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

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

#291

Post by vkou »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #276
TuringNYC wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I do want to note that you can pay with dollars or pay with time. And it's generally far better overall to pay with money. If you pay with money, then someone gets that money - Uber drivers earn more through surge pricing, in this instance. If you pay with time, then that time is simply gone forever.

It's not raining. There's one cab. The fare costs 5 dollars. There's one rider. Everything works great.

It's raining. There's one cab. The fare costs 5 dollars. There's two riders. The driver flips a coin. One rider pays $5, and gets a ride. The other has to wait, and then gets a ride.

It's raining. There's one cab. There's surge pricing, so the fare costs $15. There's two riders. One rider can afford to pay $15, and gets a ride. The other has to wait, until the surge dies down, and then pays $5 for a ride.

When there's a shortage of cabs, someone will have to pay with money. Under the lottery system, it's a random rider. Under the price surge system, it's the poorest rider. You haven't actually produced any more value in the third case. The same amount of time is wasted.

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

#292

Post by moorhosj »

cryptonector wrote: post #282
etiennemarcel wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The second avenue line was a "major investment". It was also probably [many] decades after any private company might have done it. 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…

==And yet very few people who are aware of that case will even think of applying the same approach to other typically-nationalized industries.==

Airlines were also deregulated and it hasn't really led to a "boom". Lots of bankruptcies and massive consolidation has made for a pretty poor flying experience.

==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.==

Is this true? According to Reuters, the government of Buenos Aires raised bus prices in January 2018 [1].

"Bus, train and subway fares in the Buenos Aires area will rise this year, the Argentine government said on Wednesday, despite fears that the increases will stoke already high inflation.

Fare increases on buses and trains will start in February, Transportation Minister Guillermo Dietrich told reporters, with an initial average rise of around 35 percent."

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/argentina-transportation/bue...

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

#293

Post by dyarosla »

davidgay wrote: post #249
dyarosla wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the moral difference between political ads and donations to a political campaign which will presumably spend that money on ads (or other campaign related expenses)?

What world do you live in that presumably most donations to a political campaign are spent on ads?

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

#294

Post by ccccccccccccc »

saalweachter wrote: post #252
sithadmin wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, I've always had the opposite experience. They either want to go to the city or somewhere far South. Something close like Millbrae, South City or Burlingame? They cancel the ride.

I believe all of these stories; I just don't understand why people expect or believe taxi drivers and Uber drivers are fundamentally different people with different incentives.

The frustrating part about Uber is that I have to wait 10 minutes for each one before they refuse to take me somewhere. With a taxi I can just walk down the row of taxis at the airport. On the other hand, the only reason taxis can get that benefit is because they lobby so hard to kick the Ubers out to a parking lot 10 minutes away.

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

#295

Post by cryptonector »

moorhosj wrote: post #292
cryptonector wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second avenue line was a "major investment". It was also probably [many] decades after any private company might have done it. 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…

==And yet very few people who are aware of that case will even think of applying the same approach to other typically-nationalized industries.== Airlines were also deregulated and it hasn't really led to a "boom". Lots of bankruptcies and massive consolidation has made for a pretty poor flying experience. ==That might be surprising, since in Argentina just about everything of note has been nationalized at times. It m…

Bus fare in Argentina is regulated.

EDIT: It makes sense to have the same fare for all bus lines in the same city.

EDIT: There has most certainly been a boom in air travel[0]! In Europe air travel is incredibly cheap, and much cheaper than comparable itineraries in the U.S. Now, air travel is generally harder to consume than, say, mobile phone service -- one needs no excuse to use mobile data, but to travel requires planning, time, and more money (especially for lodging), so it's not surprising to me if air travel has grown more slowly than telecoms (though I've not checked, but it's a fair assumption).

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR

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

#296

Post by bumholio »

wpietri wrote: post #280
bumholio wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also pretty obviously favors the rich, which is not a big vote-getter. In many ways, a congested city works like a income-adjusted congestion tax, where you pay with your time. Since the time of rich people is more valuable, the burden seems "fair". The only problem is that the time is wasted, no tax is collected. Maybe we should accept that political reality and setup income adjusted congestion taxes, putting t…

The notion that "the time of rich people is more valuable" seems obviously wrong to me. In some cases the time of rich people has a higher price . E.g. a famous surgeon is rich and also charges a lot by the hour. But there are plenty of rich people that couldn't get minimum wage based on their skills and work ethic. I think value is an individual metric. E.g., I value good chocolate highly, but chocolate gives my gir…

Well, since we are talking about a common resource and public law that applies to everybody, the subjectivity of value is not really much help. A flat congestion tax is proposed, so I was clearly referring to the monetary value one places on his own time, the amount of money they are willing to give up to reclaim that time.

