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Comment by kyle_martin1 | Hacker News Reader

I worked for SuperShuttle developing their driver mobile app.

I can tell you for a fact that a big reason SuperShuttle failed is because the drivers were independent. They would consistently reject low cost trips and wait it out until they got one "mega" trip so that they only need to actually work for about 3 hours/day. Some days they wouldn't take any trips, just hang out in the van playing Flappy Bird.

This was a main issue for the SuperShuttle because they couldn't get their drivers to do adapt when Uber came around, including accepting work that more resembled Uber pool workloads.

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This is what we call "revealed preference". It doesn't really matter what ten thousand Uber drivers have told you (and some of the supposed first-hand field surveying claimed in this discussion stretches belief). The only thing that matters in the end is how the participants in the market actually behave.

Actions > Words.

Such a simple concept yet many ignore it. Nowadays it's trendy to call such concepts "mental models".

True! I use this concept a lot when arguing with people about minimum wage! I think those single Mom's should be happy to have a job, not complaining they can't pay rent! Like they can just learn to code if they don't want to make min wage

I can't tell if this is a joke or someone incredibly out of touch with the reality of poverty (this being HN, there are enough people who fall in the latter group to make it unclear)

It's a joke, I'm glad taking "Actions > Words" to it's logical conclusion seemed like someone's real opinion, really tells you about the type of people that frequent this site

I think what's happening here is the defined categories don't adequately model reality. An Uber driver is somewhere between the current legal categories of employee and independent contractor.

A fully independent contractor like a SuperShuttle driver can treat each fare as a separate contract, pick only the best offers, and generally not provide the company an adequate service level to ensure a reliable stream of customers. Each driver prioritizing their short-term interests keeps that model from being a viable profession in many cases.

On the other hand, an employer is required to provide certain benefits to employees, especially if they exceed certain thresholds of hours worked. To make the fixed cost of some of those benefits viable, the employer will usually want to require the employee to work specific hours, and often limits those hours to stay within legal thresholds.

It's the flexibility of scheduling I that I think attracts people to gig work. They'll take the ability to cherry-pick the most profitable gigs if given the chance, but it isn't a core requirement.

It's probably desirable to add a third category to provide gig workers some protections without shoehorning them into the employee classification, which many of them actively wish to avoid.

Very well said. Gig workers are in that nebulous, legally undefined category between employees and contractors.

This seems more nuanced than implied here. It sounds as though the 'main issue' wasn't that Super Shuttle couldn't work while letting their drivers be independent, but rather that they couldn't compete on price with a service that didn't.

If a business was paying their workers minimum wage and couldn't compete on price with another business that came in and didn't respect minimum wage laws, you wouldn't say the main issue was paying minimum wage. You would say it was the business that didn't respect minimum wage laws.

It seems like if all companies treat drivers as independent contractors, then the market will naturally work itself out. Drivers will compete amongst themselves and determine what they are willing to work for, and prices will adapt as needed to support that. However, if some companies don't, then obviously it isn't a level playing field. That will only be exacerbated if the company that doesn't then also further depresses ride prices to the point of operating at a loss.

Whether the current legislation actually achieves the goal remains to be seen, but the whole point is to level the playing field. I don't think anyone actually thinks that the way forward is to treat drivers as employees. Instead, I think having to treat drivers as employees is a deterrent to the current way contractor laws are being skirted, with the intent of pushing all companies to treat their drivers as independent contractors in order to level the playing field.

No. It isn’t more nuanced than that. SuperShuttle couldn’t make changes because the drivers irrationally refused to work more for the same pay, even though they knew the company was failing. It really is that simple.

>> because the drivers irrationally refused to work more for the same pay

How is this irrational? You offer me $X for Y hours of work. If X/Y gets too small I say "no" and do something with higher utility, even if that's playing flappy bird. I don't really care that my actions destroy the source of this opportunity because I've already rejected it.

You are right that this is simple, just not in the way you're interpreting it.

Because if you don't take trips then you don't make any money. They felt entitled and refused to adapt when the market demanded it. That's irrational.

In discussions like these I like to start from a basic premise: people aren't stupid.

It's obvious to the drivers that if they don't take trips, then they don't make money. Clearly then, they've decided that below a certain dollar amount, it make more sense to them to play computer games than take a fare. How they arrived at that conclusion, I don't know. But I have faith that it made sense to them.

I do very small software projects for people I find online. I have a minimum fee. If I take on projects below that minimum, I'd have more work, but I have determined that it's in my best interest to hold out for that minimum rate. If this means that I don't make money on that side gig a particular day or week, so be it. I have my reasons for doing that and they won't necessarily make sense to anyone looking in from the outside.

