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Comment by blendergeek | Hacker News Reader

I am an Uber Driver. I have been wanting changes like this ever since I started driving. I saw people asking, 'how does this make drivers less employee like?' I'll tell you this. It makes us feel less like employees when we actually have enough information to choose whether or not we want to take a ride. Now we will be able to see the estimated fare before we take a specific ride. There will be no more driving 20 minutes to a ride only to discover that it will be a half mile ride that wastes another twenty minutes at a convenience store netting us $3 for 40 minutes of our time. I will simply skip any ride like that. We feel less like employees and more like the contractors we are supposed to be when we know why Uber gets a certain percentage of the fare. I wholeheartedly agree with the changes Uber is making.

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I don't really understand. It sounds great that the drivers would have enough information to decide whether to take a ride or not, but what does this have to do with stopping upfront pricing? In my ideal world, the driver knows everything about the proposed ride, and the rider knows the exact cost of it. Why is that not possible?

The change to variable priced rides is because the 'cut' of the fare that Uber takes has been standardized to 25% while driver pay remains based on time and mileage.

Giving drivers information about upcoming rides is a separate change.

How does that work?

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 payout means some form of fare bidding on driver side, as drivers can reject rides that are too low.

On top of that, they are capping their commission to 25%, meaning that they can't use more profitable rides to offset losses from less profitable ones.

Those two factors combined, means Uber cannot offer fixed pricing upfront without incurring loss.

Can one not simply show the driver the price and let them reject if too low? I don't think variable payout is the thing that lets drivers see the price and reject. Besides, if too many drivers are rejecting rides because of pricing, it would allow Uber to set higher minimum pricing and/or wait times.

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).

> of course, they might just choose to walk short distances

Walk or choose a competing service. Both seem hardly acceptable, if you want to be the default go-to option to capture the market.

> On top of that, they are capping their commission to 25%, meaning that they can't use more profitable rides to offset losses from less profitable ones.

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?

Because the driver doesn't know about unforseen factors such as traffic that change in real time during the ride to the pickup point. We do not live in an ideal world.

Uber didn't invent upfront pricing. If you pass the cost of traffic onto the customer then drivers will drive in traffic on purpose and rinse the riders.

So you give them a zero star rating and move on.

That might make you feel better but it's not going to get you to your destination faster.

Or get your wasted money back.

I had no idea Uber drivers can't see the destination before taking rides. You as a passenger certainly commit to the target before you order, so I thought the driver can see it too. Certainly makes sense to me for it to be this way, especially given it's not supposed to be employment relationship. If we're to agree with the driver on a contract, and Uber is just facilitating, then both sides of the contract should have full information about what the contract is about.

This sounds great until you get redlining.

Redlining is pretty easy to see in the data - Uber records everything. And, of course, by-source redlining is already possible - so hiding destination doesn't really solve it. And if Uber wanted, they could use the data they have to solve it.

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.

I've used Uber in various countries over the years and redlining is a huge problem they had to tackle. It was very common for drivers in Asia to call up a customer and ask for their destination and force them to cancel if they didn't feel like it. If you didn't, they report you as no show which would auto charge you and getting reimbursed was a hassle. Fortunately, Uber shut that down pretty hard. Contractor or not, if a driver agreed to drive for Uber, then they tacitly agreed to drive to any destination in their set range. I think that's fair.

In the UK at least that's one of the major differences between employees/workers/self employed. If I'm an employee I'd have to take the work offered, but if you're self employeed you should be free to decline work. It's a spectrum trading rights of the employee for freedoms.

If Uber don't want to take on the role of employer, they aren't allowed as much control over how tasks are completed or what tasks are accepted.

> but if you're self employeed you should be free to decline work.

And Uber is free to not offer you any more work

That is an overly simplistic view. It's worth reading the tribunal conclusions for the case in the UK that concluded the drivers are workers.

Edit- a quick example of why it's not so simple:

If this is the case, all employers could say their employees are just contractors as they are free to have all the contractor freedoms however if the contractor uses them then the company is free to stop offering them work.

This would skirt pretty much all employment law.

There are places that are really risky to drive to. In Buenos Aires, ie, it was reported that multiple Uber drivers got physically attacked by taxi drivers when they got identified on downtown. In some countries, like Brazil, there are some really risky areas where driver could potentially put his/her life at risk. Areas where not even police can access.

>>Contractor or not, if a driver agreed to drive for Uber, then they tacitly agreed to drive to any destination in their set range. I think that's fair.

