When Uber arrived at my town I was the weird dude who stuck to cab, which had its problems (too expensive, few drivers at night). I told people all that would eventually happen. The only difference now is the price, it’s still lower than cab fares from before the arrival of the Sillycon Valley Cab Co. I wonder for how long.
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i definitely know people who have felt unsafe both as drivers and as riders. ( including the time a driver decided to start stalking a friend of mine. ) uber puts names and faces to rides, but uber doesn’t care very much about bad behavior that doesn’t rise to the level of criminal
i wasn’t going to post about all that, but then i saw this today
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This is specifically what I was thinking of with what I was trying to say at the end of my comment. I live & work in this industry in Portland, so I saw that a week or so ago. I mean, off course that option should exist, and I hope they can make it work! But if you’re basing it off of the fantasy land Uber/Lyft business model, at some point you’re gonna say “oh…wait a minute here this doesn’t add up”. Running a car service (whatever you want to call it) isn’t rocket science, but it also isn’t easy. You need a consistent enough amount of drivers on the road to be reliable. You need a consistent enough amount of customers so your drivers keep showing up to work. You need to charge enough per ride that the drivers are mostly going home happy, can afford the necessary vehicle maintenance, and after however many years when the car is worn out you’ve banked enough to replace it. That’s tough to do when you’re taking on 2 absurdly funded companies charging the equivalent of 1970/80’s cab rates, whose labor is supplying the vehicles, and both are considered expendable & easily replaced.
And then the sad side story of why this is even needed is that Uber and Lyft are an obvious creep magnet. You apply online, never meet or know anyone from management, send them a photo of your license, roll through a JiffyLube, pay no cost upfront, & within 2 weeks you’ll be alone in your car with whatever your preference drunk person. There are legitimately some levels of sensitivity required to perform this job that should require significant barriers to entry, not removing them ‘cause freedom’.
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I’m guessing you didn’t actually spend a significant amount of time in taxis. One of the largest issues with the taxi system is that all of these requirements go out the window in the real world, especially with tourists or out-of-towners who don’t know how to use the penalty system appropriately to even report infractions.
Not only is it difficult for an out-of-towner to know if they’re going the “fast” way on a route (or shortest, or whatever), they are very likely not going to know what any of these “requirements” are in the first place. I’ve also personally been assessed a “credit card fee” in a NY medallion taxicab in the days before automated payment systems, something that I only got out of when I started calling the information number on the placard in the back of the cab to confirm the existence and legality of said “fee”.
That was solved when three very important innovations happened on the Uber side (that, frankly, anyone else could implement, too, but Uber did it first):
1 - removed payment processing from the drivers. No more shit like “I will drive you to a nearby ATM to pay me (actually happened)”, the aforementioned “CC fee” markup scam, or drivers skimming your CC number in the days before automated payment terminals (also actually happened to my partner).
2 - emailed a copy of your actual route travelled and duration upon completion of your trip, offering incontrovertible evidence should the driver have taken the long-way-around, and
3 - perhaps most importantly, the dispute resolution process for trips happens outside of the taxi, with a centralized support team, rather than arguing with the driver.
Worse, those same dispute resolutions issues were a joke. I remember when I wanted to file a formal complaint against a cab driver in Toronto who literally doubled the ride in from the airport in both distance and time for my family members. The only way to start a dispute after calling the city reporting line was to press charges! Like, who is going to do that?
GREAT way to downplay the situation here. Here’s some better context of the indentured servitude these NYC drivers were subjected to:
You should not have to risk your livelihood and financial wellbeing for decades to drive a taxi. The fact that you could refer to this as “Best in the world” shows how fucked up this very idea was.
The fact that people used the argument that it was at all appropriate highlights what I’ve been saying in this topic - As shit as the management decisions Uber have made are, the Taxi industry was terrible at the core, basically unaccountable, and needed a kick in the ass and some respect to toss this multi-city medallion-slave-trade that was going on for drivers.
That Uber has ended up being shit for drivers also sucks, but the important thing is the “old guard” is no more and hopefully, as I said above:
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And of course, ask any PoC who lived in NYC how well that “required to pick you up” rule worked out when they tried to hail a cab. I mean, that one has been a sitcom and standup joke for more than half a century.
