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The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

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Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#51

Post by dasmoth »

michaelochurch wrote: post #44
martinald wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, it does. It's £321 for a peak return, or £160.50 single. Or, alternatively, £459 rtn in first class ($767). However, an off peak return (dept after 9am, basically), and it drops to under £80 rtn.

Virgin Trains apparently offers £12.50 (one-way) service to London every 20 minutes. http://www.virgintrains.co.uk/go-by-train/manchester/

Have you actually seen a ticket at that price?

The cheapest tickets I can see for today are £39.85 and for next Tuesday are £35.50. Presumably there are some £12.50 tickets available, but they're not easy to find (my understanding from folks who do more train travel to me is that tickets are released some number of months in advance and the cheapest price bins usually disappear pretty quickly).

If you want to travel at peak times, the prices are much higher.

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#52

Post by lazylizard »

baddox wrote: post #48
potatolicious wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typical notion of the sharing economy is that you're allowing more efficient usage of activity that would exist with or without your interference. For example, car pooling is part of the sharing economy - the car was already going in that direction anyways, but now you've saved a bunch of gas by putting multiple people in the same car. Without your carpool, that driver would still be going that way - like BlaBlaC…

> Uber isn't part of the sharing economy, since the drivers are only on the road because of you. But most are using their personal cars (at least for Lyft and Sidecar, which are the ones I use), which they would own either way. It's not the driver's time and gas being "shared" under your definition, it's the car itself, which would otherwise be sitting in a garage and replaced with another taxi or rental car. Also, I…

if its just sharing the car, then there's already carpools? uber is a way for people without a cab license to operate a cab service?

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#53

Post by oleganza »

baddox wrote: post #34
oleganza wrote: post #7

"Disrupting politely" apparently means "drivers don't make a profit therefore aren't classed as professionals". In other words, "if you would like to compete with our monopolized transportation mafia you can't make any money out of it". Which simply means that you are not allowed to compete. You can only run charity and we'll call it "disruption" and continue taking profits. I can't wait for a purely p2p service that…

> To make sure both drivers and riders and not morons, they could use 2-of-2 multisig insurance deposit (both parties deposit $50 each with a single $100 output and can unlock it only together upon arrival, with respect for the fee). Or, perhaps better yet, a 2-of-3 contract with an agreed-upon arbitrator who has a reputation for being fair. That way, the implicit web-of-trust can be abstracted to the arbitrators rat…

I speculate that such arbitrators would be too expensive. Who would personally go and investigate a $10 ride?

I'd try something else. If you dislike the driver (or rider), rate him and your app propagates to your friends your vote. They may re-relay that info further (with downgrading coefficient, like *0.66). This way there will be implicit web-of-trust for reputations. If this person has upset only one guy, his mistake may cost him this guy's friends at most (next tier circle may have rating below threshold). If he has upset several people, it will lower his rating for many more people.

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#54

Post by baddox »

oleganza wrote: post #53
baddox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To make sure both drivers and riders and not morons, they could use 2-of-2 multisig insurance deposit (both parties deposit $50 each with a single $100 output and can unlock it only together upon arrival, with respect for the fee). Or, perhaps better yet, a 2-of-3 contract with an agreed-upon arbitrator who has a reputation for being fair. That way, the implicit web-of-trust can be abstracted to the arbitrators rat…

I speculate that such arbitrators would be too expensive. Who would personally go and investigate a $10 ride? I'd try something else. If you dislike the driver (or rider), rate him and your app propagates to your friends your vote. They may re-relay that info further (with downgrading coefficient, like *0.66). This way there will be implicit web-of-trust for reputations. If this person has upset only one guy, his mis…

Note that arbitrators would only be actually used in cases where the signers disagree, which would probably be rare assuming other reputation systems are also in place. Of course, the 2-of-3 contracts would be entirely optional, so it's quite possible that you're right, and that most people wouldn't bother with it for small transactions like ridesharing.

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#55

Post by eglover »

anigbrowl wrote: post #25
eglover wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"BlaBlaCar is restricted by unnecessary and economically damaging laws, but puts up with them. Uber and Lyft fight them" That's the take away. You can't compare the two and say one is simply being "polite". They take different approaches. Uber and Lyft are doing a whole lot of good and making big and beneficial waves. BlaBlaCar simply offers a competitive service where it's allowed to do so. The article smells of a "…

Restating your conclusion doesn't address Delerium's point about Uber picking fights where none exists.

It DOES exist, pay attention or don't comment.

