This seems, from a technical perspective, an easy problem to solve with the resources of a public company.
Is it the desperation of people who need the money so badly they will constantly cheat the system? Can you design for that?
They tried to solve the problem from the wrong angle, and it turns out that the high cost of taxis, while suboptimal for sure, might not be entirely for no reason.
Private transporting is not sustainable and it is not something that has to be affordable for everyone, even less by lowering workers wages or playing with the tariffs by demand. Taxi regulations gives us passengers safety and fair prices. There are taxi apps that work exactly like Uber's like 'Free-now' where you can see your trip, its aproximate cost, the driver's rating...
We have to promote governments that support affordable and good quality public transport, even though I love driving alone in my car.
I hope Deliveroo, Glovo and other companies are also punished for their labour rights abuses. Make sure your delivery guy is payed fairly or either go to the restaurant yourself.
So many years of labour rights fights being attacked by these startups that do not invent anything but base their business model on lower wages.
Is it the desperation of people who need the money so badly they will constantly cheat the system? Can you design for that?
I don't think the motivation on the part of the drivers who do this is very important. They're intentionally deceiving Uber customers, and in some cases endangering them. That just has to stop, even if the driver is desperate. The point here is that it's Uber's responsibility to stop it happening, and Uber has apparently chosen not to (like you, it's not that hard). That will be very hard to justify, especially as Uber were running TV ads about how they do background checks on all their drivers here in the UK recently.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
For a private hire vehicle (the kind you telephone or use an app to book), the price is under £700 (under £500 if the driver speaks English).
That doesn't seem unreasonable. The GP comment was referring to the American system where the license are traded at very high costs (tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars).
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
* https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2019/novemb...
> Legislation means that Uber now has 21 days to appeal, during which it can continue to operate pending any appeal and throughout any potential appeals process. Uber may seek to implement changes to demonstrate to a magistrate that it is fit and proper by the time of the appeal.
The private hire license avoids the need for "the knowledge" and to have the traditional London black cab. There are still fees involved, of course - but becoming an Uber driver is much less demanding than becoming a black cab driver.
The only reason ANY of the taxi companies have improved service with new apps and lower prices is because of the competition introduced by ride sharing companies.
You could also do spot checks (no idea if they do or not), but that's not going to eliminate the problem just reduce it.
This is the Internet. If you don't design for people cheating you, they will wreck your system as soon as it becomes popular enough to be visible.
Here's the thing: I don't want to rate my driver. I want to be able to rely on a third party that all available drivers are punctual and competent. It is not a choice I want to make.
Too much responsibility is already dumped on consumers under the guise of choice. Quality control of services I utilize is something I expect to pay for.
Perhaps a selfie with the driver taken by the passengers during the drive would also suffice.
In my opinion, Uber has done enough. They provide the passenger with the drivers name and photo. It’s up to the passenger to verify, but Uber should make violations easy to report.
Have you ever seen a bunch of Deliveroo riders clogging up the public space outside a restaurant or other public space? Why should one business get to exploit pavements for profit, without regulation. Private companies shouldn’t be able to co-opt public space without scrutiny or permission.
Or maybe I’m too ethical and not being enough of a hustler, and I should move my team into the desk space at the local library?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
Uber has pushed up quality in general. Market pressure is often a better way of doing these things rather trying to have a central inspector who can't see everything all of the time.
In reality, Uber’s existence, no matter what the company or its supporters might say, is simply a different way of highlighting the very same failure in public policy.
The poor have no bread? Let them eat cake. The citizens need an out of hours ride home from the pub? Page a Prius.
They are. Click a trip, scroll down, click "my driver was unprofessional", click "my driver didnt match the profile in my app".
The problem is most people dont report stuff to uber. I hear stories all the time from people and everytime I ask if they reported the driver they say no.
Our "grand old" taxi company in my town who advertises for being the only reliable option with professional drivers failed on me five times on a row. On successive rides I got a standard neo-nazi lecture about immigrants, my Visa credit card was refused apparently for transaction costs, two of my drivers got lost and one tried to drive to my destination using mostly sidewalks for driving on.
I sent feedback each time to only receive a generic "we are sorry, we have failed our quality controls and this will never happen again" copy-pasted message. Maybe it's more straightforward to advertise than getting rid of drivers who can't behave.
With Uber I know my bad ranking (I have always rated my drivers 5 stars, so far) has at least some effect on the misbehaving driver.
Well get this, I live in London and I love Uber and I would definitely miss Uber if they stopped operating here. So your statement is wrong. In fact, our general slack channel at work had a ton of people posting sad faces about this news. But yeah sure I guess you know what every Londoner thinks...
Even when society decides it’s up to the private sector to fulfill its needs there needs to be regulation to avoid the “race to the bottom” from meaning an actual race to rock bottom.
Uber surely provides an amazing service to consumers but at what cost to labor rights, road traffic, and in this case, public safety?
Personally, I like and use this "new breed" of app-based taxi services (except Uber). I just want to see Uber finally die. It should have died years ago.
Says who? Just because you say it, doesn't make it true. Private transporting has been with humanity since ancient times. It's not going away and it's sustainable.
> and it is not something that has to be affordable for everyone, even less by lowering workers wages or playing with the tariffs by demand.
It's nice that you aren't price conscious when taking 'private transport'. And you're right, uber opened up the market to people that could not afford (or could not justify) taking a taxi before. You see that as a detriment, because you have money but others may disagree. That was certainly me in Uni when I walked home in the middle of night, through sketchy neighbourhoods, because my city's public transport ended at 2am, and I wasn't about to pay $40-$60 for a cab ride (assuming it showed up at all).
I actually started using Uber when during a trip to Chicago I got shafted by several taxi companies who simply wouldn't pick me up from (I guess) the neighbourhood I was in .. in the middle of November. That was the reality of taxis pre-uber. Everybody hated them. They were openly discriminating by geogrpahy and ethnicity. They were expensive. They were also unreliable. And you had no options.
>Taxi regulations gives us passengers safety and fair prices.
Tax regulations, especially in cities like New York, protected taxi cab companies (and the private equity firms that owned the medallions) and created a medalion bubble which made running an independent taxi almost impossible and benefited only the medallion owners.
It's also a false choice. Muncipalities can (and do) certainly set safety standards on Uber and Lyft.
And by the way, many of the regulations that Taxis operate under came as a result of taxis scamming and cheating people (especially tourists and forgeiners) out of money. And it still happens if you travel abroad ... speaking of which, when I'm abroad and Uber is available, it really does remove the language barrier and is immensely helpful in navigating a non-english speaking city.
>We have to promote governments that support affordable and good quality public transport,
'Private transport' is public transport. It is part of the mix of public transportation. Every option you provide that disincentives car ownership is a benefit.
I simply do not trust the company.
I accept that the market pressure uber has brought has improved transportation. I do not accept that uber and its repeated atrocious behaviors required for this.
Its a shame that uber can so easily bypass tfl with appeals and minor changes.
* Deregulate halfway, by promising that things will be better in the free market
* Wait for trust erosion in the public institutions and regulations
* Remove remaining regulations, because obviously, regulation is not working, and the "free" market will take care of things
* Create an effective monopoly because it is not economic to maintain two or more infrastructures in parallel. After that, raise prices.
If only we really had people lobbying for a truly free market. I.e. a market where rules are imposed and maintained. Where umpires make sure everyone is playing fairly. Where businesses can compete and where customers have a choice.
You know if you are a butcher, you should be pretty pleased with a central inspector touring your shop's front and back, making sure that hygiene is well-maintained. What needs to be made sure though is, that EVERY business competing with you is held to the same standards.
So for uber, I'd be super happy if they'd pay their drivers an agreed standard/union wage (or more) and compensated maintenance costs for their private vehicles they are using for the profit of the company accordingly. It's not much to ask really.
I ride with FreeNow in my city, just as I did with MyTaxi before. Same drivers, same app, same prices, just different colors (and slightly less favorable terms of employment, from what I've heard from the drivers during the time of transition).
A family member booked. A driver committed. The wait got shorter. Then it got longer. And longer. And then our trip was cancelled without reason. Another was booked. Same gig. We had no opportunity to 1-star those drivers for being dicks. The third arrived but we didn't get the fabled offer of foot massages, nor were we plied with snacks or drinks. It was just a cab ride with the awkward "You've been great passengers, I'll rate you five stars!" exchange at the end. "Err, thanks mate?"
The return trip was pretty similar. It's 1am. Want to go home. One dropped. It's getting really cold now. Second arrives. Again, an entirely standard private hire experience with the added convenience of being asked to rate at the other end.
But this lack of recompense for crappy initial service isn't good. If a real private hire did that, you'd use another company and would never use that one again. You'd tell friends and family not to use it. You'd be able to complain to the council about the company. With Uber, you just huddle up and hope the next is better.
This is by far one of the more benign complaints you hear about (versus deliberately slow routes to push the top end of the range, or surge pricing) but it absolutely undermines the purported convenience factor. Being able to talk to a manned rank in actual contact with their drivers is so much better in practice.
In most cases, the person laying flat on the pavement was a delivery driver (with an "L" printed on the bike).
Amazon's subcontracting model is not much different in that regard, imo.
Their race to the bottom was absolutely beneficial to consumers while it was going on. Smaller rivals have nowhere near the resources of Uber when competing with Grab.
We surely missed Uber when it left.
It feels though like the delivery driver loitering problem is a red flag for a much larger problem of corporate appropriation being acceptable, without being challenged by those we entrust to look after our public spaces and roads.
It’s why a solution like “delivery drivers shouldn’t loiter in public spaces” is a poor solution, and why “private business should not be conducted in public without a license” might be a better and more general message.
