I'm mostly a fan of these non-taxi "taxi" services, but it seems like they are slowly and painfully rediscovering why taxis ended up so regulated in the first place.
So, now we've got an army of drivers who can't drive, don't know where they are going, playing with their phones all day. It makes for an unpleasant experience whether you're on a bike, driving you car, or sometimes just walking across the street.
In contrast, 'ride sharing' drivers seem to have no sense of direction, and are genuinely oblivious to the rules of the road.
In short, when in either type of car, I fear for my life.
While driving, I tend to fear for my life when taxis are around, but whenever I spot an Uber or Lyft car, they seem to behave unremarkably.
All drivers were cordial, polite, had no problem with routing (admittedly, it's pretty simple in Vegas). One driver was a smoker and the car smelled and that was the only negative in 6 rides.
Overall, it's the end-to-end experience. Call up the app, type in a destination, head to the curb. The car shows up about the same time I get there, I hop in, chat a bit on the way, hop out at the destination, rate & tip via the app and go on my way. The seamless experience, so far, makes up for the (so far mild) idiosyncrasies of drivers and cars.
My only request is that passengers don't encourage this by blindly rating everyone 5 stars. Take at least two star off for unsafe driving - not stopping at a stop sign, not yielding to pedestrians, not giving enough space while passing a bicyclist and at least one star for not following the rules - driving on the bus lane, double parking in the middle of a busy road, driving too fast on a 25Mph zone, not waiting long enough for the pedestrians to pass safe ...etc.
If the economics don't work out for the drivers, the fare has to go up. By keeping the fare artificially low and pushing drivers to accommodate too many trips Uber and Lyft are ruining the experience for everyone and in doing so are perpetuating the need for more people to use them instead of considering alternate transport modes. This, sooner or later, will ruin it for everyone.
Take it from me, America cannot handle a developing country style traffic. It requires a different set of skills. People here are used to predictable traffic.
I've personally been driven by awful taxi and awful Uber drivers, though Uber so far has the distinction of being the only one to genuinely scare me driving 3x the speed he should have on a twisty road, with tires screeching the whole way.
There is a bit of a natural selection process to it.
If you're a cab driver, and you keep getting into accidents, you won't be a cab driver for long. If you take no risks and are constantly late, you won't be a cab driver for long. If you have a poor sense of direction, or spacial awareness when driving, you probably won't be a driver for very long.
After decades of this process, most professional cab drivers are just reckless enough to get away with it.
These Uber drivers haven't spent decades going through that process. Everyone's a newbie. The difference this time is that the risk isn't being undertaken by the company, it's being undertaken by the drivers themselves.
Not really. A newbie at being paid to drive, but in many cases, not new to driving. In my area, I can predict to the minute when I'll arrive at my destination, and what route is best at that time of day, even for a 20 mile trip and without software support. That's because I've been driving 24k miles+ annually here for nearly 30 years.
Not to mention, the driver's app has the same real-time mapping features that smart phones have. So they can avoid grid locked areas, accidents, etc. even without years of cab driving experience.
Yes, an experienced cab driver will be a better cab driver, in general, than a new Uber driver. But not enough better to keep the masses away from Uber/Lyft. Cab companies are getting slaughtered, cab drivers are panicking and two-timing or jumping to Uber/Lyft, and this is happening globally.
And I think the disregard for rules applies to a lot of public drivers. The Port Authority buses in Pittsburgh think they own the road.
I recently went on vacation where the only option available was a taxi cab. Within 5 minutes I remembered why Uber and Lyft have become so popular. Our driver was a complete asshole, honking at everyone and almost running down a bicyclist. Plus, the A/C in the van was broken. And because it was a van, you couldn't even roll the windows down. It was a miserable ride.
Has the city published any traffic impact studies? NYC showed concerned for Uber impact on traffic and made an attempt to get data and it turned into a political kerfuffle with accusations of protecting the taxi industry etc. I don't like the title of this blog post but it points to similar of what you are stating about downtown Chicago:
http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/02/27/its-settled-uber-is-ma...
I'm not really familiar with new york's streets, but ours have been over capacity forever and now with uber/lyft there's a lot more single passenger car traffic in the business areas. Much more so than cabs, because getting them is much more convenient than cabs ever were here - calling a cab in chicago is a joke, honestly, and if you weren't in an area they pass by frequently you were out of luck. I feel like more people choose the uber option for short trips that would have been transit in the past. The convenience of it is the model, after all.
