>> the final price would now be calculated at the end of a trip, “based on the actual time and distance traveled.”
Well that sucks big time. One of the main reasons I used Uber was I know what it's going to cost me, upfront, no matter what, I just click, get in the car, get out and that's it. Now I have to gamble, risk that I get stuck in traffic and my price suddenly doubles, worry that the driver "took the scenic route", and so on, and so forth. It becomes just a taxi with a nice app.
I completely agree. It should be a fixed price, incentivizing the driver to take the most efficient route.
I also don’t want my driver to see where I’m going, because not all rides are big fares. Sometimes I must get somewhere close and I don’t want a hassle.
Uber has gotten a lot of bad press lately and I think unfairly so.
What’s worse is Amazon’s gig program. Let’s say your doing jobs like assembling BBQs and Treadmills for customers. They don’t pay trip time to the job, so you can drive 40 miles only to find out half the screws are missing. You must get the customer to request the parts, come back, only to find it’s wrong again.
You take a big hit refusing the job but you have to take all the shitty work to get the chance of a real profitable gig.
Indeed. When I was visiting the US, this was one of the prime reasons I used Uber over regular taxis.
In Uber I just added my destination and then I could decide if the price was acceptable to me or not. With a taxi you end up at your destination and pray the price isn't too bad.
That's exactly why I used Uber in new cities - I don't know which cab company is honest and which is crooked, I don't know what's the good rate looks like, I don't know whether the route from airport to my hotel is supposed to take 10 minutes or 40 minutes... I don't have time or desire to conduct this research, yet less after a long and tiring flight. In Uber, I get price upfront - if it sounds reasonable, I go, if it sounds too much, I look for the other options. Much simpler.
> But usually with taxis, if you hail one, or call an operat you can ask for a quote?
They can give you a quote but there's no telling if it's going to be accurate or not, as the final price is based on a meter for hail taxis in almost all locations within a defined area. When you get to your destination what you were quoted is irrelevant, you just have to pay the price. So what's the point in the quote?
I'd expect the driver to stop the meter, if it's on its way over the given quote. I'd also be prepared to pay the quote, even if the meter shows less. If not, what'd be the point in getting a quote?
That’s not allowed in most jurisdictions - the driver would lose their licence. They have to drive on the meter and can't barter separately unless it's outside the region.
Interesting. At least in Norway its quite common in my experience for a driver to turn off the meter if they've made a wrong turn or similar obvious mistake that makes the trip go long, were the driver is clearly at fault.
I guess that means that the only way for a driver to give discounts, would be to pay the difference themselves, incurring tax on the discount?
They're a blue collar guy trying to feed their family on a low-wage job with variable income, they have like zero incentive to do so man. They're also gambling that they can potentially intimidate a rider who says they won't pay x price because of a detour, mistake, or misquoted price. The driver could be larger or tougher than the rider, and you're in a small space with them.
I had a larger driver try to intimidate me into giving them a cash tip on top of the one I'd already written in via credit card. (I refused). This is why I never, ever use taxis now
They were already doing that! Last year, I needed a ride to get home and was quoted $11.88 in their app, but we got stuck in an unusually bad traffic jam for an hour and they billed me $28.26 instead -- that's more than double what they quoted me!
Playing devils advocate here. I prefer the predictability as well. But assuming an honest driver, it’s not usually their fault you got stuck in traffic or the ride took longer than expected. Should he/she not get paid for the extra time they drove?
Driver getting paid and the passenger paying are two different transactions; that's one of the reasons there's a company in between them. So while the driver should be compensated, this doesn't necessarily means the particular passenger should be charged extra. The company in the middle has an opportunity to pool such risk.
On top of that, with all the tech specialists Uber hires, with all the complex tech they brag about, with all the data they suck in - and given that they know your starting point and your destination - how come that they can't include traffic in the price estimation? It's not like traffic jams materialize suddenly, out of nowhere, and disappear in the flash. With the data it has, Uber could tell in advance that your ride will be stuck in traffic, and price accordingly.
> how come that they can't include traffic in the price estimation? It's not like traffic jams materialize suddenly, out of nowhere, and disappear in the flash.
Even traffic indication in Google Maps isn't that accurate, I often get into a red section where there might have been a jam 15-20 min ago but it cleared up when I got there.
Those traffic indicators aren',t really live, more like how it was 30 minutes in the past.
Options? Fixed-rate mortgages? Salaries that are stated as a number of dollars, not a percentage of company profit? "We will charge you perhaps a bit more / pay you perhaps a bit less but in exchange we will take the risk of the real value fluctuating and your number is guaranteed" is a super common deal.
More fundamentally, why should they do it? Because they think it'll get customers, and as a big company they can absorb the risk.
Every single company that ships things to customers. If it gets damaged in transit it is their problem not your problem. If traffic is bad it is the shipping companies problem.
Every single company that offers a warranty. If something unexpected caused an issue in creating the good (in this case a ride from a to b) it is their problem not your problem.
That is the entire point, they are not "Ubers drivers", that is what most people do not want to accept
You are hiring a contractor to pick you up, and drop you off, not a "uber driver"
This is no different than going to Angie's List to find a Contractor to fix your broken pipe
Now Uber has been attempting to talk out of both sides of their mouths on this topic, but I find it hard to believe people do not understand the reality here.
Maybe I have too much faith in the intelligence of people
Wait, does that mean that if I'm an uber driver, I could decide to just give a flat 100 USD quote, and anyone wanting to pay a premium could choose me in the app? And I could theoretically build up a loyal following based on quality of service?
Because that would make it a marketplace for contractors.
I always assumed Uber claimed some standard of service (all trips will be of equal quality, drivers and cars are replaceable) - in which case it's just a race to the bottom, with desperate people operating at a loss, or close to it?
No, I am obviously hiring Uber. I am going to the Uber app, putting a destination, looking at the price Uber quotes me, and clicking "go". In no meaningful way am I choosing my contractor myself.
Whether Uber chooses to structure the workforce as contractors or employees is their problem, not mine.
hmm many of the freelancing sites operate the same way,
I go to acme freelance, I put in the work I want done, acme freelance sends me quotes and profiles for people willing to do the work, I click go..
I guess in that instance i am not hiring a "contractor" either I am hiring acme freelance.. good to know
To the rest of the world when I have my software developed by a contractor I found on Acme Freelance I did infact hire a contractor, but I guess because this is driving it is some how different? Or because the rates are more standardized?
I am trying to figure out why you believe uber is different from the 100's of other freelance websites? or maybe you dont and you believe all of the people selling services on all of those sites should also be Employee's of the sites?
Not sure why this is comment is being downvoted. This is literally the point Uber is trying to make. They are a platform to connect drivers with passengers.
Too many people want to believe in the Myth that Uber is this evil company stealing all the money from the Drivers..
Most of them are Uber Customers that believe that if Uber makes the drivers employee's the drivers would be treated fairly, well compensated, and they will still get Cheap rides
Of course this is all a delusion, because as always "Price, quality, or service: Pick 2"
They believe they can "have it all" but reality does not work that way
It's called tipping. You go ahead and pay the driver whatever the heck you want for better service, $1M, whatever. Hand cash to the driver if you want.
Great, how do I tell the driver ahead of time that I'm willing to tip more for better service? For instance, how do I communicate to drivers, I know I'm in the middle of nowhere, but you should drive over here and accept my request because I'll tip more heavily?
I mean, it's just a platform for communicating with independent drivers the way that Angie's List lets me communicate with plumbers, right? So there's definitely some box in the app which lets me send this message out, I just need to find it?
That's why I didn't contest it; I knew the driver would just get shafted by Uber, even though it wasn't his fault. I'm still mad at Uber for pulling a bait-and-switch but that's not really the point of my post. The point was that they were already doing this last year!
If a plane is detoured due to weather the crew are paid for the extra hours. Why would you assume the customers should pay more for their ticket to cover the cost?
It’s just part of the company’s cost of doing business.
Yes, but I ride only a few times and they drive thousands of times. Assuming the estimates are accurate on average, they will be fairly compensated overall, whereas I could have a very skewed result.
