reality of healthcare and the success of socialized medicine almost everywhere it has been implemented, or at least superior quality and lower price to that available to the prototypical American citizen.

Most socialized systems around the world are piggybacking on all the R&D done in the US and paid for by the huge US market paying high prices. We obviously can't do the same thing to ourselves to get lower prices. And outcomes in the US for people who actually have health insurance (i.e. the large majority) are better than they are almost anywhere else in the world.

I think the two parts of this statement can be decoupled. Couldn't Uber feasibly keep fixed upfront pricing on the customer side but provide variable payouts to drivers to be compliant with the law? They probably wouldn't do this because it exposes them to risk on every ride (i.e. they might undercharge for the ride and have to pay up to the driver anyway) but the law is not directly forcing them to provide a worse experience - they're doing that by passing the risk to customers.

I can’t name sources, but it should be pretty evident just based on the new CEO public messages by now?