City of Portland sues Uber
wweek.com
wweek.com
But now it's different, and it's just random people with random cars and an app. I haven't had any problems, but I wonder if they're pushing things too far. Every time I take a ride, I feel bad for how little the driver's getting paid.
(Now that we have the green cabs out here, I usually use those. You can get one from the Uber app, but have to pay the driver normally, which is confusing.)
Presumably you still eat out, enjoy clean bathrooms, eat fruit, or live and work inside of a building? If American capitalism is a well-oiled machine, unsustainably cheap labor is its lubricant. This debate is well worth having, but in no way is it specific to Uber.
American capitalism has some problems. The cost of goods, while reflecting the value added, also has the cost of externalities extracted. The cost of the cab ride may include gas and equipment depreciation, but may not include the cost of the driver's family not having the opportunity to find a better lot in life. Maybe it all works out fine; I don't know. But I'm guessing people with minimum wage jobs are not setting their own price for their work, but rather society is conspiring against them to convince them to work for less than their actual cost. (Does the average child of a single mother who works at McDonalds go to college and become a lawyer? Why not? Shouldn't they have that chance, even if it means your cheeseburger costs a dollar more?)
End digression.
Not to sound glib, but if that is the case why not tip the driver to the level you feel is appropriate?
The other problem comes down to social skills. The driver is not supposed to accept tips, so you have to do some bargaining to give them money. Then you wonder: is it worth getting the driver in trouble for this small amount of money? Is this tip an insult? Should I give more? Is it too much? Am I making a scene? It's all a little overwhelming for me.
I do much better when the tip is a line item on a credit card receipt.
That said I still try to use anything but Uber to get a ride.
While I personally do not use Uber, we need services like Uber to be allowed to operate. My recent experience going from the airport to downtown Los Angeles was absolute hell, the taxi driver tried forcing me to pay cash even though the card terminal was working. He wanted to drive me to an ATM to get cash out. This is the kind of thing I am tired of. Don't get me started on the last weekend I was in Vegas, the taxi services are just as bad there (and unreliable).
I don't get the whole safety argument either, I have always felt safe in an Uber and Lyft, I have felt unsafe too many times when I have taken a regular taxi, when they're not deliberately taking you a longer way to extort cash or trying to get you to pay cash when you only have a credit card.
I know we need regulation and fair enough, Uber are violating some local laws here, but driving services like Uber out of the city won't make things better. Local councils should be working with services like Uber, so they can coexist and operate legally. Lets get some solid legislation and requirements for ridesharing services, otherwise, they will just continue to operate regardless (as they have shown).
This feels like a cash grab from the city of Portland. No doubt other cities are going to follow suit as well. Let the people decide who they want to drive with. The better product will always win out and if that is Lyft, Uber or whomever, it really highlights the issues that plague the taxi industry.
Sounds like what the city is trying to do. And I don't see the "cash grab" from the city when their criticisms are not about taxation but fair use for the public.
One of the blinders people wear when talking about Uber is the "it's just Uber" blinders. No: if Uber's regulatory arbitrage strategy succeeds, they'll be followed by even less scrupulous companies looking to exploit the same loophole.
However, I do think that Uber and other services should honour pricing caps in cities that have them, they should also comply with rules regarding insurance and other reasonable things asked of them. But having said that, even if they were to honour pricing caps and get the appropriate insurance for their drivers, it will never be good enough for some cities, take Vancouver as an example.
In places like New York especially, too many people benefit off of the existing cartel like structure of leasing out a medallion, insurance and all of the other costs that tend to add up quite quickly. Things need to change, and I am glad there are companies out there pushing the boundaries and getting the conversation going. Gone are the days of a single company having a transportation monopoly in a city.
Really ? Isn't that a bit short sighted ?
Do we disagree about competition being a good thing for consumers?
I don't agree that we should throw open the doors for Uber as a catalyst to make that change though.