It's a pain in the ass to have to pull over and do this sometimes, but it does seem like they're trying to do the right thing with it. I will say that at first it made me pretty angry, but when I realized the implication - that someone has probably already tried to fraudulently hand control to a different driver - it gave me chills and I realized they may not have many other options.
Wait, what?
Not that it was completely without problems, but compared to say NYC cabs they were worlds apart. Sure, there was a problem for a while with rogue unregistered cabs, though IIRC that was mainly minicabs and relied on intercepting despatch radio messages, but there were some black cabs. The cliche of not going south of the river held up to some scrutiny too. Uber of course go with phone you then just don't show if they don't like the route and waste half and hour of yours. At least it was a two way conversation with a cabbie.
That London hasn't put a blanket ban on diesel cabs in the low emission zone isn't really the cab's fault - that's firmly on the authorities...
It's a hugely better process than the old phone-a-number and hope minicabs and taxi services. That would take 15 minutes minimum, often much longer, and you had no idea when it would arrive.
Moreover, the cabs were filthy, they often refused passengers due to race, disability or other illegal prejudice, refused certain destinations, spoke little English, didn't know the city, would drive inefficiently to drive up costs and on and on.
Oh, and cellphones arrived and they did NOTHING until Uber pushed them to accept mobile payments. You STILL can't see your ETA or share the ride, and there's no ratings/reputation system.
So between the demons, I'll take the ride-sharing companies.
What I heard from drivers is Uber has by far the best tech for predicting/connecting routes. And I am really tired of of screaming "workers rights" all the time.
You sure can’t rely on the Uber, Lyft, Juno ratings. It’s 5 stars or bust. The social pressure on 5 stars is enormous.
Netflix moved to thumbs up, thumbs down. YouTube did the same, after showing a graph of the 5s and 1s:
https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/youtube-comes-to-a-5-star-...
I relentlessly give an average delivery or ride 3 stars, but feel bad every time. When the ride is quite good, 4 stars, and exceptional, 5 stars. Exceptional is the exception.
Three stars doesn’t make you a bad rider or a bad driver, just average. If it’s not the bulk of the ratings you give, you’re an unreliable rater and not helping the ratings anyway.
Well, one year on and Uber has not been able to get its house in order. This move will doubtless be extremely unpopular with Londoners, many of whom will suspect that the black cab unions are behind it. Uber called Tfl's bluff last year knowing there would be a public backlash if their services were withdrawn. It will be interesting to see how it plays out this time.
Regardless of your opinion of Uber and their labour practices, they offer an incredibly valuable service to millions of people. They have massively increased the availability of minicabs, made booking them incredibly easy and safe (not to mentioned with far better coverage than was previously possible) and affordable to more people. Not only that, thousands of people now make a living driving Ubers whom before wouldn't have been able to get a job as a minicab driver at all, as the firms would artificially limit numbers to keep fares high.
Uber and Tfl are both playing a risky game here.
The Overground has always worked well for me, it’s unreliable for you?
Here in New York we don't have the same kind of unusual taxicabs, but we do strictly regulate taxi and Uber drivers.
I personally find taxis here insufferable. I live in Queens and regularly had to help them "remember" where Queens is. Or remember the TLC regulations about accepting a credit card.
I've not had the same song and dance with Uber.
If this is the quality that the regulations enforce, count me out.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/black-cabs-taxis-a...
You could pay the whole country a penny a day if all you cared about was boosting a number metric. It wouldn't somehow translate to worker satisfaction.
>A driver committed. The wait got shorter. Then it got longer. And longer. And then our trip was cancelled without reason
has happened to me a lot too. I wish they would fix that some how. I'm not sure what it's about. You'd think the drivers would either come get you or not rather than say they are coming and then flake.
The government granted a cap on drivers to guarantee its buddies got to earn a lot of money off the backs of taxi drivers.
Here in NYC, drivers rent a medallion to be allowed to drive. They start off the day in the hole.
If we're going to judge Uber for breaking this monopoly, let's also turn that same critical eye on the monopoly it broke.
Not sure what their penalities are, though.
I've had to be aggressive with drivers sometimes to get them to cancel to avoid charging me.
This is particularly common around airport trips for me. Not sure why.
No one is forcing people to drive for uber and no one is forcing the rider to use uber. In my city, Accra, Taxis were so expensive until uber came to the market and forced down the price.
The only system that puts the consumer (read: common man) first is the free market (if and only if politicians would allow it to work).
PS: I'm not pushing for government regulation in any way though. UK have enough of totalitarianism-like regulations already.
Sure "The Knowledge" is an impressive feat of learning, but more often than not the drivers don't make use of it because the best route is not the most profitable one for the driver.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been subjected to the "tourist tax" where the driver heads straight for the major artery roads with their traffic jams (e.g. Kings Road, Strand, Embankment etc.) so you get to sit there watching the meter clock up whilst you move nowhere. Or the number of times the quickest and least-traffic route is South of the river but the driver sticks religiously to the Northen route.
Or the number of times the driver fumbles slowly getting the change, in the expectation that you say "oh forget it, keep the change" ... even if that change is £4 or more !
Or when I've been driving around London only for the Black Cab in front of me to stop on a double-red line to drop off a passenger. Or make a U-Turn in the middle of a busy street.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not fond of Uber either. Their standard of driving is pretty poor, and I hate the way they sit at the Heathrow DROP-OFF area waiting for their next job.
What I am saying is that the London cabbies are in dire need of some stiff competition. Yes I would rather that competition come from someone of better quality than Uber.
I think it's partly because of the ease of use - usability, partly because of brand investment and loyaly, but with Uber and Airbnb, there are no direct competitors that have the same user experience. That people are willing to put up with hosts cancelling their uber stays or swapping them for something dodgy and that people are willing to put up with bad Uber experiences speaks volumes. I also think it might be because when things go wrong, we users will blame the driver not the company, we will blame the airbnb host, not the company.
Also you have to remember that people work for best option they have right now. If uber wasn't their best option they simply move to a better job.
If you ban uber you simply remove the current best option for most people working for uber.
Just use the rating system like everyone else and get over it:
If the driver was great it’s 5 stars with all the “what did I do great” options checked and a note for the driver.
If the driver didn’t fuck up it’s five stars.
If you don’t want to be matched with the same driver again but they didn’t do anything egregious it’s three stars.
If you were outright disgusted at your ride it’s 1 Star.
That’s it. It’s simple. Your own personal usage of the ratings system is not helpful.
Actually, for another example of why your ratings method is bad, let’s compare three stars to grades in school. Three out of five stars would be 60%, which is a D- in most schools. That’s not an average grade. Someone who completes all the homework and does an average job would expect a B, which would be 4 stars. Someone who didn’t get any questions wrong would get an A, 5 stars.
If your Uber driver took you to your destination with a reasonably clean car that’s an A. There’s no such thing as exceptional. It’s a car ride not a physics exam, what do you want exactly?
Uber wants a driver to maintain over a 4 rating, something like 4.5 or 4.2. When you give that driver a 3 rating you’re not saying “thanks, you were acceptable and average.” You are saying “you kind of suck” and Uber won’t actually even match the driver with you again. So if you continue to give all your drivers 3 stars just because you wish the rating system worked a different way than it does, you’re even screwing yourself by reducing the number of drivers that can match with you.
Pre uber hailing a cab from a location other than the airport in Atlanta where I live was impossible. You'd have to call their 1-800 number hours in advance with no guarantee of it being serviced. Even if such apps exist now it might be due to uber pushing the envelope. Uber and other ride sharing service might not be relevant in the NYCs, Chicagos and Londons of the world but for cities like ours they were a godsend.
90% of the time, uber is being kicked not because of any concern for safety, but because of traditional taxi company lobbying.
Source: personal experience in 2 cities.
The counterpoint seems obvious here. That’s more expensive. Even more than hypothetical unsubsidized Uber. There’s lots of valid complaints against Uber. These feel like the lowest priority ones available. Uber is about cheap prices and secondly low interaction costs.
What a time to be alive. Don't have and don't need a license.
If you ban uber you simply remove the current best option for most people working for uber. You would worsen the conditions for them.
Uber at the end of a day is just a private enterprise operating (mostly) consistent with the law and with it's function as a private enterprise which is to make money for its shareholders. Blaming them for this is akin to blaming the puppy eating monster for eating the puppies we give them. Who the f- thought that would be a good idea to begin with?
I don't know if private transport is ultimately unsustainable. That's something people much smarter than me will have to figure out how to measure. But I do know rideshare is objectively a better product for consumers across the board than the services it replaced.
Uber took off here easily because existing minicabs were all really really crap. Not just expensive but often rude or incompetent drivers. I would guess a lot of them were unregistered and uninsured and their cars barely road legal.
Black cabs are Better but very expensive and still rip off tourists all the tine by charging without the meter. Even with the meter it was impossible to get any idea how much a trip would cost before you took it. And you needed cash.
Example: One time I got a minicab, it took the guy over half an hour to arrive, then he had to actually find me which took even longer. Then I realised the back seats of the car were full of vomit and he made me ride up front with the windows wide open - it was winter and cold. Then he didn’t know where he was going and got lost and then he charged me £30 for what would have cost £10 on Uber.
Uber, by comparison is great.
You're conflating how Uber works in certain countries to how it works in London. The relationship between Uber and the driver can vary so much depending on what market you are talking about.
It's kinda funny how everything is connected: school grades, restaurant tips, taxi ratings.
What year was this? Where was this? This comment is worth absolutely nothing without specifics, and even then its a tiny data point which cannot offer any real perspective on the current news about Uber in London.
That line sums up this entire site. Talking about workers rights is politics, and we can't talk about that.
Let's just invent things and concentrate on that shall we?
It doesn't matter what effect it has on people or society, that's for other people to think about.
