Fortunately we used car2go as a spare, so we would have had uninsured motorist protection if we didn’t get payment (eventually) from the other driver.
Especially after their value crashed to 1/5-1/4 their highest point ^^’.
Really, there’s not much value or differentiation that Uber or Lyft provide other than political lobbying and brute force. If you take that away, there’s room for a worker owned ride sharing coop to be formed in each city being run by an open source version of these apps. It’s easier said than done, but I know that some non-profits have tried this in Austin.
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Anothe thing to cosider is that it’s better to buy a brand new car if one isn’t insured rather than an used one I’ve asked my broker because I was paying more and more on my car insurance and the other factor is that a new car is more reliable and less prone to have accidents statistically. This compensate partially the fact one hadn’t been insured.
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Except when they don’t. Then gummit is stealing My Freedoms and the Nanny State is moving too fast.
Ah, the universal experience of reading reviews about any service…
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Today, I noticed just how heavily Uber is attempting to lure public transportation users with new ads. Practically every tram and bus stop now has an Uber ad, and they even took out advertising on the subway’s video screens in the cars. Which TOTALLY misses the point of why people take the subway and the tram in Munich: because the roads are so congested!
I say it again: fuck Uber. Fuck them for their predatory ways. I hope the company crashes and burns in a spectacular way, and that those driving for them find a new, better home elsewhere.
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I agree, as long as they’re regulated for safety, driver training and insurance. I remember a big problem with unregulated “dollar vans” from my time in NYC, with a number of terrible accidents occurring because the vehicles were poorly maintained or driven recklessly. That the dollar vans existed spoke to under-service by the MTA of certain poor neighbourhoods, but they weren’t really off-setting private car use since they tended to serve customers who couldn’t afford their own cars in the first place.
The long-term solution, along with congestion pricing in city centres, is better-funded official public transit. Jitneys and dollar vans are stopgaps.
As noted above, one of the few good things about Uber is that it exposed that racket to the public in many cities, including NYC. If Uber and Lyft go under and taxis again become the norm, I expect that people will demand the kind of reforms to medallion systems I suggested.
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Not really. It was a Ponzi scheme using people who needed rides as props that showed Uber their market. Uber has never charged enough money to pay for their services. If they had, they would have been more expensive than cabs and they never would have caught on. Their business model does not work, couldn’t replace the entrenched system, and we have little-to-no reason to think that growing pains in a new system wouldn’t produce something very much like the old system (which was essentially haggled out over generations in response to various problems it caused).
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Indeed.
Someone is shadowing him. Right off his left flank. A person on a skateboard, rolling down the highway right behind him, just as he is laying in his approach vectors to Heritage Boulevard.
The Deliverator, in his distracted state, has allowed himself to get pooned. As in harpooned. It is a big round padded electromagnet on the end of an arachnofiber cable. It has just thunked onto the back of the Deliverator’s car, and stuck. Ten feet behind him, the owner of this cursed device is surfing, taking him for a ride, skateboarding along like a water skier behind a boat.
In the rearview, flashes of orange and blue. The parasite is not just a punk out having a good time. It is a businessman making money. The orange and blue coverall, bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding, is the uniform of a Kourier. A Kourier from RadiKS, Radikal Kourier Systems. Like a bicycle messenger, but a hundred times more irritating because they don’t pedal under their own power – they just latch on and slow you down.
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There’s also more than enough room for a regular for profit company providing a ride hailing app, merchant services and payroll/book keeping services to independent drivers and cab companies. A fee for service model where the company does not employ drivers or maintain fleets, but provides a support frame work for those who do.
No different than payroll companies like ADP or PayChex. Or newer iterations that offer more comprehensive services for specific businesses.
Its a much better business model with an actual chance of profit. The most successful “start up” I know people at focuses on payroll and financial services for freelancers and small companies. They’ve been profitable since soon after they launched, and mostly seek investment to fund expansion in place of debt.
It’d be the difference between disruption by exploiting labor, and exploding regulation. And doing it by supporting labor and throwing some genuinely useful functionality into a stagnant market. What success Lyft and Uber have is almost entirely down to the convenience of hailing a cab or booking a livery car by app. The rest of it is just slipping a cab company through regulatory gray areas. Finding a technicality that lets livery cars accept street hails where that’s not allowed. And fucking workers to make it pay. These are just teched up gypsy cabs.
