How Uber Takes Over a City
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"Sharing economy" is by no means "an extension of communitarian roots". Communitarian is where the utility you derive is in part a function of the utility derived by others in your community. The "sharing" economy is where companies provide a service so you can buy or sell things (your house, car, time etc.) to others in your community. See the difference?
The same with Uber - for the "sharing economy" to be a logical extension of communitarianism, the greater population of Portland needs to derive some utility from people providing and using Uber service.
Orthogonal to all that, of course, is the generally scummy practice of reducing these folks to serfdom.
It's an abuse of language just to make these companies sound kinder.
They have nothing to do with the local community, in fact a global taxi firm degrading workers rights couldn't be further from this.
By this definition, virtually nothing is sharing beyond maybe volunteer operated community gardens. Virtually every service involves some sort of middle men getting a cut. Even a volunteer run community garden would if gardening supplies are purchased rather than wrought from supplies indigenous to the land.
(In contrast, traditional taxis do collect rents - the delta between a medallion restricted taxi market and one without barriers to entry.)
What does this mean, really? What is being "shared" with me? Airbnb's pricing in competitive markets is nearly on par with a hotel room. No one is being generous or sharing here. They're asking for what the market can bear. Except I don't get a concierge, daily housekeeping, a gym, a pool, etc.
There's this hypocritical leftist double-speak here where we pretend there's some community building or altruistic aspect at work. There's not. Its just people turning their homes into hotels for massive profit.
Hell, now commercial entities are involved, so that means less affordable rental spaces for local residents because they're just Airbnb money makers now. Now rents/prices go up to reflect the lack of real estate for renters and buyers. You'd think community minded people would care about that. Nope, they just want easy money like everyone else, but somehow they get to pretend they're morally above us all while doing it. Portland hipsters are all about the Benjamins too.
It has nothing to do with the left. The left, such as it is, views the "sharing economy" as the newest innovation in neoliberal capitalist divide-and-rule subjugation.
Now the US has become a finance/rentier economy it's great to see young people questioning business propaganda.
I'm not sure however why you say "leftist double-speak" though. Bloomberg, last time I checked, wasn't left-wing. This is all neo-liberal "free market" / "let's financialise everything" crowd.
Do we actually care about the percentage? If you spend $100 on Airbnb and most of that ends up in the local economy that's a lesser local impact than if you spend $250 at a hotel, even if only half of that stays in the local economy.
I'd also say, yes, the percentage is important in general.
That's irrelevant to the comment I was responding to, which was suggesting a transaction with a hotel chain "would funnel a greater percentage of funds away from the local economy" (despite its lack of relevance to the per-transaction discussion you do bring up a valid point which further shows we don't care about the percentage).
> I'd also say, yes, the percentage is important in general.
Why? If more money spent within an economy is beneficial to the economy then you want to maximize the amount of money spent within that economy.
Imagine a hypothetical economy of one person, you. Would you rather have a million dollars taxed at 50% or $100,000 taxed at 5%? Even though the percent you end up with is less you're still going to choose the million because $500,000 is more than $95,000.
pulled from here?
From: http://www.metareader.org/post/the-cult-of-sharing.html
(worth the read)
People have been renting out their homes via CL for over a decade. These "glue" services for AirBnB etc just make that transaction a lot better, and AirBnB takes their cut -- but people could post listings for vacation rentals online forever.
I rented apartments for the weekend in NYC as far back as 2002 off CL.
It has 250 lobbyists and 29 lobbying firms registered in capitols around the nation, at least a third more than Wal-Mart Stores. That doesn’t count municipal lobbyists. In Portland, the 28th-largest city in the U.S., 10 people would ultimately register to lobby on Uber’s behalf. They’d become a constant force in City Hall. City officials say they’d never seen anything on this scale.
I suspected politicians were responding to something besides the appeal of easy-to-get rides. What I've seen from local politicians was hard to explain otherwise.