Cabs can be downright horrible, but I'm hesitant to throw out the devil we know for the one we don't. Uber has already demonstrated an unwillingness to obey laws they disagree with, I'm concerned about how far and in what areas they're willing to push the bounds. We already have avenues for complaining about / fixing the cab system but I don't think many people actually complain to the cab company when they have a bad experience - maybe the cab company needs an app?
Isn't this why Uber is competitive on price - because they don't do all these other "onerous" things? I thought that was entirely how they were able to charge so low.
So when a cab driver, who is scraping by, needs to pay for the gas he used that night, if he has mostly credit card fees, he has no cash to pay for gas.
Which reinforces the fact that the cab companies are making a big mistake. If they only fought with the credit card processors to have a reliable, fast-paying, non-rip-off payment system or otherwise worked with the cab drivers to make it work for them, then all the cabbies would gladly take your credit card money.
Chicago cab drivers used to tell me they couldn't take cards all the time. I just said "you are required to take my card". They always did.
This may sound harsh, but... they're not earning anything past their daily spendings, right? Then this is going to happen the first day of illness, car not starting, or any other situation. Trying to avoid card transactions will likely just delay the result... so why do it at all?
Although living literally day to day with income is a new one to me. Most people can't do that even if they wanted to, what with only getting paid every two weeks.
In any case, this is obviously a situation you don't want to get into, but if you're in it, then the answer to your question should seem obvious: even if the fall is inevitable, you'd want to delay it as long as possible. Each day of survival is worth something, and maybe something will come along to help you dig out.
That said, I can't feel sorry for people whose money is delayed a few days rather than getting it immediately, when almost everybody else gets paid weeks after they work.
I'm going to bet that a big reason for resisting credit card payments is that the payments are tracked and you can't evade taxes on them the way you can with cash. This isn't meant to impugn taxi drivers, as it seems to be typical for any cash work. I've had people, who seemed otherwise wholesome, tell me that I should tip waiters with cash instead of adding a tip to my credit card receipt because they can avoid declaring cash as income for their taxes.
If Uber were the only way to get around town in Portland, that might be a valid complaint.
If you want Uber to go out of business - and it seems like supporters of this action are in that camp - you want them to charge more than people are willing to pay.
People forget that one of the reasons we have cab regulations is that taxicabs are, for major metro areas, a de facto component of the public transportation infrastructure.
If some of these segments are unprofitable and cannot be served by regular businesses, then that's good for us to realize! That encourages us to have the discussion we ought to be having, which is: should we provide these services in pursuit of a social goal? And what are the services worth?
I would be much more in favor of cities contracting with private companies to provide a service than passing regulation to require it. Requiring a service by regulation hides the true cost of the service and causes it to be borne in random places and in random ways through price increases. It's like a hidden tax.
There should be a clear dollar cost for these services in the budget, and voters should be able to inspect the costs and decide what's reasonable. Requiring private companies to provide the service through regulation does not promote a transparent democracy, since voters cannot easily determine the cost, and indeed the actual cost may be hard to determine.
For example, if the city wishes there to be a certain number of vehicles available for the disabled, then a reasonable and fair approach is to ask private transportation companies to bid on a contract to provide that service. The city should be satisfied paying the lowest bid for that service. If the lowest price is viewed as too high, then this is a signal that either some political debate is needed regarding the budget for such things, or that the resources should be spent on another social goal which provides value more effectively.
Far too many different issues are bundled together in the discussions of taxis. We ought to unbundle them. [Edit: Sorry for reposting my comment. There seems to be some kind of issue that's preventing me from editing my comments in minor ways like I usually can.]
The natural gas/water/sewer company? The fire department?
What if the end result is that rich people get stable electricity, gas, water/sewer, basic internet, and fire protection services, while the poor can just fend for themselves or hope that the low bidder utility has power tomorrow?
There are companies granted/licensed some form of monopoly in exchange for minimum mandated services, maximum mandated rates, and other limits to capitalism in its purest form because government believes that their service is essential in some way.
Many cities operate taxi licensing in this light. That you view this as prime facia evidence that the taxi market is dysfunctional and that Uber should be able to selectively siphon off a portion of the demand without abiding the rest of the government-regulated taxi requirements is consistent internally, but I believe misses some of the underlying public good that the current taxi system provides.
