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Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#171

Post by CydeWeys »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #163
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is simply nowhere else for them to pull over Yes there is. We've just zoned it for streetside parking.

Do you live in New York? Have you been to Manhattan? There is very little parking anywhere. In the busiest places there is no street parking at all.

I live and work in Manhattan and there's on-street parking everywhere. Most streets are easily wide enough for two travel lanes plus a bike lane, but instead have one or two rows of parked cars. It's quite common for streets to have two parking lanes, one travel lane, and no bike lanes.

Just pull up satellite imagery on Google Maps and it'll all be obvious.

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#172

Post by kaishiro »

CydeWeys wrote: post #168
kaishiro wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I've been taking Ubers to JFK for years and have never had this happen - but I guess everyone has their own experiences.

Where are you taking them from?

Midtown, the village, Brooklyn, Queens... Where are you taking them from?

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#173

Post by timr »

kaishiro wrote: post #160
timr wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happens all. the. time. I'm in NYC, and I use taxis 99% of the time because of this phenomenon: Uber/Lyft drivers rapidly accept your ride, then cancel (or slow-play the pickup, so that you cancel, to protect their driver rating) as soon as they see it's a place they don't want to go. It's so bad here that I just won't deal with Lyft and Uber unless they're throwing serious discounts my way, and I have time to burn.

Fair enough. I've been taking Ubers to JFK for years and have never had this happen - but I guess everyone has their own experiences.

Airport trips are relatively easy, as long as you're in normal operating hours. Drivers don't want to go places where it's hard to get a return trip. JFK has plenty of passengers both ways.

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#174

Post by bln_wgc »

tzs wrote: post #117
lotsofpulp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That issue is present with everyone else also, not just cab drivers. I don't see why they should be singled out for relief. If we want to provide a safety net for people obviated by technology, that has nothing to do with Uber or Lyft.

One difference between taxis and "everyone else" is that with everyone else, the business that does in their business is usually legal. Uber and Lyft were largely operating illegally when they started in most cities. They ignored expensive licensing requirements. They ignored safety regulations. They ignored insurance requirements. They ignored price controls on fares. They ignored requirements to accommodate disable…

Uber and Lyft operated 100% legally in NYC from their inception. The NYC ride-sharing market is not like other US cities, which allow peer-to-peer ridesharing. All rideshare drivers in NYC are licensed by the TLC, and Uber and Lyft are licensed TLC operators.

Uber and Lyft beat NYC taxis fair and square - they used the existing TLC regulations (with the overhead required) and won out because of being a better product.

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#175

Post by CydeWeys »

Regardsyjc wrote: post #169
CydeWeys wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love a congestion tax. I take a bike to work, but there's no good cross-town protected bike lanes, so I hit so a lot of damn vehicle traffic that severely slows down my commute. I frequently have to go slow to wend my way through narrow gaps of parked cars and cars stuck in traffic, and sometimes get stuck completely with double parking or construction. Make more protected bike lanes so that vehicle congestio…

Does anyone know what would be the best way to get these bike lanes? Is the only way to petition our local politicians or are there any other ways?

More cyclists need to die.

Unfortunately I'm not joking -- a lot of the protected bike lanes we've gotten recently have been along stretches where cyclists (sometimesore than one) have died. That's what it takes to override the nimbyists in the local Community Boards.

But for a less morbid suggestion, you should join Transportation Alternatives (and its mailing lists!) and go to the Community Board meetings they send notices about where bike lanes will be debated. Every voice in favor helps. I've spoken at a bunch of em.

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#176

Post by CPLX »

cm2012 wrote: post #120

As someone who lives in Eastern Queens, Uber has changed my life. There is no other kind of reliable taxi out here, and uber lets me live without a car. I had to take a yellow cab the other day from a dispatcher at JFK. I normally take Uber all the time. We were going literally 20 min away to Queens. I tell him we're going to Queens. He literally screams, "Queens?!" and storms out of the car to the dispatcher. He com…

He was mad because the dispatcher didn’t do his job and give the guy a shorty ticket like he’s supposed to.