In that case, there should be a market for an original-Uber-like service that does comply with the law (so it will probably have to charge more, but at least you know in advance how much).
The entire market for Uber was because it cost less then Taxi's
People have this mythical believe that prices are infinitely elastic and that all uber drivers can magically make 100K a year with out causing the company to fold
That is not how any of this works, as service like you are talking about has been around for decades, they are called black car services. They employ professional drivers at reasonable wages, they DO NOT however have a mass market because the costs of those cars are $$$$$$ and only people in the Upper income levels can affords to use such a service
When Uber started (then called UberCab), they weren’t cheaper than taxis. They instead were more convenient (no trying to hail a cab, no fighting drivers over taking cards, no expectation of tip despite subpar service) and consistent. I miss those days.
If you can automate part of it with an app it could be cheaper. Maybe it won't work out cheaper than a taxi, but pretty likely cheaper than those black car services. And since there is a market for the latter, there might be enough market for something in between; I don't know how large.
So you believe the booking is the most expensive part of running a professional car service? and that by automating the booking they would cut costs significantly?
In the UK, they have already automated it. Many cab companies allow booking by app, with a _similar_ experience to Uber (though with worse service, usually).
Importantly, they charge the full meter price as set by the licensing authority, and engage in the usual cab of tactics arguing about credit cards, taking sub-optimal routes and espousing disagreeable politics for the entire trip.
This is simply incorrect. Black car services are just as unreliable as cabs in many parts of the world (and in many others, the distinction does not even exist).
the same way all other laws do, passed by the legislature and signed by the governor
>>> Why wasn't I, a resident of California, asked to vote on it?
because neither the US nor the State of California is a Direct Democracy, it is a Representative Constitutional Republic
>>> Was the law buried under some legalese and just slipped past the eyes of 39 million Californians? And nobody made any noise about it?
No there have been several thousands of News reports about it, even I as a Midwestern knew about this law months ago (I think I first heard about it mid 2019), if you did not then I would recommend you update your news sources you are in some kind of Bubble or echo chamber
> the same way all other laws do, passed by the legislature and signed by the governor
In CA, there are also a fair number of propositions that are voted on by the general public. It would be interesting if there were some sort of mechanism through which a pending law could be put on hold until after a popular vote, say, if enough voter signatures were gathered within a certain timeframe.
I'm asking for something in the middle — basically pause a new law from coming into effect because enough residents have given signatures for a proposition that would invalidate it. What I think you're describing is invalidating it after it comes into effect. It would seem reasonable to have an avenue for pre-empting a very unpopular law (passed by legislators and signed by the governor) from coming into effect, given that the proposition system already gives residents a way to later overturn it.
The poster didn't claim to be an American and even if they are American, there are lots of different opinions on what things are important to spend time on and not everyone agrees that it's following the news or reading up on various ways places structure their government.
they claim to live in the state of California, and are concerned about voting so that would imply they are at minimum a Naturalized Citizen of the US...
>> there are lots of different opinions on what things are important to spend time on
True, however they are the one acting shocked about a new law being passed, if they do not believe new laws in their state is something important to spend time on, they should then not be shocked when a law passes they were no aware of.
AB5 supposedly just clarifies what the law already said: that workers should be classified as employees except in narrow circumstances when they're clearly independent. As employees, they're entitled to minimum wage, sick leave, etc.
It's a plausible interpretation of some old laws designed for a different world, but it doesn't seem like good policy for today.
If you're US citizen residing in California, you had an option to vote for (or against) people that enacted it. If you didn't, now you learned that elections have consequences regardless of whether you participate or not. If you are, like me, an alien living in California, you can be happy that at least the weather is nice, so far they didn't find the way to mess this up too.
>Well that sucks big time. One of the main reasons I used Uber was I know what it's going to cost me, upfront, no matter what, I just click
And I can't care less about this change, when estimate was for £5-£7 but actual price was £8.80. Estimate never worked for me, only once in several trips in last 2 years actual price was in range of the estimates.
This isn't how Uber, or indeed any competently-written service, works. I'd be beyond shocked if there was some hard-coded algorithm for estimating fares that they do one-off manual upgrades on. It's far more likely that they have a statistical method for doing so, that's constantly doing the equivalent of the "upgrade" you're describing. Such systems have nonzero error.
I am an Uber Driver. I have been wanting changes like this ever since I started driving. I saw people asking, 'how does this make drivers less employee like?' I'll tell you this. It makes us feel less like employees when we actually have enough information to choose whether or not we want to take a ride. Now we will be able to see the estimated fare before we take a specific ride. There will be no more driving 20 minutes to a ride only to discover that it will be a half mile ride that wastes another twenty minutes at a convenience store netting us $3 for 40 minutes of our time. I will simply skip any ride like that. We feel less like employees and more like the contractors we are supposed to be when we know why Uber gets a certain percentage of the fare. I wholeheartedly agree with the changes Uber is making.
I don't really understand. It sounds great that the drivers would have enough information to decide whether to take a ride or not, but what does this have to do with stopping upfront pricing? In my ideal world, the driver knows everything about the proposed ride, and the rider knows the exact cost of it. Why is that not possible?
Variable payout means some form of fare bidding on driver side, as drivers can reject rides that are too low.
On top of that, they are capping their commission to 25%, meaning that they can't use more profitable rides to offset losses from less profitable ones.
Those two factors combined, means Uber cannot offer fixed pricing upfront without incurring loss.
Can one not simply show the driver the price and let them reject if too low? I don't think variable payout is the thing that lets drivers see the price and reject. Besides, if too many drivers are rejecting rides because of pricing, it would allow Uber to set higher minimum pricing and/or wait times.
Variable pricing also doesn't mean the second - it simply limits the amount they take from it. They still have tools like minimum pricing. I'd even say minimum pricing would be more beneficial to drivers and wouldn't seem unreasonable to customers (of course, they might just choose to walk short distances).
> On top of that, they are capping their commission to 25%, meaning that they can't use more profitable rides to offset losses from less profitable ones.
What? Uber is getting payed for a transaction. How is 25% of a hundred dollar ride not more than 25% off a three dollar ride?
Uber costs are running the service - if drivers truly are contractors, then payment to drivers isn't a cost for uber?
The change to variable priced rides is because the 'cut' of the fare that Uber takes has been standardized to 25% while driver pay remains based on time and mileage.
Giving drivers information about upcoming rides is a separate change.
If a driver is always paid x/minute/mile (total X), customer always pays Y dollars as made up by Uber. Uber takes U, 25% of Y, pays the driver X, where does the rest go if Y-U-X > 0?
How can this ever work without Uber sometimes taking a loss?
Because the driver doesn't know about unforseen factors such as traffic that change in real time during the ride to the pickup point. We do not live in an ideal world.
Uber didn't invent upfront pricing. If you pass the cost of traffic onto the customer then drivers will drive in traffic on purpose and rinse the riders.
I had no idea Uber drivers can't see the destination before taking rides. You as a passenger certainly commit to the target before you order, so I thought the driver can see it too. Certainly makes sense to me for it to be this way, especially given it's not supposed to be employment relationship. If we're to agree with the driver on a contract, and Uber is just facilitating, then both sides of the contract should have full information about what the contract is about.
Redlining is pretty easy to see in the data - Uber records everything. And, of course, by-source redlining is already possible - so hiding destination doesn't really solve it. And if Uber wanted, they could use the data they have to solve it.
OTOH, as a passenger, if the provider feels they are not comfortable driving me somewhere - do I really have the right to force them? I am not really much into forcing people to work for me if they don't want to do it. Would you as a services provider want to work in the area you don't feel safe in? I wouldn't.
I've used Uber in various countries over the years and redlining is a huge problem they had to tackle.
It was very common for drivers in Asia to call up a customer and ask for their destination and force them to cancel if they didn't feel like it. If you didn't, they report you as no show which would auto charge you and getting reimbursed was a hassle. Fortunately, Uber shut that down pretty hard.
