501–510 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Muni was any good, people wouldn't have used ridesharing. Ridesharing costs a bit more. This just shows that public transit in SF is so bad that people would rather pay more money for a taxi.
Don't forget the stigma that public transit is for dirty poor people. Rideshare is a bit of a classist thing.
Another group caught in the collateral damage is people in wheelchairs. Paratransit sucks in most places and where wheelchair accessible Uber/Lyft is available they provide a much better service. This is an especially vulnerable population because it's not like a wheelchair user can just find a friend with an accessible vehicle to take them to appointments, etc.
This is a true and an important concern. Municipalities and counties in California really need to step up their game and provide a viable and cheap to use alternative. Everybody deserves to be able to go where they want within their community when they want to. And we should provide these without relying on private companies with questionable labor practices.
[1]: https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-uni...
Another group caught in the collateral damage is people in wheelchairs. Paratransit sucks in most places and where wheelchair accessible Uber/Lyft is available they provide a much better service. This is an especially vulnerable population because it's not like a wheelchair user can just find a friend with an accessible vehicle to take them to appointments, etc.
This is a true and an important concern. Municipalities and counties in California really need to step up their game and provide a viable and cheap to use alternative. Everybody deserves to be able to go where they want within their community when they want to. And we should provide these without relying on private companies with questionable labor practices.
It's fascinating how the subsistence wage is simultaneously too low for workers and too high corporations.
I dislike Uber and Lyft's practices as much as the next guy. But I also believe AB5 is a terrible bill and will be voting in November to exempt Uber and Lyft from AB5. AB5 was written to impose a 20th century employment model to a 21st century situation. As such, the bill is distorted that it carve out hundreds of exemptions to musicians, freelancers, journalists, doctors, hair stylists and so on and so forth. A bill…
'Ridesharing' (Which is a hilarious term for the simple fact that the ride is not being shared, the driver is not intending to go to your favorite bar. ) isn't a 21st century situation or solution. It's not a profitable or a good force in an economy, it does not pay a reasonable wage for anyone to live on, it is not environmentally friendly unless done in large quantities of people,(which is called a bus). Ridesharin…
Great summary for this scary situation.
> I see this as an attempt to make the Gig Economy pay all workers fairly in addition to healthcare costs and to put the onus on the company rather than their taxes.
There is a new word for this class of gig workers doing precarious labor that I've started using: the Precariat.
"In sociology and economics, the precariat (/prɪˈkɛəriət/) is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau obtained by merging precarious with proletariat.[1] Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive "unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings".
Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for "gig" work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being "on call"). The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.[2] The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.[3][4]"
[..]
"The British economist Guy Standing has analysed the precariat as a new emerging social class in work done for the think tank Policy Network and the World Economic Forum.[6] In his 2014 book entitled A Precariat Charter he argued that all citizens have a right to socially inherited wealth.[8][9] The latest in the series is titled The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class[2][10] where he proposed basic income as a solution for addressing the problem.
The analysis of the results of the Great British Class Survey of 2013, a collaboration between the BBC and researchers from several UK universities, contended there is a new model of class structure consisting of seven classes, ranging from the Elite at the top to the Precariat at the bottom.[11] The Precariat class was envisaged as "the most deprived British class of all with low levels of economic, cultural and social capital." This was contrasted with "the Technical Middle Class" in Great Britain in that instead of having disposable income but no interests, people of the new Precariat Class have all sorts of potential activities they like to engage in but cannot do any of them because they have no money, insecure lives, and are usually trapped in old industrial parts of the country.
The precariat class has been emerging in societies such as Japan, where it includes over 2 million so-called "freeters".[12]"
Am I nuts, or is the heart of this issue really the fact that our healthcare system is built on tying benefits to full time jobs?
This is an interesting idea. Is this an unintended consequence of binding health insurance to your employment? According to the NYT: "During World War II, federal wage controls prevented employers from wooing workers with higher pay, so companies started offering health insurance as a way around the law. Of course, this form of nonmonetary compensation is still pay. When the war ended, the practice stuck." I would mu…
I would rather see employment and health insurance totally separated from each other.
But if people aren't open to that for whatever reason, one alternative would be a system where the employee freely picks any insurance plan, but the employer pays the premiums tax-free like they do now.
If you make it so the set of insurance choices is the same for all employers and for individuals paying their own way, then you could move around between employers or freelance.
Right now, big employers have bargaining power due to their size, so you'd lose that, but perhaps stronger competition (from everyone freely choosing) would make up for it.
I suspect that California is going to backpedal on this pretty quickly. Uber and Lyft are popular. Going back to taxis is going to be very unpopular. IMO, if the California Republican party was smart they would make this a wedge issue in the next election. "Elect us, and we'll make it possible to use Uber again."
Drivers choose to make their living with Lyft and Uber. California is starting to feel the repercussions of their far left policies. It hurts consumers (fare prices rise), stifles innovation, pushes entrepreneurs out of the state, and the irony is it ended up hurting the drivers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who forced Lyft to shut down? Was it the state, or did they freely choose to cease operations? Obviously, spin will characterize this in any way that's advantageous. But nobody 'forced' Lyft to close.
Their business model is on-demand transportation. The business model doesn't work if the workforce is not also on-demand. I don't think that's spin, but maybe society decides that we don't like on-demand businesses.
There are peculiarities to Lyft and Uber’s business model, being on demand is not one.
If so, would there be an equity-based loophole that would allow it to continue operating in California under these rules?
What people are not talking about is how much congestion these services bring to city streets. For San Francisco traffic congestion increased by 60% between 2010-2016[1] and Lyft/Uber contributed to half of that. That is very bad as more traffic leads to more traffic accidents, more fatalities and pedestrians getting hit. In addition lets not forget the heavy toll on the environment with air pollution and its myriad…
I don't think modern car exhaust emissions are a significant factor when you have a bunch of forest fire smoke floating around. The traffic concerns are much more credible, but can the government step up on public transportation to fill the inevitable gaps?
I think it's more of a matter of "will" vs "can"