I humbly suggest to you that, if P!=NP, then the Efficient Market Hypothesis (any flavor!) cannot be true, as otherwise we could program markets to solve NP-complete problems in P time.
Edit: Remember, downvote means "you are right and I must hide your argument lest it show others my folly". That's how the free marketplace of comments works.
Uber isn't exploiting anyone: it is extremely simple to register with them, you can work whenever you please, and you can stop at any point; they pay on time and give you transparent access to their managerial infrastructure to see how you can align yourself with their business, or that you're unwilling to do that. Just because your system isn't set up to particularly support independent contractors doesn't mean that Uber's drivers fall outside that category.
In Toronto, when the cabbies were fed up with being out-competed by Uber contractors (and Uber's subsidies at the time), they decided to block all the roads surrounding a major hospital, including the emergency vehicle routes. To my mind, all of them should have lost not only their taxi licenses, but their driver's licenses as well.
The authorities promised to professionalize cabs, but in reality they did the exact opposite, and the same story has repeated itself across North America.
However, the think that irks me the most is that rating everyday experiences is just dumb. Most taxi drives will be average and that's it, because we all just want it to be good enough. It's as if my local supermarket made me rate the cashier with 1 to 5 stars. I don't want to do that, because that person just needs to do their job. Anything above "good enough" is unnecessary. Significantly bad experiences should be a "reported to the manager" (or any similar mechanism), filtering out trivial complaints that you'd get in a 5-star scale and getting actual useful information on how to improve the system.
The US restaurant example is funny because the problem is the same. Instead of paying by default fair wages and paying attention to customers that complain about workers, they delegate the 'rating' part to customers, which means that there's no feedback on which they can improve and that their salary is determined by arbitrary people judgements.
So TFL do operate trains, even ignoring London Overground which is in effect also TFL.
This is actually the sole reason I don't go to restaurants/diners. These rules aren't what I grew up with (yes, in the US, I've never left the country), seem to be different every time I hear them, and usually keep creeping higher. I just never know what to tip, so it's either fast food and no tip, or go a bit hungry until I can get home.
1. Remember to get the cab medallion number during your ride.
2. Go online to submit a fairly lengthy report to TLC, alongside your contact info.
3. Nothing for 2 months
4. Someone calls you asking you for details. You may even have to show up to a hearing. By this point you forget almost the entire issue.
5. The cabbie who ignored you, drove dangerously, scammed you has been driving for months without a registered complaint and nothing will happen.
New York Yellow Cab is the best too—cabs in the Bay Area, for instance, were absolutely awful before Uber. I also cannot imagine Taxi companies were stewards of fair labor practices before Uber either.
That very much depends on which country you're talking about. That's the case in the US, but try telling a teacher in France you deserve 16/20 because you did an average job!
Also, with the tactics Uber has historically used - in a "proper" free market, would they not become a monopoly? And then they could charge what they please, ending up in the same position that previous taxi companies have been in.
I bet they could go on like this forever.
> If uber wasn't their best option they simply move to a better job.
Simply? You know there are costs and risks associated with changing jobs, right?
> If you ban uber you simply remove the current best option for most people working for uber
This is blackmail and using workers as hostages. If Uber were a decent company, it would have hired the workers they need instead of the fraud that is the partner scheme. In this situation of Uber losing license to operate, the drivers would either be still employed or be fired and get severance packages and unemployment benefits.
This is why a lot of people dislike and want the "gig economy startups" gone: they ignore the rules in the name of "user experience", exploit their workers to keep prices down and eat up the market, and then use the position they have to force their views on public policy. Governments must stop them and make them pay what they should have paid if they were operating correctly.
on the other hand, often it often takes an outsider to disrupt a well established and corrupt market in order to move it forward.
I don't know why on earth that even technical people praise them so much.
The technical innovations to delivering this cheap labour are just an afterthought.
Please, take some time to understand why people have different ideas. It is seldom if ever, malice. If you cannot relate, keep your mouth shut, or ask questions.
When I was in London, the ease of ordering a ride with your smartphone was a reliable comfort in a foreign land.
Maybe if I hadn't undergone shitty experiences in Paris et al. being swindled by the train operations, I wouldn't be taking Uber's side, but it just is that Uber has just worked for me so many times when other options failed.
"Uber of course go with phone you then just don't show if they don't like the route and waste half and hour of yours. At least it was a two way conversation with a cabbie."
I completely disagree. The uber app shows the route the driver is taking and offers way more transparency than a black cab.
Yes. I can provide you with multiple examples.
Use a cab in Singapore or anywhere in Japan and be amazed.
The "cabs are terrible" argument seems to me to be a very localized view.
Terrible cabs exist. So does fantastic service via the most efficient route by a driver who actually knows the city.
Do not know about London. In my location all the money go to paying license fees and to the actual owners of Cabs (any entity with the money but the taxi driver). And how exactly exploiting taxi drivers makes us safer I have no idea.
Failure to do criminal background check is also pathetic lame excuse. I really doubt that said former criminal got into taxi driving job and paid all those fees in order to rob/assault passengers.
Uber has its advantages, but as I've moaned about here on HN in the past, its drivers tend to slavishly follow whatever automatatically-derived route it is that Uber spoon feeds them, often meaning they set off in the wrong direction (based upon which side of the road they pick up from) or use routes that anyone who knows the local area (or has The Knowledge) would do their utmost to avoid.
Tipping doesn’t need to be a source of anxiety. If the act of figuring out your tip is the sole reason you don’t go out for a nice meal on a special occasion, I think this is something to talk to a therapist or confidant about.
any idea what the source of this info is?
And not sure what the timeframe here is. Is it 14000 since Uber started operating in london?
When you have a 5* scale for rating a restaurant my description would be:
* A disaster level lousy place
** Sub par. Probably wouldn't visit again
*** Quite OK. Probably not my fave anytime soon, but
fine
**** Above average. Excellent food, service and
atmosphere
***** An out of this world dining experience. Perfect in
every aspect
But it should mean something and when most restaurants have something between 4 and 5 stars (Let alone that the #1 rated restaurant in London was one, which didn't exist[1]) the value of such ratings become very questionable.
You can see the exact same with Airbnb ratings where 4 -, or 5 star does not mean that you will have a great experience.
The legit driver almost always gets a cut for this, free money on your vacation days or while you're working other, better jobs.
Uber, automatic payment by card and no cheating on the route.
Yes, Ghana has been through a lot of dictatorship rule until recently when we saw the light of reducing government involvement in people's lives. But why does that matter here?
>Also, with the tactics Uber has historically used - in a "proper" free market, would they not become a monopoly?
How so? it's very easy to start a ride-hailing service. In fact, I've lost count of how many of them we have here in Accra. Uber itself has been forced to reduce its charges by other competitors like Yango[1], Bolt(Taxify) and even ironically the traditional taxi providers.
These days, I don't even bother to order uber or Yango or Taxify because the taxis are responding to the competition.
In Canada's national capital region (Ottawa/Gatineau), where I travel to frequently, I've used Uber extensively even though it's more expensive and less convenient (taxi is right in front of hotel, Uber I have to call and wait for), simply because all cars were in good shape and all drivers were polite and reasonable.
For some reason in that region, majority of taxi drivers:
a) Have cars that are falling apart. Not just significant rust on the car, but frequently wonky suspension, brakes, bearings, etc.
b) They strongly believe they are rally drivers, and traffic lights, pedestrians, let alone bicycles, are their mortal enemies.
Further, all Uber drivers were happy to be Uber drivers, and 70%+ of Taxi drivers were profoundly, existentially unhappy to be Taxi drivers, and would spend entirety of their ride letting me know why.
----
Now, in principle, just from theory and articles, I'd agree that Uber feels it is / should be more exploitative of drivers and less safe for riders. I personally just haven't found it that way in practice... :-/
Did they go beyond simple parking into more egregious use of public space, like parking on the sidewalk or blocking traffic?
Or is it about public parking? Would it be okay if they were customers instead of delivery workers? How much of a difference does it make that a corporation is involved?
Of course you can just have a bunch of black car services in your phonebook that are dispersed around the city but.. at that point why not just use rideshare?
What it sounds like is that people were able to buy/use/borrow “verified” Uber Driver accounts, and upload their own photo into the app to allow them to drive for Uber without the correct background and license checks. I think it’s fair for a regular to give Uber a slap on the wrist for allowing this to happen, whether in purpose or not.
If you actually listen to vast majority workers working Uber they're ok with it. They enjoy the flexibility and the lack of obligations. If people want more fixed work they can get it at the moment.
Essentially you are taking the choice away from these people to work for uber, based on your own version of your morals and not theirs.
Your imposing your own morals on people who don't want your morals. That can be dangerous.
Why do you think that the millions of Londoners who voluntarily chose Uber over traditional taxi services should be denied the freedom to choose what taxi services to use?
So maybe _your_ choice is clear; but mine is Uber, 100% of the time.
And if you care so much about poor cabbies, you're free to tip them as much as you want.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/78827b06-0f6a-11ea-a225-db2f231cf...
I take it for granted that the staff at Uber would do anything not to lose the license. I am sure that, for 17 months, they've been investing heavily in security systems, ID verification etc. They must have followed up on every complaint. If I were them, I would have just manually followed everything that the Cabs do till I had a technology in place.
It also seems that the city is making some effort to give them space to improve: 15 months, then 2 months.
So then why didn't the gap close in time? Is this because the technology platform was so massive that turning it just took more time? Or is there something about the details that I can't see?
Edit: I start with the assumption that both Uber and the City are trying to do their best, and don't ascribe nefarious intent to anyone.
>Your imposing your own morals on people who don't want your morals.
You are wrong. It is not morals. It is the law. Uber is bypassing laws, full stop.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/08/uber-driv... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/02/mit-study-shows-how-much-d...
