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Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

bbc.com

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Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#271

Post by ekianjo »

criddell wrote: post #254
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> underpaid drivers This is and always will be a matter of opinion. Uber is not putting a gun to anyone's head. If it's not profitable for you to drive, you don't have to.

Since drivers can't set their own rates, I've always felt the government should regulate the split. Uber's portion should be capped at something like 5%. The marginal cost for them to connect a driver to a rider is close to 0 so even 5% feels very generous.

That's not the job of the government to regulate margins of businesses. If you go by that way, then you might as well regulate every margin of every app store?

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#272

Post by harel »

Semaphor wrote: post #239
harel wrote: post #198

I'm not a fan of companies like Uber or AirBnB who attempt a violent takeover of a market. However, as a consumer who needs to get from A to B, or stay at some random city, I find those services invaluable. The black cabs in London are expensive, never around when you need them, and until recently might have refused card payments (now they just seem unhappy about it). At the very least I was hoping Uber would make th…

> At the very least I was hoping Uber would make that industry wake up and join the modern world. Even with Uber never getting a real foothold in Germany, they still did just that. It start with the myTaxi (nor for some inexplicable reason rebranded to FREE NOW) app that allowed you to book a cab, see where it is, get a price estimate and pay with your credit card. It wasn’t as smooth, but still better than before. N…

We're not that lucky in the UK. They came, they might go, and the traditionals will stay the same.

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#273

Post by ekianjo »

Crashbat wrote: post #263
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> underpaid drivers This is and always will be a matter of opinion. Uber is not putting a gun to anyone's head. If it's not profitable for you to drive, you don't have to.

Except then you can't eat? It's not that it's not profitable, it's that the earnings drivers make are meager compared to what people need to sustain themselves. You make it sound like anybody who's on minimum wage just doesn't realise that they could go elsewhere for higher wages!

> Except then you can't eat?

In an era of record low unemployment (in the US at least), claiming that it's "Uber at low wages or you don't eat" is kind of a ridiculous hyperbole.

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#274

Post by tomatocracy »

harel wrote: post #234
thinkindie wrote: post #217

have you ever wondered what makes services like Uber affordable? 1) underpaid drivers 2) VC money dropped into an otherwise unsustainable business I'm pretty sure Uber will raise prices the moment it kills the competition

That's why I differentiated my like and dislike. As a consumer, it's a service I use. I would use anyone who gave me that service and driver-mass. As a citizen of the net, I dislike them for their practices. But to be perfectly honest I rather call an uber than stand in the rain waiting for a black cab.

There are a couple of apps you can use to get a black cab. They help to avoid an annoying argument with the driver about cash vs card and you can wait inside until the cab arrives. Uber is still cheaper though (excepting surge pricing) and late at night both have patchy availability to be honest.

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#275

Post by Symbiote »

larnmar wrote: post #211
ghaff wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London it's really not bad in my somewhat limited experience. (Usually take transit.) Yes it's more expensive than VC-subsidized rides but is better than taxis in most places.

The black cabs in London were excellent but ridiculously expensive, which is why I’ve only caught one, like, once. Most people have to rely on minicabs, which were sketchy and unreliable. Uber was a huge boon to London.

I mostly lived in London just before Uber.

I don't know if they still do, but many nightclubs would have some arrangement where there was someone from a minicab company in the lobby or just outside. You'd say "W3", he'd say "That'll be £20, in 10 minutes time" and you could wait in the warm until the car arrived. (Of course, if you knew a number for a different company, you could phone them yourself.)

The drivers were pretty clueless -- even a fairly large inner-London station name like "Ealing Broadway" would frequently be misunderstood, and they'd want to slowly type a postcode into a satnav -- but otherwise they were OK.

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#276

Post by tomatocracy »

jacobush wrote: post #268
folkrav wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Welcome to the rest of the world where people [...] only get paid at the end of every month. Wait, what? You get paid once a month? Is this a UK thing? Every single job I've had over here (Canada) was either once every two weeks, or two times a month.

In Sweden, and I think in most of EU, once a month is the standard. I know of no-one with in Sweden with a full time job which is once a month.

Same in the UK. Traditionally here the lowest skilled jobs were paid weekly and higher skilled monthly but I think that's rapidly disappearing, if not completely gone, now.

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#277

Post by Endy »

ekianjo wrote: post #271
criddell wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since drivers can't set their own rates, I've always felt the government should regulate the split. Uber's portion should be capped at something like 5%. The marginal cost for them to connect a driver to a rider is close to 0 so even 5% feels very generous.

That's not the job of the government to regulate margins of businesses. If you go by that way, then you might as well regulate every margin of every app store?

A great idea.

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#278

Post by gordaco »

pjmlp wrote: post #258
thathndude wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I'm always amazed at how quickly people crap on Uber. In hindsight it's not a particularly revolutionary service. But does everyone remember how much the Taxi system sucked?

On the German city where I live, they are pretty alright.

Spaniard here. They also work quite well in Spain.

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#279

Post by jobigoud »

dominotw wrote: post #160

>At least 14,000 trips involved drivers who weren’t who the riders thought they were, any idea what the source of this info is? And not sure what the timeframe here is. Is it 14000 since Uber started operating in london?

And what is the number for regular cabs?

Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

#280

Post by eviltandem »

_vrmm wrote: post #10

I know this opinion is not popular but I'm so happy everytime I see bad news for Uber and all these companies that only exist thanks to basically exploiting THEIR workers. Private transporting is not sustainable and it is not something that has to be affordable for everyone, even less by lowering workers wages or playing with the tariffs by demand. Taxi regulations gives us passengers safety and fair prices. There ar…

The market has spoken. Uber as a service has shown itself to be wildly better and more loved than traditional cab services in every city where it's gone head to head in open competition with traditional taxi services.

Unfortunately people are morons that don't know how to make the "right" choice. We will be conveniently layering bureaucracy and laws on top of all of this to make sure the clearly inferior product wins by fiat of the government.

You would all thank us but you're obviously too stupid to know what's best for you.

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