California deems carpooling via all ride-share services illegal
cnet.com
cnet.com
I'm sure there are other issues that need sorting, but as an outsider much of the taxi industry's regulations seem like they can be modernized for a post uber/lyft world.
I'm not sure about the situation in California but I looked into how taxis were insured in Maryland and it turns out they basically don't have insurance. They are only required to have a certain amount of cash in an account that acts like insurance if something happens. I believe the amount was around $30,000 which is very very little if something legitimately serious were to happen. Which is why I find it funny when people think taxis are some how better insured than ride share services.
As the fleet size increases, the amount of the bond goes up as well -- essentially giving companies the choice of self insuring. I'd be surprised if many independent operators were self-bonded.
And of course, it's not like the minimum insurance requirements are great across the board either.
The alternative is something like Toronto where personal car insurance costs upwards of $300 a month for a 23 year old male with no tickets or accidents because the minimum coverage is so extensive.
> The Maryland General Assembly approved the increase in April, slightly upping legal minimum insurance coverage to at least $30,000 per person and $60,000 per crash.
Exactly. And that's amazing. I don't want to pay any insurance, I can self-insure and pay with my own bond if I'm caught into an accident.
If not, you might have a comfortable position waiting for you in the mafia.
Yes, this includes targeted killings and violent extortion when required. Since this threat has been proven credible it's normally not required to actually break people; people simply give up before the tire irons have to be brought out.
FTFY
However you call it, it is ultimately power (of man) that rules other men. Having to push it through the frictional and slow law process merely makes powerful men less powerful by the amount of the systemic friction. But the power gradients still exist and lead to the same consequences.
It merely prolongs a "i dont like him, behead him on the spot" into "i dont like him, make the state attorney accuse him of rape and murder, drag him through courts for 20 years and execute him". But the intimidating effect of power differences is the same. Rule of law is just the same ol rule of man cloaked into law.
However there is a clever trick that the current President has used. Pass laws that are ridiculously long and large. When you pass a law that is 1000 pages long with another 1000 pages of appendixes, no sensible man can read and make sense of it and hence does not have much credible ground to oppose it.
"You think clause 9, subsection B poses a problem for X ? We have taken care of in clause 204 sub-claue 11c when taken into context of Annex. Z" a trick that was mastered by British and Indians.
But we're providing something of value!
Drug dealers provide something of value and personally I think we would be way better off if drugs were legalized. So we're going to call our local drugs-gangs "disruptive startups" now?
90% procent of the time these companies are simply breaking privacy, consumer protection and labor laws for one reason and one reason only: greed. So occasionally they may stumble upon a law that actually needs reform. Even a broken clock is right twice per day.
That doesn't make me okay with OK with breaking the law as a business strategy, especially since most of the time it isn't the Comcasts of this world that suffer the consequences, but individual workers and consumers.
This Robin Hood worship is pathetic. These startups are not making the world a better place.
You know, I actually agree with you, by the definitions of things we have in place today, that is, in fact, organized crime. And since most people violate three laws a day, and we use various corporate affiliations to do it, it would follow that we are all members of a vast organized crime syndicate.
Going to need some bigger prisons.
Don't know about "local drug-gangs," but yeah, I see my friendly, neighborhood reefer dealer as an entrepreneur who provides a valued service.
As opposed to governments gone berserk?
* zimride.com
* erideshare.com
And my friend made https://github.com/thedjpetersen/ridezap_os
And I've seen countless school projects trying to address ride-sharing.
I don't think it will ever catch on.
What do you see as the main problems?
As a driver, I got as many as 10 viable requests per seat regardless of my ride schedule. I saw a lot of empty seats in other SF-LA rides so I was confused at the disparity...until one ride, a college-aged woman that bought a seat showed up with her mother. Both of them expressed visible relief at the fact that I, a woman, was driving, and with two adults that were obviously my parents in the back seat just like my blurb said. They really were just going to walk away if anything was different, and they didn't even consider male drivers.
It clicked in my head that most messages were from women that must have felt safer riding with another woman. I naïvely assumed all the happy riders were just happy about a fast 5-6 hour ride with fresh fruit and snacks from my parents.
tl;dr I think it's about intimacy. Even for an extroverted culture, plenty of people didn't use Zimride and similar even if they knew about it. Sharing 1-6 seats (most private cars) is way more intimate than 6-10 (airport shuttle-types) or a bus/train and is typically not backed by a company with a professional driver. Not sure that there will ever be a solution that provides enough trust and support to get over that problem before we get better mass transit and self-driving cars.
1) Write a script to answer requests without ever intending to pick up.
2) Get out of the car, don't transfer the other half.
