Uber Boston Has Been Served • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#71

Post by mindslight » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:28 PM UTC

emmett wrote: post #68

mindslight wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They know your start location because you call them there. They use GPS to determine your end location, to save time. Uber doesn't really even publish a rate schedule for how much you pay, and it doesn't have stable prices. They go up during periods of high demand, for example. So it's unclear why you'd object to the GPS, except to mess with them; you don't know what you're going to pay in any case.

So make the destination address optional while booking, and if given you'll get an exact price ahead of time. This doesn't exactly conflict with demand pricing either - Uber just has to be a bit smarter ahead of time.

The fundamental problem is "you don't know what you're going to pay", and I'm not surprised they're being called out for that under consumer protection laws. The point of taxi regulation is to prevent people from being cheated on the spot. Uber is in a position to do even better than what regulations are capable of, with market pricing, and they should aim for that.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#72

Post by emmett » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:30 PM UTC

andygcook wrote: post #7

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 think that pretty much sums it up correctly. The City of Boston placed a sting operation on one of the Uber drivers in the issuance of ticket (i), where once they saw the driver had used an unauthorized meter, they made him pull over where a police officer was already waiting. It's unfortunate that Boston has issued a cease and desist on the service though. I live in Boston, and Uber is great as it's almost impossi…

They already knew he had an "unauthorized meter". The sting was wholly unnecessary to learn anything.

It was purely the legal justification to slap on the C&D; they needed evidence in the court-admissible sense. But the idea that they "noticed" anything in the process is silly. It was all scripted from minute 1.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#73

Post by emmett » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:33 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #13

chimi wrote: post #6

I don't think being a startup should grant you immunity from the law or absolve the requirement to follow local regulations and licensing statutes. Lawyers, doctors, electricians they all have to follow the law too. Why is Uber a special case?

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.

I would add:

(iii) It's unclear Uber is actually in violation of the law. Boston may have sent a C&D, but this hasn't been tried in court yet and I would not be surprised if Uber was to win.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#74

Post by localhost3000 » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:36 PM UTC

i think the uber service is great. that said, we (collectively, the startup community) can't keep using this "we're an innovative tech company and the laws we're breaking weren't written with our great innovations in mind" argument. it doesn't hold water. it just sounds childish and pompous.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#75

Post by driverdan » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:40 PM UTC

andylei wrote: post #67

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…

> wind and solar subsidies > the government is picking a winner. Sometimes picking a winner is a good thing. Burning coal and oil pollutes air and exacerbates global warming. These are bad things. As a society, we should pay a little extra to avoid them. Wind and solar subsidies are probably less efficient than, say, a carbon tax, but probably better than nothing.

Except it stifles innovation in other sectors. There may be alternatives that are better but aren't subsidized which makes it harder for them to succeed.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#76

Post by bonzoesc » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:41 PM UTC

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, 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.

Au contraire, Uber provides you a much easier way to audit your ride, a detailed email receipt seconds after you leave the cab with a map, origin and destination addresses, breakdown of your fare, how it was paid, and a customer service email address. On your phone, you also get a couple survey questions about the ride (how was the car, driver, etc.) too.

https://skitch.com/bkerley/ecigm/skitched-20120814-192957

I haven't had to deal with them (Miami doesn't have Uber yet :( ) but I suspect that their customer service is more interested in customer happiness than pinching pennies. Since it's paid with a credit card, even if their customer support process breaks down, you still have a powerful recourse.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#77

Post by jaylevitt » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:51 PM UTC

andrewpi wrote: post #44

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,…

Except Uber isn't a cab, it's a private car service, which is generally less regulated. Rates for private car services are generally negotiated between the driver and passenger, and if both parties agree to use Uber's GPS-based software, I don't see what Massachusetts's problem is.

More importantly, Uber is neither a cab NOR a private car service.

It's a communications network that links private car services with people who want to get a ride from the private car service.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#78

Post by jaylevitt » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:56 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #57

neilk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

OK, but how does MA decide which equipment is considered a measuring device used for trade? Are grocer's scales and gas pump meters a special case that's explicitly regulated, or is anything that (a) takes a measurement while (b) in the path of a transaction regulated?

My supermarket sells cheddar for $8/pound. When they take some cheese and price it, the scale that decides it's 8 oz of cheese is a regulated scale.

But my co-worker's friend sells D&D dice for $5/cupful. Is that cup a measuring device that would technically need to be certified by DWM for trade use?

And if not, what is the bright-line test for whether the Uber app is a cup or a scale?

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#79

Post by temphn » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:57 PM UTC

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,…

  Boston has standardized on a way of metering passengers

But more than a dozen other cities allow Uber to use their own way and the world hasn't ended.

Why should passengers care about what the city of Boston has "standardized" on? Why not just let passengers vote with their wallets? If Uber is too expensive or the drivers gain a reputation for ripping off customers, they'll just choose another cab. But the real problem is that Uber is actually too much better than the competition, which is why you see this kind of harassment occurring.

Regulation of this kind is about as corrupt an example of rent-seeking and resistance to technological innovation as you are likely to find in a lab. It's not a close call.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#80

Post by bri3d » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 11:58 PM UTC

bonzoesc wrote: post #76

bri3d wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, 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…

I'm unlikely to be able to identify a discrepancy on a map in an unfamiliar place - but the map-in-email feature does bring Uber much closer to a regulated cab meter, especially since it can be reviewed by a more knowledgeable person later.

It still doesn't match the "system audited by a supposedly independent government inspector" aspect of a regulated cab meter (i.e. to prevent Uber from using fake distance calculations), but Uber being dishonest is a lot less likely than a shady cab company, so I guess that's less of a concern.

I personally never used the map as my only Uber trips have been flat-rate (SFO to Palo Alto, where Uber is actually cheaper than a cab in some circumstances).