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#56

Post by eglover »

_delirium wrote: post #10
eglover wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"BlaBlaCar is restricted by unnecessary and economically damaging laws, but puts up with them. Uber and Lyft fight them" That's the take away. You can't compare the two and say one is simply being "polite". They take different approaches. Uber and Lyft are doing a whole lot of good and making big and beneficial waves. BlaBlaCar simply offers a competitive service where it's allowed to do so. The article smells of a "…

I guess that's the part I disagree with. I think Uber and Lyft are mostly doing harm, and not even an interesting new kind of harm: shady taxi companies skirting laws to up their profits is as old as the taxi business. (And doing it "with an app" doesn't make it tech, either, any more than Domino's Pizza is a tech company.) And in some cases (like Sweden) I suspect the conflict is even manufactured for PR purposes: U…

How are they doing harm? Unless you're going to tell me people are too dumb to make decisions about who gives them rides I can't possibly see where there can be any harm.

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#57

Post by eglover »

_delirium wrote: post #16
wuliwong wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your stance is that Uber is doing "harm" as a "shady" NON TECH company manufacturing "conflict PR"? 1. How do you define harm? My experience is that every one of my friends who use Uber really like it and the drivers I've spoken to along my rides have all said they like working with Uber too. Is the "harm" done to the other taxi companies? Would you say that Apple did "harm" when they released the iPhone because p…

On #4, I don't see any evidence they attempted to follow the laws. The Swedish taxi market is deregulated and not a cartel. You can enter it, as long as you follow some fairly simple consumer-protection regulations! Uber is just not interested. I suspect that part of the reason is that it would be damaging to their image to be "just another taxi company". But it could also be that they legitimately find it difficult…

This is exactly why many people CHOOSE to use Uber. Because they don't put up with unnecessary and economically damaging laws. This allows them to draw in either better drivers or better prices. If you're going to hang on to this point, you're going to have to provide some real reasons as to how people choosing to use Uber or Lyft over other "official" companies because they like them better is somehow harming them.

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#58

Post by wutbrodo »

foobarqux wrote: post #46
wutbrodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that does is shift Uber along the spectrum of predictable availability vs predictable price. You have the cognitive load of remembering/having to check a schedule, plus no guarantee of availability, since the schedule will be a highly imperfect predictor of demand, as well as not accounting for unforeseen surges in demand. That seems like it would be more stressful and a worse solution than either of the other op…

I assume demand in major cities doesn't really change that much so that the schedule is announced and updated very rarely (similar to public transportation). Yes, you would occasionally sacrifice some availability but I think people prefer that trade-off.

> I assume demand in major cities doesn't really change that much so that the schedule is announced and updated very rarely (similar to public transportation).

This is way way way off. Looking just at my experience in San Francisco: weather patterns (in detail, across different parts of the city), public transit issues, tourism, events, fluctuations in the city's population and travel across various holidays/festivals/three-day weekends, changes in price of Uber, changes in price of alternatives (i.e. Lyft drops prices)...and the interplay of all these variables (e.g. public transit happens to have diminished capacity along a critical line for a given event vs having diminished capacity on an unrelated line).

It's not market fundamentalism to acknowledge that what the market is good at is this sort of massively decentralized, million-variable price optimization[1]. This is precisely the reason why direct price controls on consumer products tend not to work: because it's damn near impossible for any entity (even the freaking US gov't) to accurately gauge the million variables that go into setting supply and demand. The idea that Uber could do this without being way, way, way off almost all the time is a hilariously bad idea.

As someone alluded to below (and I alluded to above multiple times): The product Uber is selling is predictable-availability rides. The product taxis are selling is predictable-price rides. It's nonsense to say that reducing the predictability of Uber's availability would be "less stressful" or easier on its passengers.

[1] Note that it optimizes for allocative efficiency. Much of what market fundamentalism gets wrong is ignoring that allocative efficiency is not always what our goal is. That's not relevant in this case though, since we're explicitly talking about how a centralized, top-down rate schedule is a laughably terrible idea.

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#59

Post by baddox »

lazylizard wrote: post #52
baddox wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uber isn't part of the sharing economy, since the drivers are only on the road because of you. But most are using their personal cars (at least for Lyft and Sidecar, which are the ones I use), which they would own either way. It's not the driver's time and gas being "shared" under your definition, it's the car itself, which would otherwise be sitting in a garage and replaced with another taxi or rental car. Also, I…

if its just sharing the car, then there's already carpools? uber is a way for people without a cab license to operate a cab service?

Of course there are already carpools. Those generally imply that driver and passengers were already taking the same route, and they all usually know one another. Ridesharing services extend that to rides the driver would not otherwise be taking. Again, what's being shared is the car itself.

Re: The Anti-Uber Way of Disrupting Transportation, Politely

#60

Post by lazylizard »

baddox wrote: post #59
lazylizard wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if its just sharing the car, then there's already carpools? uber is a way for people without a cab license to operate a cab service?

Of course there are already carpools. Those generally imply that driver and passengers were already taking the same route, and they all usually know one another. Ridesharing services extend that to rides the driver would not otherwise be taking. Again, what's being shared is the car itself.

ah. so its like zipcar but for individual car owners.
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