3) Sign up as a driver, and wait until you find an attractive/rich fare. Lock doors and do what you will.
Deregulation is not the answer for everything. Uber/Lyft works precisely because they are very well regulated to stop the cases I outline above, and more.
#3 can be avoided based on reputation previously gained. Maybe some sort of signup payment with a trusted vetting authority.
- Every node is potentially untrustworthy therefore additional verification must be performed on the results of any query. To verify a piece of information, a "paper trail" must be transmitted as well (who created what when).
- This overhead causes information to move much more slowly in a system (if at all, if the threshold is set too high it's possible for all queries to fail).
- To counter this cost, each node can build its own map of trusted nodes based on the validity of previous information. This "network of trust" can be used to throttle the amount of verification performed.
- To illustrate, let's take what happens if you're totally new to a fully decentralized ridesharing platform. You start off not knowing any of the other users (nodes) and so you select a few at random (trusting all mutually), perform a query on all nodes and select the driver with the best rating (according to popular rating from those few users). You take a ride from that driver, have an awful experience, and therefore don't trust the ratings shared by those users anymore. You're back to square one. Building trust takes a lot of time and first-hand validation.
- There's potential for trusted nodes to turn "bad" (untrustworthy) therefore each node must continuously "police" neighboring nodes and relay any changes in behavior to mutually-trusted nodes.
- What's more, there is a certain "cost of competition" that comes with truly decentralized systems. You cannot roll out "system-wide" changes as easily as a centralized one since a majority of the system must first agree (and many times that majority is too small to even consider it a consensus, which ends in grid-lock).
- These five costs (paper-trail, verification, building network of trust, policing network of trust, cost of competition) makes the overall performance of a distributed platform very inferior to that of a centralized platform like Uber.
- Of course there are downsides to centralized platforms like Uber. The quality of ratings is less trustworthy since all users use separate criteria (and could be untrustworthy Lyft proponents). Also, Uber (as a system) does not make decisions in the best interest of its users and is only kept in check by its competition (which is diminishing each day).
- You can look to human civilization as a way to illustrate some of the challenges and solutions of purely decentralized systems. It would be pretty hard to survive if everyone didn't trust anyone outside of himself. We built our own networks of trust via our family and friends (our tribe). As human populations grew, so too did competition between tribes. Centralized governments and services were then built to offset some of our individual responsibilities and promote unimpeded, fair flow of certain resources while still preserving those aspects that benefit the most from decentralization.
- These hybrid systems (platforms with both decentralized AND centralized aspects) work the best in the real world as long as those centralized parts keep working for the majority of nodes and a healthy balance of decentralized/centralized is maintained. (You'll notice we struggle with both of those caveats today in modern civilization).
Whoo! Sorry for the long-winded post, I have a lot more to say on the subject but I'll save the rest for a blog post :). (I'm working on decentralized authority and identification in my spare time so this is a hot area of research for me!).
It does seem like that would not require an overseers anymore than Bitcoin does.
What am I missing?
Credit card verification doesn't include the name, and only includes street number and zip code of the billing address.
When I request a ride, the _system_ gives me...
Think of the "system" as a large crowd of people in a room. Only certain people in the room have the information you want. It is totally unfeasible to ask every person in the room, you can only ask the three guys closest to you.
What do you do?
The best strategy to maximize query performance mimics the real-world— each person occasionally gossips information to each other, which replicates data across a network and increases the chance that someone nearby will have the answer you seek.
The problem then comes down to trust-- say you ask three guys nearby a question: "Do you know if there are any cabs nearby?"
Let's say those three guys did happen to know of a cab nearby but wanted it for themselves (they just got an invite to this AWESOME party in the Haight), so they lie to you and take the cab for themselves.
Or, in an alternative case— they are all three sons of a rather horrible cab driver and tell you that he is the ONLY one available.
If we had a global view of the system, the chances of this abuse might be minimized but this is just not feasible in real-world implementations.
There's also other implications for privacy (nodes in the middle might log your queries) which might also introduce new vectors for abuse.
Thinking about it this way, the real value of bitcoin might not be in the coins but in the blockchain itself.
It's essentially a write-only log that you can append to by paying a minimal fee.
Absolutely. Blockchains are much more general and useful than a Bitcoin-centric view assumes them to be. See http://namecoin.info, https://ethereum.org, http://bitshares.org, and http://proofofexistence.com for examples.
Using the block chain as a single, shared, decentralized database is an interesting solution but has serious flaws when used as you describe:
1. Transactions are not added immediately (and by added, I mean a consensus has been reached by a majority of the network on the state of the block chain), it can take up to 10 minutes for confirmation to be reached [1] with modern networks and hardware.