At least in NYC, if you were a white male with cash who didn’t present as a tourist those requirements worked great (except between 3:45PM and 4:15PM, when no-one could get a taxi because the geniuses at the TLC decreed that all the drivers in the city would go off-duty at the same time). Otherwise, not so much.
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The fact that I can go to any number of big cities in the world and use the exact same app to get a ride, know exactly how much I’m paying, and not have to deal with cash is something else. I’ve used Uber service all over the world and the overall experience (as a rider) is something that local taxi companies just can’t match. But this all comes with a bunch of caveats…
Nothing Uber has done has been particularly novel or innovative – which I think is what the video is trying to assert. They started with an interesting idea (“let’s disrupt the taxi industry”), then stitched together a bunch of existing technologies and used extremely aggressive lobbying to quickly expand and become the juggernaut they are today.
I’m not going to deny that as a result they have been incredibly disruptive, but it’s hard to say that it’s innovative – especially, as the video mentioned, with any local taxi company being able to replicate what Uber does (but obviously not at the same scale). In the end, absolutely terrible for the workers (sorry, “independent contractors”). Uber doesn’t care – they know that for every driver they lose, they can get another 5 to fill their place that they can exploit.
As is typical with tech companies, they took a great idea and concept and took it to the most terrible logical extreme.
A few years back, Bojack Horseman had a whole plotline about some of the characters setting up an alternative to Uber called “Cabacadabra” – a ride-share service without the creepy male drivers meant to make women feel safe. (Naturally, men started using the service just so they could hit on the female drivers.)
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I fail to see how experiences in Toronto, and what sounds like plain livery styles cabs, bear on my description of NYC’s separate, different medallion system.
But I have taken a shit ton of cabs. I grew up in the NYC Metro Area and lived in the city for years.
I never once experienced any of those problems in metered cabs. And know very few people who did. Not like they didn’t happen but it’s hardly the default.
My experience in other areas is largely that cabs are borderline unavailable, being call ahead car services only in most of the US. And that they are vastly overpriced vs those NYC metered cabs to begin with.
A big part of my point is that the NYC Cab system is a very different thing than most people are talking about when they talk about cabs in general.
Uber did not innovate that. In NYC metered cabs from when credit card payments were allowed (so 20 or so years) it was handled with a key pad in the passenger cabin directly linked to the meter.
That was also common to default in a lot of Europe before NYC adopted it.
Drivers have also been required to post their hack license and medallion info in the cab since the 50’s. And as long I’ve been around clear info on who to call, meter rates and what’s not allowed. 311 for complaints since that’s exist and the Police if the driver violates the law.
Yeah Uber’s approach on that has been real convenient when shit like sexual assaults by drivers happen.
Great innovating there. Putting private companies between the law, basic safety and the victim.
More over Uber’s approach to customer service disputes essentially just penalizes the driver by default and gives no recourse. It’s an ongoing feature of their labor disputes. Your convenient app based complaint is their tactic for mistreating employees.
So we’re back at “better” from a really narrow perspective.
Yeah an article from 2019. Which describes the truly fucked situation for those drivers after or during what I was explaining
I wasn’t down playing anything. What you’re pointing is the result.
Insult to injury, before Uber enter the market. Drivers in that situation mostly made more than typical ride share drivers do now.
That wasn’t the only harm either. When the value of medallions collapsed. Many of the remaining independent drivers had gone into debt to buy their medallions. Often splitting the costs between multiple drivers. Those guys were pretty quickly permanently underwater on their loans. And ended up in very similar situations to the guys working for the most exploitive cab garages. Most of the suicides I’ve seen reported have been people in that circumstance.
In a lot of cases Uber is more shit for drivers and also made shit worse for non-Uber Drivers.
And they under cut a lot of attempts to make things better for drivers as a core tactic to accomplishing that.
I’m not give them credit for “innovating” in way that made things actively worse and actively harder to fix for everyone except now I can use an app.
I think it’s a little much to expect transit regulation to end racism.
Especially since Uber has pretty much the same issue, including the end of it that involves cars clustering in whiter, more affluent and central areas.