There are varying strategies for solving the problem of social goods like utilities. In some cities, utilities like these are publicly owned, such as Seattle City Light.
I'm not convinced that individual transportation services are sufficiently similar to utilities that they fall into this category. What utilities have in common is that they fundamentally share physical infrastructure: pipes, wires, etc. It does not make economic sense to run duplicate wires everywhere, and so we grant a monopoly to one utility company. By comparison, each private vehicle traveling along the road is physically distinct from all others. (There will certainly be economies to scale for a single organization to operate a larger fleet of vehicles, but that's always true in every business.) Buses make sense to offer as a public good since they represent collective transportation; whereas private for-hire vehicles inherently offer individualized transportation. So it may be a public good, but it's not quite collective nor a natural monopoly.
I don't think it's inherently unreasonable for cities to want to ensure access to this type of individual transportation [1], but I question whether the current taxi model is the right one. What is the best way to meet these public needs? I don't know for sure, but some attractive alternative approaches include: (1) offering a subsidy for private transportation companies to meet certain criteria (e.g., area coverage) (2) soliciting bids for private contracts with companies to provide the service under contract (3) directly providing the service (metro). Forcing companies to provide the service in order to get licensed to provide other services is heavy-handed and unjustified based on what I've learned so far.
I have not heard a convincing argument for why a company that wishes to provide some transportation services should also be forced to provide other transportation services at certain prices. The utility company should be forced to support everyone because we don't want to dig up our roads over and over again, and because water and electricity are necessary for life, and sewer for sanitation reasons. The fire department should support everyone so that your house catching fire doesn't cause mine to burn down. There are good public benefit arguments behind most of these utilities. Are private cars that drive you around really in the same category? And if they are, what stops cities from solving these problems with a much less heavy-handed approach that enables innovation?
Isn't Uber serving taxi-like needs through UberX anyway? It's not as if the poor would be without transport even if only Uber was available. Let's allow private companies to provide what transportation they can. The existence of these companies does not stop the city from offering alternative solutions for various market segments, or offering a subsidy to entice companies to meet those needs.
I would like to make one last argument against the current model. The current regulation model imposes a lot of costs on transportation companies that are effectively a hidden tax - when in any aspect of their operations they're forced to do something unnatural. These costs surface through higher prices. However, these prices are opaque. A voter in the district can't necessarily determine how much higher taxi prices are because of the city's decision to force them to do <X>. This does not support an informed, rational democracy. Consider the alternative models I've proposed above. They all essentially include a contract where the city is providing a service directly, or paying a third party to do so. You can imagine computing a very clear line-item cost in the budget for each of the services that the city wishes to be provided. Consequently, voters in the district can learn about these costs transparently, and reason about whether the cost/benefit tradeoff makes sense to them. It is possible for voters to say, "This service is too expensive - we should cease funding it". How could we determine whether certain requirements mandated under taxi regulation are too expensive? Does deciding to stop providing a service mean that the city needs to amend its law? (Inflexible and, again, heavy-handed.) The costs are known only to private companies, and even they might require actuarial analysis to understand the costs.
Whereas if you pay a private transportation service to offer subsidized taxi-like transportation in certain areas, in certain hours, then we know exactly what it costs, and we can make an informed decision about whether to continue to provide the service or not. Regulation requiring private companies to provide the service as part of other activities just obfuscates the cost and prevents us from reasoning about it intelligently, like in debates like this.
[1] In fact, I hope the city of the future will move away from buses, and move to automated fleets of something like robotic Uber, scheduled in real-time based on live transportation needs
Isn't Uber serving taxi-like needs through UberX anyway? It's not as if the poor would be without transport even if only Uber was available. Let's allow private companies to provide what transportation they can. The existence of these companies does not stop the city from offering alternative solutions for various market segments, or offering a subsidy to entice companies to meet those needs.
The presence of unliscensed (as a livery service) operators in a city has two possible negative effects on the transport options for the community.