I would guess that if this is a widespread practice it is only a secret to the outsiders. Probably an investigation can find a way to frame this known secret in a way that is legally accepted in the court of law.
"I rode a black cab once before Uber and it was awful."
I'll trust the research from TFL rather than random anecdotes from either side, thanks.
This is politics plain and simple. And not the first time Uber has had to play the game. This same thing played out in 2017. The courts will side with Uber.
Even worse, "Pedestrian outside crosswalk not assigned goal of crossing street", "Tracking history not considered when classification changes", "Predicted path depended on object’s goal".
Basically they configured it to run over people who crossed outside a sidewalk.
I would not assume Uber are doing their best. Or, insofar as they define "best", it's "what can we do as quickly as possible with no consideration to what is legal".
"I'd like to pay with credit card" "Machine is broken." "It's all I have." "Fine."
I would not be surprised one bit to learn that they did very little or even nothing at all to address the concerns.
I'm certainly not keen on Ubers business practices, it's lacklustre approach to safety and poor record when it comes to employment regulations. However I think acceptance that the taxi industry has been changed forever will come eventually, these luddite challenges will eventually be forgotten and we'll all move on with our lives.
If we're lucky Uber will crash and burn and someone will pickup the baton, ideally in a more fair and sustainable way.
To be fair, I could see myself implementing these sort of heuristics to get a working prototype. On the other hand, I deliberately avoid working on life-critical software because of how easily it can go wrong.
Same can be said about the tfl note. Uber is basically a franchise company, locations rarely have strong interactions with eachother. Not to mention the reaction from tfl is in the end minor. Uber doesn't even need to stop operations.
I'm pretty sure Uber will raise prices the moment it kills the competition
1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The laws are created by a minority of people who don't always vote in favour of the public.
You regulate it like a normal job, and the thing they like about it most will be removed.
Car hire can work but it's often more expensive, needs to be booked ahead of time and they also refuse trips that aren't profitable for them.
Uber openen up travel for many people in London, especially at night. It's quite easy to find a lot of places in London that aren't serviced by Night Buses, there are plenty of places that are 15-30 min walk from a tube station, and the Night Tube is only available on select lines and only during the weekend.
Have you ever driven for a taxi company as an independent contractor? Taxi companies exploit. People talking about drivers being “exploited” by Uber have never driven for a “normal” taxi company. There is a reason that many taxi drivers now drive for Uber. The taxi business is filthy. Journalists don’t usually write about it because it isn’t sexy like bashing Uber every chance they get.
They're bad in the center too. I live in London bridge / SE1 and black cabs still illegally refuse to take me home from say, Shoreditch because they can't be bothered crossing the river.
It seems that you rode a black cab very occasionally, if you never experienced a cabbie getting lost. Much has been made of the knowledge, which was dense where the routes being traversed were frequent but it was already deteriorating by the time Uber arrived. I have had the misfortune of having to rely on black cabs, on some of my past gigs, on a daily basis and spent a small fortune/part of my life on these rides, especially when they were the only choice in a rush. I can assure you that the cliché of not going south of the river was 100% true, amongst many others, although it doesn't matter so much anymore. As for romanticising the 'two-way conversation' ─ it was not a dialogue but usually an unsolicited diatribe of regurgitated opinions, gathered from the daily rags and caustic radio chat shows ─ which you were bullied into agreeing with, just to journey in some relative peace and quiet. I will take an Uber et al. every single time, for the very reasons you mentioned.
[edit] open access version of article: http://archive.is/mNxBo
What is a "violent" takeover? What would a nonviolent takeover be?
I'm all for new companies providing better services to consumers. If they take over a market, isn't that because the existing market wasn't meeting consumer needs? A new company taking over a market is generally a good thing, the creative force of capitalism itself.
(Provided it's not done by ignoring legitimate standards for safety, environment, externalities, etc.)
I wouldn't be surprised to see Uber riders blocking taxi ranks if Uber actually stopped operating, Black Cabs serve very few Londoners.
Edit: Not "literally couldn't get home", I would just have to spend over an hour on a night bus.
This is and always will be a matter of opinion.
Uber is not putting a gun to anyone's head. If it's not profitable for you to drive, you don't have to.
Even with Uber never getting a real foothold in Germany, they still did just that. It start with the myTaxi (nor for some inexplicable reason rebranded to FREE NOW) app that allowed you to book a cab, see where it is, get a price estimate and pay with your credit card. It wasn’t as smooth, but still better than before.
Now last weekend when I came back from a party at night, I called out "Anyone taking card payments?" and two drivers out of 10 raised their hands, they used SumUp [0] which is also what my favorite cocktail bar uses :)
[0]: https://sumup.com/
In the centre of town during the day black cabs are often ubiquitous, immediately available, and skilled at getting you the hell out of dodge. Something for which I’m happy to pay a premium.
Anywhere else they can be capricious and scarce. After 11pm this is the case with in fact almost all black cabs anywhere in the city, when a very different type of driver — “borrowing” their license from a friend, card machine with a “sorry not working” post it taped to it, no chat — starts working the night shift. Usually these are more often likely to be rental drivers — during the day it’s owner drivers. The difference between the two classes of driver is, if you will, day and night.
By contrast, the semi robotic Uber will always come, eventually. They’ll drive past you. Go the wrong way to pick you up. Stop on the wrong side of the road and wait for you to cross because they don’t have a tight turning circle. Go the wrong way on your journey. It’s a fact of life that while not all black cab drivers meet the highest professional standards, it’s much rarer to find a good Uber driver.
SF and the Bay Area — I mention them as the root source of Uber’s app and product culture — certainly aren’t a cakewalk to drive around but it’s not a patch on London’s warrens. You can absolutely see that in the navigation skills of those using the big map apps to get around, and those who did The Knowledge. My subjective viewpoint isn’t some romantic notion based on the old ways or traditions either: everyone I know in London has pretty much the same experience.
But, for the sake of argument, let me grant you that some large subset of the decision makers were callous about these safety concerns.
I don't know how they would still not be sensitive to the need to respond to the authority that has only conditionally let it have its license back. I mean, that sort of threat has a tendency to focus one, even if one is cynical about their motives.
Another huge reason is that black cab drivers need to pass The Knowledge, a test of London streets, that often takes 3-4 years of study to pass, and AFAIK the requirements for this test haven't changed in the age of smartphones. This is utterly absurd with modern GPS, and just serves as protectionism and a false barrier to entry for new drivers.
“Any London politician wants the black cabs on their side. They carry a political and electoral clout that is way beyond their numbers. There is nothing secret about that,” says Daniel Moylan, who was deputy chairman of TfL under Mr Johnson. [1]
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/07/31/the-t... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/41a0ff40-a383-11e7-9e4f-7f5e6a7c9...
Wait, what? You get paid once a month? Is this a UK thing? Every single job I've had over here (Canada) was either once every two weeks, or two times a month.
Uber drivers are actually refreshingly polite, I even enjoyed the conversation a few times. Out of my more than a hundred rides there was only one bad experience (other than occasionally waiting for a driver that’s motionless or moving away from me): obviously new driver, didn’t know where the fuck he was going, couldn’t seem to follow GPS, asked for tip at the end of the exceptionally bad, twice as long trip.
At the very least, if the only penalty is getting booted off the 'platform', getting added to Uber's platform is relatively cheap. Getting added to the black cab 'platform' requires getting licensed, which takes years and costs a lot of money.
I'd imagine that fraudulently impersonating a black cabbie comes with significantly more penalty than getting 'booted off the platform' (license revocation).
So Uber as a service hasn't been that revolutionary in London, the things they HAVE done is improve the ordering UX and making CC's ubiquitous.
They are not rare in city centres, which is their natural habitat eg. take a trip into Central London/Westend/City of London etc., you will find them everywhere. Unless, you are talking about the suburbs, where they have always been as rare as hens teeth.
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
By the way, the report shows in appendix table 7 that only 23% of the sample reported more than 50% income from the gig economy. Don't you find it weird?
> The laws are created by a minority of people who don't always vote in favour of the public.
And Uber has the interest of the public in mind, right?
> You regulate it like a normal job, and the thing they like about it most will be removed.
Hiring someone as a freelancer to do a regular job (that is, a job where Uber decides fares, conditions and tools for the job and the worker mainly does what it's told) is fraud. And I'm not the one saying this, the courts are saying it in the UK [1] and other countries are following suit.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/uber-lose...
Such enormous cognitive dissonance. We humans are so good at that.
I don't know if they still do, but many nightclubs would have some arrangement where there was someone from a minicab company in the lobby or just outside. You'd say "W3", he'd say "That'll be £20, in 10 minutes time" and you could wait in the warm until the car arrived. (Of course, if you knew a number for a different company, you could phone them yourself.)
The drivers were pretty clueless -- even a fairly large inner-London station name like "Ealing Broadway" would frequently be misunderstood, and they'd want to slowly type a postcode into a satnav -- but otherwise they were OK.
Unfortunately people are morons that don't know how to make the "right" choice. We will be conveniently layering bureaucracy and laws on top of all of this to make sure the clearly inferior product wins by fiat of the government.
You would all thank us but you're obviously too stupid to know what's best for you.
From my understanding, this might be called "limousine service" in the USA, although unless you make a special request it will just be a fairly normal car.
Mobile phones and then apps made the border between the two services fuzzier, but they are still separate things.
Just recently I took a bus at LGA that takes you from the tetminal to the taxi stand due to construction. Even this was easier than getting a Lyft or Uber. I was in the cab way faster (including bus ride) much faster than if I trek to the designated ride hailing pickup areas and negotiate the sea of traffic to find my driver (even in less busy hours).
To boot, the cab trip started further from the airport due to the bus ride, so we were out of airport’s immediate dropoff traffic right away.