That clustering being a massive part of the issue. More often the inability to get a cab in a minority neighborhood than the inability of POC to get a cab at all.
Which in NYC pressed people in parts of the outer boroughs to rely on more expensive livery cabs and riskier unlicensed cabs.
NYC cracked down on discrimination, and created the Borough cabs. Which are only allowed to serve outlying areas. And did this before Uber turned up.
The App companies have largely had typical tech based shrug in response to criticism on this front. But at least they currently cost more than the gypsy cabs used to.
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You have misunderstood what I wrote. While I included references to Toronto, I am speaking from actual experiences and conversations with actual New York Medallion taxi drivers over my many many visits. YMMV.
Unless you are speaking from experience, I will say only that my partner and I have direct, first-hand experience on what this is like when you don’t have the resources Uber provides around who was where when and it was NOT a better solution without Uber’s involvement, and leave it at that.
I fully understand from the treatise you have chosen to write on this topic that you have a very specific, entrenched position in support for the status quo. You are welcome to that position, and I doubt any reader here has any question about your motivations or position after your very detailed responses.
I, on the other hand, have talked to enough taxi drivers in both NY (specifically!), and around the world to know that every single one sucked from their perspective in some way, while also simultaneously knowing that I had enough shit experiences in taxis in enough cities to know that the status quo absolutely had to go. I’m sorry that this conflicts with your worldview on the topic.
IMHO, Uber addressed some of the worst issues surrounding the abysmal state of taxis, then added a bunch of their own crap. The good news is, I hope, that second-mover advantage will allow someone to follow up with a better solution that gets rid of the shit that is the taxi industry while allowing all the modernization to blossom. Because I have zero loyalty to Uber, but extreme loyalty to the company that comes around and gets this right in the future.
And it sure as shit isn’t going to be medallion taxicabs.
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You shouldn’t be looking for one company to “get right” the taxi/rideshare/whatever business. You should be looking for better regulation and business models that give drivers a decent income.
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Where did I say that? Exact quote, please.
What I was doing was pointing out that the “ironclad” requirement you discussed works differently in practise for PoC (and for the differently abled, I should add).
And yes, transit regulatory agencies that actually take customer complaints seriously can work with medallion and permit cab companies to identify and ban habitually racist and ableist drivers.
But when Uber drivers actually refused rides to Black passengers years ago in a similar manner to taxi drivers, there was enough outcry and media attention that the company was forced to address it. That never happened for the medallion taxi industry over decades if not a century – not one yellow cab company did anything about racist drivers despite the practise being a widely known fact that made its way into pop culture.
[@orenwolf addressed it, but the same goes for drivers who sexually assault or just creep out women passengers. Uber had this problem, too, and acted just like the medallion monopolies until bad PR forced them to put in background checks.]
To be sure, there are other ways drivers can get around being blatantly discriminatory when a cab is actually hailed by a PoC (which is what I was discussing), like clustering in Manhattan or around the airports. But until very recently the existing medallion monopoly drivers didn’t have to bother with such measures.
The crackdown on explicit discrimination by yellow cab drivers has been weak. You’re obviously not a PoC, but I still know enough Black folks in Manhattan to know that it’s still a problem for them to flag down a yellow cab.
The green Boro cabs (really a hybrid of a cheaper permit system and livery cars) help alleviate the clustering issue, but a lot of drivers (both green and yellow as well as traditional livery) dislike it. It’s better than the dollar vans and unlicensed cabs (let’s avoid using the word starting with “G”, please) for residents of the outer boroughs and north Manhattan, but as with Uber it’s a solution that shifts the cost burdens (including opportunity costs) to the drivers.
It’s not really a shrug. The tech companies hate proper regulation at least as much as the traditional medallion companies do, and like the latter see that corrupting and weakening the agencies and politicians is the best way to get what they want. Uber and Lyft just have more money and smarter political operators, which allowed them to out-corrupt the medallion monopolies. “Corruption disruption”, as it were.