It's bad for politics and the traditional taxi industry because they get less from the cake.
Is that really a thing outside of NYC? Pretty sure it isn't.
When Seattle built the Link light rail system, it stopped 1 mile shy of the airport because the taxi drivers didn't want the competition. Fortunately public outcry shut that down, but it's pretty rare that the general public gets upset enough about an issue to overcome the power of a specific interest group (yes, this includes Uber as well!)
There's plenty of literature to explain why price fixing and limiting supply/licensure is bad. There's no competition, no incentive to improve or provide a premium service. There's no reason to provide service in far-out areas where it might be hard to find a return fare. There's no reason to provide service in less "desirable" (read: minority) areas.
Of course, there are problems with the Uber model, too: Surge pricing being one of them. Some people think it's gouging, some think it's the right solution to provide supply for excess demand.
Why is it always left out that a limited number of taxis is good for society as well? Taxis operate on public roads, pollute public air, cause traffic congestion the public must deal with, cause car accidents and hit pedestrians. When you're not catching a ride taxis (and Ubers) are a nuisance and society has decided to limit their negative side effects.
They where a monopoly, and they acted like it, and now they aren't.
What would give you the idea that they are not paid?
Maybe some Uber supporters take "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" to heart. Uber does a lot wrong, and there are a lot of reasons to dislike them, but there are also reasons to cheer their success -- if not some of their methods.
I had to take a cab home from the airport a few weeks ago because my phone was dead. Not only did it cost almost twice as much as an uber would have, but the cab smelled terrible, the driver didn't know where we were going, and when we got to my house, I had to wait for five minutes while he literally made a carbon imprint of my credit card.
Uber has a bunch of, yes, unpaid (in fact negatively paid!) cheerleaders because it's offering a service that people really like.
Using modern tech for summoning, paying, and rating cabs is a great idea though.
Imagine a public area where lobbyists could post lobbying materials (videos, notes, slides, research, etc) and then the public could have a way to like the ones they thought were the most important.
As the most liked issues filtered up there could be a team of public (since governments a bad word to some people) fact checkers who would check the claims asserted, and put out possibility estimates.
From there there'd have to be some sort of action plan committee which would commission experts to make proposals and evaluate the presented solutions.
And from there, things would start to happen.
Private lobbying would only be legal when all presentations, correspondence, and meetings were recorded and transcribed for public release.
Of course, this requires a tremendous amount of effort on the publics part and a well connected and engaged public. It may be that a politician would be elected based on the team of 15 lobby likers he presented (or some such idea). If those lobby likers focused on some of the same issues the electorate wanted to focus on they'd elect that guy.
It's far fetched and would probably require publicly funded elections, but, shit, it's gotta be better than the no holds barred, resolutely opaque, money begotten system we have today.
Lobbyists certainly have a place, but they shouldn't be the only ones with the official's ears.
This preserves the benefits of lobbying (conveying to the ruler that "if you do this, you will cause this bad thing"), but makes it more obvious when someone is receiving bad arguments.
Unfortunately, representatives aren't required, like the Supreme Court, to declare "I'm voting this way because of these considerations", and it's not a 100% good thing either -- sometimes there are politically sensitive compromises where candor is punished at the polls.
[1] "Friend of the court"
Especially in cities taxis are just inefficient. They use over 10 times as much space as a similar amount of busses, and produce a lot more emissions per passenger, too.
Self driving car fleets for rent or taxis are good for rarely used routes, or for city - region transport, but inside a city taxis should be mostly replaced with proper subway and bus systems.
Especially in european cities with a historic core, this is just not the case - even in my city, it's common knowledge to NEVER take a car into the city, as the roads are just always fully congested.
Public Transport is the only long term solution. Especially when one takes the cost for building roads into account. And if one considers that with public transport 100% of the fare goes back into the infrastructure, while with self-driving cars operated by for-profit businesses most of your fare ends up in the pockets of a rich investor overseas. Which is just not desireable.