Contractor or not, if a driver agreed to drive for Uber, then they tacitly agreed to drive to any destination in their set range. I think that's fair.
In the UK at least that's one of the major differences between employees/workers/self employed. If I'm an employee I'd have to take the work offered, but if you're self employeed you should be free to decline work. It's a spectrum trading rights of the employee for freedoms.
If Uber don't want to take on the role of employer, they aren't allowed as much control over how tasks are completed or what tasks are accepted.
That is an overly simplistic view. It's worth reading the tribunal conclusions for the case in the UK that concluded the drivers are workers.
Edit- a quick example of why it's not so simple:
If this is the case, all employers could say their employees are just contractors as they are free to have all the contractor freedoms however if the contractor uses them then the company is free to stop offering them work.
There are places that are really risky to drive to.
In Buenos Aires, ie, it was reported that multiple Uber drivers got physically attacked by taxi drivers when they got identified on downtown.
In some countries, like Brazil, there are some really risky areas where driver could potentially put his/her life at risk. Areas where not even police can access.
>>Contractor or not, if a driver agreed to drive for Uber, then they tacitly agreed to drive to any destination in their set range. I think that's fair.
This is a difference of how people view the platforms, I dont believe that is either fair or correct.
If I sign up for say a Freelancing site that offers a wide range of services I have not "tacitly agreed to" offer every service the site offers, I have not "tacitly agreed to" do the same thing that everyone else on the site offers
That is what uber is a Freelance Driver site, where a customer can select a Driver to perform a service (take me from a to b), just like when I take a Freelance programming job I have (and uber drivers should also have) the ability to set the terms of who they accept as clients, and where they want to go
That is the very nature of Freelance work.
A Taxi Service however would be different, as it would be if Uber was a "Car Service" that employs the drivers directly, and to be clear there are Car Services out there with company employed drivers they are $$$ but they exist
What is the length of this contract? Isn't a freelancer usually signing up for a well defined piece of work, not some arbitrary unknown bundle lasting an arbitrary amount of time?
Except you already know the rules of the contract, i.e. you get A but not B until you accept the contract. If you don't like the rule, you can opt out of the contract (in this case decline the ride).
It’s not just for safety reasons. I’ve had an incident where I was trying to get to SFO from fairly far away. 3 drivers left after they arrived and found out I was going to sfo. Had to wait until the 4th driver, which took an extra half an hour or so more than normal. I was cutting it fairly close, so this made it almost too close.
I'm aware of the guidelines. I've been here for years and such tiny dabs of sarcasm have never been an issue before. If we're not all grown up enough here to handle a basic "oh, great" then that's a sad state of affairs. Guess I'll write every comment like a college thesis statement from now on.
It always seems like "tiny dabs" when we're the one producing it, but I guarantee you that it doesn't feel that way to everyone else. Perhaps the majority don't care, but at least in the long tail, a bunch will, and some of those will get activated enough to lash back. The reason we ask people not to post like that isn't because we think it's somehow wrong in itself. It's simply because the quality of the lash-backs is so low, and they lead to even worse. That's why we got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22021528 and so on.
In that way, each user here is partly responsible for the quality of the replies they get. If we want to have a good community in the long run, we have to learn to edit out gratuitous provocation.
I drive in smallish city. I never drive more than ten minutes for a ride. This means that at night (when I'm the only one on the road) some people don't get rides. I know it would be nice if we had people who could drive around on their own dime and give everybody rides, unfortunately that does not exist. I will happily go anywhere in a city where a ride will be worth my time and effort. We could increase the cost of short rides and pay the drivers (and charge the drivers) for the time spent driving to the rides. Then the drivers will come.
However, you are asking that drivers be willing to take 40 minutes out of their day to make 3 dollars. These drivers often barely make it by as it is. That is neither profitable or sustainable.
Subsidizing a small portion of the user base in the name of fairness is certainly sustainable, as it already was before. I get you don't like making a few less dollars in the day but society works better when we help each other out a bit and I don't think people should suddenly start having to pay an extra transportation tax for the zip code they live in.
Why? One does pay more for a metro ticket in area 9 compared to area 3. And metros are usually as subsidised as it gets. Also the cost/rent of an apartment in area 9 is less than one in area 3.
The guy that your parent post is responding to us the guy responsible for refusing rides, in this instance, not Uber.
The point is with this change it is no longer like “complaining to the customer service rep” it is now a whole lot more like “complaining to the independent contractor that his policy is exclusionary”, despite the fact that his contracting agency clearly wishes it weren’t, which is why they hid that information from the ‘contractor’ in the first place.
Or how about instead of eroding the user experience to allow Uber to continue to take advantage of the fiction of the drivers being "independent contractors", the state does what it should and enforce minimum conditions, including a minimum wage?
Uber has no contact phone number or email for costumers or drivers to reach anyone in the company in the event an issue arises. Delete Uber, it's a shit company.
I once had someone try to brute force my uber password, I was getting constant login failed notifications. Could not contact Uber, so I tried deleting the CC they had on file. They don't allow that. So I tried deleting the account. They don't allow that. So I changed my password to a ridiculously long set of random characters and deactivated the account, which they indicated would take 60 days.
They make it so easy to give them your money, but if you have a problem, it's 100% "We don't give a fuck about you."
I find it amazing that such a large and "successful" company survives with such pathetic customer service. Of course they are not profitable (and not likely ever will be) so I assume customer service is the least of their concerns.
If Uber et.al. were really smart, their response to AB5 would be to cap every driver at 30 hours per week, avoiding the legally mandated benefits and the decreased supply will increase surge pricing. Also, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez would have her feet held to the fire by most of her base.
> If Uber et.al. were really smart,... and the decreased supply will increase surge pricing.
I like how you indirectly criticize Uber for not being particularly smart and then you assert that, while ignoring other effects, decreased supply => increased surge prices is a strictly good thing. While, in the absolute simplest terms, this clearly decreases supply (by your own admission) and therefore decrease # of trips by an amount that is obviously both unknown AND inestimable by you so it's NOT clearly beneficial to Uber. They, also, MIGHT know better than you whether or not it may be beneficial to them.
Temporary loss for long term gain, combined with unconventional politics actually is the cornerstone of Uber’s business strategy.
AB 5 is a symptom of the underlying problem that 3000 bills were considered in the Capitol last session. Not even the combined army of staffers of all representatives could think carefully about all that. Insanity Leaders driving this madness like Gonzalez-Fletcher need to be ousted. And that’s the point of my idea.
Clever yet risky. Narrative could be spun as "drivers who could barely support themselves now definitely can't support themselves on their diminished hours because Uber doesn't want to give provide them basic benefits and yet rides are more expensive than ever." If that narrative prevailed, _Uber's_ feet would end up right back in the fire and California would look like a saint.
Uber has more cash to spend pushing the other side of that narrative, how much better off drivers were prior to AB 5. The gambit for Uber is, if they don’t flat reverse this law in CA, NY then WA will adopt it, followed by all Blue States. And then it’s game over for them. They will cost more than a taxi. And taxis will cost more due to the same contractor to employee conversion.
If "game over" is what WA and blue states are dead set on bringing about (vs. unintended consequences) then they and their constituents can have it and deal with the outcome. A faceless corporation doesn't care in the long run, there are always other markets and other businesses.
Yes! And when no uber is nearby i have to take a taxi: But the estimated price of the taxi is all the time a lot higher than uber pricing, and the real price is again a lot higher than the estimated price. This is the exact reason uber got big, you feel tricked when getting a taxi.
Bolt has fixed upfront pricing (at least in Estonia and Hungary). It's also NOT Uber, one significant factor I use Bolt (for all of Uber's past transgressions).
For what it is worth, I think it has always been this way in the UK. You put in a destination and you get a £15-18 estimate or whatever. It is even an estimate in the ads shown in google maps for Uber/Bolt/Kapten/etc
The problem is almost everyone in the US uses credit cards etc -> so having the driver handle the money is not easy - it almost always will need to go through someone else (usually a merchant gateway, merchant processor etc.).