The kind of worker-owned co-op referenced in the article I posted above seems to be the best approach. The apps and software are commodity stuff now in a way they weren’t in 2009. Open-source the tech, make it available as a common branded platform to a network of co-ops around the country, and have the co-ops focus on working with local regulators (and working out “last-mile” arrangements with public transit agencies) rather than undermining them. Cut out the House of Saud, cut out private equity, cut out the subprime lenders, cut out the arrogant Libertarian techbros, cut out the sleazy medallion monopolists. Then we might have a more equitable rideshare system that benefits drivers and passengers and sends both Uber and the medallion monopolies to a well-earned demise.
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I will happily take that, too!
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The real life racism of ‘not being able to get a cab while Black’ is even played as a gag in the Wiz; Dorothy & Co walked to the Emerald City because they had no choice - the cabbies wouldn’t fuck with them.
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I’m going from the wide reporting on these companies on the issue.
California fined Uber $60m just last year over their refusal to even release data on sexual assaults. For years they used forced arbitration to keep cases out of the press and out of the courts. There’s been a FUCK ton of lawsuits. And they still don’t adequately vet employees or take them out of circulation.
I didn’t pull that subject out of my ass. Uber in specific, but Lyft too, have a very, very shitty record on handling sexual assaults.
Thankfully I don’t need personal experience on that one. Cause there’s a whole lot of documentation.
As do a lot of things. But laws and rules don’t ceased to exist cause some people don’t follow them. Neither does it mean whatever Ubers done works any better.
It happened in the NYC medallion system. Well before hand. And is still being actively addressed.
Before Uber ever did.
Like I said and like you yourself are discussing.
A big part of my point is we didn’t need them to. Metered cabs are basically regulated as public transit in NYC. So a government has stepped in to address this (in multiple way over the years).
Uber still has this problem and is actively being sued and pressed by regulators over it as we speak.
That’s more of a structural racism and societal thing. The wealthier and denser parts of the city are where the bulk of the fares are, and they also tend to be the whitest areas. Along with the vague assumption that whites have money or are a safer bet for customers. You don’t need active discrimination by drivers to make it happen.
From the coverage, Uber hasn’t handled discrimination much better than they have sexual assault. Especially when it comes to employees being victimized.
But they definitely have the cluster problem.
I would agree. Though less weak than past efforts. The point of that is it’s not a cab problem. Or one that Uber has solved, or was even concerned about.
If we’re going with “some of my best friends are black” I have plenty of non-white friends and family in the five boroughs who use regular metered cabs frequently.
A lot of them much more often than I did/do (still prefer subways and walking).
Driver discrimination is and was something they had to deal with regularly for sure. But it’s less “excluded from cab system” than regular micro-aggression and occasional verbal assaults.
It’s also regionally bound. It’s harder for many of them to get a cab in touristy areas and the wealthiest areas. And harder still in outlying minority neighborhoods.
A bit.
But the cost of medallions and consolidation in ownership driven by it greatly exaggerated the press into central areas.
It became less possible to make a living without the absolute maximum ride volume. Longer, higher dollar fares and reliable fixed fares to places like airports became undesirable, because they took too much time. The only way to keep up was as many short trips around the densest areas you could pack into a shift.
The green cabs have to be viewed in the context of lowering the cost of the medallions (and eventually doing away with the secondary market).
They were intended to be much cheaper to buy. Thus allowing independent drivers and smaller new cab companies to buy in. Since the buy in was cheaper and they weren’t working for the consolidated cab companies. It was practical to make money servicing those other areas, on those longer fares and on those airport runs.
From what I gather that works pretty well. I actually have a neighbor who is an independent green cab owner. Which is crazy because we’re like an hour and thirty from the border with Queens and you’re not finding a house around here for less than like $600k.
By undercutting the market the way they did, Uber basically threw all that into over drive.
To be fair the city (and state) has been way too lax on adjusting or pushing back. They should be regulating the ride shares aggressively, and they should probably be aggressively issuing medallions or just flat make them non-transferable.
The whole “don’t tank the market too fast” ship has sailed, and they need to make a meter cab a more attractive proposition than Uber and aggressively sign up small operations and independent drivers.
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Hey, relevant to today’s conversations - NY Taxi drivers have spun up their own Uber alternative, and Cory Doctorow has blogged about it:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#gig-no-more
New Yorkers have a new ridehailing alternative to Uber: The Drivers Cooperative is a driver-owned, app-based ride-hailing service that pays drivers more, charges riders less, and pays out any profits to driver-owners as periodic dividends.