It's trivial to find out why looking at driver's posts online:

There's a minimum time cost to them for each ride or delivery. There's the time you spend finding out exactly where the person is, there can be a delay between jobs, there's delays when picking up an order.

Someone who drives 10 miles for one job will spend much less time than someone who drives 1 mile for 10 jobs. And since they have X units of time to spend in the app, they'll start making less and less per mile driven.

They also don't get paid for the time spent going to a pickup unless it exceeds a certain length: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/24/16533940/uber-long-picku...

It's easy enough to see how, at some point, they start to get paid so little that it's in their best interest to just not drive and spend the gas and their effort

Here's a severe case showing someone go through that exact experience:

> I accepted the pick-up and app informed me that the customer was 13 miles away I drove there[...] pressed my App for the drop-off Destination [...] and saw that drop-off was 1 mile away

> Total time of trip, back and forth, 45 to 50 minutes and 29 miles , and I earned $8 dollars

> So, after thinking about it, I have decided to ‘decline’ all trips that are more than 10 miles away from me and do not say that it is gonna be a ‘long trip’

https://ride.guru/lounge/p/uber-drivers-how-far-will-you-dri...

You can be smart and be irrational. You can be dumb and be irrational. So it’s sort of a moot point.

The drivers were not investors in the company; it failing was not a huge problem for them. Having a strong preference for leisure is totally ok. The drivers didn’t have enough stock and weren’t paid enough to motivate them to work the hours the company needed to be viable. The company failed. The investors lost all their money. The founders and employees got nothing. That’s capitalism. If they’d been right they’d have made massive bank and that too would have been capitalism. Workers get to play capitalism too. Everyone played. Everyone made their choices and the company failed.

The drivers are franchisees so they have huge interest in keeping the company going, otherwise they wouldn't get any trips. It was their problem. They just didn't want to change.

They can just drive for another company, they don't suffer any significant loss the same way a McDonald's restaurant would if McD's folded and had to overhaul the entire restaurant. The drivers just install another app on their phone.

This is a problem with Taxi drivers as well. Have had friends too close to the airport miss flights because drivers keep rejecting the fare because it goes to drivers near the airport who want a long trip.

I've had taxi drivers yell at me for how close I lived to the airport. Angrily banging the steering wheel. "I waited in line for 2 hours and I get this fucking fare!?" Then they drive maniacally fast, weaving through traffic hoping to catch the tail end of passengers disembarking my flight. Mildly terrifying. Uber and Lyft were so welcome.

I have had this exact experience, Taxi's are the worst and there is 0 feedback loop to improve quality. I once had a taxi driver yell at me and ask me why I didn't just take an uber if I live so close to the airport. Good riddance to traditional taxis (in all but a few cities where they are still marginally more convenient in my experience).

I had the same thing, but the driver dropped his phone off with a friend that was still "within the airport" as we drove out the airpot so that he didn't lose his virtual place. He was pretty upset with me.

Things I don't miss about cabs:

1. them complaining about short fair or straight up driving off before I could get in because I wasn't going far enough (lesson learned in Vegas: get in before answering questions) 2. The constant, relentless dance about their "credit card machine being broken" "you can pay cash!" "there's an ATM machine inside"

Uber and Lyft were god sends when I was traveling a lot for work. click button, get in car, arrive at place. None of the adversarial nonsense.

>Uber and Lyft were god sends when I was traveling a lot for work. click button, get in car, arrive at place. None of the adversarial nonsense

At the expense of the security of the drivers serving you. You get convenience, they get a subsistence lifestyle.

A living wage and convenient cabs don't need to be mutually exclusive. Also, the adversarial nonsense was more than just a lack of convenience. Some drivers are just not nice people and managed to get away with it.

If they don’t want to follow the terms of the taxi license fuck them. Universal service, take every fare, don’t discriminate by race. If Uber and Lyft destroy the entire taxi industry it can’t come soon enough.

I don't want anyone working a job to live a subsistence lifestyle, but taxis have also always been a nightmare for me (in the US and every country I've ever been in) and I never want to go back. Uber and Lyft are vastly superior and less stressful experiences for the customer in every way. I'd like them to be good experiences for the drivers, too, but the answer isn't to scrap the whole thing and go back to taxis.

In some countries, the meter is just for show and every ride is a negotiated fare. Also, sometimes it's hard to distinguish taxi from pirate. Heck, in some places, even the licensed drivers are notorious for robbing tourists. Yikes.

You think they'd have been that angry if they had a decent lifestyle?

Maybe the causality goes the other way, people like that might have difficulty finding other jobs.

Most low-paying jobs aren't known for having lots of angry/rude people working them. Probably because in most jobs you have to work with other people or interact with customers within view of your co-workers/manager.

