The Drunk Men I Drive Around Every Night (2020)

edit: The Japanese are also famous for treating foreigners and tourists differently.

Only if you get in and clear show you don’t want to talk will they refrain from engaging you in a conversation.

Perhaps minimum loading after 10pm to help with driver availability and service providers providing a minimum of x vehicles per hour slot?

In Holland we're pretty accustomed to cycling home drunk, and drivers are pretty aware of hazardous bikers :) Especially because Taxis are unaffordable in the Netherlands.

I know driving for Uber is not really a stellar job. But some people do it because that's the best they can do at the moment. They could never afford to drive a taxi. They could never be able to pay the dues for entering the monopoly. They would have to undertake even worse job.

The problem is not that those jobs pay little and provide no security. The problem is that people who decide to take those jobs are left without help to such a degree that they take them.

Introduce basic income and look how the conditions of ride-share drivers improve when they have a choice and some bargaining power.

Local transportation is a basic service. Ideally, your taxpayer money goes into providing one. But we all know how inefficient that is, especially in areas with low population density. So, short of that, Uber and Lyft are the next best thing to happen in transportation. Will that increase binge drinking, yes, so be it. So be it, because people who binge drink will do it anyway. If they don't drink at a bar they will drink at home. The correlation of binge drinking to the availability of ride hailing needs to be questioned.

Where did I suggest that?

You may share with the article writer a set of assumptions that makes it easier for you to understand what her point is. No need for hostility. I wrote what I wrote hoping that someone would explain it to me.

You correctly deduced that I am a man. As a man who does not sexually harass women and shuts bad behavior down immediately when I see it, I'm baffled by rest of what you say here. My fragile ego? Because I missed the point of the article?

I bear responsibility as a civilized human being for my fellow humans, even strangers. But it seems like you're saying that I bear culpability as a man for the behavior of the minority of men who behave violently or reprehensibly, specifically because I'm a man? Am I reading you correctly?

If that's your belief, I can understand your hostility. It would seem to you as if I'm denying my personal culpability. If that's a belief shared by the writer, it makes sense now why you understood the article and I did not.

To my mind, this kind of thinking is a category error to be avoided. It derives from assuming that, because most of the people who behave badly belong to some group, that therefore most members of that group behave badly. A corollary then is the idea all individuals of that group bear culpability for the actions of their most extreme individuals.

As a human being, I bear responsibility to end bad behavior. If I were in a group of drunken men, and someone said something so reprehensible, I would shut it down. If it was a man I knew, I would apologize profusely to the driver, leaving a big tip; I would have a series of seriously uncomfortable conversation with this man in the days and weeks to follow. But that's because I am a civilized human being, not because I bear culpability as a man for his behavior. That's the way I see it, anyway.

I have 2 related questions for you. Bear with me, and answer honestly: Are you a man? Do you believe that all men, deep down, are inherently violent rapists?

Lyft and Uber do not enable binge drinking, they enable social binge drinking. The violent drunks I knew of growing up were plenty content on getting hammered at home and becoming violent. Most would become violent well after they would have been cutoff by a bartender.

"Hold her down, and I'll keep her mouth busy". And of course they ask him why he isn't laughing.

It just sounds made up for article dramitism.

Do people drink more because of cheap ride share--yes.

The problem is ride share is not cheap anymore.

I browse a lot of driver subreddits (r/uberdrivers, r/doordash, r/doordash_drivers, etc) and it's surprisingly common to see people complain about things like this. Imo this is extra weird when you consider this is a major selling point of these apps - "You can work your own schedule and you won't have a boss to worry about" is part of the allure and is often even how the apps are advertised. I would be interested to know why this is such a common theme but people don't usually comment on the why on reddit

But he didn't mention this in the article at all so apparently that's not his complaint. What he does complain about is indeed what a taxi service is for. I wouldn't call Uber a "rideshare" anymore, this is how it started but all Uber drivers are pros now. It's just a "taxi license (and worker rights) avoiding taxi service" now :P

The idea of ridesharing was that you'd take a trip to place X and people could chip in and join you for the trip. But literally nobody uses Uber for that anymore.

Having lived in London when I was younger I beg to differ. I only ended up at the last stop and having to walk home a couple of miles a few times. One time I managed to cycle from Leicester Square to Chelsea - I don't know why, I didn't live anywhere near Chelsea.

No?! I grew up a 500 miles from public transportation, I assure you plenty of drinking happened in my community. And history is replete with people drinking in the past, more so than we drink now!

This part of your statement baffles me.

I only need to be sober enough to walk a short way (Bus) or go up some stairs (Taxi). [most of the ride sharing is illegal here, as they are basically alternative taxis - though they still exist. The taxi service isn't all that expensive, though, and easy to get]

(Some) Taxi companies have apps too.

Showing a piece of paper with your address on it is not harder than using an app.

I guess there were some locations, I'm thinking rural but also just places with dysfunctional taxi regulations, where it was simply the norm to drive drunk before uber arrived. This is maybe a couple of decades longer than it was in places with decent taxi systems. So if you live in one of those areas, then you'd associate ride-sharing with this phenomenon, but if you didn't you'd have considered this as 'normal' a while ago and not see much difference when taxi's got apps.

You see the same phenomenon in reverse, where people talk about ride-sharing as a positive revolution in their lives, and they're just talking about a taxi system that works, which is their experience, but isn't universal.

For example in Europe there's a certain divide between Northern (and technically some port of Central, from a latitude pov) Europe and its Southern parts, there's also a strong divide when it comes to how acceptable women getting shit-drunk during a night out is.

The thing is that those Northern and Central European cultures are highly successful from an economic point of view, i.e. compared to other cultures, so whatever shitty thing they have with their culture of binge drinking is sort of hidden under the rug, instead of being put front and center and trying to fix it.