Taxi's do it by saying the credit card machine is "broken" to avoid the merchant / middleman charge - is that what you are proposing?
If the drivers process all the amounts gross will they properly deduct the commissions paid to uber / lyft?
I actually like the idea - just you are putting a fair bit on the drivers -> merchant accounts, chargeback handling and dispute resolution, etc. And you generally need good credit to manage all this.
It seems to me that the option to refuse drives is the bigger change.
But regarding pricing, Uber is no longer "mandating" the drivers accept a price, instead Uber drives agree to the rates Uber sets. Maybe that has some bearing? I'm no expert.
Yeah, that'd theoretically work. But I wonder how it would go in practice with the limited information of each driver. Perhaps if they provided drivers with statistics (average offering price, bottom 10% offering price, ride volume over time, peak areas etc) then it would work. Interesting proposition.
They could do it dutch auction style. Suppose there are five drivers and three rides. The drivers bid per-mile rates of $.75, $1, $1.25, $1.50 and $1.75. The rides go to the three lowest bidding drivers and they all get $1.25, i.e. the highest rate of the drivers who get rides.
It gives everyone the incentive to bid their actual threshold past which they wouldn't want the ride, because if you bid too high you don't get any rides, but if you bid lower you may still get paid more than that unless bidding that low was actually necessary to get the ride. And at any given time all the riders pay the same rate as each other.
>They could do it dutch auction style. Suppose there are five drivers and three rides. The drivers bid per-mile rates of $.75, $1, $1.25, $1.50 and $1.75. The rides go to the three lowest bidding drivers and they all get $1.25, i.e. the highest rate of the drivers who get rides.
The problem with all these variables is that the more "preferences" you introduce into marketplace to matching, the longer your pickup time will be.
The 2nd most frustrating change is going to be the increase in pickup times because drivers will now optimize for rides that are exclusively in city limits.
You can address things like that with predictive matching. You don't actually wait until there are three rides before matching anybody, you just look at the data for this timeslot and expect that statistically there will be three rides this hour, use that rate based on the drivers who are on, and assign the nearest of the three lowest bidding drivers as they come. If a fourth ride appears that hour then you immediately raise the rate to the fourth lowest bidding driver starting with that ride, and so on, and next time have more data and make a better prediction.
This is actually really clever. Maybe Uber can set a base rate of $0.75 per mile and then the driver can elect to increase it at a 25c per mile interval so that the supply is grouped together
The advantage is that since drivers know where a passenger is going before accepting, riders can be assured that the driver wants to take them to the destination they have set.
No more waiting for the driver to arrive to hear they are declining a super long distance trip; they won’t even know they’ve been declined even multiple times.
If it takes one longer to get a rides’ information with Uber, take a look at their rating. Indeed, It is becoming more important.
Try to keep an Uber rating sharp. I’m likely to accept a 4.86 score for $4-6 fare, decline a 4.63 for a $25-30 trip.
Don't bring your kids. I had a perfect 5 until I brought my kids with me.
They were well behaved and quiet, but it took me a minute to install the car seat and uninstall it, and the driver was clearly annoyed.
Look man, the law says they have to be in the seat, and for their safety, they have to be in the seat. I'd pay more if I could, but I can't.
Now I usually tell the driver to start the ride as soon as I get there so they get paid for waiting for me to install and uninstall the seat.
I just wish Uber had a "I have a car seat" checkbox that would pay the driver a couple extra bucks (and charge me extra). Then everyone would win.
The driver would get extra for taking someone with kids and they would know in advance and not get annoyed.
Also I know I got dinged on my rating once because the driver couldn't find me. I can't help it if Seattle literally has streets on top of each other and there is no way to tell the driver I'm on the bottom road and not the top!
> Now I usually tell the driver to start the ride as soon as I get there
They already bill for wait time. I needed to get picked up from home once but my house is on a street that Uber's mapping system apparently doesn't understand how to navigate to properly. The driver went to the wrong place to try to pick me up, and they billed me for "wait time" even though I was exactly where I said I would be!
Uber sounds more and more like a Black Mirror dystopia. I think I'll go back to using taxis. (Where I live there is no Uber, but I've used a lot it while traveling)
Unfortunately Lyft only operates in North America, and I haven't traveled there in many years now. I have used some other regional competitors (Cabify in Spain)
Part of the problem is ratings are arbitrary on both sides. I take Uber every day for work, and I'm an Uber Diamond user, but I have a 4.50 rating, which my friend tells me is incredibly low. So I'm not taking drunk trips, and my trips are usually within SF, to SFO, or Mountain View.
However, I'm a minority and an introvert so I can't help but feel like I'm being dinged for not being an ideal passenger even though all that matters is going from A to B . So it sucks to read that ontop of my other perks going away there are drivers who will decide to not pick me up despite the fact I spend almost a grand every month on Uber.
I'm happy AB5 seems to be a win for driver, but its looking like a loss for riders and just pushing Uber into a taxi service with an app.
It changes the behavioral relationship between Uber and the drivers.
If the company controls what the worker does and how the worker does it then the worker should likely be classified as an employee. By fixing the rates and giving drivers control over which rides to take Uber is strengthening their argument that drivers are contractors, not employees.
I think the idea is "not Uber". If Uber is the only payment processor, then they look more like an employer and less like the middleman they want to claim to be. The money is coming from Uber to the driver rather than from the driver to Uber as their commission.
That is normal, e.g. if you travel through a federated regional bus/train transport system, you're paying through the platform and the company is processing your payment, sending money to individual transport operators. See flixbus as the most extreme example, but there are tons of these across Europe, many of them formed during post-communist privatization. Its similar with parcel delivery companies, these even are forced to have the PPL brand on their own cars!
Why not let the drivers see the destination and price and then make the choice if they want to accept it? When we are at it the customer should be able to increase the price to encourage drivers.
I see it this way: drivers reject giving a reason, one of the two: too cheap or other. Then the customer gets information about how many drivers rejected because of the amount and they get an option to increase it.
As it is I often feel bad about requesting short trips. I feel most drivers don't want them and the situation is uncomfortable for everyone. I would like to have an option to pay enough so it's worthwhile for them to take a short ride.
As far as I remember some articles that came out around the time of this change, that's because Uber is not an official taxi service. So they need to operate as "contract rides" which must have their prices specified in advance.
Wait, Uber uses fixed pricing in other countries? That sounds amazing. Here in The Netherlands, the actual price is usually 25% more than the top estimate Uber gives before the ride (they give a range).
Yeah, we have fixed pricing in Prague. I believe that Uber was forced to implement it by government to distinguish itself from taxi service and the related regulations (which truly are obsolete). From a customer perspective, it was a win and one more reason to prefer Uber over a traditional taxi.
I mean, to be fair, back in the days before Uber the abuses some riders got from drivers was even more sickening. Giving them the right to refuse rides arbitrarily is not really the greatest thing for consumers.
It has downsides (like redlining, for one thing) but those downsides already existed in the traditional cab model, so it's at least not worse. Given the problems upfront ride pricing caused for drivers I think it's reasonable for it to go away, even if it's slightly less convenient for me as a passenger.
Ideally the problems with abuse of ride cancellation can just be solved via universal methods that apply to uber, lyft, AND traditional cabs. There's plenty of data available so it is feasible to use that data to police abuses of the system.
Why not? I certainly don't want to be driven by somebody who doesn't want to drive me and hates my guts for being forced into driving me. I'd rather he refused and another willing driver pick up the job.
One would think the price would increase until someone would pick you up.
Uber should add the ability to bid up your route--like when it's taking a long time to match you to a driver, or you want to entice a driver who is nearby so you can get where you're going sooner.
Uber in a blog post on Wednesday said the step was the result of changes to its fare structure
Does anyone know where this blog post is? I checked https://www.uber.com/blog but the only post I could find for Wednesday was in the Culture section and didn't have this info.
Uber already works this way here in the UK and in my opinion it's the only fair way to charge for rides. I'm totally ok with paying for the ride I actually took (taking into account traffic and diversions) so that drivers make a decent living.