Cost vs. speed is a fundamental trade-off in transportation, nothing groundbreaking here. It allows an economic discussion and market allocation of various individual preferences. Otherwise we are stuck into positions like "my time with my family has infinite subjective value, so I should clearly be allowed to race my Formula 1 car down 5th avenue back from work" - and there is really no way for me to prove that you don't really love your family to that degree.

What we can all agree is that time wasted in traffic is net social cost that affects everybody, and that it takes very little extra vehicles on the road to go from peak road efficiency to gridlock. The public resource of road infrastructure is badly mismanaged by leaving it in a a congested, unproductive state.

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

#297

Post by etiennemarcel »

cryptonector wrote: post #282
etiennemarcel wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The second avenue line was a "major investment". It was also probably [many] decades after any private company might have done it. 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…

I'm not saying one model (national companies) is always better than the other (private ventures). But I was trying to show that it's mostly a management issue, the MTA seems to be terribly mismanaged, while its French counterpart is not that bad. Even though it has its own challenges.

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

#298

Post by CydeWeys »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #245
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks to me like that map indicates about half of one side of all the steeets are ok for parking?

Take another look. Everywhere that is not green means that trucks, garbage trucks, UPS vans, and every other delivery service has to pull over and block a potential bike lane to make a delivery. That would be true even if every green area was open, and nobody else was parked anywhere. There is a reason that parking garages charge what they do in Manhattan, and its not because there is parking available on the street.…

Most on-street parking isn't paid, so almost everywhere that's green on that map isn't available for delivery services anyway; it's going to be taken by personal vehicles that move twice a week for street-sweeping. Add more on-street parking and you'll just have more people with personal vehicles using it; it won't make it available for deliveries.

The best way to make delivery drop-off points available is to get rid of all the free parking and make it all paid, and keep raising prices on a block-by-block basis until there's typically spots free on any given block. It'll be a minor marginal cost for someone making a delivery to pay, say, $5/30 minutes (this will probably actually be cheaper if it means they can find a nearby spot, thus saving time driving around and time shuttling things from a farther spot). But $5/30 minutes works out to $240/day, which will easily discourage long-term parkers who shouldn't be using the scarce resource of on-street parking in busy areas anyway.

In less busy (i.e. purely residential) areas, it might make sense to move to a permit model, with permits costing several hundred dollars per month. There'd of course be parking meters mixed in with all that for people who are driving to the area and don't have permits.

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

#299

Post by cryptonector »

etiennemarcel wrote: post #297
cryptonector wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second avenue line was a "major investment". It was also probably [many] decades after any private company might have done it. 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…

I'm not saying one model (national companies) is always better than the other (private ventures). But I was trying to show that it's mostly a management issue, the MTA seems to be terribly mismanaged, while its French counterpart is not that bad. Even though it has its own challenges.

In the U.S. city public transit is always mismanaged then. Buses come on a schedule, yes, but way too infrequently. The subways run, yes, but improvements and innovation take decades longer than they used to under private management. I don't know if in Europe private ownership of these things would do better, but in the U.S. public ownership has been pretty bad, and private ownership used to be pretty good.

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

#300

Post by gojomo »

bumholio wrote: post #274
gojomo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Car-owning households in NYC are significantly richer than zero-car households. I have no doubt that's true, as in most other places on the planet. The thing is, you are making an absolute argument: those who drive in NY are richer than those who don't. I don't deny that. I'm making a relative argument: within the driving group, the poorer ones will be priced out. You say those are not poor, but "merely wealthy". O…

OK, we agree that I'm likely correct, barring any other evidence that remains unpresented, that road congestion pricing in NYC wouldn't be "regressive" over all New Yorkers/visitors.

If the congestion fees go to expenditures that broadly benefit all New Yorkers, it's far a simpler system than "tradable driving coupons" and could wind up highly progressive. (At one extreme, this "broad benefit" could be just a per-capita rebate of fees collected, in cash, to all residents.)

A "coupons" system would trend towards being just like fees: at the margin, every coupon-holder has to decide whether they prefer cash (from selling their coupons) or driving, exactly like someone facing a congestion fee. Roughly the same set of people "priced out" by fees would be eager to sell rather than drive.

A coupon-system might be nastier to the non-conscientious, because there's likely extra budgeting/deadlines/resale-effort involved. And the lost revenues for broad public projects would have to made up through other NY taxes – some regressive, some progressive – so the net effect on household budgets of a big "coupon giveaway" would be unclear.

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