You would need Uber/Lyft's help I believe. But I think if you combined the Uber/Lyft data with data that the DOT keeps it would be pretty easy to quantify the impact. I think that was NYC's point as well. But unfortunately the mayor had received money from a taxi lobbying effort which allowed Uber to cry foul and make accusations of protectionism.[1]
One metric used is average travel speed which according to this recent article is down 12% to 8.1 miles compared to 2010[2]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/nyregion/de-blasio-reaps-b...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/nyregion/uber-ride-hailin...
It's been pretty eye opening.
Those cab drivers can't get starved out of business fast enough as far as I'm concerned.
This is where Tesla is going to have an advantage. They're going to start with self-driving, no need to deal with pissed off drivers and other problems that come with a transition. Same thing with their dealerships - they didn't have to deal with the dealer-franchise system.
Apart from the fact GPSes don't really work on Lower Wacker, so it's hard to nail down the pickup location on the app.
Chicago has also begotten the most amazingly complicated 3D road diagram in America: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Chicago_...
The worst drivers are cab drivers in the Loop during rush hour who will honk at the slightest provocation, who don't use turn signals, and will suddenly stop in front of you. If Chicago cab drivers are trained, that training certainly isn't evident.
On the other hand, Lyft drivers have stars docked if they exhibit unsafe driving behaviors, and they are deactivated if their rating gets too low (4.6 stars is the threshold I believe).
Many non-casual Lyft drivers actually try not to crash their ratings. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-real-reason-Uber-and-Lyft-us...
Cabs don't have this feedback loop. Only accidents will get them off the road.
Edit: I speak as a driver and a passenger. I imagine things have gotten worse for bicyclists. Also, I don't use Uber, only Lyft. I've heard Uber drivers are worse because Uber is more liberal with their rating system.
Plus the GPS systems here will take you down these speed bump residential roads and do crazy contortions to drop off on a one-way road.
On the flip side though, when I first moved here a cab was like $20 each way just from like Broadway to Kimball. Now it's...$4.
It seems like a much better system.
Don't get me wrong, I always use Uber or Lyft over a cab. Taxi regulations are often cited as awful. But this particular one is a good one.
> It makes for an unpleasant experience whether you're on a bike, driving you car, or sometimes just walking across the street.
How drivers guided by a nav system is worse for streetwalkers than any other drivers? And, from my experience, long-term commercial driving doesn't always make a driver a model road citizen - in fact, in many places taxi drivers are kinda notorious for being less than model co-roaders.
Last time I was in a cab in Chicago the driver ran a man over in the street and just kept going. When I jumped out to see if the victim was okay the driver yelled to me that I was fare dodging before he sped away....
> Which is funnier: tech bros innovating their way to public transit, or bitcoin folks slowly reinventing financial regulation?
- @PlanetOfFinks, https://twitter.com/planetoffinks/status/850848359392870400?...
With Uber/Lyft it's trickier since while you are welcome to not use it, it may have implications which are beyond direct users of the services. Still, I think the effects are relatively small and not disproportional to what you could encounter without them - i.e. how badly you can be burned there? Surely, you can have a bad driver - same could happen with a Taxi. A bad Uber driver could create a bad situation on the road - so can any other bad driver, nothing new here. So marginal costs are pretty low here. Not to defend bad drivers - those should be dealt with appropriately - but the additional "burn" that would be caused is IMHO pretty low.
As for insurance, there are tons of people on the road with bad insurance, at least for Uber as I understand you have something to back it up.
As for assaults and other bad apples, that could have happened with taxi too. I don't believe any company of these proportions could have checks that could 100% prevent such cases. I'm not sure it's possible in even in principle...
Have we kept the same regulations because they work incredibly well? Or because we are complacent.
Uber coming along has been a good reset for the regulations. There were a lot of ineffective and counterproductive regulations in place and I think wiping them out and starting over is a good thing.
Sarasota, FL is an interesting case to study. The traditional taxi companies complained about Uber in the city and rather than fight Uber, the city removed the regulations on taxi companies. So far, I don't think much has really changed.
As for the gaming of surge pricing, I think that's fixable. Uber just needs to think more carefully about driver incentives.
What's the Uber business case?
Is there enough profit in taxi services around the world to justify their valuation and financial losses?
Do they hope to recoup through a future monopoly? Tracking Data? Self-driving vehicle fleets?
Now it seems to be, avoiding regulation for fun & profit.