This encourages drivers to maximize each fare, though. So now every time my driver makes a wrong turn, not only does it cost me time but it also costs me money - and what's worse is the drivers are now incentivized to do this!
True, although unlike a taxi, I can see during the trip the route the driver should be taking and, after the trip, I can see the route the driver actuall took.
And, if the route taken is unreasonably different from the optimal route, I can complain to Uber and get a refund.
So yes, while drivers may be incentivised to take longer routes, they can’t do it without being exposed.
That doesn’t make any sense. Unless something else has changed, there’s no concrete way of knowing or estimating the cost of a ride. The price per mile/min is not regulated or posted like taxis. So what, you just hope surge pricing or per-rider-price-discrimination is not suddenly in play?
you would know if surge pricing took effect, the range is pretty small in the UK (a few pounds). you aren't going to suddenly pay 20 quid over the midpoint of the original band
Indeed, I don't know why there is such a fuss about it. It's not like the pricing is super shady, it just shows a small range like £12 - £15, to take into account irregularities in traffic.
I'm fairly sure this is how it works already in London, once a month or so I have to travel across the city with a load of bags so I uber, and the app normally says something like £30-40 estimate and I end up paying closer to £30.
The estimates should be pretty darn accurate most of the time, and Uber still knows if drivers are taking the piss based on their data so.. I'm not overly pessimistic on this.
Taxis were originally as cheap as ubers used to be (think rickshaws in developing countries). Absent regulation, the price goes down to the cost of fuel, because this is a class of workers with barely any bargaining power. Uber originally claimed their innovation was logistical efficiencies ("traveling salesman") which would lower prices, but I don't think that matters as much as avoiding the regulation and removing bargaining power from drivers.
It's a cycle: rickshaws > regulation > new rickshaws ("innovation") > regulation.
This will hurt the people who take ubers for convenience e.g. don't feel like walking or squeamish about public transit. But won't affect people who need to get A > B directly. IMO this is a good thing -- more people on public transit will improve public transit.
This absolutely hurts people who need to go to A->B in suburban areas where public transit is abysmal (due to everyone driving, not using Uber). e.g. a family member of mine frequently helps with picking my kid up at school (by using Uber as she can't drive).
Public transit is so slow (an hour vs. 10 minutes driving) that it isn't possible to use it schedule-wise - we'll just be taking the pricing hit. Others might be less able to absorb the pricing hit and will just suffer (it's either pay more or lose job).
Yes, if you really need to get from A > B, your "willingness to pay" can afford the price hike. Sure, you'd rather pay less money for what you buy, but that goes for everything in life. Point is you still buy it.
If you didn't really need that uber, you get back to walking, biking, or busing. Or decide not to take the trip.
Well, yes, but the question is whether it is good or bad for society to add regulations that lead to driving up the cost of "taxi" services and people potentially being unable to get places.
You might be helping the small segment of low income drivers, but hurting plenty of other low income users who may have difficulty paying higher prices. I have no idea what the net effect is, but what worries me is the state (as far as I'm aware) didn't run such an analysis before passing such far reaching laws.
I usually just didn't go whereever I am going now - like to a social outing which involves drinking, because I don't want DUI, getting there by public transit sucks and finding a cab while drunk sucks too. Or paid through the nose, if it's a necessary trip, or driven full hour super-tired after a 10 hour flight (not illegal, unlike DUI, but almost as dangerous, sigh). As every quality of life improvement, Uber is not strictly necessary - people lived millenia without it, right? It just... well, improves the quality of life.
I know people who use rideshares to get to the job, and wouldn't have a job without that possibility. They'd probably had another one - but probably worse one due to restricted choices.
How does it hurt them? Instead of a seeing a fixed price, they'll now see a range, and decide if the upper amount of that range is something they're willing to pay.
For the 10-minute ride in your example, the upper and lower ranges aren't going to be very far apart.
Uber has been subsidizing the rates with VC money for years, which is why they've never been profitable, while being able to destroy competition that does have as deep a war chest.
They'll now get to raise rates and move to profitability while using employee protection laws as air cover.
Uber has been profitable on a unit economics basis, they've used the VC money to expand into new markets and test new models (Uber Eats, self-driving).
> Here is the thing about Uber and Lyft (and much of the “sharing economy”).
> They don’t pay the cost of their capital.
> The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.
> These business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.
> The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.
That isn't at all the same thing as being unsustainable, because people typically have cars whether or not they drive for Uber. Depreciation comes from both miles and vehicle age, but in general more of it comes from vehicle age. It doesn't matter if the rates can cover the portion of the depreciation attributable to vehicle age because it's not an avoidable cost; you pay it either way.
Critics also like to do these calculations using "average" vehicles and so on, but people aren't stupid. If you're making a living from driving then you buy a car that gets above average mileage and below average maintenance costs. The fact that you can't make a living doing it in a pickup truck is pretty irrelevant when the people doing it are driving hybrid sedans.
The average numbers also get brought down by the people doing it on the side. Some people drive to work every morning and will take a couple of passengers who are going in the same direction. Those people have close to zero incremental costs; they don't have to recover anything. Meanwhile the people doing it full time aren't taking whatever rides they can get at whatever rates they can get along their existing commute, they're working in the places and times that give the best rates, so they need to make more than the part timer but they also do make more.
The whole thing is in balance. If people aren't making enough money to sustain themselves then sooner or later they figure that out and they quit, which makes the price go up because there is less competition. If the price is high enough to be attractive to people then more people start driving and it comes down some. You reach an equilibrium.
I don't know what your models are doing, but if you look at e.g. a ten year old Ford Focus, the original price was somewhere around $17,000. With only one mile on it the bluebook is now around $3800, with 120,000 miles it's around $1800. Which implies that being ten years old accounts for something north of $13,000 of deprecation and adding 120,000 miles accounts for only $2000 more.
That may be different for cars bought after they've already suffered most of the age-related depreciation they ever will, but in that case there is only modest depreciation in either event because the car can't lose much value to depreciation if it was already not worth very much when you bought it.
A ten year old Ford Focus with one mile on the odometer isn’t realistic. Download real data from cars.com by scraping the HTML and build a linear regression.
Who should we trust to make the calculation on whether it is a fair price for a "human" ?
- 1 blogger with potentially an axe to grind
- miilions of people who vokuntarily drive their cars and make money in the process
Uber from my house to the airport has been a little over half of what taxi was (~$60 with tips vs. $100-120+). If it goes back to double that, I won't go bankrupt but I can't say I am rich enough that spending extra $100 on every trip is nothing to me. And yes, there's no public transit worth mentioning around here.
"Taxi prices" are the way they are because taxi companies aren't propped up by a Japanese billionaire and his coterie of Gulf oil barons and VC pals whose stated goal is to monopolize the market.
Uber's a public company now, it has to price its services to make a profit, or to at least reduce the billions it loses each year because its prices aren't in line with market forces.
> "Taxi prices" are the way they are because taxi companies aren't propped up by a Japanese billionaire and his coterie of Gulf oil barons and VC pals whose stated goal is to monopolize the market.
That can't be the whole story. Surely the artificial restriction of supply (taxi medallions, etc) must contribute to a higher cost.
Taxi prices in most jurisdictions are regulated by a public transit regulator (there are some exceptions - Sweden deregulated taxis and every taxi can set its own price, you have to check the price sticker in the window before getting into make sure you're not going to get ripped off), as a tradeoff between affordability and taxi drivers being able to make a living. Medallions are there to keep the number of taxis down so that the taxis that do have medallions have enough riders to keep busy enough to make a living. Adding more medallions wouldn't lower the price, changing the regulated price would.
>Lower prices at the cost of turning a group of people into a serf class, is not a good tradeoff imo
All of the estimates I've seen range from $10-20 an hour after all of their expenses are factored in. Let's be really conservative and take the bottom quartile, so Uber drivers make $10-12.50 an hour.
