S.F., L.A. threaten Uber, Lyft, Sidecar with legal action
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
OTOH, rideshare drivers are incentivised to have as many (useful) rideshare apps on their phones as possible to maximise their ride volume, and customers are then incentivised to order their rides from the rideshare app with the lowest commission, and eventually a race to the bottom will result.
No thanks. Did you ever stop for a moment and think that perhaps people use Uber for a reason beyond "they developed an app"? It's the standard of service, silly.
Nothing except that fact that you and every other customer can choose to not patronize any drivers or services that don't provide the information or assurance that you require.
Meanwhile Uber has another PR headache as of last night... http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Uber-driver-accused-of-h...
That said, drivers for these services are going to be replaced by self-driving cars.
If the online drug markets can use reputation systems to ensure fairplay amongst the vast majority of anonymous blackmarket trades then local taxi networks should be able to manage it too!
Similarly, I like that I can call my credit card company and dispute a charge. The blockchain style of trust just means you get screwed.
The weights and measures complaint I am curious about and wonder if it's to do with surge pricing. For the record I'm against surge pricing as I feel it amounts to usury in the Aquinian sense.
That said, I think it's completely reasonable for the city to ask these companies to stop lying to consumers to make us feel safer for the sake of their revenue.
I'm totally for innovation and everything that comes with it though. I want these companies to succeed (well, maybe not Uber) but them behaving in this way is going to make it more difficult from a legal perspective for the startups of tomorrow.
Anyway, does anyone know if there's any type of 'Startup Legal Counsel' where companies that are innovating faster than the the law is able to evolve can be advised on the laws they may be breaking or help them lobby to get relevant laws updated faster before it has to get to this point? Or should they just know better?
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Uber-driver-charged-wi...
Seems like a DA being a DA and it will go away once his power tantrum runs its course.
When there is a hurricane, and the government declares a ban on "price gouging," then there is inevitably a shortage on things like gasoline, water, food, etc, because people by more than they need. When these goods cost more, people will tend to by only as much as they need. A sudden increase in demand should be met with a corresponding increase in price, but that is not allowed to happen. Furthermore, if the price of water, gas, and food goes up, then it is profitable for people to drive hundreds of miles in trucks with those goods to sell them, thus increasing the supply.
In the case of Uber and Lyft, surge pricing sorts out who really wants the rides. You might rethink going to the mall or the bar during surge pricing because you are competing with people who need those rides much more. If surge pricing was banned, then a traveler might not be able to get home from the airport because someone wanted an Uber ride to a sports bar to watch a football game.
No it doesn't - it sorts out who really wants the ride and can pay the price. Like many things in economics, laws of supply and demand are expressed ceteris paribus - all other things being equal. When everyone has the same amount of money, then demand pricing does indeed reflect who wants a good or service more. But in the real world this isn't true, so the idealized law does not accurately model real economic behavior and thus you shouldn't build on such a shaky foundation.
One reason that regulators impose price controls on taxi services is to give people with lesser income a degree of predictability about what a taxi ride will cost. The downside of this is indeed shortages, but insofar as time is fungible surge pricing leads to shoratages as well, it's just that they only affect poorer people who have to wait for the richer people to exhaust their demand.
If surge pricing was banned, then a traveler might not be able to get home from the airport because someone wanted an Uber ride to a sports bar to watch a football game.
That really makes no sense. If a sufficiently exciting game is on then people may be willing to pay top $ to be taken to sports bars and make the ride from the airport unaffordable. Indeed, given the relative scarcity of football games to plane flights, surge pricing seems more likely to occur in response to a popular sporting event than a flight arrival. I'm perplexed as to why you assume the air traveler is willing or able to pay more (although we can easily understand wanting to take a cab instead of a bus or train after a tiring journey), or why you assume that this would necessarily lead to a more economically efficient result.
As a purely anecdotal observation, I've never had a problem getting a cab at an airport, and only rarely at a train station. Cab drivers also like predictability and while they might be able to make more via surge pricing during very busy periods, there's also value in having places where the demand is very predictable, like transit infrastructure. Like everyone else, cab drivers have different priorities - some may be happy to chase demand, others may need to work fixed hours because of family or contractual commitments, and want less income volatility.
I'm not railing against demand-based pricing here, I'm just pointing out that the real world is more complex than just supply and demand.
But having someone pick you up in a private vehicle and chauffeur you around is?
"Today, we are thrilled to announce that the Tulsa City Council and Mayor Bartlett have paved the way for a permanent home for uberX in Tulsa by signing the recently passed rideshare ordinance."
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=8d2fd6968b2b5c64d0d22dba...
Edit Here's a copy of the ordinance: http://councildocs.tulsacouncil.org/SuperContainer/RawData//...
Not unlike say, babysitters transporting their charges from school to daycare.
Some places put the limit at '3' to avoid just those situations (but it also freezes out couples going on a date) and at least one jurisdiction was quoted as allowing only vehicles at their 'full passenger capacity' what ever that is (which seems a bit extreme to me)
The thing is that unlike my own fine city of Minneapolis, many other metropolitan areas seem incapable or unwilling to respond reasonably to try to work with these companies to come to a mutually agreeable set of regulations.
The city governments are incompetent to do their jobs instead they throw around legal threats and the companies openly flaunt the law. Neither seem to be doing what's right.
At the same time, city attorney's have a lot of stuff on their plates. Obviously someone thought this was worth spending on time (aka the higher ups want it to happen).
And of course the government feels pressure to stay relevant.
But legal threats and other government systems can't keep up with a fast-changing digital economy.
I think that we need some kind of effectively integrated system of regulation that can somehow represent the public good in a way that interfaces more directly with things like mobile apps and the blockchain, etc.
I also think we need to move away from a single-point-of-failure, all-powerful centralized government into something more egalitarian and decentralized. Maybe even polycentric.
Exactly how you do all of those things is an incredibly challenging set of problems.
Given the absolute raft of laws that Uber/Lyft/et al. violate most of the DA's are being more respectful than I would have expected, actually.
SF could force these services to shut down tomorrow and they would be on very safe legal grounds.
The rich and powerful make money off of people dumb enough to believe in the concept of the "sharing" economy enough to be their peons.
You have to trust someone's opinion, somewhere.
Decentralized or massively federated reputation and arbitration networks are possible. Clever people would need to figure out a way to set things up, but it's certainly not a technological impossibility.