2. Each transaction increases the size of the block chain. To independently verify a transaction, each node must have a complete copy of the block chain which is about 21 GB today [2], and growing ~1 GB per month. This rate is expected to increase with time which presents one of the biggest flaws of Bitcoin today. Several strategies exist to reduce the size (pruning of the data, using lightweight clients that only store headers instead of full data) but all of these reduce the ability for an individual node to verify a transaction.
3. Transactions can fail for various reasons: data is too large, transaction fee too low, fork in the blockchain, orphaned blocks, etc. What's even worse is that you won't know (and can't try submitting the transaction again) until confirmation fails ~10 minutes later.
4. Transactions fees for storing arbitrary data in the block chain is dependent upon the real-world price of bitcoin. What's more, once the block reward approaches zero (the reward is cut in half approx. every four years) the rewards of mining will shift entirely to voluntary transaction fees. This will likely cause transaction fees to increase.
5. The block chain is only secure as long as there doesn't exist a single group with a majority of processing power (it is kept in check by competition between miners). If a monopoly develops it can abuse the system very readily.
These various reasons (latency, size, failure, fee increases over time) make the block chain a pretty bad back-end for the implementation of a shared, decentralized database of a real-time P2P app.
The idea isn't completely unsalvageable however, another way of looking at the problem is to realize that the block chain file itself is used as a shared resource between many "threads". Each thread has its own local copy but reconciliation must be performed across all threads to ensure consistent state (which introduces huge amounts of synchronization and contention).
To parallelize the problem, we must reduce the amount of resource contention required. The best way to do that is to use separate databases (eg, separate block chains) for separate, logical clusters of threads. Eg, for a ridesharing app, you can use a separate database (block chain) for each city. This way, only the data that is relevant to each thread must be synchronized.
There's a few problems with this approach (could allow local monopolies to develop more readily) as well but it better emulates natural models for decentralized systems.
It might also be better to use a hybrid approach based on the type of data involved:
1. Use a secure DHT (distributed hash table) to store data that isn't necessarily transactional (such as individual ratings that could be aggregated via an unstructured query).
2. Use a local block chain to synchronize shared resources (such as driver availability).
Yet another option: re-design bitcoin in such a way that these problems can be addressed and then convince miners to adopt that since it will in the long run result in increased fees for them because of a larger number of 'riders' on the transactions. This could offset the loss of mined coins and will effectively allow bitcoin a smoother transition from the 'mining' to the 'transaction' stage, it adds sufficient value to the blockchain that it might even replace the mined coin reward completely or surpass it before that reward goes to '0'.
You've pointed out why it can't be perfect. You haven't proven that it can't work.
Perfect is the enemy of good. It doesn't have to be perfect. I was going to say it just has to be better than our current system. But it doesn't. It just has to be legal. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse. But we're allowed to give it a try (generally speaking -- maybe not in California, but possibly in another state that doesn't have the same rules).
If the flaws you point out occur often enough, then people will stop using it and the experiment will fail.
Who is "you"? Someone, somewhere would be creating a system that verifies unique identities, aggregates ratings, etc. Even if the logic is peer-to-peer, the system requires an extremely robust engineering infrastructure to keep it going, and the people that build that thing take on all the issues Uber is dealing with, but without real control over the system.
Or to put it differently, it's not a coincidence that all big peer-to-peer systems are anchored in weird spots around the world. In any major country the government will hunt down the keepers of the system and hold them accountable for the content.
So, to answer your question directly, you're missing a whole lot.
So there goes your lengthy argument.
Seems they use the bitcoin block chain heavily as the basis for trust and security. Both of their "proof of burn" and "proof of timelock" techniques require each user to have a complete copy of the latest block chain (currently >20GB) to independently verify global trust.
I mention a few other pitfalls with this approach in another comment [2].
- bumming a ride
- hitchhiking
- car jacking
- kidnapping
It's worked remarkably well for the past 5+ years and right now, there are almost 500 rides available for today.
I suspect that if Uber had a second app, or maybe a second marketplace within the same app, which matched Uber passengers with each other -- instead of multiple passengers with a single driver -- it probably would have been legal.
It's a law designed to protect an existing marketplace.
Super Shuttle is a Passenger Stage Corporation (of the subtype defined as a "Door-to-Door Shuttle Service"), whereas Uber, Lyft, etc. are Charter Party Carriers, of the recently-defined subtype defined as "Transportation Network Companies".)
The rule at issue here applies to Charter Party Carriers, and therefore does not impact Super Shuttle and similar services, just as there are many rules that would apply to Super Shuttle as a PSC that do not apply to Uber/Lyft.
http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/uber-is-currently-fighting-th...