Perfect example of what I was talking about. Second mover advantage, gets drivers in control of their own destiny, without the shit Medallion system or other old, atequated ideas, and puts the profits back in front of the Drivers, where it should have been in the first place.
I will 100% use this service whenever the world is Unbroken and I can return to NYC, even if it should happen to cost more than Uber - or even traditional taxis - because it’s the best of both worlds - convenient for the customer and fair to the driver.
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They do effectively cease to exist if they’re not enforced. Which they weren’t and still aren’t when it comes to NYC’s medallion cabs.
Feel-good training videos aren’t an adequate alternative substitute for tracking and banning racist drivers (on the basis of a robust and easy-to-use and preferably government-run consumer reporting system). It was only after Uber had to address the issue with its own drivers that the medallion monopolies (at the prompting of the TLC, suddenly worried about its own image) finally started to try and impose real consequences, after decades of inaction.
This will be an on-going problem (and not only in the rides-for-hire sector). Uber is no angel, but it moved on the first report of the problem within months of it hitting the media out of pure self-interest. For reference, “The Wiz” (h/t @melizmatic) was released as a film in 1975.
Which is not addressed by the “ironclad” requirements of the yellow-cab medallion system. The city had to create a separate green-cab livery/permit hybrid system that no-one really loves to address it. Uber likely addresses it through fare-based driver incentives, a market-based system that has its own shortcomings.
You may be, but I’m not.* Again, I’m pointing out (as is @orenwolf) that the requirements you see as making a case to preserve the medallion monopolies don’t work the same for Black people like they do for me (and likely for you).
[* just like I wasn’t saying I expected transit regulation to end racism. That’s two.]
Which brings up another issue. It’s a funny thing, if someone hails a yellow cab in Manhattan and wants to go to the Bronx or certain areas of Queens or Brooklyn the driver may claim it’s “too far” or that he suddenly has to go “off duty”. But somehow a request to go to Staten Island or an airport doesn’t elicit the same response. I wonder why…
So all those sub-prime loans to buy million-dollar medallions, the squeezing out of private operators by consolidating monopolists, the suicides … all “greatly exaggerated”. Okie dokie.
They have lowered the cost of medallions – just enough to put some independent drivers underwater to the point of suicide but apparently not enough to get the vulture capitalists and monopolists to take their losses and dump out.
Meanwhile, the green cab drivers are barred from the most lucrative Manhattan and airport pickups. They’re not struggling to pay off a huge medallion debt (IIRC the green permits cost less than $2k/annum), but they’re likely not bringing in a living wage for the NYC area either.
Again, the fact that Uber’s “disruption” forced changes in the traditional industries for the worse or for the better does not mean anyone acknowledging that is defending Uber’s business model.
That’s an understatement. They just shifted some of their focus to a new corruption model that’s more lucrative than the old one (which they still preserve, because a buck’s a buck).
Ultimately, meter cabs are a major part of the problem, encouraging all kinds of bad behaviours on the part of drivers (esp. when it comes to tourists). Consumers and drivers both benefit from a pre-quoted (and, for societal benefit, un-subsidised) rate to get from point A to B, with a pre-arranged route visible to both and hailing/dispatching and payment done via an app. There’s nothing magical about a meter that makes it more easy to regulate than that kind of app. I’ll be glad to see the taxi meter (analogue and digital) join the pay toilet in the Museum of Unloved and Obsolete Technologies.
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I think I saw such a system in Venezuela, early 2000s. I noticed many cars or radically different age & up upkeep with hand-made (usually black marker on cardboard), “TAXI” signs in the front window. Sometimes flipped up to show the word “TAXI”, but sometimes flipped over to show the blank side.
I was told that anyone could be a taxi. Just make a sign with the word on it, and stop if someone signals you. They state their destination, driver agrees or not, and if so, you hope in, And later get out at your destination. Cash only. Flat rate, zone-to-zone pricing that everyone just knew. Cheap.
Apparently very safe and efficient. I think similar thing exists in some large US cities. Jitney cabs. I’m not sure if they’re still a thing.
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