That's.... a perfectly normal wage for tens of millions of people. Have you eaten a meal out or gotten a coffee, ever? That's how much money the people behind the counter were making. Did you feel like you were contributing to a 'serf class' when you bought a coffee this morning, or bought dinner last week?
And if these people weren't employed by Uber, they'd be working for $10-12 an hour at a different employer instead. Kind of by definition, they lack the ability to earn more money in the market (especially this job market!) because if they could they'd already be doing so
The minimum wage in California (the subject of the OP) for companies with more than 25 employees is $13.00. I know you were trying to be conservative in your estimate and I don't know if that $10-20 range you're referencing is for California, the USA, or all Uber drivers. Maybe the real average is higher than that, but it's wrong to present $10-12 as a "perfectly normal" wage for workers in California.
I don't have an issue with Uber/Lyft/any gig companies being required to pay workers effectively whatever the minimum wage is wherever they are (which is obviously much lower in other states). And maybe a regulator can sample drivers, look at their annual expenses, and work out what their 'effective' wage is, I'm fine with that.
I just think it's overly dramatic when people present lower wage jobs as literally serfdom or whatever- especially when the HN crowd has undoubtedly eaten out, had drinks, hired a contractor, got coffee, or employed a cleaner that was probably making the same as an Uber driver. There will always be low wage jobs. No one's picketing coffeeshops for making their employees 'serfs', why single out Uber?
Also keep in mind that pretty much no minimum wage job except ridesharing allows you to earn to and from your way to work.
If you make $13 and hour on an 8 hour shift in California with a 1 hour commute each way and a $3 bus fare each way, it comes out to $9.80/hour not $13.
I mean to be fair, the argument is that the expenses (basically, wear & tear on the vehicle) are significant. The IRS I guess has a whole schedule for vehicle depreciation, they have this down to a science. So $23ish an hour but large vehicle expenses drag this down to quite a bit less
Serf class? Hardly. Uber and Lyft allow pretty much anyone to use their car and make money for rides. This is a complete choice and if you can make a living at it? Great. If not, it's a great way to make some extra money on the side.
The end result will be that many people just won't be able to drive for Uber or Lyft any longer. So you are taking money making opportunities away from many people and giving to a select few (the ones that can make the cut as employees).
The next step will be unionization..and then we will be back to the taxi cab situation: high prices, difficult to become a driver, and sub-par technology that stays decades behind the rest of the world.
They weren't the serf class though. Most of the people I know that drive uber, and on the comments on these many of the people that said they were driving uber weren't doing it to make a living they were doing as a little extra spending cash or to meet new people.
Quite frankly anyone that thinks they can suddenly make a decent living off of just driving people around and had that vision of making it rich doing Uber was stupid in the first place. If it is easy enough for anyone to do it then rest assured it won't be lucrative. The corollary is true if something takes great skill and is difficult and people need it then you are probably going to be able quite a bit more. Supply and demand economics 101, if we keep trying to approach economic issues from social perspectives we are going to end up with lots of stupid decisions that cause more problems than the solve. Classic example rent control.
I agree but then the only solutions are to either have a massive shift over to government services to help people, or let people die in the street if they don't have the resources and get sick. The two major political parties in the United States seem like they would rather destroy the system than accept one of those two positions, Republicans against growth in government and Democrats against letting people go without help
However you could use the tax system to do things like pay certain workers "reverse income tax" where instead of taxing their income you support the lower prices with tax credits for their profession.
Are you talking about a Negative Income Tax? It is one of the most effective ways to rebalance the economy (Milton Friedman famously supported one), and can be designed to work like a Universal Basic Income. The other common option is the EITC, but both NIT and EITC only help those who file taxes in the first place.
If everyone ought to have something, it shouldn’t matter whether they’re employable at the moment. How their industry is doing, macroeconomic cycles, whether their skills are in demand, whether they produce enough value to justify hiring at the wage you consider fair, whether bosses and coworkers like them personally. None of that should be an input into whether or not you can see a doctor or eat a meal.
Cutting checks is a lot simpler than policing the terms of private transactions. Particularly when not all those transactions look like full time work for one corporate employer.
More than subsidizing humans, it actually pumps money directly into automation. Currently the value prop of an automated solution to companies is the total cost of human labor it replaces. If humans get more expensive, the machines/software looks more appealing to implement.
Machines work 24/7, never get sick, and don't unionize.
Why then tie it to labor at all, why not the full UBI? Also why tax credits - many low wage jobs aren't well served by annualized refunds (you can see that in stats where medical visits surge for a bit after tax refunds...).
A UBI of course has a lot of other benefits (being distributed monthly or more often, going to people who are unable to work, being universal and therefore more resistant politically).
Because a negative income tax increases labor market attachment, giving workers more skills, work experience and pride and increases the number of people working. A higher minimum wage on the other hand reduces the number of people working and has no positive effects on employment or skills. From a politician’s perspective a minimum wage is superior because the link between a higher minimum wage and greater unemployment is opaque but that from subsidizing employment is quite direct. Also all of the social cost of subsidizing employment is borne by the government while that of the reduction in labor supply and employment is borne by employers who can’t find workers and potential employees.
You’re right that annualized refunds are far from ideal. Monthly would be better.
Uber isn't even that cheap. My 3 mile, 10 minute Uber-X trips in the South Bay typically cost around $10. That should produce a pretty good wage if the driver utilization was high enough -- as a comparison, that's about triple the cost of say a Didi in Shanghai.
My wife drives for Lyft, she does not have to, she is an extrovert and loves to talk to other people. She puts up with her share of crap, people puking in her van (a lot) lots of drunks, guys hitting on her (usually drunk), you name it it happens. (disclaimer: she drives weekends from about 9pm to 4am in a van for plus size rides (rides over 3 people), so some could consider a lot of this self inflicted on her part, but someone has to drive the inebriated).
She drives to talk to people and make a bit of extra money, it was never meant to be a job to support us. I personally think she is crazy for putting up with all she does. Anytime she is waiting for passengers or going through a drive through (for the passengers) for 15 minutes she makes NO money, because the ride price is fixed (and yes after events passengers will get in the van and one will be outside talking to someone else and she has to wait for them to get in, not getting paid for her time). She tells me all the time, a few riders are really grateful, but most don't care and the driver is just some person they hired (she has hard candy and the large things of bubble gum for riders, a few weeks ago a group of guys stole one of the things of gum, she saw them walking away with it and laughing, $6 down the drain).
There are also the passengers who order the Lyft, she shows up and they are 2 streets over from where they said and tell her to go to a different location. Again, she could cancel the ride, but unless someone is in the same location waiting for a ride she would be losing more time and money.
So i think charging for ride time is fine. If the driver does take extra turns and time for more money you can always give them a lower rating, i am unsure about Uber, but the driver rating at Lyft really does mean something.
It can be a useful way to extract some value from your car without selling it. Say you are between jobs and have a car you bought new. You would like to keep the car, as you know its history, so you drive Uber to "sell" a part of the car until you get a new job.
Not really. More like a way to sell a fraction of your vehicle's value while working for less than minimum wage in some cases. Not a great situation but, you are not paying high interest on a loan that you have to pay back.
It’s definitely the invisible hand of the market at work here and not the massive amounts of marketing subsidies being thrown at the product. That’s why Uber is posting so much profit each quarter, right?
Take it from a software contractor that's refused full time from multiple Fortune 100 companies: You don't know what's best for someone else. Choice is the only form of empowerment.
Software work is incredibly different from what Uber does.
Edit:
On top of that, I'm not coming into this thinking that this is whats best for all those people in their current situation. This is what I think is best for my society and country. I do not want companies to be able to push off large costs of doing business to their employees by just calling them contractors. I don't think this is good for _me_ in general and so I would support laws like this
> This is what I think is best for my society and country.
Could you be wrong? Perhaps Uber drivers chose the profession by choice. Perhaps before the company Uber existed, these drivers would be less content.
Perhaps you or I are not smart enough to calculate what each individual wants and needs.
Despite the fact that we commit the world's most powerful computers to the cause, weather prediction systems are incredibly inaccurate. Should those wearing inappropriate attire be fined?