It seems pretty clear to me. CPUC isn't against multiple passengers in the same car. They are against billing those passengers individually, for whatever reason that rule was originally enacted. Perhaps to prevent cabbies from charging pairs of passengers $4 each when a single passenger would be charged $5.
And why is tswartz being downvoted?
Don't know.. maybe because he thinks a law that is 20 years old was somehow written specifically to attack Uber/Lyft?
Presumably, the airport shuttle vans have a different type of permit than the ones Uber et al have. Seems more like a temporary paperwork issue than a genuine showstopper.
Seems legit...
That was not the case. I remember paying a different amount than the person I was sitting next to, because we were travelling different distances.
The rate is the same for everyone in a given "zone" regardless of the specific route the driver must take.
Most likely the law is simple protectionism for unionized bus drivers, to stop private jitneys from putting them out of business. The use case is: you commute every day from point A to B, so you go along El Camino following the bus route, picking up people FROM BUS STOPS to share your ride and charging them what the bus would have charged. This is great news for the bus riders - they don't have to wait for the next bus so they get to their destination quicker - but if it catches on the bus lines ride empty, lose more money, and eventually political support for the bus route goes away.
> Perhaps to prevent cabbies from charging pairs of passengers $4 each when a single passenger would be charged $5.
Nah, that's not it. Normal cabbies (that use a taxi meter) have no flexibility over rates - the whole point of the meter is to make sure they're paying the right amount of taxes and kickbacks; accepting any extra regular fare (other than tips) would be illegal.
Car pooling/sharing is supposed to be sharing, i.e. split the cost. If you charge every pessenger individually you're trying to make a profit, not sharing or pooling.
Since the government considers the existing public transport infrastructure worthwhile to keep (buses, taxis), it doesn't want non-dependable competition to undercut it. Non-dependable meaning that these services aren't guaranteed to have a schedule, or to even transport you, like a bus will.
If people have a problem with a service and don't get satisfaction, they (or their attorneys) typically call up the CPUC and say 'why are you letting company X get away with this?' which is why companies are supposed to apprise the CPUC of what services they're offering in advance.
I'm not a big fan of CPUC (for example I think they have far too cosy of a relationship with PG&E), but they're not making it up as they go along.
CPUC isn't deeming it a bad thing, its deeming it an illegal thing. While part of what the CPUC does is adopt regulation, this isn't that kind of action -- this is the CPUC looking at the law adopted by the legislature that it is charged with enforcing, looking at the action going on, and saying "this action does not comply with the law; under the law as it stands, you must apply for a different permit to do this action. Or you can ask the legislature to change the law."
This is not a judgement of good/bad. (You will find such judgement in regulatory actions where, given the law, the CPUC must choose what regulations to adopt to implement the law given the discretion it has within the law.)
Do we know that? In this case it seems that they just didn't bother to apply. Unfortunately, that seems to be the normal way these ridesharing companies operate: ignore the law knowing that when they're called on it the media will spin it as "Evil Government Bureaucrat Does Job"
As others have pointed out, running the service inside of the regulation would probably require some changes on their part. In particular, I bet they won't be allowed to directly bill based on time or distance driven: if I'm on a bus that gets delayed in bad traffic or forced on a long detour I won't be asked for more money, but in a cab I would be. They should be able to still bill for distance-by-shortest-route though which should work well since it should be highly correlated, especially if they charge more during rush hour when travel is expected to be slower and thus costlier.
Before jitneys were generally outlawed in the US a popular billing method was based on zones. You take a map of the city, chop it into regions and there's a flat charge for travel anywhere within one zone, a different charge to travel between two or more zones. The zone map and payment schedule can then be printed on a business card the driver hands passengers or painted on the side of the vehicle. This is a LOT cheaper and simpler and more predictable than a taxi meter and removes any incentive to take a longer or slower route, but regulators tend to hate it because without metering it's too easy for the cab driver to take payment in cash and avoid paying any taxes on the income.
The whole reason that charter party carrier laws and regulation are applied to Uber, Lyft, etc., in California is that they fall outside of the ridesharing exemption to those laws.
They are no such thing.
They're rides for hire, and pretending otherwise is insulting at best.
Idiocy. Plain and simple.
Do the legislators there just love making people more problems?
Because due to its population and economy, and other factors that increase the attention to what goes on in California, you (and the web) or more likely to hear about anything in California than similar things in other states.
They have no long-term obligation to the drivers, and they have no business need for actual human drivers. What makes you think they won't be early adopters for autonomous vehicles?
Good luck running for an election again when you're destroying the environment with more cars.
This is California!