Ride was ~$10 cheaper than Lyft as well. The only downside was the annoying TV embedded in the cab. I muted it but could not power off the display.
Is it "stupid" to want jobs that arguably require "less-skill" to not pay out a decent wage? Are we going to try to force more and more into university and leave those that don't fit in that box to work towards minimum wage? Taxi driving in London has long been a way of making a working class individual's life much better in exchange for the investment of the cost of the cab and licence.
Not that America is any better these days, NJ recently decided to get into the game and started to go after Uber.
I wonder if we would all feel the same about some other ponzi scheme.
Honestly, what's your solution?
They aren't regulating an app on the store, they would be in this hypothetical scenario regulating the labor practices of a multinational corporation, which is for sure the job of any government.
First your argument is does one have a right to make money doing something the same way it was done yesterday? Or 10 or 20 years ago?
At one time you could make good money operating an elevator. Do we ban buttons in elevators to protect these jobs?
So no. No I don't think it's on societies best interest to outlaw buttons in elevators. New technology is happening that fundamentally de-values what a driver now does. It's unfair but it's maybe time for new jobs. That's simply best for society as a whole. The amount we all collectively save will vastly dwarf anything these few get by holding back the tide.
Two - the old system sucked. It was terrible. It still is. Taxis in NYC were already a cesspool of con-men and corruption. Lives were ruined in the buying and selling of medallions. The cars sucked, the drivers refused to go places, the ONLY reason it survived at all was the government forced it down our throats.
Uber won because people like it better. No matter what you say about any of it - people decided they VASTLY prefer pressing their own button in the elevator. It's sad but it's life.
So yes, it is "stupid" to fight this when everyone using these services has so clearly said the new way is better.
On what planet are "the poor" commuting back and forth to work via Uber?
And if they compensate for that by eg. lower price, then how is it different from any other market. You want premium quality, you pay extra - you're fine with compromising on it, you go for the cheaper option.
Perhaps it's a regional condition?
Usually I just take a taxi from the airport if there isn't a good transit option available. (Or book a car service in advance at my home airport.)
But it's all related. There is more availability because both drivers and customers are being subsidized.
At the end of the day, a car costs so much to operate and maintain, and a person requires so much economic profit to make driving around worth their while. No "hacks" around that fact.
Uber has to straddle both sides with great risk of leaning toward the wrong side in any particular scenario.
However, if that were the case, why not just say no license? Why give an opportunity to Uber to show an improvement in their numbers? And why do it twice?
It's been 10 years since you could first do it in e.g. Stockholm with normal licensed taxis.
Edit what I mean are regular taxis, not "black cabs", "minicabs" etc. I mean the iconic taxis. If you can't hail those, why not?
Also, Uber are paying under the minimum wage in the UK, or at least the regional minimum living wage in London. Uber don't pay taxes in the UK like a London minicab company would, then they underpay their drivers and expect our welfare system to pick up the slack on their crummy wages.
Minimum wages should apply to gig type working like Uber/Deliveroo etc as much as it does to everyone else. This is the market failure.
Without a minimum wage, sick pay, materity/paternity leave pay, of course you can make the ride cheaper.
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uber-verdic...
They are independent contractors. There's no time you have to be at work. There's no amount of time you have to work a given day of the week, or during the whole week. If they were forced to turn them into employees, that would all go away.
Nobody denies that people like Uber for reasons but what does it even mean for a Taxi system to suck when compared to a super exploitative, unregulated enterprise such as this? As a driver, this is not only about compensation. It's about a critical lack of security in all aspects of your life. And if, as a passenger, you can't really afford decent service and working conditions maybe you are trying to live beyond your means and you should really be boarding a train or bus instead. And if you can't, that, to me, seems like a political problem that shouldn't be solved on the backs of some of the most vulnerable sectors of society.
Cars are an extremely modern invention for London - the city is almost 2000 years old, and has some really fancy, really old, really precious stuff in the way.
No. Regulated taxis used to be a racket; of course they provided (somewhat) decent living for those who participated, although most money went to the medallion ownert.
I don't see why the needs of a few thousand cabbies (per city) should trump the needs of the millions who clearly prefer Uber.
Customers will frequently do things that are bad for them and bad for everyone, just because they have received advertising. That's why I think Uber is basically the antivaxx of taxis; they ignore regulations and break laws, putting people at risk and do everything they can in bad faith, but remain incredibly popular in some circles so I expect the law to drive them out, not "customers themselves".
The EU's CAP is huge protection and in the US I'm sure there are all sorts of subsidises industries that "don't deserve it".
From the perspective of the working man this argument just seems to push down their wages but not allow other industries to pop.
This tunnel vision of only seeing one provider of a new but fundamentally commodity service is interesting. It reminds me a lot of how Git and MySQL took off - people encountered them, thought, "oh, that's great, i'll use that", and never stopped to think if there might be better alternatives.
A black cab driver has made a more significant investment in that license and will be much less likely to jeopardise it than some shmuck loaning out his uberx login -- especially when Uber not only doesn't do anything to stop it, but encourages it with more dark patterns.
I'm not a fan of them and I've never paid them any money, neither one. They are scum bags.
How will the world improve if you reward what you don't like?
This place is full of politics.
> Let's just invent things and concentrate on that shall we?
I wish! But, for better of for worse, that's not what you'll find here.
https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/taxis-and-minicabs/book-a-taxi?intc...
There isn't a central service that gives you access to all cabs, though.
TfL used to have a service where you could text them, and they would text back two phone numbers for local minicab firms near you. That was really useful for getting home when you were in an unfamiliar part of town.
Most public transit services have reduced service on nights and weekends; so, in a world where you don't have a car; you can take the train/bus to get to a shift in the day, but must take a cab or uber home.
It seems obvious that Ubers or Taxis would serve this purpose wherever vehicle ownership is cost prohibitive and public transit is at all available.
Likely, this isn't "the poor" but inclusive of much of the working class in modern cities.
I drove for Uber for almost a year when I was between jobs. The hours I chose were generally 3am-noon (early because I like mornings, but late enough to dodge most of the drunks). The majority of my passengers were people going to and from factory jobs.
A large number of those passengers were people who didn't speak English whose English-speaking children would order the Uber for them. I didn't notice it at first, but after a few pick-up confusions where the passenger handed me a phone to talk to the person who actually ordered the ride, one of them explained it to me.
I live in a transit-sparse city, and a surprising number of poor people use Uber as their main means of getting around. It's simply cheaper than owning a car, especially if you don't have money up front, a steady job, or exceptional credit (Notice how car ads on TV are now disclaiming their advertised interest rates to indicate those rates are only for people with the best credit).
Even for me, now being an office-dwelling developer, if I factor in the cost of just a car payment and fuel, Ubering to work would be cheaper than owning a car. And that's before factoring in insurance, repairs, maintenance, etc... If I didn't enjoy weekend road trips, I'd ditch the car altogether.
I think it's just symptomatic of hundreds of years of town growth.
You can read the article without a subscription if you google the URL and then click on it from the search results.
- What do you expect would happen to Uber prices?
- How do you expect that change would affect overall demand for the service?
- From there, how do you expect this change of demand (if any) would affect the take-home pay of the drivers?
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240104764/iPhone-app-bo...
I saw few acquaintances trying Bolt (in London) and the main argument is the first rides are free, then the next rides are free too if you refer a friend.
You can google the URL and then click on the link to get through the paywall.
There is currently a "super sewer" tunnelling project (Thames Tideway Tunnel) which goes down to a depth of about 75m, below other infrastructure.
The Elizabeth line and other tube lines are shallower, for access reasons and because building stations at a great depth is more expensive. But a road tunnel could go deeper, especially if it only permitted zero-emissions vehicles so that ventilation is easier.
Of course, it'd all be very expensive. And there is an argument that building more road relief capacity is not a desirable thing as it just encourages traffic elsewhere.
Unlike the others, it's operated and owned by the workers - so you know that everyone is getting a fair deal.
The working class does not in general commute by Uber in London.
there is no real room for big players which is why Uber's business model is burning investment money and dodging regulations.
Have you ever seen a taxi monopoly? There is no scale effect to this business because adding more drivers and more taxis just drives your costs up linearly, and given the diseases big business suffers from and all the tech overhead of Uber it's probably worse than that.
That's why transportation like trucking or the cab industry is dominated by small business.
I imagine Uber is incredibly badly managed.
Literally what? Who does this? The app is a source of income, why would anyone share it?
If anything, this ban makes me feel like London is run by a bunch of protectionist luddites.
Now with Lyft I can get a car in just a few minutes, hop in, get driven to my destination, and get out. No worrying about cash or tipping. Just go. A lot nicer.
I personally have a moral problem with drivers not being allowed to charge their own rate while simultaneously being labeled independent contractors.
I don't see that here http://archive.is/mNxBo
was it edited out after u read it?
Given that this is the only part of your comment that remotely reaches "bad for the customer" [1], can you elaborate on this? I've heard scattered reports of safety concerns but they never seem to add up to much, and I've never seen anyone try to do an apples-to-apples comparison to taxis. There's obviously inherent danger in large numbers of people getting into strangers' cars, and the question is whether Uber is less safe than taxis.
[1] I mean directly, not via "bad for everyone"
It is a bit unclear though which numbers and findings come from Cognizant and which are from the TfL investigation.
Cities need to designate pick-up/drop-off spots away from heavily-trafficked streets for these pseudo-taxi services, UX be damned.
Maybe some form of limited-supply, transferrable crypto-token[1][2]... Could be used to prevent these sorts of situations.
[1] I am, of course referring to medallions.
[2] I am, of course, fishing for karma, by introducing a blockchain when one is not necessary.
That would depend on how much money Softbank has left to invest. Prices might go up.
> How do you expect that change would affect overall demand for the service?