1. The "creaming off" of some high-value trips makes it less economical to have cars in the area to serve other needs (like bringing groceries home from the supermarket with good selection and low prices rather than buying all food from a corner bodega).
2. It's well and good to suggest that the city step in to provide subsidized transportation (directly or via an agent), but without the licensing and taxation revenue, that money now has to come from general funds whereas, before Uber, it was provided without hitting the general funds of the city.
3. There is a public good provided by "must transport" laws that most livery services operate under. That relates to #1, so I won't call it a third point.
For the record, I agree with you that the current taxi system is antiquated and if we were to design an idealized system from scratch, it might look closer to Uber/Lyft than the current system, but I don't agree with "screw the laws; they're stupid anyway, so let Uber do whatever they want" approach that many pro-Uber advocates seem to advance (of course, not in so many words).
A quick search on the matter reveals that Portland seems to have imposed ridiculous requirements on them:
- a requirement that forces customers to arrange a trip with an executive sedan or limousine at least 60 minutes prior to pick-up. For example, if you request a town car and it comes in 10 minutes, you must wait 50 minutes before you are legally allowed to enter the vehicle.
- a requirement that forces executive sedans and limousines to charge a 35% fixed premium above current taxi rates established by the city.
This seems like serious and absurd intervention in the market for transportation. It's difficult for me to believe that rules like this are fair and justified. An article [1] suggests that these rules were put in place to "differentiate towncar service from taxicabs". The implication is that without these arbitrary limitations, taxicabs could not compete with towncars effectively. In other words, in an effort to protect the taxicab monopolies, the city is impairing other business.
It seems to me to be the behavior of people in power who believe they know best. Haven't we learned by now that central planning is usually not an efficient way of allocating resources? This kind of interference in the market sounds like authoritarianism of the sort that I'd prefer not to see in my country.
Strive to minimize regulation: limit it to matters of health and safety. Requiring insurance and an appropriate driver license seems reasonable.
It seems like Portland is imposing rule after arbitrary rule on the marketplace. If I lived in Portland I would be furious that the city is interfering in such a way with business, and my personal right to contract with others for transportation in the manner that I want to. I suspect the city could accomplish its goals (such as ensuring that a certain number of vehicles provide transportation for the disabled) in a more efficient and fair manner, such as establishing a subsidy for transportation vehicles meeting certain requirements. It seems unreasonable to me that the city requires taxis to provide that service, rather than providing a subsidy for vehicles to support the disabled, or providing its own transportation directly, or contracting with a privacy company to do so. The point is, those issues shouldn't be arbitrarily bundled together (the business facility that provides taxis and the business facility that provides transportation to the disabled). Allow them to be the same company or not as the market allows.
It also seems absurd to regulate the price charged for a fare. I have never understood the objection to surge pricing. When crazy things are happening (like snowstorms), drivers will not be out on the road working unless they're compensated more than usual. The rougher the circumstances, or the busier things are, the more the price needs to rise in order to provide adequate supply. Anyone objecting to the concept of surge pricing clearly does not understand basic economics. (Objecting to the implementation is a different matter.) A city trying to regulate maximum price is taking a thoughtless approach, and cannot be understood to genuinely have consumer interest at heart, since consumers will typically prefer to have transportation available at a high price than not at all.
No, we haven't. Because it often is an efficient way of allocating resources. Like within a company. Or within certain governmental organizations. Central planning can be awesome.
Balderdash. There's a trivial way to get drivers on the road during bad weather without surge pricing: you tell them that if they don't work during bad weather, the won't be allowed to work during good weather.
> Anyone objecting to the concept of surge pricing clearly does not understand basic economics
There's more to economics than what they cover in Ec101. A free market is not always the most efficient way to allocate resources. That's why, for instance, emergency rooms treat people based on the seriousness of their condition rather than based on who is willing to pay the most. Transportation during bad weather can become that kind of resource.
Honest question: how well does that actually work in practice? Do cabbies generally fear the prospects of turning down have-to-takes? When was the last time one faced any consequences for nope-ing right past a black person? And would it even be practical?