I went from a heavily used 14 year old car with 170k miles on it to a 2 year old dealer maintained lease return, still under warranty and “certified”. My insurance went up, but only because of the increased value of the car (my insurance company is very transparent about pricing).
Its not the same as a new car, but near enough. If there’s an impact from the reliability of the car its more than out weighed by the increased replacement value and parts/maintenance costs of a newer vehicle.
I’m thinking the issue on this stuff is going through an agent or broker. Those guys are salesmen, I am a salesman. Salesmen lie. I’ve never seen anyone get a fair quote that way. Almost everyone I know shops by going directly to the company themselves. And the best quotes I’ve been able to get come through places I have prior association with. Especially my credit union, the bank that holds my auto loan. And best of all through USAA, who I’ve got access to through military family.
Less certain poor neighborhoods than all outlying areas not on a Subway line. Along with the problems with how the current taxi commission works. Medallions became so expensive that small cab companies and independent drivers became a thing of the past. With most drivers paying expensive rentals to drive some one else’s cab, they needed to stick to the densest, wealthiest areas to make a living.
Mid Town and specific neighborhoods south of 96th street. Despite it being illegal most cabs refused to take fares out of that area, and there were no cabs to make pickups outside of it.
Other areas were serviced by gypsy cabs, dollar cabs being one type. Better bus service killed the dollar vans years and years ago. The green cabs mitigated the costs of a medallion, and spread cab service around the city. But they didn’t kill the gypsy cabs, ride hailing aps legitimized them. They initially contributed to better service in the outer boroughs, but by now it pays so little they focus on the same places the yellow cabs do, and suffer many of the same issues.
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Collapse is irrelevant. Uber and Lyft have been wildly successful. They did exactly what they were meant to do - they made a buttload of money for the scam artists who founded them and lied and cheated and bribed lawmakers and regulatory agencies and sucked in a big bunch of fools who shoveled their money into the pockets of the founders who can now retire to the Cayman Islands and drink mojitos and laugh at the idiots who made them rich by believing their bullshit.
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You know what would happen, people would “license” the medallions. Simpler yet: Only the medallion owner can use it. No sublicensing. And no transfers of ownership, no more so than you can sell your sublicense your driver’s license.
Thank you. it was some message board found via google a couple years ago when I was considering going car-less. Someone was going car-less and asked. And someone said they went without for a couple years while traveling abroad, and when they came back and tried to get new insurance their rates were through the roof. It was anecdotal.
Cool. Good to know. Thank you.
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I have no problem with letting other qualified drivers use a medallion cab (the medallion is physically and legally affixed to the vehicle). Taxis are a 24/7 business, and individual cab owners routinely lent or rented out their cars to people they knew so that the asset wasn’t sitting idle. The point is to avoid the monopoly racket, where a few fatcats like Michael Cohen who haven’t driven a cab in years if ever control hundreds medallions and shut out individuals and raise consumer prices.
Being a cab driver (as opposed to owning a medallion) should continue to carry with it the requirement of a special commercial driver’s license, though. That license should also be required of anyone who buys a medallion.
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That’s the thing. It shouldn’t be an asset any more than my driver’s license is or a health inspection report. I know they are used as a way of limiting the number of drivers on the road. So do that, limit individual drivers rather than the number of cars. Or maybe just scratch that entirely and charge a congestion fee for downtown. Dunno.
If an item is made artificially scarce, as taxi medallions are and health inspection reports are not, it becomes an asset. The owner will understandably want to maximise its use, and there’s a public good argument to be made as well (sometimes you need a cab at 2AM).
That reminds me of one of my pet peeves about the existing NYC medallion system: all the drivers going off-duty at the same and worst possible time.
They’re used as a way of limiting the number of vehicles on the road. It’s an important distinction. In contrast, taxi operators’ driving licensing aren’t subject to artificial scarcity.
Why not both? If general congestion fees work, they might be able to increase the number of available medallions.
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There’s a lot of received wisdom around car insurance. Like red cars costing more than other colors because sports cars tend to be red. And that tends to skew their actuary math or something. That’s never been the case as far as I know. But its a true fact according to many.
Others like what you’re mentioning sound more like sales tactics. An insurance agent wants to sell you a more expensive policy, or wants to charge you more than is necessary. And that’s the reason given. Even if its something that’ll never come up if you just dial up the insurance company on its own or hit their website.
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Good to hear. Thank you.
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