The fake innovation of gig companies

One fundamental problem with "gig jobs" are that modern cities are built for cars not people, making everything more spread out than it used to be. Most gigs require their workers to provide their own transportation.

> A normal taxi company will own a fleet of cars that are all the same (or just a few models), thus creating efficiencies of scale in terms of purchasing and maintenance.

It's hard to overstate how important maintenance is to running a fleet of vehicles efficiently: cars are expensive because maintenance is expensive. The taxi company I drove for started adding Toyota Priuses to the fleet in the mid 2000's, and was mostly-Prius (and minivans) by 2014. They expected to get 400,000 miles out of all their vehicles. Some were totaled before they hit 400,000 miles, some made it 475,000+. State law mandated retirement at 500,000 miles.

The Prius was a much better Taxi than the Crown Victoria. I had an old guy who couldn't get his foot into the back seat of the Crown Vic... A more experienced driver later told me that she had those passengers get in the front seat.

One time I was going to check out a Prius the windshield wipers overlapped. The checkout staffer flagged a maintenance person who happened to be in the checkout area, who said "that's a 12mm (nut)..." When he returned with a wrench I asked, "what breaks on these [Priuses]?" He said, "... Nothing in particular. They're very reliable cars, and I would recommend them to anyone."

The taxi company kept a boneyard of totaled taxis, and would go to their parts yard to get some of the expensive parts that are just as good used as new.

I once had a low tire and pulled into the maintenance garage. The company mechanic jacked front end up, spun the tire until he found the nail, pulled the nail, plugged the hole, and had me back on the road in less than 10 minutes.

The taxi company started their own uber-like service to get drivers to use their personal cars to transport people for their contracts. They paid better than uber, so I gave it a try. The advantage of using your own car is that you deduct $0.55/mile for your vehicle's depreciation, which basically canceled out a lot of my earnings (thereby significantly reducing self-employment/income tax liability). But even with that deduction, I couldn't justify driving my personal car for the taxi company's better-than-uber mileage reimbursements. Sometimes I'd get trips going out in the boonies, and there was NOT enough fares in the system to count on getting a return trip. (I understand that UBER now offers the ability to tell which way you're going, and they'll match you to someone going where you're going.)

I figured my car was likely to need a transmission at some point, and decided to not put those miles on my car.

I had to quit taxi driving in 2015. I later heard the company eventually sold off most their taxis, sold the yard for several million dollars, and seriously downsized their leasing operations. But their uber-like service is still going...

Gig work might be okay if you could just sign up and not need to provide your own transportation to get to your gig. But as it is, gig workers wear out their capital (vehicles) for low-paying jobs.