What the fuck do you think everyone is trying to do? We have a legalized form of mass corruption that is in nearly every single US city. The entire political apparatus, because they are getting fucking bribed, is working against it. Uber and people who dislike mass corruption are pushing to fix it. They are trying to change the corrupt as shit laws where they can and find loopholes to get around the legalized corruption when they can’t.
If actual laws are broken (rather than routed around) on the way, boo-fucking-woo. I’m sorry the bribery isn’t as appealing when the corrupt profits go down. Law and order nuts can go piss off and smoke some weed. Laws and justice are two different things. I am happy to see unjust laws broken. I want people to break unjust laws. I shed not a single fucking tear when someone lights up a joint, eats some shrooms, or buys a fucking dildo in Alabama. I also couldn’t give two slimy shits if the corrupt bribery scheme used to keep corruption politicians in office and corrupt companies in business gets pissed on.
Yeah, the more I hear about it, it just seems like it depends on everyone’s unique situation. It sounds like in your case, since you travel a lot (long distance and within tight timeframes, I assume) you can’t practically drive a car to all these destinations. And, even if you did have the time to do so, it wouldn’t be worth all the wear and tear on the car and lost time on the highway.
Or, in other cases, it’s ideal to share one car in a household combined with Car2Go and Uber as backup for when no Car2Go is nearby and the shared household car is in use. Then also rely on a rental when that’s more practical.
In my case, I have to fairly often get up and go within minutes within the city and often have to do so between destinations once I’m out and about in the city and also venture out to Boulder from Denver as well on the fly. No time to wait for a cab or Uber or time to walk to a (hopefully) nearby Car2Go available on the fly. Gotta have a personal car at my disposal in those cases. If I can’t park close-by for any reason, I’ll park and ride my bike. And Car2Go gets incredibly expensive if I leave it parked and waiting at each destination, so that’s not practical.
It seems a dubious proposition that Uber or similar brokers will affect the inherent inefficiencies in “free-range” car services. The same forces that drive businesses to exploit externalities are abound in any activity depending upon transportation’s most suspect element - vehicles themselves. The problem of broken, needing repair or aging vehicles is only one system challenge that throws cold water on the Uber concept. Consider the size of Uber’s commission. Until or unless that number gets into the single digits, the price for consumers or costs for operators will become unattractive if not unworkable.
There’s also the question of law enforcement. Not that pertaining to honoring payments across constituencies or mediating “competition” between drivers during lucrative “surge” price moments. I mean with regard to the creeping presence of organized crime. One need not think hard or long about the cornucopia of opportunity organized crime stands to harvest. In the end, Uber and like services will draw as much or more from the public coffer as hey now claim to save businesses though increased efficiency today.
I suppose I was wrong about you wanting dialog, too! Ah, well.
When you start your screed by omitting the fact that I said a small group of people could write an app without money by quoting the part of my reply before I say that, well, this is not what one would call discourse and I bid you good day, sir/ma’am/your-preferred-designation-here.
A couple of thoughts after reading this before, then coming back to it:
Insurance is going to be a tough angle for Uber, Lyft, Sidecar and other services inviting people to use their own cars. Traditional auto-insurance issuers don’t like that at all, or anything else that smacks of turning a private auto into a business asset (see the quotes I got in this VentureBeat review of FlightCar). A company like Uber can afford to step in, but a startup competitor might not. That strikes me as a bigger barrier to entry than app-development costs.
At the same time the competition isn’t just other taxis or taxi-like services but car-sharing systems like car2go and Zipcar, bike-sharing networks and public transit. I feel lucky to have all of those options in quality and quantity across much of the Washington, D.C., area; had they existed in the late '90s, I never would have bought a car, and with them I’m not so nervous about an Uber ascendancy. (Note that I also have painful memories from then of the District’s abysmal taxi service… don’t even get me started about the idiotic zone system.)
(Disclaimer: Glenn is a friend and occasional editor, who I imagine is already thinking of ways to refine this prose.)