That said, if it happens, these self-driving cars should BECOME public transport, a common good, of course. Not some corporation's private automaton army of money-printing cars, even though Uber really is helping speed up the whole transition. I think Europe and perhaps Latin America will have better luck escaping Uber's monopoly claws and bringing service into the commons.
What an age we are living through, where all the valued and ideals of competition aren't even given lip service anymore and all of society goes all in on monopolies. Because what can go wrong when monopolies reach the phase where they turn all those lobbyists from market capture goals to regulatory capture goals to lock out any competition in an inherently low barrier to entry industry? Nothing can go wrong, right?
So long as the regulations aren't specific to Uber, what's to stop Lyft, Sidecar and others from competing in the same space? It seems like in this case, the monopoly is taxies, and the disruptor is still ridesharing services.
In regards to your monopoly point. There are very few, of any, natural monopolies. Ones which occur in a real free market.
That is not costly. Uber has raised $6 billion in capital, and is presently working on a $2 billion line of credit. Half a million dollars per major metro, would be trivial - but it won't be necessary, for every Portland, there are a dozen smaller cities that will just fall in line.
Terrifying ...
Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser (cited by Nobelist Paul Krugman and others) wrote this: (Build Big Bill)
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....
Thus, Uber and Airbnb owe much of their success to addressing market inefficiencies, "rent seeking" introduced by bad laws which serve special interests at the cost to people who take taxis, rent and buy apartments, and rent office space.
Once the companies involved start being more reasonable with paying taxes and employees instead of trying to essentially skirt the law and be irresponsible corporate citizens, they'll be a great addition to our economy. As of right now, they just make a lot of money for a few people at the expense of the rest just like any other Mega-Corp would.
I like to think the tech community tries to make the world better rather than just scrounge for cash, but maybe I'm too much of an idealist.
I spend a fair amount of time in Portland and it's incredibly similar to most American cities. All this exceptionalist serves only to stroke egos and generate clicks.
Lobbyists are well-positioned to inform legislators about how the market is different today, and why the animating purposes of taxi regulations may no longer be applicable, or at least may not have the same force they used to.
Government administers regulations on behalf of the people. If they're failing to do so then the political process is broken. Lobbyists do not fix broken political processes.
> Uber had been working on the council members for months. “They kinda run this,” Alpert said in February. “I keep feeling they will just wear you down. If we end up in court, we will have to lose just based on resources.”
This doesn't sound like they're simply informing legislators of new information nor does it sound like the legislators had the resources or the time to do anything but roll over.
Is that meant to be descriptive? Because I don't know where to start. "The people" isn't even an entity expect in a defunct branch of classical political philosophy.
And I do think this isn't an ideological claim. I believe this could be stated by socialists, libertarians, democrats..
Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people. Do you think politicians should be sitting around reading papers about the reputation economy and thinking about where those ideas can be applied? It would be intractable and a huge waste of time considering the vast universe of concerns involved. And it's not like ordinary citizens are clamoring writing letters about how the reputation economy enabled by smart phones makes certain taxi regulations obsolete. It's far better for lobbyists to do the relevant work and tell politicians what they should fix and why.
Or does it "shift responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to" corporations looking to maximize their financial benefits, regardless of its impact on society?
The entire point of elected officials is that their decisions aren't based on who has money. If we depend on lobbyists then only companies big enough to afford them get a seat at the table. That's a plutocracy.
> Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people.
Wait, are you asserting that corporations are people? Uber is not a person and the article suggests that they used their considerable power to take the decisions regarding their regulations out of the hands of the government officials of Portland and thus farther away from the people of Portland.
Lobbyists don't inform, they spin and skew.
The alternative is "neutral" fact-finding by unelected technocrats. I'd rather have a system where the environmentalist lobby and the coal lobby fight it out than rely on some bureaucrat to come up with his version of the facts with no input from anyone else.