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Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

Could they be using the law as a pretext? Offering a service without an upfront price is shady. If Uber can get away with it, we know the market is not as competitive as we thought it is.

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Uber and Lyft both operated this way in the beginning, and switched to upfront pricing later, presumably after having enough data to make upfront pricing reliable. I still remember the outcry - people say it’s a tactic to bury surge pricing and implement price discrimination.

Guess you can’t please everybody :(

Yeah - I remember the claims about upfront pricing being bad / illegal etc.

I think they did upfront pricing because users preferred it - I certainly did.

But you can't do upfront pricing under CA law - the driver has to be able to earn whatever they earn from driving - if they take you on a long route now - they get the extra I think and you are charged the extra.

Well that’s good for the customer /s

Does the law say you can't do upfront pricing? Surely the company could just eat the difference in the situation you raise? To me this seems to be Uber's way of passing on any extra cost and risk to customers rather than risk any of their own skin.

The law prohibits upfront pricing unless the drivers are employees of uber.

The law requires you (the rider) to be the customer of the driver. So the pricing / payment between driver and rider need to be linked.

If you are a customer of uber transit services (instead of uber ride finding and safety platform) they can offer flat rate prices and eat difference, but the drivers then need to be employees.

>But you can't do upfront pricing under CA law - the driver has to be able to earn whatever they earn from driving

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.

In the rest of the world, and in CA before this change, drivers are paid per mile/time and riders pay an upfront price.

The only way this is possible is if Uber does absorb the risk for the rider's convenience. They will not be providing this service from now on because it strengthens their claim that the drivers are contractors.

For what it's worth, I agree that the drivers deserve more protection, and I also consider that it's impossible to envision Uber drivers as employees without totally destroying the whole concept.

The only solution that I can see to this problem is to improve the status of contractor for these people's health care to be covered at large.

Government is pretty bad in this country like in most other countries. I suspect it is because most good solutions are the product of balanced view-points, but politics and legislation is driven by public opinion, which is rarely balanced in its views.

I for one would happily pay, or at least like to have the option to pay, a risk-adjusted flat fare instead of by-mile. This change will absolutely tilt my default provider to lyft.

Its just nice as a customer to be able to know that a 40$ trip to the airport can't wind up being 140$ if the car gets stuck behind an accident on a bridge (or whatever). I'd much rather round it up to 42 - call it trip insurance. Uber must have enough data to be able to handicap their markets to within 5% or so, and still come out ahead.

There’s absolutely nothing in CA law preventing upfront pricing!

Uber can do upfront pricing if they accept that their drivers are employees and pay them by the hour. Eventually, they'll be forced to do this in California.

Yes, it felt like it was all to hide surge info from consumers.

Surge pricing gives the consumer insight into when they're being charged more. Many consumers reluctantly will pay a high price, but will not pay an "inflated" price.

It also allowed areas like sf to have continuous surges over weekends at low levels without consumers feeling like "uber is always surging".

Is it? There's no upfront pricing in the taxi industry. There is a set fare rate, but the fare is dependent on external conditions.

Many cities have a set rate for airport-to-downtown trips, and you may be able to negotiate one directly with the taxi driver for long or unusual trips.

For example: https://www.jfkairport.com/to-from-airport/taxi-car-and-van-...

> Taxis at JFK Airport charge a flat fare of $52 for trips between the airport and Manhattan. Taxis impose a $4.50 surcharge during peak hours (4-8 p.m. weekdays, excluding holidays), for a fare of $56.50.

Most people aren’t going to/from the airport.

That's one of the reason people hate taxis, and why people jumped to Uber instead. Who's to stop the driver from taking the long route, and how am I supposed to compare options if I don't know how much it will cost? Pull out a pocket calculator and a map?

> Offering a service without an upfront price is shady.

One of the many reasons Uber gained market share over taxis. I doubt they're using the law as a pretext.

This is not at all true. Uber only introduced upfront pricing at the end of 2017. Prior to that users were charged based on time and distance, the same way as taxis.

Which country/region was that in? I'm a late adopter of Uber (2015) in Canada and I have always seen the fixed rate price when requesting a ride.

with Uber at this point, why is anyone assuming they act in good faith?

Welcome to the United States where you find out the pricing for a medical service 6 months after receiving the service, then keep finding out about it for another year, random bill upon random bill.

This is how cabs work in many countries.

Presumably the rate chart of the cab is known. It's not a random number that springs on you months after the ride with no real logic other than 'this is how it be'.

That’s not what the flexible rate is either? You won’t pay for a ride 6 months after it, you’ll pay per mile, like Taxis

Except the driver has discretion to choose a path and it’s easy to take a longer route when the passenger is not a local. Likewise it’s easy for hospitals in the US to pad their charges arbitrarily (e.g. $50 for a Tylenol/Panadol tablet, a genuine example)

Many cities Taxis had upfront pricing. You just had to do the math yourself.

it would like something like 2.60 to enter the cab, 2.00 per mile, or 50c per minute thereafter.

https://www.seattle.gov/your-rights-as-a-customer/file-a-com...

Sad thing is, some people even get billed twice for the same service too and might not even be paying attention fully to notice either. Someone I know almost mistakenly paid twice because of a double billing error. Then I seen on a TV commercial, some college has an entire degree on medical coding and billing... Not sure why tech isn't being used to help, seems insane you have to go to college just to learn how to bill people properly and then probably still end up making mistakes.

They’ll most likely expand the model everywhere, while still blaming “regulation”. Then push the narrative that it’s better for the drivers. They need to turn a profit any way possible, and this is a good way to skim a couple dollars per ride. Local competitors in a lot of international markets never adopted flat pricing - in fact Uber itself isn’t flat-price in some markets (eg in my region of Brazil, and it’s not because there’s any regulation there). Uber is the new Taxi cartel. So it goes.

You know Uber started out as this and then switched to upfront pricing right?

Yes. They A/B tested and the flat fee model was more popular. The new directive is to increase margins, and the variable model is better at that.

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

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