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Uber Boston Has Been Served

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Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#51

Post by bri3d »

creativename wrote: post #41
untog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn too, but the meter thing is a very sensible point. Taxi meters in NYC (the only market I have experience with) are basically entirely locked boxes- the drivers can't do anything beyond poke the buttons on the front. This is, of course, very sensible- otherwise there's a danger of unscrupulous drivers modifying their meters to charge passengers more. This is only the case for yellow cabs in NYC, though- I'm s…

About taxi meters: from my experience, the mileage may be fixed, but it always seems that the cab driver is able to press something/manipulate the box somehow when they need to add additional fees (in Boston, specifically, in fact). For instance, when I get picked up at many airports the cab driver adds some additional fee (usually between $3 and $8). For all I know, they're just making this number up - how would I k…

Cabs are generally required to have fare schedules including fees clearly visible to the rider, to prevent just this sort of scam.

Even if the user doesn't know the actual airport fare and the cabbie manages to scam a few riders unfamiliar with the true fare schedule, a tampered-with giant human-readable fare schedule is pretty easy for an inspector or frequent rider to detect and report.

Plus, as the user pays the cab driver on the way out, there's an opportunity for the user to review the charge and reject payment if the driver is scamming them.

With Uber, the payment takes place later and an e-mail receipt is sent, and the fares are seemingly intentionally obfuscated (see: the controversy about displaying peak v. off-peak pricing as a multiplier rather than a dollar amount). Hence, a driver using a malicious Uber Driver app to report a few more blocks travelled on each trip is much less likely to be detected than a cabbie physically and obviously entering additional fees. I suspect Uber would find it difficult to prove that the driver's (fake) extra mileage wasn't actually rider-requested or an attempt to circumvent traffic - and I also suspect most riders won't notice.

Regular cabbies try the obvious, physical "take the long way" scam often enough that I suspect a hard-to-track digital form of the same idea isn't far off.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#52

Post by Ralith »

uuilly wrote: post #35

Uber, AirBNB and Food Trucks are interesting for two reasons: 1) They are on a collision course with the regulatory state. 2) Their employees are, by and large, young liberals. Cab medallions are not much different in concept than wind and solar subsidies. In both cases, the government is picking a winner. Our types of companies have been happily immune from the meddling of the regulatory state. As we crawl out into…

Damn liberals, screwing everything up for the rest of us!

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#53

Post by BadLogInMyAss »

uuilly wrote: post #35

Uber, AirBNB and Food Trucks are interesting for two reasons: 1) They are on a collision course with the regulatory state. 2) Their employees are, by and large, young liberals. Cab medallions are not much different in concept than wind and solar subsidies. In both cases, the government is picking a winner. Our types of companies have been happily immune from the meddling of the regulatory state. As we crawl out into…

"Dog-fooding"?

Come on. Don't try to verb a noun. We have legitimate words for whatever that was supposed to mean.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#55

Post by bengl3rt »

jhcoaps2 wrote: post #50
bengl3rt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The original Ubercab model (allow anybody to sign up as a driver without any vetting of anything) was absolutely atrocious." What about Lyft? Isn't that essentially what they're doing?

My understanding of zimride/lyft is that they're more about arranging carpooling than acting as professional taxi service. Does Lyft let random people sign up to work as gypsy cab drivers? If so, I think that's insane.

Zimride arranges carpools for long trips, but Lyft is pretty much just an Uber clone with private individuals operating their personal cars. There is some vetting but no insurance or anything as far as I know.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#56

Post by pjscott »

rhizome wrote: post #43
tarr11 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had to look up "rent seeking", I'm sure I'm not the only one In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth, for example, spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created. A famous example of rent-seeking is the limiting o…

You might also be interested in the concept of regulatory capture, which is kind of rent-seeking's opposite (IANAE). Say you have a company that provides web-security audits and you help press for a law requiring websites to have current security audits. Boom, guaranteed business.