Yea, but I can turn the question right back around at you. You are trying to claim that this law shouldn't have passed because people can make the best decision for themselves. I am saying that I view this law passing as one of the best decisions for me. I do not want to work in an environment where companies can be this predatory without regulation. Letting companies do so will embolden other companies and then put downward pressure on my wages.
I think one thing you're getting at is this idea that all players can make locally optimal choices which result in a globally non-optimal solution. I.e. uber drivers could individually want to drive uber rather than work a 9/5 retail job, but all of them would have been better off unionizing or something.
The other thing sounds like "this policy is good for me personally so I'll support it", which is at least honest.
Taxis were an exact example of what you describe. How did that work out?
Have you ever asked an Uber driver how they feel about the law? All the ones I spoke with dislike it. You think you're doing good by forcing people how to live? Your position is either arrogant or uninformed. Uber driver loved their jobs and the freedom they provided until politicians came in to enforce your view of the world. If they couldn't figure out taxis, what make you think they can figure out Uber?
>Have you ever asked an Uber driver how they feel about the law?
I literally do not care about their opinion. I believe how Uber acts is bad for a society to let continue. The Uber drivers may be getting a good deal for themselves, but I think it has negative externalities that they themselves don't care about.
Someone may be fine getting abused, or it may even be the best deal they personally can get at the moment. When we watch it happen and let it happen we are implicitly condoning the behavior which leads to others to act just as bad or worse.
You are not going to change my mind on this by trying to convince me that the drivers don't want it, I already believe you and it is not influencing my decision
love how thoughtful people in this forum come downvote all contributions like this blindly without offering a single genuine counterpoint. god forbid we apply logic over religious political views.
The definition offered in the first paragraph of that article seems to conjure the exact same imagery in my head that the parent post did. How exactly is he parent off base with this comparison?
"As with slaves, serfs could be bought, sold, or traded (...), abused with no rights over their own bodies, could not leave the land they were bound to, and could marry only with their lord's permission."
Does anyone really think this is how Uber drivers live?
You could argue yes but on a grander scale. There are many laws that cover what you can do to your own body and the government claims the output of your labor as theirs. Trump just tried to buy Greenland and the inhabitants. You require papers to leave the country and permission to revoke your citizenship. Marriage (a religious institution) licenses were originally created to prevent different ethnicities from union and are still used to prevent same sex marriages.
They have very little control over their lives and work, Uber does not let them set prices and they arent making enough money to go retire early. I refer to them as serfs in that they have to answer to Uber with no actual negotiating power on their own.
I mean prices will go up no matter what. But also as a reasonable person, why would complain if the price reflects the living wage of a person providing the service ? I know if we used child labor my tv would be a lot cheaper, but do I really complain about that ?
The law at issue merely codified in statute what the California Supreme Court had long held to be the way the law worked (and added some new exceptions not germane to Uber), so there was no relevant change to the law. So, it's the same legal regime Uber has always been working under, and so the policy change is, no matter what the PR spin is, not actually driven by the new law.
Wrong, the Supreme Court produced a test for use in case of litigation, not to proactively apply to every non-litigant. Codification of the test is a step change, and its litany of incomprehensible exceptions is a strong sign that the test and the law are severely flawed in the general context.
> Wrong, the Supreme Court produced a test for use in case of litigation, not to proactively apply to every non-litigant.
That's...not how law works. The law doesn't adopt a different meaning in litigation than it has in administrative application; when the Court adopts an interpretration/operationalization of the law (which is what adopting a “test for use in litigation” is), it defines what the law is. That's true in general in common law systems, and it's certainly true in specific in that administrative application if California State Law is controlled by how that law has been interpreted by the State Supreme Court.
> Are you suggesting Lorena Gonzalez wasted her time completely?
Making the legal regime more resilient against future change in the composition of the Supreme Court is a thing, whether it's something that justifies the effort expended or not, it's really not my place to say. But AB5 did not substantively alter the status quo legal regime faced by Uber, etc., so any change in practice they shot was not driven by a change in legal regime stemming from the law.
It's insane how much of this contractor vs employee debate would just be solved with universal healthcare. I don't understand why the US is obsessed with passing on any cost to their citizens or employers in ways that lower productivity and clearly hurt the economy, instead of just biting the bullet and budgeting out policies to improve the economy, increase quality of life, and make the country in general stronger.
It could also be solved by just ending employer provided insurance. Individual / ACA markets are dysfunctional and expensive in large part due to the fact that most averaged age, healthy adults are in employer only plans.
We have medicare and medicaid. They aren't perfect, but the people who are hurt most by our current setup are the working lower middle class, in particular those who contract or work for small companies that can't afford to setup healthcare benefits.
The conservative viewpoint is that the government can never do things as well as companies can, so they like to not provide services.
The reason companies provide healthcare at all is an artifact from WWII when the tax rate was high enough that offering more salary was not enough to attract the limited workers left, so companies started offering other perks that were untaxed. Since the US Constitution being set up in a way as to encourage deadlock if there is not a large majority of agreement, were stuck in a deadlock on moving this forward to a government operated endeavor, and wont do anything to remove it from an employer offered benefit.
An addendum to this is that the government forced the companies to do this because the feds passed the insane 1942 Stabilization Act putting limits on wage hike capabilities of firms.
The problem is that we have good economists who say: here are the facts and history of what your choices will do and bad economists who say: if you have x, y, z, and the planets of Saturn and Uranus in alignment, you may be able to affect the economy to the way you wish despite all of the historical evidence to the contrary. The bad economists are hired into administrations to justify politically expedient proposals.
I mean the US was in a fully mobilized war at that point. I don't think the government was looking at long term consequences but at winning the war and surviving
The market theory breaks down with healthcare, which does not operate in a free market or with adequate competition/price visibility. Furthermore the entire concept of "price" falls apart when talking about the fundamentally priceless nature of human life.
The conservative viewpoint is woefully ignorant of the reality of healthcare and the success of socialized medicine almost everywhere it has been implemented, or at least superior quality and lower price to that available to the prototypical American citizen.
I wish the myth that "the markets will provide the optimal solution" will die when talking about healthcare. It hasn't, it can't, and it won't.
> The market theory breaks down with healthcare, which does not operate in a free market or with adequate competition/price visibility.
This is a problem that could in principle be solved using price transparency. Most medical procedures are scheduled ahead of time. Emergency services are a small percentage of overall healthcare costs and there is no need to treat everything else the same way.
> Furthermore the entire concept of "price" falls apart when talking about the fundamentally priceless nature of human life.
The high value of the product doesn't break anything as long as there is adequate competition. You die without water but that doesn't mean Evian can charge a million dollars for a bottle.
> The conservative viewpoint is woefully ignorant of the reality of healthcare and the success of socialized medicine almost everywhere it has been implemented, or at least superior quality and lower price to that available to the prototypical American citizen.
Most socialized systems around the world are piggybacking on all the R&D done in the US and paid for by the huge US market paying high prices. We obviously can't do the same thing to ourselves to get lower prices. And outcomes in the US for people who actually have health insurance (i.e. the large majority) are better than they are almost anywhere else in the world.
> Most medical procedures are scheduled ahead of time.
Does that really matter when the procedure is non-optional?
It's not just price that matters, but also the quality of the provided healthcare, and you're forcing somebody to make a stressful decision when they're already impaired by whatever health issue makes that procedure necessary.
Basically, most health-related decisions are made under at least some level of duress, which makes all "free choice" based reasoning at least somewhat suspect.
> Does that really matter when the procedure is non-optional?
Of course it does. If you have time to shop around then you can choose a provider that costs less, and if we had real price transparency it would allow people do to this, which would require providers to compete on price and that would lower costs.
> It's not just price that matters, but also the quality of the provided healthcare, and you're forcing somebody to make a stressful decision when they're already impaired by whatever health issue makes that procedure necessary.
Quality is ensured by medical licensing. If there are five providers that have all met the licensing requirements, maybe some of them are still better than others, but how do you know that even now? It's a completely independent problem. You still need some way to figure that out regardless of whether there is transparent pricing; or you just have to trust the licensing process to ensure a minimum level of quality.