This is a difference of how people view the platforms, I dont believe that is either fair or correct.

If I sign up for say a Freelancing site that offers a wide range of services I have not "tacitly agreed to" offer every service the site offers, I have not "tacitly agreed to" do the same thing that everyone else on the site offers

That is what uber is a Freelance Driver site, where a customer can select a Driver to perform a service (take me from a to b), just like when I take a Freelance programming job I have (and uber drivers should also have) the ability to set the terms of who they accept as clients, and where they want to go

That is the very nature of Freelance work.

A Taxi Service however would be different, as it would be if Uber was a "Car Service" that employs the drivers directly, and to be clear there are Car Services out there with company employed drivers they are $$$ but they exist

What is the length of this contract? Isn't a freelancer usually signing up for a well defined piece of work, not some arbitrary unknown bundle lasting an arbitrary amount of time?

How is "Take me from Point a to Point B" not a well defined piece of work or how do it last an arbitrary amount of time?

Each Trip is a "Piece of Work", is a contract, is a Freelance Job.

Not specifying what A and B are is a problem. Can I ask you to write some program A that I tell you later?

Except you already know the rules of the contract, i.e. you get A but not B until you accept the contract. If you don't like the rule, you can opt out of the contract (in this case decline the ride).

It’s not just for safety reasons. I’ve had an incident where I was trying to get to SFO from fairly far away. 3 drivers left after they arrived and found out I was going to sfo. Had to wait until the 4th driver, which took an extra half an hour or so more than normal. I was cutting it fairly close, so this made it almost too close.

So now people not in a city center will never get rides. Wonderful outcome, very progressive.

This is like when people yell at the customer service rep about a company policy. They're a driver, take the sass to Uber.

The guy that your parent post is responding to us the guy responsible for refusing rides, in this instance, not Uber.

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.

Ah yes, you're right. The minimum wage worker should continue subsidizing your travel. This injustice to the tech elite will not stand.

Maybe my analogy was bad, maybe you should take it up with California rather than this random driver expressing their opinion.

Or how about instead of eroding the user experience to allow Uber to continue to take advantage of the fiction of the drivers being "independent contractors", the state does what it should and enforce minimum conditions, including a minimum wage?

Why, because they're too short? Why not walk?

If you aren't in a city center, why would the ride be short?

I drive in smallish city. I never drive more than ten minutes for a ride. This means that at night (when I'm the only one on the road) some people don't get rides. I know it would be nice if we had people who could drive around on their own dime and give everybody rides, unfortunately that does not exist. I will happily go anywhere in a city where a ride will be worth my time and effort. We could increase the cost of short rides and pay the drivers (and charge the drivers) for the time spent driving to the rides. Then the drivers will come.

However, you are asking that drivers be willing to take 40 minutes out of their day to make 3 dollars. These drivers often barely make it by as it is. That is neither profitable or sustainable.

Subsidizing a small portion of the user base in the name of fairness is certainly sustainable, as it already was before. I get you don't like making a few less dollars in the day but society works better when we help each other out a bit and I don't think people should suddenly start having to pay an extra transportation tax for the zip code they live in.

Why? One does pay more for a metro ticket in area 9 compared to area 3. And metros are usually as subsidised as it gets. Also the cost/rent of an apartment in area 9 is less than one in area 3.

What a great attitude. What, are you entitled to subsidized taxi rides even if you live 50 miles away? Geez.

Can you please not post in the snarky or flamewar style to HN? It's against the rules, and evokes worse from others, as demonstrated below.

We're trying for thoughtful conversation here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking that spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.

I'm aware of the guidelines. I've been here for years and such tiny dabs of sarcasm have never been an issue before. If we're not all grown up enough here to handle a basic "oh, great" then that's a sad state of affairs. Guess I'll write every comment like a college thesis statement from now on.

It always seems like "tiny dabs" when we're the one producing it, but I guarantee you that it doesn't feel that way to everyone else. Perhaps the majority don't care, but at least in the long tail, a bunch will, and some of those will get activated enough to lash back. The reason we ask people not to post like that isn't because we think it's somehow wrong in itself. It's simply because the quality of the lash-backs is so low, and they lead to even worse. That's why we got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22021528 and so on.

In that way, each user here is partly responsible for the quality of the replies they get. If we want to have a good community in the long run, we have to learn to edit out gratuitous provocation.

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