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#177

Post by komali2 »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #115
komali2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank God there's no electronic push scooters there, though. That would be the tipping point /s

If you have a substantive point to make, make it. As someone who doesn’t live in the USA it’s difficult for me to determine if your comment refers to some context I’m unfamiliar with. Are you implying electric push scooters are a solution for people who live 20 kilometres out of the city but work there? I’ve never been, but doesn’t it snow in NYC?

NYC traffic mitigation solutions are generally backwards or working from bad information.

Allowing electric bicycles and push scooters solves the last mile problem for many people.

The argument the city has made is that electric bicycles are too dangerous and will cause injury to pedestrians. This is a bad faith argument, because it's already illegal to cycle on the sidewalk, and if the city actually cared about non driver safety, it would push to enforce bicycle lane safety. It also failed to provide sufficient, to me, evidence that electric bicycles and push scooters pose a threat to pedestrians.

If better transit options existed, including last mile (push scooter) and ~3mile solutions (electric rentable bicycles), perhaps people wouldn't Uber as much.

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#178

Post by ctoth »

bgruber wrote: post #141
cm2012 wrote: post #120

As someone who lives in Eastern Queens, Uber has changed my life. There is no other kind of reliable taxi out here, and uber lets me live without a car. I had to take a yellow cab the other day from a dispatcher at JFK. I normally take Uber all the time. We were going literally 20 min away to Queens. I tell him we're going to Queens. He literally screams, "Queens?!" and storms out of the car to the dispatcher. He com…

When going from JFK to somewhere else in queens, yellow cabs are supposed to get a voucher from the dispatcher that allows them to skip to the front of the line when they get back to the airport. The fact that he was surprised when you said Queens implies that the dispatcher failed to do this, which explains both his going back to the dispatcher and his annoyance.

And maybe this is the reason. Not that it should matter... But why then should I care? Why should I have to deal with the problem? I tell you what, I've never had this happen in the hundreds of Uber and Lyft rides I've taken this year or the thousands in the years before. So... Okay there's a reason. But that reason still demonstrates why one would prefer rideshare over taxi.

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#179

Post by kaishiro »

timr wrote: post #173
kaishiro wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I've been taking Ubers to JFK for years and have never had this happen - but I guess everyone has their own experiences.

Airport trips are relatively easy, as long as you're in normal operating hours. Drivers don't want to go places where it's hard to get a return trip. JFK has plenty of passengers both ways.

This does not seem to jive with the parent comment to whom I was originally replying though:

"Ubers don't want to go to the airport for the same reason that cabs don't."

Re: Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

#180

Post by bln_wgc »

jroblak wrote: post #76
romwell wrote: post #22

Alternative title: "NYC Taxi mafia strikes back, gives Uber 12 months to come up with a large enough bribe". Really, the life of nearly everyone (who's not a taxi driver, perhaps) improved a bit since Uber entered the city. Even the fabled subway in its theoretical best has been dysfunctional in Brooklyn since the takedown of streetcars a hundred years ago (see how all the tracks are running towards Manhattan and ver…

There is a lot of ridiculous hyperbole and disingenuousness in this post so it's a little hard to take seriously. As someone who has lived in New York for the past ten years, the entrance of Uber hasn't changed my life at all, other than some VCs subsidizing/coercing some lower income drivers into taking $10 off my fare when I go to the airport. Public transportation, which you deride, usage utterly dwarfs taxis/uber…

> As someone who has lived in New York for the past ten years, the entrance of Uber hasn't changed my life at all

As someone who has lived in NYC for longer, I find your experience atypical. Do you take taxi/ride-hail trips outside of Manhattan? Are you a person of color? If either of those are true, your transportation experience has been fundamentally changed by the existence of Uber/Lyft.

And I'm sorry, but any favorable comparison of the cleanliness of an NYC yellow cab to an NYC Uber is laughable. The cleanest, best-smelling NYC yellow cab I've taken was worse than the dirtiest NYC Uber I've ever taken.

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