The common refrain I hear is "they're better than taxis" and more and more evidence is mounting against them (at the corporate level) that suggests: no, they really aren't.
Uber is better than taxis for riders, and worse than taxis (in some ways) for drivers.
Also consider that some Uber drivers couldn't realistically become taxi drivers in their spare time, and perhaps some of them would prefer to be underpaid by Uber rather than not working at all.
See my response to parent comment. I've taken some Ubers that were undoubtedly driven by drivers who were unqualified to carry passengers.
... and taxpayers. Someone else pays for the upkeep of those roads, without which their business could not exist. In the UK, someone else pays for the healthcare of their drivers, as they dodge Employer's NI. Etc etc.
The entire business model of "disruption" is pocketing what everyone else pays for the dependencies and externalities.
If the TNCs were a 1:1 replacement for traditional taxis, this wouldn't be a legitimate argument, but the evidence out there suggests that TNCs have grown the size of the car hail market at the expense of off-peak transit, so the TNCs really are putting more cars on the streets.
In San Francisco, the Treasurer estimated 45,000 TNC vehicles in operation compared to just 1,800 taxis. That's an enormous increase in car hail traffic, and one that I claim has a substantial maintenance impact absent evidence to the contrary.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/45000-uber-lyft-drivers-may-now-op...
Everyone pays gas taxes that scale with the amount driven and therefore their use of the roads. Any unusually high driving would be made up by the higher gas consumption and the resultant taxes thereon.
If anything:
1) Taxi routes are concentrated in cities, where they have lower miles per gallon and thus pay more taxes per mile driven than the typical car. (Edit: and city roads probably have lower maintenance costs per ton-mile due to not having to drag people out as far to maintain it and related factors.)
2) Maintenance costs on roads are almost entirely due to cargo trucks, not sedans, since road damage scales with (something like) the fourth power of weight per axle.
Side note: why is it that every time there's an unpopular big player, everyone finds a way to label any publicly provided good as a subsidy to that player? It's not just this but "arresting shoplifters is a subsidy to Walmart", "public roads are a subsidy to Amazon", "public infra is a subsidy to Netflix", "navies are a subsidy to shipping".
> someone else pays for the healthcare of their drivers
No, the government collects income taxes from everyone to provide universal health care through the NHS. Uber's drivers pay the social insurance taxes on their income. The fact that it isn't billed to Uber specifically is irrelevant. Lloyd's isn't billed for the NHS taxes on the couriers that drop them packages, but that doesn't mean Lloyd's "dodges employer's NI".
If your point is that they should be so assessed because they're really employers, not clients, that's economically questionable too -- the burden of a tax is independent of who you assess it to; if one day they forced Uber to pay NI, they could just cut payments to drivers to cover the tax, since all the income streams would be unaffected. Same effect as if they started assessing VAT by charging customers as they leave the store instead of taking it from retailers.
You've clearly not researched just how much Employer's NI is. It's a lot more than an employee pays.
It's clearly not a subsidy if a company is paying their fair share in taxes. Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because their employers underpay them... That is quite literally a case of the public purse subsidising a private enterprise.
If it works anything like the US, there is a portion[1] assessed to the employer and to the employee. If you report income as an independent contractor/self-employment, you pay both sides of it (since otherwise people would artificially class themselves as contractors to pay less). Are you saying Uber drivers in the UK aren't paying that, or that UK law allows that loophole?
>Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because their employers underpay them... That is quite literally a case of the public purse subsidising a private enterprise.
So, it's not Uber-specific, just the general argument that all low-wage labor (below some threshold) is inherently subsidized because you qualify for public assistance at that level.
[1] economically pointlessly, I might add
If you report income as an independent contractor/self-employment,
you pay both sides of it (since otherwise people would artificially
class themselves as contractors to pay less).
There are complicated rules to ensure this is only allowed in cases of genuine freelancing/self-employment (IR35 is one part of those rules), but Uber has previously lost court cases on parts of those rules, where drivers were ruled to be employees rather than freelancers [1].
In IT consultancy (and other high-paid jobs), it's generally more tax-efficient for the worker to be an independent contractor (but has to satisfy various rules to do so). For lower-paid jobs like driving for Uber (and the general "gig economy"), it's in the companies' interest to label the worker as "self-employed", which means the worker misses out on all sorts of worker protection regulations whilst the employer saves on costs and taxes. Many companies skirt the limit of the regulations, and end up in court as a result.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-t...
1) That your tax rate can be lower under self-employment classification (incentivizing spurious misclassifications).
