Which isn’t a great option in many places.
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The article is missing a lot of Uber’s awfulness, like the “Rides of Glory” blog entry in which Uber gleefully revealed its ability to track users’ one-night stands.
I’m going to enjoy watching Uber and its douchebag management team go down in flames like the dumpster fire of a business that it is.
Fuck you, Uber.
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What are you? A godless heathen who hates America?! That’s socialism and we won’t have that here!!
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Oh I know. 
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Living in Germany, I prefer to use DriveNow and Car2Go when my travel needs aren’t met by the public transportation network. I can drive myself, and leave the car parked (as long as I am in the home zone). I expect those two companies to perfect the self driving car sooner, working their way up to cars parking themselves.
I haven’t even given Uber or Lyft much of a look, as the stiff licensing for taxis means those two companies couldn’t get drivers: people were afraid of losing their licenses if caught carrying passengers without the proper driver’s license.
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Right, that’s it. I drove for both Lyft and Uber, and while the experience of being a driver for both is nearly identical, I actually feel bad driving for Uber because of their constant, unrelenting bad press. I stopped driving for them about a year ago and deleted the app from my phone, but didn’t delete my account, I guess on the off chance that I really needed the income in the future. Well, tonight I just deleted it, and left a link to this article in their “why are you leaving?” box. I don’t care how bad my finances get, I’m not selling my soul to these scumbags.
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It really sucks that Uber is bad for their drivers. As a customer, it has been incredibly good. Their reliability is many levels above any taxi company I’ve used, the customer experience is at a much higher level, and the rates are much more reasonable. It was something that was really needed to shakeup the taxi monopolies. I haven’t used Lyft yet, but I would assume that like Uber, it’s far better than the alternatives in every possible way (for the customer).
Using conventional taxis: 5 phone calls to local ‘taxi’ companies:
- “we only serve the airport”
- busy signal
- “we’re a limo service now, not a taxi”
- this number is no longer in service
- “ok, somebody’ll be there sometime, but it’ll be awhile”
Using Uber: a couple of clicks and “driver will arrive in 4 minutes”
Conventional taxi (which shows up after a little over an hour if you’re lucky): “Ok, where ya goin’? Where is that? Do you have directions? I guess I’ll have to call in…sigh”
Uber (which shows up in about 3-5 minutes): “Hi, how are you? Going to _?”
Conventional taxi (after taking most of an hour for a 20 minute drive): “That’ll be $120”
Uber (after taking 20 minutes for a 20 minute drive): “Trip price: $40”
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I remember trying to get a cab near Golden Gate Park during Bay to Breakers several years ago. One dispatcher literally laughed at me and hung up. Another told me to take Muni instead. Another just hung up on me when I said where I was. That definitely soured my opinion of cab companies. SF is a particularly terrible cab market, though.
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I don’t think I could ever drive for even excellent money. I am very bad at it.
(May I just say I love your typewriter icon? Because I do.)
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It’s Jack Kerouac’s typewriter.
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The linked article really doesn’t address what most people are pissed at Uber about, which is its corporate culture of douchiness. Its criticisms of Lyft are summarized as:
You can condemn almost any business using those criteria, including especially traditional taxi companies.
And Lyft has pledged to donate $1,000,000 to the ACLU (which that article doesn’t dispute). I suppose someone could say that’s merely a gimmick, but if its a gimmick that results in a $1,000,000 donation to the ACLU, it makes the choice between Uber and Lyft a no brainer.
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@Daaksyde What wound up happening in SF was that the traditional cab companies (which were abysmal) were forced to step up their game by the competition from Uber & Lyft. All the major ones now have similar apps. I haven’t had a single no-show (“Your [invisible] taxi has arrived!” followed by the driver and/or dispatcher lying to you about you not having been at the pickup location.) or had to wait more than ten minutes since the transformation.
Oh, and no more “Credit card reader is broken” at the end of the ride. I don’t even have to pull out my wallet, thanks to phone auto-pay.
ETA @ficuswhisperer they were actually doing you a favor. You never would have gotten anywhere during Bay To Breakers.
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This is what strikes me about it; US taxi companies seem to be genuinely shit, while where I am in northern England, so long as it’s not chucking out time for pubs or clubs on a weekend, you can pretty much rely on a cab in between 5 & 15 minutes max, and they’ve had tracking/hailing apps for years, and prior to that, text/ringback services to tell you when it’s arrived. WTF were all your taxi firms doing for the last twenty years?
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Trying to become the only game in town so they could raise their fares and give shitty service.
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Not really – I used to live in San Diego and taxis were essentially unusable except maybe in the downtown area. You would never see them on the street, so you couldn’t hail them like you can in denser cities, and calling them often meant getting a taxi an hour later (if they bothered to show up at all).
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I don’t get the impression that people accuse Uber of bad customer service(aside from the ‘eh, the invisible hand will sort out the rapey drivers sooner or later’ stuff); just that, once they reaped the advantages of automated phone based dispatching they don’t actually have any other advantages in terms of efficiency or cost structure, so they’ve been using a mixture of burning VC money and grinding capital costs out of drivers to offer the remaining improvements in service or cost.
They’ve been pretty effective at this; but that isn’t really a compliment.
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Of course, they were the only game in town thanks to the “medallion” system, which was a (very successful until Uber and Lyft) plan to create artificial scarcity.
In much the same way that endless copyright and DRM create artificial scarcity of media, except that not being able to get to a doctor’s office/family dinner/job interview is a lot more serious than not being able to watch the latest “Fargo” on your platform of choice.
My solution has yet to be implemented…
(1) Every driver for hire must be bonded.
(2) Every vehicle for hire must be safety inspected twice a year.
(3) Drivers and (if any) their employers must carry sufficient insurance.
(4) Anyone who meets these requirements can get a taxi medallion.
(5) Taxi medallions cost $50 per year.
…and it won’t be, because it totally fails to generate sufficient graft.
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All of this. Uber is cheaper, faster, and easier. Hopefully it will continue to exist… with different everything. Or, its competitors will take its place. Either way, I’m not going back to traditional cabs.