> Basically, most health-related decisions are made under at least some level of duress, which makes all "free choice" based reasoning at least somewhat suspect.
How is this any different than buying food? You have to buy it but that doesn't mean you can't have a market.
The difference with buying food is that that is a recurring item where you as a buyer can learn over time about relative prices and quality and adjust your behavior accordingly.
> Medical procedures are ideally one-time affairs.
Sure, but so are a lot of other things we have markets for. Ideally you don't have to buy a car more than once every five or ten years, by which point the models on the market have been redesigned and your experience may not be relevant. You also have no basis for comparison; if you buy a worse car, how do you know the competition is any better?
The answer is that you rely on the experiences of other people and independent reviewers, or the advice of professionals. If you ask your doctor which provider is better, they may have some information about that -- either be able to tell you they're all the same so choose the cheapest one, or they're all good except this one which should be avoided, so choose the cheapest from the remainder etc.
That's assuming the prices they agree on are optimal, which implies they have all the right incentives.
They could be paying too much in some cases (and then healthcare costs more than it should and some people can't afford it and die), or not enough in others (and then we get less medical R&D and more people die).
It's not an easy problem. And we can't just hand wave it to "have the government do it" as if they have some magic price-finding method that isn't susceptible to principal-agent problems or bureaucratic inefficiency or regulatory capture.
I wish more people understood the limitations of markets (just as I wish more people understood the power of markets). Markets only work well with with price/quality transparency, enough competition, substitutability... everything that healthcare in America lacks.
> What Singapore shows is that unusual fusions of conservative and liberal ideas in health care really are possible. Singapore is a place where the government acts to keep costs low and then uses those low costs to make a market-driven insurance system possible.
Could they be using the law as a pretext? Offering a service without an upfront price is shady. If Uber can get away with it, we know the market is not as competitive as we thought it is.
Uber and Lyft both operated this way in the beginning, and switched to upfront pricing later, presumably after having enough data to make upfront pricing reliable. I still remember the outcry - people say it’s a tactic to bury surge pricing and implement price discrimination.
Yeah - I remember the claims about upfront pricing being bad / illegal etc.
I think they did upfront pricing because users preferred it - I certainly did.
But you can't do upfront pricing under CA law - the driver has to be able to earn whatever they earn from driving - if they take you on a long route now - they get the extra I think and you are charged the extra.
>But you can't do upfront pricing under CA law - the driver has to be able to earn whatever they earn from driving
I think the two parts of this statement can be decoupled. Couldn't Uber feasibly keep fixed upfront pricing on the customer side but provide variable payouts to drivers to be compliant with the law? They probably wouldn't do this because it exposes them to risk on every ride (i.e. they might undercharge for the ride and have to pay up to the driver anyway) but the law is not directly forcing them to provide a worse experience - they're doing that by passing the risk to customers.
In the rest of the world, and in CA before this change, drivers are paid per mile/time and riders pay an upfront price.
The only way this is possible is if Uber does absorb the risk for the rider's convenience. They will not be providing this service from now on because it strengthens their claim that the drivers are contractors.
For what it's worth, I agree that the drivers deserve more protection, and I also consider that it's impossible to envision Uber drivers as employees without totally destroying the whole concept.
The only solution that I can see to this problem is to improve the status of contractor for these people's health care to be covered at large.
Government is pretty bad in this country like in most other countries. I suspect it is because most good solutions are the product of balanced view-points, but politics and legislation is driven by public opinion, which is rarely balanced in its views.
I for one would happily pay, or at least like to have the option to pay, a risk-adjusted flat fare instead of by-mile. This change will absolutely tilt my default provider to lyft.
Its just nice as a customer to be able to know that a 40$ trip to the airport can't wind up being 140$ if the car gets stuck behind an accident on a bridge (or whatever). I'd much rather round it up to 42 - call it trip insurance. Uber must have enough data to be able to handicap their markets to within 5% or so, and still come out ahead.
Does the law say you can't do upfront pricing? Surely the company could just eat the difference in the situation you raise? To me this seems to be Uber's way of passing on any extra cost and risk to customers rather than risk any of their own skin.
The law prohibits upfront pricing unless the drivers are employees of uber.
The law requires you (the rider) to be the customer of the driver. So the pricing / payment between driver and rider need to be linked.
If you are a customer of uber transit services (instead of uber ride finding and safety platform) they can offer flat rate prices and eat difference, but the drivers then need to be employees.
Uber can do upfront pricing if they accept that their drivers are employees and pay them by the hour. Eventually, they'll be forced to do this in California.
Yes, it felt like it was all to hide surge info from consumers.
Surge pricing gives the consumer insight into when they're being charged more. Many consumers reluctantly will pay a high price, but will not pay an "inflated" price.
It also allowed areas like sf to have continuous surges over weekends at low levels without consumers feeling like "uber is always surging".
That's one of the reason people hate taxis, and why people jumped to Uber instead. Who's to stop the driver from taking the long route, and how am I supposed to compare options if I don't know how much it will cost? Pull out a pocket calculator and a map?
Many cities have a set rate for airport-to-downtown trips, and you may be able to negotiate one directly with the taxi driver for long or unusual trips.
> Taxis at JFK Airport charge a flat fare of $52 for trips between the airport and Manhattan. Taxis impose a $4.50 surcharge during peak hours (4-8 p.m. weekdays, excluding holidays), for a fare of $56.50.
This is not at all true. Uber only introduced upfront pricing at the end of 2017. Prior to that users were charged based on time and distance, the same way as taxis.
Welcome to the United States where you find out the pricing for a medical service 6 months after receiving the service, then keep finding out about it for another year, random bill upon random bill.
Sad thing is, some people even get billed twice for the same service too and might not even be paying attention fully to notice either. Someone I know almost mistakenly paid twice because of a double billing error. Then I seen on a TV commercial, some college has an entire degree on medical coding and billing... Not sure why tech isn't being used to help, seems insane you have to go to college just to learn how to bill people properly and then probably still end up making mistakes.
Presumably the rate chart of the cab is known. It's not a random number that springs on you months after the ride with no real logic other than 'this is how it be'.
Except the driver has discretion to choose a path and it’s easy to take a longer route when the passenger is not a local. Likewise it’s easy for hospitals in the US to pad their charges arbitrarily (e.g. $50 for a Tylenol/Panadol tablet, a genuine example)
They’ll most likely expand the model everywhere, while still blaming “regulation”. Then push the narrative that it’s better for the drivers. They need to turn a profit any way possible, and this is a good way to skim a couple dollars per ride. Local competitors in a lot of international markets never adopted flat pricing - in fact Uber itself isn’t flat-price in some markets (eg in my region of Brazil, and it’s not because there’s any regulation there). Uber is the new Taxi cartel. So it goes.
Do this and the market will speak. I view ridesharing mostly as a luxury/convenience thing. My usage has already began to decline as prices have risen locally. If they start operating like taxis then I'll use them as often as taxis, which is to say rarely.
It really was all the convenience of a car without having to drive it. A designated driver on call. And in cities where finding a cab was hard or next to impossible.
The low cost was subsidized by a combination of VC money and underpaying drivers. The fact that you don’t get free stuff anymore is unfortunate but not all that different than the fate of Movie Pass.
Uber has made the taxi market worse off than govt controlled taxi services, when it comes to pricing, safety and affordability.
These shady practices prove that the interventions such as surge pricing is just a money making scheme for them. If you disagree, then explain to me as to why does surge pricing increases their commission ? And does it not give them incentive to always surge. I can agree with a peak hour surcharge to increase supply but surge and these kind of things show that they are just money fleecing business
Well that sucks big time. One of the main reasons I used Uber was I know what it's going to cost me, upfront, no matter what, I just click, get in the car, get out and that's it. Now I have to gamble, risk that I get stuck in traffic and my price suddenly doubles, worry that the driver "took the scenic route", and so on, and so forth. It becomes just a taxi with a nice app.