2) That roads are paid for through income tax (rather than petrol or odometer tax), which is only loosely correlated with road usage and which punishes people who economize on it, while subsidizing above average users.
In any case, you can't really pin 2) on Uber, which isn't getting any more of a subsidy than any other business using the "road platform". They were abusing the law for 1) but courts have since put a stop to it.
That is exactly what they do do. IT, media, even public sector, it is rampant. The Inland Revenue keep trying to crack down on it but contractors are very sly about it and always find a loophole to technically meet the requirement as if they were a genuine small business.
To qualify for income support a person has to be working less than 16 hours per week.
You also have to be one of these:
> pregnant or a carer or a lone parent with a child under 5 or, in some cases, unable to work because you’re sick or disabled
(There are 3 other requirements too)
The UK benefits system is comprehensive and complex, and there are some people in full time work who get benefits. This is a good thing - we want people to work. We want people to have at least a minimum wage. We don't want to set the minimum wage too high because it reduces jobs.
Some benefits are specifically "in work" benefits - working tax credit and child tax credit.
While I'm not familiar with how Employer's NI works else where in the world, given the way it works in the US I'm fine with it being cut. The way it works in the US is great for hiding the true rate of tax from the employee by having it taken out of their paycheck before the employee ever sees it. I think it works better if the employee sees the full amount their employer pays them and exactly how much the government taxes that rate.
Furthermore, the point under debate was whether Uber, as a cab[-like] service is underpaying for its road usage -- relative to the typical person -- by driving so much more; that point is still wrong because their per mile costs are unchanged with such higher usage.
If talking about the UK, that is not quite correct. Roads in the UK are mainly funded by income tax and council tax. See http://ipayroadtax.com/ for more information.
Things like how using an app makes hailing a ride easier, how having a rating system forces drivers and riders to behave better, how mobile payment removes the awkwardness of exchanging money, etc.
There's nothing specific to Uber in there, and when it does come to specifics, Uber is pretty awful as we've seen.
Even further, there's nothing specific to the Uber model in there. Every one of those things could be implemented exactly the same way by an ordinary cab company. In fact, many cab companies worldwide have already implemented both the first and the third one.
The only unique thing about the Uber model as opposed to regular cabs is that it's priced lower through a combination of semi-illegal dirty tricks and setting unsustainably low (or negative) margins in order to maintain growth and capture the market.
Not in NYC.
First, download Curb, add a payment option. Then...
1. Hail a cab, any cab, on street, get in immediately, no wait.
2. While riding, key cab code into app. Every cab is in same system.
3. At destination, simply exit cab. Apple Pay or regular cc pay bills your card, emails you receipt.
If you're in a cab lite zone, you can optionally hail using app, just like Uber.
As far as I can tell, this is BnL always faster pickup and less charge than Uber.
Tell your friends in the city cabs are the new hotness.
Yeah, definitely worse than any taxi I've ever taken.
I don't expect my cabbies to have The Knowledge, but it would be nice if I didn't have to have my phone out the whole time, watching for upcoming turns and highway exits. At least Uber/Lyft/etc guarantee that the driver has a smartphone with internet connectivity. :/
In much the same way that the capitalist class "did the world a favor" by breaking the politico-economic power monopoly of the nobility.
http://chicago.suntimes.com/opinion/laura-washington-uber-so...
DENNIS: Oh king, eh, very nice. An' how'd you get that, eh? By exploitin' the workers -- by 'angin' on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic an' social differences in our society! ....If there's ever going to be any progress--
WOMAN: Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here. Oh -- how d'you do?
ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?
WOMAN: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
WOMAN: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we're all Britons and I am your king.
WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. ..... A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
WOMAN: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS: That's what it's all about if only people would--
In a way, that makes regulatory sense -- there are many issues that arise with taxis (in this sense) that don't with limos -- unnamed randos getting into a stranger's car, large amounts of cash floating around, clogging up pickup points, fighting for fares, dubious upcharges. In that sense, Uber has functioned more as a limo service than a taxi service (except for this historic association between limo services and expensive cars).
OTOH, I agree that it's ridiculous for them to claim it's "not a taxi service" in the sense of "just a technology company, bro!". It's certainly a ride service of some kind, for which safety/insurance regs are applicable and reasonable (or at least, not outrageous).
(Ditto for the claim of "we just match people up!" -- they obviously are functioning more as a service provider with tight control of the product than some kind of marketplace or matchmaker.)
[1] Despite it's name, that doesn't necessarily mean "stretch limo"; it could be a sedan.