Below is your entire quote about apps. Point to me the part that I cut that mischaracterized what you said. The part in bold is the part I cut for brevities sake, the italics is what I left. Where in the bolded part did I cut you saying, “I said a small group of people could write an app without money”
You are of course free to sulk off. It doesn’t change the fact that building an app is hilariously and laughably cheap compared to essentially any other industry in existence.
You’re so itching for a fight, my “sulking” is a lack of desire to engage with someone who is uninterested in discussion, but starts out pounding a table. It’s tedious and doesn’t advance anyone’s understanding or position.
I’ll just wait for you to build your simple app that challenges Uber and then you can rub my nose in it.
Sorry, not my specialty, and I am not the entrepreneurial sort to begin with, especially in my industry where the cost to enter is north of a billion dollars and at least half a decade of construction up front before you make anything. That said, you are free to go see the challengers in the form of Lyft and Sidecar, just to name two well known ones off the top of my head.
This is a totally wonderful idea. The big question is whether any entrant can produce a density of drivers enough that riders will use the app. Without drivers always available, people won’t use an app to find a ride (even though it’s easy to launch and check on different apps).
But this is the diversity I hope gets explored before the new model becomes entrenched.
This is a pretty example of what an open market in this particular field can do. People feel hurt by Uber? Awesome, start your own. Hell, I could see drivers forming a co-op so as to make the extraction for doing the networking bit as small as humanly possible. The really great thing is because the barrier to entry is so absurdly low, you can start small and local.
The sooner we trash the mayoral bribery system that is the current madalon system, the better.
Unless Uber actually turns their drivers into actual full time employees, I don’t see how they could prevent current drivers from branching out to other services given the current regulatory environment. I imagine it would be exceptionally hard for a “disruptive” start-up to compete with Uber. That being said, I think this is an underestimation of the degree that many larger companies looking to branch out could compete with Uber. The primary factor keeping them out of many markets, government monopoly and regulation, is likely the primary reason you do not see companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft from wanting to get their hands dirty. The main differences I see from any other market winner in the tech sector are that it is generally hard to cater to two different markets (professional drivers and passengers) from a start-up, and it is dependent on the utilization of a publicly owned resource.
…
The libertarian half of my brain just let me know that someone needs to make a bus-ride share service…
I’m curious as to why the situation is so bad in the US. In Cambridge we have a small number of taxi firms. They are of course regulated by law - this means drivers have to pass an additional driving course, their vehicles have regular and much more stringent checks than the regular MOT and their is a structure for licencing and most importantly removing the licence from bad drivers. All firms have run a phone dispatch service for the last 20-30 years and they have had web bookings for ages and mobile app bookings for ages.
Typically if I summon a cab (one button on the Panther app) it will be with me in 5-10 mins. Sure I have plenty of anecdotes about slow cabs but that’s usually due to Cambridge’s appalling traffic and I cannot see how Uber would do better. Pricing is set by the Council so no great surprises there.
Yet when I was in SF, whenever I tried to do similar it was a pretty dire experience as recounted by others on this thread. I even had two cab drivers get close to violent over who would take me from my hotel to the airport.
There are many things I expect the US to worse than us but this was not one of them. What is peculiar to your regulatory structure, wage levels etc to make it so bad that Uber can run rings round the local cab firms who could just install their own app and not give 20% away?
PS: Glenn said:
I won’t feel bad when awful people are forced out of a profession in which they have to provide service to others. (I suppose I can’t be a socialist now.)
Huh? I’ve heard this from Americans many times. I know you have a completely warped view of socialism and can’t distinguish it from Maoist back to the land communism but keeping bad people in good jobs is not what it’s about. Indeed quite the opposite. What socialism does want to do is make sure that when that bad performer is fired, they aren’t going to starve, they still have a roof over their heads and they still have other essential requirements of life for them and their children including healthcare and education. Look at the Nordic countries for examples!
Buying politicians and regulators to create an artificial scarcity of a luxury item (digitized music and movies) - corrupt and eeeevil.
Buying politicians and regulators to create an artificial scarcity of a necessity item (urban transportation outside the bus routes) - vital and noble activity in the public interest.
Sorry, sunshine, my cognitive dissonance meter just pegged, busted the glass, and is leaking brown smoke at all its seams.