Uber's great advantage is that the quality of service is better than the alternatives. If drivers can make more money, more drivers might sign up and wait times would drop. A better experience means the service will be used even more.
> From there, how do you expect this change of demand (if any) would affect the take-home pay of the drivers?
There are two parts to this. First Uber should have to make sure no driver ever makes less than minimum wage. If a driver starts the app to announce their availability and has the app running for four hours, they are entitled to a minimum of four hours of pay.
The second part is that I think getting 95% of the fare would mean drivers take-home pay is generally higher than it is today. If Uber wants to make more money by raising the rate, then drivers automatically get a pay increase as well and that seems fair.
For example this map is the night bus map just for the area around the Bank of England, and most of those will run at 15 minute intervals: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/bus-route-maps/city-of-london-nigh...
This is not unusual - other maps exist for other parts of London, and even when I lived in W6 (Zone 2), I could get a bus at all hours of the night from Piccadilly Circus to my home or vice versa. Even now living out in TW1 which is some 11 miles out from central London, I can get a night bus all night, every night to and from Oxford Circus.
Costs are also low: £1.50 a ride, with a second ride taken within 60 minutes of your first ride being free/included.
Realisitically that means you can easily get from one side of London to the other in the middle of the night for £1.50 - £3.00. It might not be the most direct or fastest route, but it's popular, and with good and obvious reason.
Tubes also run all night on some routes a few nights a week, and even when they don't 5am is a typical start time.
Poor people don't tend to use Uber in London as a utility that it sounds like happened in your city - it's a luxury product with luxury prices. Their target market here are those who are drinking and meeting friends off the beaten path from home or work on the tube network.
I do think that if the city tried to make navigation more user friendly, a few simple ideas could improve things. I suspect no such effort has ever been made.
I know this is very hard even in companies that live or die by their their products being user friendly, so for a city that don't have those incentives, it probably will never happen.
Not sure how bulldozing would help. It doesn't seem like a charitable interpretation of my post :)
Black cab drivers also got into Halo and other apps for ride hailing, and there are now a few other third party private hire apps for non-Uber drivers. I also think it made Addison Lee - the largest private hire company in London pre-Uber - shake their game up a little.
A few people will complain, but genuinely, London will be a better place without the fleet of thousands of Toyota Priuses circling all day, every day being driven by people who TfL suspect are not fit to hold a private hire vehicle license.
I wonder if it will trigger some social structure / device to avoid too much stagnation without requiring a shark-like company to try wiping the traditional market with infinite pockets.
There is concern that this is happened in the past and penalties are extremely severe: the owner of the original license will lose their badge and may face criminal charges.
It's a bit hard to describe the taxi market in London to anybody who doesn't live here, but it's a closed shop only to the extent that if you're prepared to do the work to get a badge, it won't cost you $1m like New York, but you will have to put some hours in, and you'll get known by many other black cab drivers.
If you show up with "Dave's cab" and you're not Dave, you're going to get asked questions. Do it a couple of times, and they might decide to pull your badge number up.
A few years ago a genuinely licensed black cab driver was convicted of rape and sexual assault, and as a result the community was shaken: it was the first time in over 300 years where a licensed operator had been convicted of such a crime, and they now look on newcomers with even more suspicion.
There are no lobbyists in parliament, and most black cab drivers I know have modest incomes. They declare an average of £38k/year, but as a cash business (until recently), it was assumed they were actually doing about £50k/year. Good money, but not megabucks.
The system is supported because it's worked for hundreds of years. Their chief complaint against Uber is whether their drivers have to undergo the same amount of vetting as they had to (they don't), and whether the fare structure is fair (it isn't, especially as it's VC-subsidised).
Uber is a great solution in many places that have poor transit and poor taxi solutions already. London isn't one of those places, and hasn't been for hundreds of years.
I'm not being flippant here: customers have routinely shown that for lower prices they'll suffer almost anything, to the point that safer alternatives become uncompetitive.
TfL isn't asking for much here: just that drivers are vetted properly and consistently. Every other firm in London is asked to do it, and complies. If Uber can put them all out of business by saving money on not doing that, the market will make the industry less safe for passengers.
We have voted in people to ensure that doesn't happen, because we want protection from the free market, simple as.
Multiple mayors - including the current PM who was once Mayor of London - have explained that there needs to be an open culture.
There are other private hire vehicle operator firms in London. Addison Lee is huge, and there are many, many "minicab" firms. They all comply with TfL's licensing and vetting procedures. Uber does not.
This isn't "black cabs vs Uber", this is "black cabs, Addison Lee, all the minicab firms, TfL and the Mayor of London demanding basic vetting procedures that everybody else does without question or issue".
London is not an easy place to drive, and many of those passengers would have been vulnerable: lone females, people who had too much to drink, etc.
You might not consider it horrific, but by London standards it is completely unacceptable.
Given Addison Lee is not VC subsidised, you have to wonder how they're getting the price down, but I always choose AL when I can.
I doubt that there are many Uber drivers that do it long term. Eventually at some point they have to realize that they're making peanuts (if not operating at a loss) after they factor in routine AND long-term maintenance costs of their vehicle. Or they simply get 'real' jobs and were using Uber between jobs or to supplement income temporarily.
The people I know that have personally done driving for these services has done it in addition to full-time work, largely hoping to earn decent extra money from tips.
This boogeyman trope needs to die. Uber is not funded by VCs anymore.
And this seems to just be the commonly accepted narrative among upper middle class progressives, so much so that nobody even bats an eye at the extraordinary contradiction.
I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality lately. All tech is evil, that's just a fact, but it has improved our lives so much that we all continue to use it all day every day.
> Tons of breaches documented here [1], at least 14 000 trips with unlicensed (uninsured) drivers. Drivers with suspended licences were allowed to re-register with Uber, drivers were allowed to drive without insurance on their vehicle.
I genuinely wonder if Uber could keep enough drivers if they stopped allowing uninsured or suspended drivers.
[1]: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2019/novemb...
"When TfL decided not to renew Uber's licence in 2017, the company addressed some of the issues raised by TfL back then and then a magistrate later granted Uber a new licence.
On the face of it TfL is standing tough against perceived failings by Uber. But in effect it is letting the courts decide, at a later date, whether Uber should have a licence, or not."
Especially in New Jersey's case trying to retroactively tax them. California at least is just changing a law.
Admittedly, I only have my own anecdotal evidence among my own experiences, friends, and family, but I can't think of anyone I've had the salary conversation with that mentioned getting paid other than monthly and would be curious to see what the actual breakdown is in the US.
Edit: This [1] article states that 59% of the US workforce is hourly, so it's accurate to say that bi-weekly is the most common frequency among all jobs in the US, but I can't find any resources that focus on the breakdown specifically among salaried workers.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-are-hourly-worke...
Not the person you were replying to but sexual harassment or just creepiness is a common one here in Indianapolis. This year alone:
- one friend had an Uber driver offer her perfume when she took an Uber home which creeped her out
- A co-worker driving Uber on the side had a couple invite her into their home offering her use of their hot tub and telling her that she could borrow clothes or just wear her underwear
- Another female friend had a driver offer her "complimentary earnings".
- Two female friends getting a ride to a bridal bar crawl were repeatedly asked for their phone numbers to 'meet up later tonight'
And I don't think this is abnormal either, a little searching on reddit/facebook/twitter and you can find report after report of such activity on the various ride platforms.
Pretty much everyone I know will not use ride share any more for being responsible while out drinking or when needing a ride to the airport and have gone back to using cabs or friends/family.
I've only used them myself a few times, all last summer when I was in San Francisco for less than 48 hours and none of them left me feeling "yay this is a great service"
- The guy that picked me up at SFO apparently didn't speak a word of English and just kept smile and nodding when I tried to ask him questions. It was Pride weekend and a road between us and my hotel (the Proper) was closed for the parade and he kept trying to find a way around and looking at me panicked, eventually I cancelled the ride and got out to try and find my own way.
- The guy that picked me up to take me to OpenAI had some sort of Alex Jones-esque talk radio on that was talking about 'government sanctioned false flag events' that left me wondering about the mental well being of the driver, he never said one word to me the entire time. No hi, no are you my guy, no we are here, no get the hell out of my car. Nothing. Worse, the dude had total Travis Bickle vibes WITHOUT the radio/podcast. He dropped me off on the wrong side of the street and at the end of the block.
- My first ride from there to YC's San Francisco office was hijacked by someone else. Got in my ride and the app reflected me in the car being charged, I cancelled the ride after a minute while trying to find any sort of way to notify the app or driver I wasn't in the vehicle. Had to request another and wait several minutes, this guy seemed alright, said hi to me, then proceeded to drive like he just stole the car while cutting off a couple of buses/trolleys on the way back to the Proper while letting off strings of 'mother f* this, hole that, can you believe this guy" and had three phones on his dash with some app open that was apparently telling him if he should take a Lyft or Uber fair right then (IIRC it was actually a company from a YC batch, I looked it up on my phone because I thought it was a neat concept). He also was on the wrong side of the street and and said "is his good" after he'd already put the car in park with traffic behind him.
- The guy that took me from the Proper to SFO again, apparently did not speak or understand English, I believe was muttering at traffic in Russian or Serbian, was extremely impatient in traffic getting out of the city with a lot of hard accelerations and abrupt stops trying to get one car advantages by weaving in and out of the lanes. Also had 2 phones on the dash and a dedicated GPS unit and accepted a Lyft ride with me still in the car on an Uber ride as he was maybe 1/4 of a mile from the terminal, jumped out of the car and had the trunk open before I was out and was shoving my suitcase at me and immediately walked up to his apparent next customer to get theirs.