In theory, the idea of regulated, but high, fares for taxis came with a legal obligation to accept all rides.

But that never stopped drivers from playing that game anyway.

> Uber and Lyft were so welcome

Then you are lucky. I can't count the times the drivers called me before picking me up, asking me where I want to go and then cancelling if it was nearby (or no answer at all).

I never cancel, but they do.

And when they don't do that, they are extremly annoyed when it's something close to the airport.

I've used both hundreds of times in the US, and that has never happened to me. They would only call to sync our positions to find each other, which happened very rarely.

This is basically the same thing, except cancelling based on pick-up location instead of destination. The app apparently doesn't always tell the driver exactly where the pickup is- it only gives the direction to drive and the next turn or two. It only gives the exact location once they're close to it.

This is to keep drivers from cancelling based on an out of the way pick-up location.

When they call, it's almost always to get information that the app won't give them.

I've gotten burned by both.

Sounds like taxi drivers should be paid by the hour instead of per fare.

But that's partly because, in all likelihood, the taxi driver also couldn't set their own rates. If that taxi driver could have asked $20 instead of the $3.75 legally mandated by the meter, would you have paid it?

It seems like allowing a proper market, where both riders and drivers could bid on rides, would solve both this problem and the SuperShuttle problem.

It doesn't, because at 3am in a sparsely populated bit of town, there aren't enough participants for a market to work.

For me to have real choice as a rider, I need at least a few different offers from drivers on the table, at which point I can pick the cheapest/fastest/highest rated/whatever.

Likewise, for the driver to have a true choice, he has to have multiple ride offers in front of him to pick the best.

The reality is that in most local markets, most drivers spend the majority of their time sitting around because there are no riders (and therefore would never turn down any work), and riders are frequently so far from drivers that there is only one driver to choose from within 10 minutes waiting time, so they would be forced to accept the ride, whatever the price.

As a tourist in Shanghai/Beijing last year, this (technically illegal) practice is quite common if you don't have the right apps set up. We did frequently pay the higher fare, though the difference in currency was like $1 vs $3 iirc.

Taxis work like this in Panama. Prices vary wildly ( but are low by developed world standards) and trying to get across town in times of high traffic is nearly impossible, nobody will take you ( they ask you where you're going, snort and drive away) until you offer at least four times the standard fare.

They're also unsafe, my brother was robbed at gunpoint by a fake taxi. I've heard multiple women who had to jump from a moving taxi to escape a potential rape.

Uber is more expensive in Panama, but I use it nearly exclusively.

It was a $20-something fare. It'd vary between $22 and $26 based on traffic. I'm not sure how much of that was airport fees. For pleasant drivers, I'd bump it to $30 with tip.

Yeah, $20 and about 1 in 3 were visibly angry and not shy about letting me know it.

Context: I took this route almost weekly for a few years.

Strange. I've heard the same stories about Uber: drivers complaining about short, unprofitable rides, and then there was the study about Uber drivers who take more risks while driving making more money.[1]

I suppose the only thing preventing the adversarial behavior is that the driver needs your five-star review.

[1] in the context of why women Uber drivers make less.

>Uber and Lyft were so welcome.

Because these companies are VC and investor subsidized, and apparently breaking labour laws. It isn't a functioning market. If they had to cover the full costs they would face the same issues as taxis.

Did doordash for a few weeks and discovered that this is exactly how the dashers in the community that made "okay" money operated. They turn down deliveries that didn't pay a certain amount and would sit in their car doing nothing if they had to.

So lower the price of big trips and raise the price of small trips until thing balance out?

We tried. The drivers revolted when we changed fares because they didn’t want things to change. Remember humans are irrational beings.

Most were longtime drivers and knew historical fare. We just couldn’t get them to change their mindset.

Then the “fix” would be to make the shuttle drivers employees right?

Each van is a separate business franchise. The franchise owner, owned the van and could hire drivers as employees under their franchise.

It was more profitable for everybody with this way.

I remember seeing off a rental travel van a few miles from LAX. They were a tiny business and had no shuttle service. Next door was a EUROPCAR rental and outside it a bunch of taxis and Ubers. They ALL refused to take me, and EUROPCAR security didn't want me catching their shuttle bus because I want a customer. I had to conspicuously beg them to let me on the bus in front of customers in the service area to not miss my flight.

I'm curious what you mean by failed - do you mean in the model and they had to change? California?

I'm seeing Supershuttle availability right now (not in California but in the U.S.)

SuperShuttle was bleeding money from subsidizing fares to compete with ride sharing and shrunk 30% YoY for 3 years straight. The SuperShuttle that you see is now just a brand facade and the original business is on a feeding tube.

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