And how well does this "vinegar" strategy work to improve supply generally? Would you prefer a world in which grocers had to maintain constant produce prices through the year to the current one in which they charge more as the seasonal supply contracts?
Additionally, Uber is exploding in popularity because taxi's did a horrible job, abused their government granted monopolies and basically made life miserable for people... the first person in my peer group to start using Uber regularly did it because of the challenge of getting a cab while black late at night.
Moreover, I think you're underestimating an important effect: which is that significant events like snowstorms, maybe sporting events will affect both supply and demand. The impact may not be something that anyone can forecast.
When the Uber surge price rises to 6x normal, new supply will enter the system, and demand will leave it. Say an Uber driver is relaxing at home and did not plan to work today. He receives a notification that fare is now 6x normal. That will entice him to work today, even if he wasn't planning to. Or a driver that works predominately in a different area might travel to the area that needs more drivers. Etc. The fact that price can fluctuate in this way ensures that sufficient supply is available. The high price literally creates supply. There is no economic incentive for a taxi driver to come into work on his day off in order to give rides in a snowstorm if he'll receive the same prices the following day.
Similarly, when the price rises to 6x, Uber users might decide to call a friend for a ride, instead of taking an Uber, ensuring that people who have alternative means of transportation use them, leaving the drivers available for those who wish to pay or have no alternatives.
Thinking through all the side effects and eventualities, the fact that price can fluctuate according to supply and demand provides a significant benefit in the way of allowing more rides to occur.
What they wrote would be exactly as valid or invalid as it is now. Account age (education, job title, etc) does not magically validate (or invalidate) ideas, they have to stand on their own.
> if they had a two year old hacker news account, how exactly would that change the content of their post?
The likelihood of astroturfing would be far reduced. (That would indeed be playing the long game!)
Compare that to this post, it isn't about the posters personal experience or testimonial, they claim none, it is objective points, not a personal testimonial about how "Uber saved my life 7 weeks ago..."
http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-rel...
... so I stand by my initial point, when you CAN have a rational debate, DO have a rational debate. When you can't -- you are right to call astroturfing, no way to argue with how people feel or unsubstantiated personal claims.
> It also seems absurd to regulate the price charged for a fare. I have never understood the objection to surge pricing.
Taxis are a form of punlic transport. They need to have predictable pricing. The public also needs protection from unscrupulous operators who would overcharge.
There are better ways to achieve this.
Here's Portland's official website on the issue: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/511920
> The Limited Passenger Transportation and Taxi Driver Permit requirements ensure the public that drivers have passed annual City-required annual background checks.
> “If Uber thinks there should be no maximum price on what they charge Portlanders, they should make their case to the Portland City Council,” Novick said. “If Uber thinks taxi companies shouldn’t have to serve people with disabilities, they should make their case. If Uber thinks taxis should not have to have proper insurance in case of a crash, they should tell us why we should allow that.”
But if it's a ride sharing broker, there probably aren't any specific regs to cover that.
This is all about the money. Uber is suddenly rich, at least in terms of estimated valuation, and that makes it worth it to put lawyers to work trying to get a piece of that action.
I'm cheering for Uber in this fight. The taxi industry has long been over regulated and much too buddy-buddy with city governments, to the detriment of both the drivers and their customers.
When I lived in Asia, taxis were much less regulated, the drivers had a lot more autonomy, and you could go anywhere for a couple of dollars; it was a fantastic alternative to owning a car.
We have regulated the taxi industry into an overpriced mess that poorly serves the cities, especially the lower income people who can't afford to buy and maintain a car, who would most benefit from a ride sharing service to get them where they're going quickly and cheaply. Just my opinion :)
Is there anything Uber have done in terms of improving user experience that they couldn't have done within the same framework offered to every other business? Maybe something to do with branding of cars? A legal taxi company could have created a great app, had some form of driver/user voting, presumably handled payment through apps?
Sometimes it sucks when people ignore the law. So does selective prosecution.
Who gets to make that judgement? In my mind you are asking for punishment based on subjective criteria, which would be ripe for abuse.