281–290 of 303 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have the green cabs helped in that regard?
Not sure, but green cabs do address the bias against the non-Manhattan crowd. It is very common for yellow cabs in NYC to refuse rides to Brooklyn/etc. Destination discrimination "isnt allowed" but there isn't really a way to enforce the rule.
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Did you know that the NYC subway system was originally built and operated by two private companies that competed with each other? Guess how that came to no longer be the case. (The city froze their rates until they were no longer able to improve services, then the city took them over.)
It was the same in Paris (CMP and Nord-Sud), until the subway was nationalized after the war. And yet there are still major investments... You could say the same for the national railway network, it's a state company and it didn't prevent investments and improvements (high speed trains).
When one have lived for decades with the same nationalized system, one can't imagine what the alternative might be like. But we know from other industries. E.g., telecoms. The UK nationalized its telephone industry in 1912(!). The rest of the world basically followed suit (the U.S. didn't, but we gave AT&T a monopoly that tended to limit innovation in the same sort of way), then in the 90s the whole world privatized and/or deregulated telecoms and... wow, what a boom resulted! And yet very few people who are aware of that case will even think of applying the same approach to other typically-nationalized industries.
It's always interesting to see what gets nationalized. It seems to be the biggest, most notable, locally culturally valued industry that the relevant politicians have the power to nationalize. National governments tend nationalize big things, like telecoms, utilities, steel manufacturing, etc.
In the U.S. the Federal government has not had the ability / constitutional power to do this (see the Steel Cases from 1947), the States have and have had the constitutional power, but by dint of having so many of them in competition with each other, they've mostly been unable to use it, which leaves: the cities. In the U.S. every city has a "nationalized" public transit system.
But in many parts of the world things like city buses are entirely private sector industries (e.g., in Buenos Aires, which has an incredibly vast private bus network). That might be surprising, since in Argentina just about everything of note has been nationalized at times. It makes sense though: Argentina has a strong central government, and weak local governments, so the central government nationalizes things of national importance, and the local governments not so much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure, but green cabs do address the bias against the non-Manhattan crowd. It is very common for yellow cabs in NYC to refuse rides to Brooklyn/etc. Destination discrimination "isnt allowed" but there isn't really a way to enforce the rule.
It's pretty easy. Undecover bylaw enforcement can hail a cab, ask to be driven to Brooklyn, when the driver refuses, cite them, and pull their medallion for a month. I guarantee you, after a few medallions get pulled, this problem will evaporate. What you have is lack of will in enforcement.
So once cant support the Uber crackdown and say: oh, and we can [theoretically] "just" crack down on discrimination using this method. It hasnt been enforced for 30+yrs, no need to assume laws will be enforced suddenly starting today.
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You are definitely coming off as biased which to me is strange. Maybe Uber isn’t a saint of a company, but thinking that bribery is somehow morally equivalent to advertising (whatever the multiple) is very odd.
I've never had any affiliation with any transportation company or lobby group on any side of the issue, nor have I bought or shorted any relevant stocks. I admitted my dislike of Uber and their peers very explicitly, but I'm only biased in the sense of having considered the issue and formed an opinion. As are we all, if we've thought about it enough. Not sure where bribery entered the conversation. The person I was r…
For example, I see HSBC's ads incessantly at airports about how they value customer service, but 5+ personal interactions with the bank proved otherwise and no amount of ad spending can get me to suddenly get on message boards and support HSBC. They could spend 10x for all I care and I still wouldnt use their bank...and certainly would never get on message boards to support their product.
What ride hailing apps did is make rides available to a giant sector of the population who didn't previously have any reasonable alternative. That makes me (both through my experience, and that of my mother) spend my valuable time on message boards arguing in favor of ride hailing apps.
A one line summary of my mom's very limited anecdote: for a frail elderly POC frequenting hospital trips in Manhattan and traveling back to Brooklyn -- there was life before Uber and life after Uber. For excited consumers, it has to do with the product, not ads.
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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…
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It's still traffic to get into and out of those spaces. It's more cars on the road, whether parked or not, which means delays given limited throughput. Having a shared Uber pool encourages the actual namesake of "ride-sharing" and gets multiple people using the same cars, hopefully at the same time, or at least waiting on the street where they take up much less space than a car. Even a small amount of passenger pooli…
You can’t defend Uber by reference to Uber pool when most Uber rides are not shared. If you want more busses that’s cool, they really help but having a few cars with a couple extra passengers occasionally does little. That said if you want to limit Uber to always using Uber pool you are going to get strong objections.
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I've never had any affiliation with any transportation company or lobby group on any side of the issue, nor have I bought or shorted any relevant stocks. I admitted my dislike of Uber and their peers very explicitly, but I'm only biased in the sense of having considered the issue and formed an opinion. As are we all, if we've thought about it enough. Not sure where bribery entered the conversation. The person I was r…
I'm not in marketing or advertisement, but I seriously wonder if honest grassroots support can be "purchased" through ad spending. For example, I see HSBC's ads incessantly at airports about how they value customer service, but 5+ personal interactions with the bank proved otherwise and no amount of ad spending can get me to suddenly get on message boards and support HSBC. They could spend 10x for all I care and I st…
NYC has traditionally used that for the same purpose as Uber, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are underserved areas or racial discrimination by the dispatchers.
