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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

#181

Post by StanislavPetrov »

CydeWeys wrote: post #171
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I live and drive here. Parking is virtually non-existent.

http://www.opencurb.nyc/

You see the sea of red lines? Those are all places you cannot park.

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

#182

Post by pradn »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #46
pradn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue is that cab drivers are committing suicide because of their debts. Simple market analysis ignores the real human toll these technological changes are making. Yes, better service should be rewarded. But those hurting should get some relief. (I personally don't care too much about medallion-owning companies/groups.)

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.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. Why not help some people on the way to helping a wider group? I do agree that we need wider-ranging policies for people displaced by technological change. It would help people find work and society make use of their talents.

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

#184

Post by astura »

timr wrote: post #158
kaishiro wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've had ride shares cancel on me once the driver's gotten close enough to see that the destination is an airport." I'm not understanding this. If you're using the app correctly then the driver knows the destination before they even accept the ride. If you're setting an address near an airport in an attempt to be duplicitous I would be equally discouraged as a driver.

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.

>or slow-play the pickup, so that you cancel, to protect their driver rating

Yep, or they even just call you and ask you to cancel.

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

#185

Post by manigandham »

Retric wrote: post #68
ddtaylor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with a vast majority of the vehicles on the road not being owned by the people who use them for transportation? It seems that a large amount of people don't want to purchase and maintain a vehicle they might not always be using and instead pay on-demand like they do for many other services where someone specializes to reduce the cost for others?

Driving a car from A to B is less miles driven than someone driving from X to A to pick you up before driving to B to drop you off them Y to wait for next ride. Thus Uber increases congestion.

Unless you only make 1-way trips, you still need to get from B back to A, so it's much more efficient to have a car that does these smaller individual legs of a trip for multiple people without needing parking space at every destination. Even better if that car can carry multiple people at the same time.

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

#186

Post by weeksie »

CydeWeys wrote: post #140
weeksie wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's super weird, maybe I had another NYT article open. Seriously, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. No numbers at all in that one though. Anyway quick googling for 2017 numbers: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/10/13/16468716/uber-yellow-cab-ny... So we have 10k medallion holders and ~60k uber drivers giving the same number of rides per day. No, there's not enough there to give a rigorous analysis but that is a vast d…

Uber cars aren't on the road most of the time. Yellow cabs are. Those taxi medallions are expensive and they operate with shifts of drivers, the goal being to keep the taxi running 24/7, except when it needs maintenance. It's pretty typical for any given cab to have three different drivers running in 12 hour shifts. That way you keep it on the road all 168 hours of every week. An Uber just requires a relatively inexp…

That's a nice story but even if each yellow cab was operating 24/7 that's 3x, not 6x. // edit: right, 7 days so ~4x.

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

#187

Post by erik_seaberg »

ctoth wrote: post #178
bgruber wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the symptom is "I don't want task X, I'd rather sit here earning nothing waiting for task Y", the root cause is compensation being too low for X and too high for Y.

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

#189

Post by admax88q »

bunderbunder wrote: post #161
CydeWeys wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't many poor people commuting into Manhattan every day using a car. You'd be spending way more on fuel and parking than the monthly MTA ticket costs.

Well, if you're an FHV driver, MTA won't cut it, since you can't take it on the train with you, and you need it to do your job. On the upside, given the nature of the work, you shouldn't have to worry too much about parking costs.

With a for hire vehicle any congestion tax you had to pay should be passed on to your customers.

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

#190

Post by TuringNYC »

vkou wrote: post #71
TuringNYC wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did that a couple of times. Then once I got in, i changed the destination. It made for a tense ride because you're already in an adverserial transaction for something that should be a default right of rider. Oh, and my mom has bigger problems. Cabs pass her by at Manhattan hospitals. Of course no one knows drivers' intents for sure, but there is some quick eyeballing, i'm sure, of whether the potential passeng…

> There is also a larger problem Uber solves (one of many) -- once you lose density (i.e., outside airport/centercity) it is hard to hail a cab, so you have to dial a cab. You dail, they invariably say "wait outside be there in 5 min" -- sometimes they show up in 5min, sometimes 10min, sometimes 30min, sometimes never. Variable pricing and GPS tracking solves this. Variable pricing solves this for people with the abi…

I agree with almost everything you say. However, I do want to note that you can pay with dollars or pay with time. The old way was that you paid with time/uncertainty. You'd wait, and wait, and wait. Now you can get what you want right away, you just need to auction/bid on it to get it immediately. Totally agreed this solves the problem for those who can bear higher prices, so it disfavors the poor.

That said, people have voted quite a bit with their wallets and accepted surge pricing to solve the old problem of uncertainty. When I used to be a consultant and go to the airport every Monday morning, i'd have to leave 40+minutes earlier just in case the dial-a-cab randomly decided not to show up for 30min. That problem has mostly gone away.

Same thing for rainy weather -- cabs would disappear. That was legitimate because the cost of driving is indeed higher in rain (fewer rides per hour) and thus deserves more compensation. Instead...the old way was...dial-a-cabs would just stop answering their phone during storms, etc.

Sometimes people did nasty things like call 2 separate cab companies, go with the first arrival, and leave the other one hanging (another problem solved by ride-hailing services, who have the concept of identity and reputation scores.)

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