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Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long before these companies pull out of Seattle, or Washington entirely.

If it's just Seattle, will they just geofence the city and not allow rides to originate or terminate there? What happens if a driver is transiting the city limits, but isn't within for a full hour - does the minimum wage get prorated, or what?

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Everyone predicts doom and gloom when Seattle enacts a progressive policy. Seattle’s economy is still doing well. I view this as essentially fixing a loop hole around their existing minimum wage laws.

These policies don't have an effect in a day - it takes time.

People need to move - if Amazon wanted to move it would take them years just to build a new campus; let a lone try to transfer employees. People are sticky to a location, so the city can extract more and more from them until they eventually decide to leave. It will slow growth as people choose not set up there; it will make the economy less flexible as people have few choices.

These policies will destroy wealth and will hurt those who currently do these jobs. Remember the people doing these jobs are doing them because they're the best option available to them - this include far more than just the wage.

It's going to be harder and harder to find jobs for low skilled workers in Seattle.

To me this is about a group of laws being passed in Seattle that raise wages for labor and tax corporations. Seattle has a very long history of such laws. Corporations keep expanding in Seattle and people keep moving to Seattle because it’s such a great place to do business. These laws are about ensuring that the great amount of wealth being generated in the area is shared among the entire community.

Seattle’s median household income is $93,500 (2018) and it has a population of 744,955. Their clearly doing something correctly.

If you don't make solid money, you move out of the city because it is too expensive. The minimum wage law is less than 2 years old, and it's possible for Seattle to continue it's boom momentum despite recently policy. If the policy is bad, it isn't hurting the tech workers, it's hurting the smaller businesses and people who work there. When a burger and beer is $25, people eat out less and businesses have fewer $16 an hour people on staff.

Minimum wage doesn’t increase restaurant prices much. It varies a lot, but ~8 people can handle an average of 50 customers an hour. That’s an extra 90cents per meal assuming their all paid an extra 7.50 an hour. More realistically several of those people where already making more than minimum wage so the impact is even less.

Further, rent is based in large part on how profitable the location is. So, land lords end up picking up a chunk of the difference.

you can barely afford to live there if you make less, so of course the median is high.

I hated living in Seattle, loved the rest of Washington though.

The result isn't really doom. It's just you have shitty taxi services and everyone is sad. Nobody remembers the reason is bad regulation. Uber started in the first place because taxis in San Francisco were and are so bad that they were basically unusable.

It's a bit more complex than this (source: I live in Seattle). Seattle is saved from the impact of a lot of the progressive policies because many of them are shut down by the courts (all the attempts to instate an income tax, for example).

And while the Seattle area is doing well, a lot of the growth and new jobs are now in Bellevue, not Seattle itself, to avoid the various head taxes which are proposed or enacted (which, btw, is another case of Seattle enacting a progressive tax and then immediately dropping it because of business outcry -- so it's not really correct to say that Seattle's economy is doing well "in spite of" the policy).

And as other point out... these things take time. Amazon isn't going to pull up and leave overnight. But it will shift jobs out of downtown over the course of 5 years, and Facebook and Google have easy options to do the same (Google has a large Bellevue presence as well).

Big companies are establishing offices in both Seattle and Bellevue. It isn't an either or situation. I think sourcing talent is a bigger priority.

Example: Google has a new-new building in South Lake Union, but they are also in Kirkland.

It's true, but the SLU campus has been in the works for most of a decade. There's a really long trailing indicator on new construction, and few if any big employers are laying down plans for new downtown offices starting in 2020.

Maybe it's not 100% of the goal, but I'm very confident that legal jurisdiction hedging (w/ the ability to move staff at less-than-decade notice) is a big part of splitting offices across SLU and Kirkland.

Why would they pull out? Taxis existed before Uber and others. Either a) Uber at scale can't compete with local taxi service which will return pretty quickly, (so Uber would die anyway in a long run) or b) they will be completely fine with a few tweaks around scheduling / number is drivers.

> Taxis existed before Uber and others.

To be fair, taxi service in seattle was quite awful during the pre-uber times. It was usually best to pretend they didn't exist unless you were at a location they congregated frequently (the airport, for example).

Hopefully, the prompt and transparent service that came with Uber is here to stay even if the company itself isn't.

This is true about pre-Uber taxi service. But it has improved largely due to Uber competition.

It would suck to lose Uber and Lyft, but I don’t think it would be long for a competing local service to pop up.

Need to make sure taxis have to pay this minimum wage too... let's see how that works.

And/or raise prices on consumers who are using the drivers who have to be paid more. That seems like a component of any solution to the issue.

Which seems fine. A service that isn't paying the minimum wage isn't competing fairly.

Edit: Typo. If you aren't paying a minimum wage, you ARE NOT competing fairly.

As long as Ubers and taxis are subject to the same rules, I'm fine with it. If this minimum wage requirement does not also apply to taxi drivers, then it's very suspect to me.

> A service that isn't paying the minimum wage is competing fairly.

Did you mean to say it this way? Presumably "fairly" would be abiding by the same rules as the competition, including paying a minimum wage?

Whoops, fixed!

When they pulled out of Austin it didn't take long before a bunch of replacements pop up. This isn't a tough problem to solve anymore.

The replacements they had in Austin never filled those shoes unfortunately. During SXSW traffic spiked and all the replacements were crashing and people were getting "stranded" with no rides.

I've had Uber crash during traffic spikes, and was "stranded" for a few hours while I waiting for demand to calm down.

Have you tried using Uber or Lyft during any large event? They are just as much of a clusterfuck. Either the app crashes due to so many phones nearby clogging the network, or drivers drop the ball, either cancelling on you or accepting your ride from 30 minutes out, trapping you for fear of getting a bad rider rating for too many cancelled rides. Getting into the wrong rideshare is also surprisingly common and concerning, especially when these large events involve a lot of drinking. I usually resort to walking a mile, maybe more, from the event before I attempt to call up a rideshare.

I use Uber and Lyft all the time during Re:invent which is, by any reasonable measure, a large event. It works great and works even better than Amazon's buses (which themselves are pretty good) if you need to cram a lot of transit into your workday.

Sure, but since then things have kept improving. From a technology point of view it's only going to get easier and easier to run a ride-sharing service.

Is that why several of the Austin replacements have now folded since Uber/Lyft have been back for a while?

No, it's not.

I suspect the market will solve this problem. There's a pretty neat growth hack that you can do that doesn't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) and therefore lets you out-compete the incumbents like Uber and Lyft: pay your drivers minimum wage. Once you're established and profitable you can keep doing it.

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