The biggest example of skewed information in PR (whether ads or official statements) is when they promote how much cheaper they are than the traditional alternatives. While it's often completely true, that's only the case because of their huge VC-funded warchest.
This is a major omission from many people's public policy opinion-forming: They're subsidizing rides and losing money in a way that local customer-funded competitors can't match, moving market share toward either a monopoly (as they'd prefer) or an oligopoly (including Lyft etc). Previously NYC taxi and car service companies were diverse small competitors.
Once they get enough of a collective stranglehold, or once VC funding gets sick of them waiting for self-driving cars to greatly reduce their cost of goods sold (drivers aren't cheap) in the rough and tumble real world, they'll raise prices and there will be either a captive audience or another rough societal readjustment period.
People might still think the speculative future pain is worth the tradeoff, but "cheaper" is a skewers truth without the context. The context lets them consider the full picture when forming their opinion.
But yeah, a frail elderly POC woman who needs a better way to go to the hospital has very different priorities than anyone thinking about long term economic and urban planning impacts, and I completely see why it's good for her. :) Glad her needs are better met now than they once were, even if through Uber.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never had any affiliation with any transportation company or lobby group on any side of the issue, nor have I bought or shorted any relevant stocks. I admitted my dislike of Uber and their peers very explicitly, but I'm only biased in the sense of having considered the issue and formed an opinion. As are we all, if we've thought about it enough. Not sure where bribery entered the conversation. The person I was r…
I'm not in marketing or advertisement, but I seriously wonder if honest grassroots support can be "purchased" through ad spending. For example, I see HSBC's ads incessantly at airports about how they value customer service, but 5+ personal interactions with the bank proved otherwise and no amount of ad spending can get me to suddenly get on message boards and support HSBC. They could spend 10x for all I care and I st…
I should note that most of my drivers for Uber/Lyft were not cost-driven but feature-driven. Cost is a factor, of course, and note that my mom almost always uses the pool option to save money -- something Yellow cabs dont/cannot offer.
Drivers:
- Dispatch services work going from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but not the other way. You'd have to know the local dispatch service, they would need to know your mobile phone number (they usually dont ask) to coordinate with you, etc. The only dispatch services that seem to work well in Manhattan are black car services, which is way out of the conversation here -- she needs a ride home, not a Lincoln Towncar :-)
- Dispatch services DO work going from Brooklyn to Manhattan give you a blanket "be ready in 5min" regardless of demand and you end up waiting and waiting -- sometimes at the worst times. I've known people to call 2 or 3 dispatch services, take the first car, and leave the other drivers hanging (unethical...but it happens.)
- Dispatch services are hard to get ahold of when you really need them, often in bad weather etc.
- Dispatch services do price in the dead-head ride back, so there is a legitimate cost issue there on both supply and demand side. Uber/Lyft mostly solve the dead-head ride back issue, so legitimately lower cost by better utilization.
A personal issue when i travel for business:
- Dispatch services mysteriously dont keep receipts or have broken credit card machines (not sure why? to hid tax revenue?) -- so I am left with a ride for work (e.g., to airport) with no receipt and thus i have to pay work expenses out of pocket and they wont be reimbursed without a receipt.
- Dispath services mysteriously "dont have change" so you're paying $80 for a $62 ride
- I'm arriving at Delta Terminal late night in LGA and all the yellow cabs are at the other terminals. You wait and wait. There isnt a good way to "hail" them. I understand the Arro app tries to solve this, but that came years too late.
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You can’t defend Uber by reference to Uber pool when most Uber rides are not shared. If you want more busses that’s cool, they really help but having a few cars with a couple extra passengers occasionally does little. That said if you want to limit Uber to always using Uber pool you are going to get strong objections.
It was referring to a "pool" of cars. And yes I can defend it because the official Uber Pool is still a non-zero amount compared to individuals using their own cars. Remember your first post claimed that parking spaces are not at street level even though that's not true, and entrances do have to be at street level, creating bottlenecks. Reduction in total extra cars on the road and reduced traffic to get to parking c…
An irrelevant non-zero. Over the last 5 years Uber added vastly more miles driven in congested areas which is the only important measurement in terms of increasing congestion. NYC traffic's average MPH is down and it's ride sharing's fault.
Lack of new Taxi medallions means it's not Taxi's fault. Their has been no increase in street level parking it can't make things worse. Uber on the other hand adds cars to the road above and beyond the limits of street level parking or even any parking which limits normal drivers.
PS: As you have not countered my argument I can only assume you countered the point that Uber is making congestion worse.