- I think had another ride back to the YC SF offices to meet with another person a little later and the woman that picked me up kept turning around to talk to me face to face while driving, told me how she was raising her son 'free range' and asked if I was in town for Pride. I informed her no and told her about the entirely naked man I'd seen walking down the street with only sandals and a bag [1] at which point she went on to explain that her and her child's father took him to the parade the day before to expose him to as much of the 'exposed male form' as possible because she thinks 5 is old enough for a child to start learning about sexual freedom, again while looking back over her shoulder at me regularly.
- The guy that took me back to the Proper had been (or perhaps a passenger), at some recent point, vaping THC containing vape in his car as there was both a fruity and a immediately recognizable skunky aroma in the car
Prior to this I'd only ever been in one other Uber ride, all of a mile here in Indy that a co-worker and I took just to get out of the rain that we'd been in all day so we could try and figure out where to eat now that an outdoor concert was over and that guy too didn't say as much as boo to us.
Now, I'm a 6'1 330lb male strength athlete and I generally found the rides to be questionable at best. Combine that with my female friends consistently having creepy drivers ('complimentary earrings'!) and I'm honestly surprised at how many people seem to swear by such services.
[1] censored photo here about 1/4 of the way down the page https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2019/3/4/21ad-after...
However, I was replying to someone who could not grasp that anywhere "on the planet" would poor people use Uber.
I take my fair share of Uber rides but I can see the next dot com bust happening now when this unprofitable business model all washes out. See also WeWork.
So the data suggests that being paid every two weeks is somewhat more common than monthly. (And, for larger businesses, biweekly is overwhelmingly the norm.)
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-3/how-frequently-do-priv...
> In March 2013, 94.8 percent of private businesses were single-pay-period businesses
meaning that most companies pay all workers on the same schedule. Therefore, if a company has any hourly workers that get paid more frequently than monthly, everyone salaried in the company is going to get put in the same pay schedule as well. All the orgs I've worked at either paid monthly uniformly or were part of that rare 5.2% that had different pay schedules, so I admit that my experience is an outlier here.
I assume this is because small businesses (and many employees) prefer a pay schedule that's aligned with their (often monthly ) bills for cash flow reasons. Whereas larger businesses prefer to keep payroll expenses from fluctuating a bit depending upon how many days are in a given month.
In any case: being able to hail a taxi on the street doesn’t mean it can’t be useful to pre book one with an app too. I you want to go to the airport in the morning from a house where few taxis pass, that’s what you need to do. In the 90s that meant calling a phone number but these days you want to use an app, pre pay in the app and so on.
(On a side note, I take buses every day but I have never seen someone signal for one. If I’m at the bus stop it stops, if I’m not - it doesn’t. This varies between cities too I guess)
In London? The suckage level was zero. Black cabs were fine. Reputable minicabs (Addison Lee etc.) were fine. Uber does not provide anything like enough improvement to justify the level of illegality it's riddled with.
I guess demeanor, dress, etiquette, and a bunch of other pleasantries are still a commodity, but then again the stereotypical NY cabbie gets their fair share of likes and dislikes from the movies and tourists too. To me, Uber and Lyft are indispensable for doing business across teh US now. I can go away with car rentals where I only need to make a few hops during a day, and I can stay somewhere without worrying about parking or hailing down a cab.
https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/uber-post-ipo-equit...
Do we have any numbers on sexual assaults by Uber drivers in London?
I just find it crazy that in the scenario where Uber pays someone poor $8/h while I pay them 0$/h, Uber is the bad guy, while I am completely blameless.
The only actor actually paying the poor person is somehow the problem!
It's hard for me to come up with a logical framework that supports that conclusion. So I think it's not actually a matter of logic.
'Black cab' specifically refers to the famous London cars that have a particular shape.
I agree. Black cabs are hailed though, that's the point. You don't call a black cab, that's not how they work. That's what private hire (e.g. Uber) is for.
WRT buses: almost everywhere in the UK is request stop, or at least I wouldn't rely on just expecting the driver to guess.
There might be ten different buses stopping at your stop for example, so it's inefficient to just stop anyway, unless someone is already getting off.
And yes, I think Uber's attempt to squash all competition is bad. But because they are managing to do it, the smaller firms lack driver mass and when i need to get from A to B, I'm stuck with Uber. Tomorrow I will try Kapten, and if that works fine, I'll just use it. If it doesn't deliver, I'll stick with uber while it's around. Between standing in the rain and using Uber - my choice is already made up. Still doesn't mean i need to like them.
Black Cab drivers have the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association lobbying for them politically https://twitter.com/TheLTDA
I have heard of not speaking English too, was watching a cruise vlog someone did from Miami, she commented on that fact. Probably awkward, but I guess if you want to be a world traveler got to figure out the language barrier.
Checked out your blog post. Also interesting about pride, very popular there so not surprised it's mess. "move along, KEEP MOVING", surprised the police didn't want to help with directions, but probably a huge crowd? so trying to control the crowd maybe? hmm. I know there's reports that the police in SF don't even investigate car break ins anymore either, so not sure what their job is anymore. Needles and poop part I hear a lot about sadly though. It seems like the entire west coast is going down hill. In Seattle the local news station KOMO did a special called "Seattle is dying". Also not sure if people running around Naked is normal, but maybe doing it just because of pride? Kinda surprised they tolerate that, I think if I started running around nude here I'd be arrested and probably sent for a mental evaluation.
I used to want to go out west because of tech, but I've woken up a lot more about the realities. The housing costs, high crime, high taxes. I kinda change my mind a bunch of where I want to live though, I think working remotely being a digital nomad would be nice or retire early if got lucky from creating something successful... So much to explore around the US and world. Want to do a bit of cruising and international travel, RV around the US, plus I feel like RVing would be cheaper than exploring the globe so more long term. And it's basically a home on wheels. There's parts out west though I think would be nice to vacation, but not a place to live. Like you see Seattle on TV growing up on TV shows and movies so be nice to sightsee. Same with some of the places in California.
Spend summers exploring more north, spend winters in the sunbelt. But if that dream doesn't happen yet, my other goal is to go somewhere warmer and nicer like FL or TX. But it seems like Austin is growing, and starting to have some of the same problems as SF... Austin is warmer too than here but still some days it gets cold it looks. Tech is growing in Miami too. Orlando would be another spot, plus could get an annual pass to Disney! Some people are happy if they get to go once in their life, imagine being able to go almost every day! Some people with passes living near by will just go only for dinner and maybe ride one ride or two. One of my goals with the RV dream is to spend probably at least a month in Orlando during the winters, but there's other spots in FL to explore. Galveston, TX and Quartzsite, AZ are some other winter destinations that seem popular.
The Night Tube has been operational since mid-2014 and it has only gathered pace.
https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/what-we-are-do...
My own personal experience has been in the post financial crisis tech industry, and I wonder if tech pays monthly more often compared to others (and if funding plays any role in that).
Same problem has infected everything from rating your apartment maintenance guy to the support person at the call center.
However, it seems so many many taxis were frauding their taxes, that it became cultural and enforced.
Which means taxis, which are already known as the top thief job in the world, also steal the citizen on a third level after the ride itself and after choosing the night rate at noon: taxes.
I dare to say Uber, as bad as they can ever be with wages under the legal minimum, can still be a better behaved citizen.
Even in the center good luck hailing one at 2am on a Saturday night.
I’ve been refused rides form the Shard, Bank, and Canary Wharf plto Lancaster gate, both of which are in Zone 1.
If I want to hail a cab from my home I have to walk 10 min to Paddington and I live essentially across from Hyde Park which makes me considerably more central than most people in London.
For my friends who live in Hammersmith, Fulham, Acton and Chiswick they might as well be living in Belgium as far as black cabs are concerned they don’t go there and they won’t take you there.
I once waited 1.5 hrs for a cab to pick me up from a hotel. The idea you would just hop in a taxi and travel places was impossible pre-Uber. If you were downtown, you might be able to flag a taxi but once you arrived at your destination you wouldn’t be able to flag a taxi down depending on where you were. So you would have to call a cab and hope they would show up. At 3X the price.
This is part of the equation that you don’t get. Empty cabs would pass people on the streets because they would pick and choose rides to the airport because those were the most lucrative.
Safety was impossible. Now with Uber safety is better than it ever has been, you just don’t realize it because you don’t know what the taxi stays on safety were before.
If you don’t like the service, give them 1 star and complain. That’s how it works.
Black Cab drivers seem to think it is somehow their birth right to have a job that charges outrageous amounts, like they are some sort of vital service like the police or ambulance service that needs to be protected no matter what. Bullshit - I bet if they all disappeared tomorrow most non-tourists wouldn't even notice apart from the lack of traffic and diesel pollution near stations.
And "The Knowledge"? yeah yeah yeah...whatever. Most of us had to study full-time and/or in evenings & weekends in order to pass exams to get our jobs too, but that doesn't mean our out-dated and largely obsolete knowledge should be put on a pedestal and protected against more efficient modern tech (1).
The sad reality is that they have TfL by the balls, and that is why this action against Uber is happening. Just as a reminder, the UK's most prolific rapist was a black cab driver who picked people up in his cab then drugged and raped them - they think he raped up to 100 people (2) so it is clear that the vetting for black cab drivers does not actually work (3). Yet despite this, and the obvious parallels of anyone being able to borrow their mates black cab just the same as anyone can borrow their mate's uber login & car - TfL do nothing about Black Cabs.
1 - "the knowledge" only memorises fixed routes. It does not provide information about traffic, road works, accidents etc, but google maps API as used by Uber et al does, so the knowledge is obsolete there.
2 - "The Blackcab Rapist" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Worboys
3 - this guy was not just a "one off" that slipped through the vetting process through a moment of madness or a "who could tell that one day this man would rape someone?" He was a maniac who raped up to ONE HUNDRED people - the UK's most prolific serial rapist in fact - yet the vetting process failed to detect the worst rapist the UK has ever seen and approved him to be a black cab driver. You have to wonder how many small-time rapists also got through the vetting...
