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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

#221

Post by gojomo »

bumholio wrote: post #151
gojomo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not quite evidence, and my intuition would still be: the more one drives inside NYC city limits, the richer one is. And the more one uses car services that would also pay the tax, the wealthier one is. So: it's highly progressive when you consider all NYC residents, including those who don't drive. And it's maybe a little regressive between the wealthy and the very-wealthy, just on the general pattern that the…

> the more one drives inside NYC city limits, the richer one is. Why would you say that? A rich person would not spend hours every day commuting though rush hour traffic, or spend most of their day inside their work vehicle. They would buy or rent a central home, possibly near the central office building where they work. City driving in itself makes for a very low quality of life and most rational people would minimi…

I would say that because I'm familiar with the NYC area!

There's expensive tolls, and limited & expensive parking, but excellent public transportation – the USA's most extensive and most-used subway system. NY state has the nation's highest (regressive!) gas taxes.

New York is far-and-away the US city with the lowest rate of car ownership:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...

Manhattan is the most likely place for congestion pricing. But, though rare in the USA, many Manhattanites never learn to drive! And only 8% of Manhattanite workers commute by car to work:

https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-their-cars

(I highly doubt that 8% is correlated with the poorest Manhattanites.)

Car-owning households in NYC are significantly richer than zero-car households:

http://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/

So, people who elect to drive in NYC (outside of driving-on-the-job) are richer than the New Yorkers who don't drive. Further, New Yorkers are richer than other Americans. Ergo, a fee that falls on people who choose to drive in NYC is unlikely to be "regressive", barring any actual evidence to the contrary.

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

#222

Post by Itaxpica »

ahoy wrote: post #80
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…

This post is full of schlock. I live in brooklyn and commute to manhattan via subway everyday. It's reliable and good.

Seriously? I also live in Brooklyn and commute by subway (the C, specifically), and when it works it’s great... which is maybe 60% of the time.

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

#223

Post by kaishiro »

timr wrote: post #206
kaishiro wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Seems consistent to me: Ubers don't want to places where they can't easily pick up a return trip; same as cabs. That's always been my assumption, anyway.

Sorry, I'm confused now. You stated above that JFK has passengers going both ways - so isn't this exactly the kind of fare an Uber would want to take on?

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

#224

Post by romwell »

komali2 wrote: post #177
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FYI, responding to the parent comment, I've found out that the e-bikes were kind of unbanned a few months ago[1].

Kind of because you can go 20+mph on a regular bike without pedal assist. It seems like e-bikes are still banned statewide. Eh.

[1]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/new-york-city...

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

#225

Post by gniv »

romwell wrote: post #212
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>it’s difficult for me to determine if your comment refers to some context I’m unfamiliar with. The city has only lifted the ban on electric bikes a few months ago[1], but still bans electric scooters[2][3] because screw you, that's why. (They have reasons now, just like they've had reasons for banning e-bikes for over a decade after the technology provided a really viable mode of transportation at a reasonable price…

The other part of the context is Lime and Bird (scooter rentals), which are expanding like crazy in other cities in the US.

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

#226

Post by humanrebar »

CydeWeys wrote: post #164
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.

The worst part is how much of your time it wastes. With a cab, whatever, another one is coming soon. But with rideshares, you could be waiting awhile on someone who'll cancel on you, thus wasting a lot more time. Even if twice as many taxis refuse to go there as rideshares, I'm still wasting more time on the rideshares, so it's worse.

> With a cab, whatever, another one is coming soon.

That really depends on your neighborhood. In the outer burroughs, you can walk some ways before you reach a busy enough street to find cabs.

If you have bags, small children, or are disabled, that walk is basically a non-starter.

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

#227

Post by sethhochberg »

zjaffee wrote: post #217
CydeWeys wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure about this? Maybe this is true on avenues, but at least with the new york I know well (grew up in greenwich village), the streets are very narrow (one parking lane and one driving lane is already tricky), with avenues sometimes being wider.

The village, particularly west of 6th Ave, is one of the only parts of Manhattan I can think of where 1 traffic lane and 1 parking lane is the norm. Once you get above 14th St or east of 6th Ave, its pretty much 2 parking lanes, one travel lane, and sometimes a bike lane nestled between the parking and the traffic on the crosstown streets (and on your major crosstown streets like 14th, 23rd, etc... still two lanes of parking, and often two lanes of traffic, but almost never any kind of bike facilities)

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

#229

Post by CamperBob2 »

knuththetruth wrote: post #205
CamperBob2 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shrug) It's an appropriate response, I think, to the use of peoples' suicides for purposes of overt emotional manipulation. Your beef is with the taxi cartels and their click-hungry sympathizers in the media, not with me. They started it.

It speaks more to your disposition than anything else that being troubled by other’s suicides is “emotional manipulation.” And I don’t have “beefs” with fictional boogie man cooked up by Uber, however bought in you are to that narrative. I certainly don’t remember “taxi cartels” stealing and passing around the medical records of rape victims, but that was probably a conspiracy by their “click-hungry sympathizers in t…

And here come the whataboutisms. You'll notice that in the post above, I explicitly called out Uber for actively circumventing the local taxi laws. I'm not apologizing for Uber, believe me, just pointing out that I'm not the one pulling the emotional-manipulation strings. The journalists (and the HN posters) who are citing someone's suicide to back up their position favoring one debatably-ethical actor over another are the ones who are doing that.

Uber is not responsible for pushing people to suicide at the end of a 30-year taxi-driving career. If you disagree, I respectfully suggest there are other sites where such opinions are more in line with the underlying ethos.

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

#230

Post by ccccccccccccc »

CydeWeys wrote: post #134
jrockway wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I'm no fan of Uber but at least the service is consistent. I remember on my first trip to NYC many years ago, I wanted to go to the airport during rush hour. No cab would stop and take me, because I looked like someone who wanted to go to the airport, which is out of their way. Apparently this is a known problem, so you're supposed to kind of hide your bag so they don't notice, then get in the cab, close the doo…

> Meanwhile, with Uber you just press a button and they take you to the airport, bags and all. Not necessarily. Ubers don't want to go to the airport for the same reason that cabs don't. I've had ride shares cancel on me once the driver's gotten close enough to see that the destination is an airport. Granted it doesn't happen as often as with cabs whose meter is conveniently not working once you mention the airport,…

I tried to go from SFO to South Bay a while back around midnight and eventually took a cab after being cancelled by multiple Uber drivers. Some even called me, asked where I was going, then angrily said they don't go to South Bay and cancelled.
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