That example you gave is also an example of rent seeking.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#57

Post by dsr_ »

neilk wrote: post #11
tptacek wrote: post #4

Two tickets were apparently issued: (i) For operating an unlicensed livery service (ii) For using a non-approved mechanism for metering the ride The C&D at issue here covers (ii). At its heart, the complaint is that Boston has standardized on a way of metering passengers, and Uber has replaced that standard with GPS. Presumably, cab drivers in Boston could not simply choose to replace their meters with GPS monitors,…

I was amazed by this sentence in the C&D: "Massachusetts law does not sanction unapproved devices for use in commercial transactions." Does that mean what I think it means? If I use an iPhone app to calculate the tax, and it's not approved, then I broke the law? Does this apply to Square, too? I thought that there was an English common law principle that "Everything which is not forbidden is allowed".

"Everything which is not forbidden is allowed".

Sure. Massachusetts forbids you from operating a commercial service that charges based on the readings of measuring equipment that does not meet the standards of the Department of Weights and Measures. Taxi meters do. Standard car odometers don't. You can calculate with an abacus or an Apple, but your market fruit scale has a seal indicating that it was inspected and passed.

Your gasoline is measured by pumps similarly inspected. The pump at the dairy that fills gallon jugs is inspected. You can pay with barter, coins or large stones, as long as the negotiation is acceptable to both parties -- and when you pay for eight pounds of foie gras, you'd better be getting it weighed from an inspected scale.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#58

Post by mindslight »

calciphus wrote: post #40
tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons (neither dispositive): (i) The cities in which Uber operates usually have dysfunctional cab systems. San Francisco, for instance, is notoriously underserved. (ii) Much of the regulatory overhead in running a cab/livery service really is an artifact of top-down market controls from the turn of the last century that have been exploited to lock the market to a privileged few operators.

Imagine for a moment you got into a taxi and instead of the meter, he had an hour-glass with tick marks on the side and a bike odometer. Would you feel secure about what you're being charged? Most of the Uber drivers use iPhones, which (especially the older models) have notoriously bad GPS. If it skips off to the wrong street for a few blocks and adds 1/4 mile to my trip, and I don't notice by staring at his screen,…

Phone-based GPS, really?! They probably should be taken to task by weights and measures.

But why is Uber even metering the trip distance? If they incorporated the destination address to the booking, they could calculate an exact price based on time of day/projected congestion/etc. Then they'd have even better consumer protection than a taxi cab (where the driver still has an incentive to go a more expensive route).

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#59

Post by jdleesmiller »

mindcrime wrote: post #22
tptacek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always in situations like this, my thoughts are simultaneously on how awesome Uber is, and how not awesome every other service/scam that takes advantage of this flexibility might be. It is very important that cities be able to provide visitors with a reliable way to get a ride from point A (usually: the airport) to point B (usually: the convention center hotel) at a predictable price. Obviously, Uber doesn't preve…

But if the "Uber way of doing business" effectively drives regulated cabs out of business, that's a problem. It's not a "problem," it's "a sign that the State should get out of the business of regulating cabs."

While Uber may be changing things, most of the literature that I am aware of in this area suggests that regulation of taxi services is necessary to get near a social optimum. It's also interesting to note that not all kinds of regulation are equally good -- e.g. some argue that controlling the number of medallions is less effective than controlling fares. This paper provides a good overview, I think:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261501...

Unfortunately, I can't find a free version -- sorry!

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#60

Post by andrewpi »

bri3d wrote: post #51
creativename wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About taxi meters: from my experience, the mileage may be fixed, but it always seems that the cab driver is able to press something/manipulate the box somehow when they need to add additional fees (in Boston, specifically, in fact). For instance, when I get picked up at many airports the cab driver adds some additional fee (usually between $3 and $8). For all I know, they're just making this number up - how would I k…

Cabs are generally required to have fare schedules including fees clearly visible to the rider, to prevent just this sort of scam. Even if the user doesn't know the actual airport fare and the cabbie manages to scam a few riders unfamiliar with the true fare schedule, a tampered-with giant human-readable fare schedule is pretty easy for an inspector or frequent rider to detect and report. Plus, as the user pays the c…

With Uber you get an actual map of the route taken on your receipt, so it seems like a driver trying to pull a scam would be quickly discovered.
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