The crowd was INSANE. It was effectively crotch to butt for a block or more in some spots with no movement at times and the collective body heat actually making it difficult to breathe on the street that had the barricades, then you'd duck down a street going the opposite direction and it was much more sane. I landed I guess as the parade was starting, by the time I actually got to my room the last few floats were passing by outside it.
Just apically bad timing/bad planning on the assistant that booked my room and flight (to be fare when she asked how my trip was when she saw me before one of my meetings she admitted she hadn't even thought about the parade and apologized for not looking at the parade route and wher the hotel was.
If my plane had landed an hour later I imagine things would have been quite different as far as getting directions on how to get around the barricades (under the street as it happened to be).
>Also not sure if people running around Naked is normal, but maybe doing it just because of pride?
So my boss back here in Indy actually recognized the guy (on description alone, before showing the photo) from when they lived there for a few years before transferring back to our office. I guess it's just his thing and based on research when I returned apparently San Francisco allows public nudity via permit for events.
Not gonna lie, the naked guy made the whole trip. I followed him for several minutes just watching people's reactions and that woman in the photo, catching her looking down at his crotch and that expression was completely an accident, I wasn't even paying attention to the crowd.
You should think of black cabs as vehicles for the wealthy to potter around Central London avoiding public transport, or for tourists to get mugged.
The average Londoner doesn't really use them.
That's quite an accusation (going from "taxi mafia" to taxis connected to actual mafia), though I suppose it's true in some parts of the world.
Either way, sure, plenty of cities had their taxi services thoroughly broken. However, that doesn't justify fighting the bad with the worse. Despite the PR narrative they pushed, Uber wasn't some tiny upstart bravely fighting against the great taxi mafia - it was a VC backed corporation (later on, a multinational) fighting individual taxi networks in a divide-and-conquer fashion. And when I call Uber sociopathic, I don't just mean I don't like them - this particular company has a long documented history of antisocial behavior.
> If we're going to judge Uber for breaking this monopoly, let's also turn that same critical eye on the monopoly it broke.
Again, multinational corporation breaking city after city, in isolation? Also, I'm not judging Uber for being a monopoly. I'm judging them for being a morally bankrupt company that achieved market domination by breaking the law and only got away with it because they moved fast and burned through lots of investor money.
It is human to not do a shit job perfectly all the time and I won’t make their day any shitier, just because they hurt my sensitive soul by not treating me like a member of the royal family.
I’d rather blame the systems that organize their days.
Using a taxi cab in Berkeley before Lyft was a worse nightmare. It's a long story, but Berkeley has a "medallion" system ( because, um, they were afraid of a crush of taxis? ), and one business bought them all, but then went over the limit of something like 3 employees and thus would have to pay benefits. Since they were cheap, they didn't want to pay benefits ( sound familiar? ), and created lots of small sham "taxi companies". Each had a different phone number and dispatch, with the same poor cars and drivers, and the numbers were always busy. The only way to get a taxi was to get somehow to the taxi rank at Berkeley Bart, anything else, forget it. Forget living 5 miles from the train up in the hills or needing a ride to the airport, you simply couldn't do it.
San Francisco was about as bad. Locals realized ( eventually ) that the only way to get a taxi was to head to one of the major hotels and present yourself as a guest to the doorman. If you didn't live within walking distance of a downtown hotel, you weren't ever going to get a taxi. Dispatchers ( there were only two real companies, Veterans and Luxor ) would simply refuse to service non-business addresses, and if you asked a bar or restaurant to call on behalf, they would simply reject outright half the time.
When I read that people were "made uncomfortable by a comment", I agree the system could and should be better, but what happened in the bay area is we moved from an entirely non-functional system where taxi rides simply can't be had, to a system with some problems but people can get rides. The story above about getting rides and the complaints about being dropped off on the wrong side, um, yeah.
I would say about 10% of the rides I take by Lyft are less than optimal. I wish the app allowed me to select preferences: fast driving over chit-chat, don't bother with my luggage I got it, drop me off somewhere close instead of being precise, because we all have different opinions.
I've had my fair share of bad rides, one where a guy was nodding off and I thought we were going to die, a couple where the "meter" was turned on early or off late. The most recent ride I took wasn't great, the guy kept calling me and his location didn't budge for 5 minutes --- I don't answer anymore, they're trying to figure out where you're going and if they don't like it they cancel the ride. That particular guy picked me up from the wrong bay at the airport ("oh, my app didn't show me", yeah right ) as well, but drove me home quickly and correctly otherwise.
I had this same discussion with a driver in Munich last week, and I argued there are places where the old taxi system works great, and those places aren't at risk for replacement. Germany is one of them, and there's no point in using Lyft there. Japan is another. Some of london is fine, the rest, you have to know the minicab number to call. I was in a London cab a few days ago, it was great --- and they're electric! Manhattan isn't bad, but you get some crazy apples.
You could invent a better system. It's pretty easy. The primary customer issue is hailing and tracking. If you built a hailing and tracking app, and the municipal law simply says "anyone offering rides can do it how they want, but they must ALSO offer rides through the municipal app" with a well defined REST API, and created a bidding-like system to allow prices to fluctuate, _and_ gave the municipality the ability to operate that app instead of a contractor agreement where a for-profit company owns the monopoly part of the transit infrastructure.... that works.
Unfortunately, that would require someone to build such an app and offer it to municipalities without the 1000x investor payoff that is required by investors. And it would require a municipality to operate a 7/24 web service, or contract it out, which we haven't seen municipalities be able to do.
Really the problem is not that Uber gets paid too much, but that drivers are underpaid. I think a minimum wage for drivers is a better solution. In California such a law is currently underway.
There are multiple markets where Uber is not ripping their drivers off in any way, because if they did they would be running to competitors. The problem with gig economy workers nearly always stems from the core issue of lack of legislation in self-employment.
If they introduced one-way systems to reduce the number of signs in a given area, it'd still lead to having to have "knowledge" to know about the one-way system and how to get on/off it at the appopriate place so that wouldn't be an improvement.
If they reduced signs, it'd require knowledge of the area.
If they added more signs to help make it more navigable, it'd be impossible to read at speed (like it currently is).
There is honestly no solution. At some point you will have to actually learn something of the locality. We wouldn't apply the same logic to writing software - "people shouldn't have to learn a programming language! It's not fair!" - no we have to have knowledge of the machine we are writing for and an understanding of the language we are using.
And I say this having driven there before GPS and driving into the (new at the time) congestion zone accidentally and getting a fine.
What difference in vehicle maintenence?
The vetting process may be flawed, but it's flawed in both hackney carriage and phv licensing. This was acknowleged by say Milton Keynes, which gave a Hackney + PHV license to an applicant with convictions for rape and other serious sexual offences [0]
I have no confidence in London that the vetting process works, and the authorities are far more interested in retaining an obsolete cartel. Rather than fix their vetting procedure (which has always allowed dodgy minicab firms, which were never a threat to the powerful black cab industry), they concentrate on Uber.
[0] https://www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/pressreleases/2014/aug/taxi...
Perhaps it's the London / out of London divide. The BBC certainly has a London-centric approach to news on its all-day news-recycling channel, I noticed.
Uber lost the license because they were 'not fit or proper', nothing to do with vetting, seemingly because of a feature of the website that seemingly allows drivers to upload new photos and get other people to drive for them
> A key issue identified was that a change to Uber's systems allowed unauthorised drivers to upload their photos to other Uber driver accounts.
Other minicab firms of course don't have a photo on an app, and the passenger has to check the photo once they've got in the car (I believe PHV drivers have to show their PHV license from TFL), which puts passengers in a far worse situation when the driver doesn't match. I wonder how many small minicab firms have been determined to be not fit or proper.
I've had cabbies get lost twice, that I can remember - once he was claiming to be new, and he was stressing like crazy about it. The other time I went a fair way out of local area. Both times resolved amicably. Sure, I've also had a fair selection of less than perfect routing - but overall, far less than some of the games Uber drivers have tried.
I almost always got conversation or quiet and can't ever remember an unsolicited diatribe. I'd steer conversation away from the political, and if that's what the driver wanted to chat about, I'd ask them to shut up.
I would take the overall service received every time over the comparative service from Uber. Neither was or is perfect. Uber's cheap, and it shows in what and how they deliver, and the complete lack of quality and standards for drivers. It's essentially the only selling point. I'm a long way out of London now, but I've gone back to exclusively using cabs and private hire.
If enough people make the right choice instead of the herd behavior, the commons will be less tragic.
“If the driver didn’t fuck up it’s five stars” is aggressively harmful to any above average or excellent drivers out there, with no reward for trying to be either.
This is the reason why I find this "TFL is against innovation" rubbish is so annoying. AL had an app way before uber was in london.
The only difference for the end user is that AL is more expensive. (because whilst the drivers are "independent" they lease the cars from AL, and have an exclusive contract with them)
Minicabs are.
There is stiff competition, if uber is banned from london permanently, the drivers will be going to one of the three+ alternatives.
Uber's idea isn't new in london, Addison Lee had a "app based booking" since at least 2013. The _only_ thing going for it is that its ubiquitous. Its not even the cheapest.
I rarely get taxis anymore, because frankly its pointless unless you're drunk. However when I have been forced to (wife in hospital, post tube closing time) The fastest, cheapest and most comfortable was the black cab.
Failing that there was a really good minicab firm round the corner from my old house.
Plus, there are two taxi systems, the Black cab, and the minicab. There are way more minicabs than black cabs, and they are a much bigger competitor to uber than black cabs.
Those issues are all systemic. They apply to Uber everywhere today just as much as they did six days ago when this happened.