
Uber protest gridlocks London - ewood
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-27799938
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jacquesm
The Streisand effect at work. I can see all those people thinking: these cabs
are blocking me, I must find that one company that still drives, what was it
called again?

Uber will be picking up a ton of business in London because of this. I imagine
some bottles are being uncorked at Uber HQ because of this spectacularly
stupid response. It's never clever to try to resolve your commercial disputes
by punishing your paying customers.

And technically it's not an 'Uber protest' but an 'Anti-Uber protest'.

~~~
tomp
I don't think their goal is to influence the _people_ ; rather, it's to
influence the _government_. I mean, it looks like the protests have _some_
power - after 3 tube strikes, the 4th was cancelled, I assume they made some
kind of a deal.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but there is no viable alternative for the tube, for taxis there is. It's
a nice illustration of cutting of the nose to spite the face.

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cushychicken
Cabbies here in Boston did a similar thing last month - circled the block
Uber's office was in honking and making a racket. The two foremost reactions I
got from it were, "It was impossible to get a cab in Boston that day", and
"Why would acting like disruptive children make me sympathize with you?"

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coherentpony
I'm interested to see how Uber will be regulated by the UK government.

Taxi companies are regulated for extremely good reasons. I know people sing
Uber's praises but regulations exist for good reasons. Some exist for bad
reasons too but they are largely there to protect people.

Would you get in a stranger's car?

And to preempt the downvoters: I'm not saying I don't want competition. I want
competition _and safety_ for the general public.

~~~
viraptor
> Would you get in a stranger's car?

Yes. And I do that when I get into any cab.

This is one argument I never understood. People providing taxi-like services
for other people need additional licenses for street safety - sure. But what
can be safer apart from that? The person inside could just as well have just
stolen the car. They are complete strangers.

~~~
michaelt
> This is one argument I never understood.

As I understand it, regulation of private hire vehicles is motivated by
regular rapes of attractive, young, drunk women on the way home from nights
out.

With that said, as long as Uber verifies that all drivers have the correct
vehicle and driver license and background checks [1] I don't see how they're
any different to Addison Lee and those.

[1] www.tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/become-a-private-hire-
licensee

~~~
viraptor
Should've added more context probably - I don't understand it in case of Uber
specifically, since it provides more information automatically than is
available in a standard cab. Specifically both you and the driver get GPS
tracked by the application and you get more info about the car/driver than in
case of a usual cab.

I'm assuming Uber does at least the standard background checks for new
employees.

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pdubs
_" Despite the protest Uber said it had seen the number of people downloading
its app increase by 850% compared to last Wednesday."_

Uber gets some free publicity it seems.

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bicubic
I think this is another sign that we need to start thinking about basic income
_now_. The cabbies are understandably pissed because they've invested a lot of
money into playing along with the cab companies and regulators. Additionally,
I have a feeling that a lot of these people are poor drivers with poor
language skills who wouldn't be able to compete with better people on Uber.

So what choice do they have but to protest and engage in rent seeking? If Uber
succeeds, they'll be jobless. At the same time, Uber is preferred by consumers
and as a society, we do want it to succeed and remove the need for taxi
drivers to exist.

I think the only answer is basic income, and I think that over the next
decade, more money will be spent on rent seeking to keep people in redundant
jobs than if we eliminated those jobs and used the same money to fund their
basic income.

~~~
ddalex
I don't get why Uber is better than taxi drivers - aren't they a taxi, as well
?

In London, they're cheaper than black cabs because they aren't regulated. If
they're taxi, they should be regulated - same regulation, or lack of, for all.

I don't get why you think Uber is not a taxi ?

~~~
bicubic
I don't think it's better, but the signs are that the typical consumer does.
If Uber wasn't perceived as better by consumers, it wouldn't be experiencing
the tremendous growth it is and it wouldn't be a threat to the cab industry.

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gedrap
>>>> Black cab driver Bernie Doyle, 68, said: "<..> I've been driving 42 years
and I'm not about to see my trade go down the pan."

And that is the problem, Mr Doyle. The world has changed a lot in 42 years.
But the cabs business didn't.

Haven't tried Uber in Manchester yet, but regular cabs are between "I just
want to get out" and "bearable". Driver is usually on the phone talking
foreign language, or if you are less lucky, always running on red lights,
especially when the demand is high. I don't want a royal treatment, no, but at
least some basic things. What I heard from friends about Uber, it doesn't have
those problems.

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Theodores
With public transport there is this concept of service, the service exists to
get people from A to B in a timely, affordable fashion. There are wider
benefits to society and the economy for doing this.

With this Uber protest and the way this battle is working out there has been
remarkably little discussion on how technology and tradition can be aligned to
move people from A to B more efficiently. It should be possible to have people
have a step change in service thanks to modern technology with cab drivers
able to profit more than they used to by being able to take more passengers.
We could also cut down on the amount of cabs rolling around looking for rides.

We actually need some strong leadership in London to cut a deal. A deal where
getting a cab is easier and cheaper for normal people, where taxi drivers make
more money than previously (and still get respect for doing the knowledge),
where the air quality is better and where tax revenue for London increases
too. This is a problem that can be solved. If government had any technical
competency then they would have seen this off a long time ago with their own
'uber' app, one where the 5% (or whatever it is that Uber get) goes straight
into government coffers as taxation. Such a public sector app - had it been
written - could have been shared with cities all over the world that are
having problems with Uber.

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mrfusion
So I checked out uber for the first time this week to see what all the fuss is
about, and it actually seems more expensive than a cab. Can anyone explain why
it's so popular?

Bonus points: why is it so expensive? It seems like most non-professional
drivers would be happy charging a lot list than a cab charges, especially if
it's somewhere you're going anyway.

~~~
pmorici
Which Uber service did you use? They have several you can select from though
some cities only have the original Uber, UberBlack. There is UberPOP, UberX,
UberBlack, UberSUV, UberVan, and UberLux.

UberX is the service that competes with cabs on price. Uber Black, SUV, VAN,
and Lux are comparable to calling a limo service. Uber Pop is a low cost
service offered outside of the US.

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infogulch
All the old monopolies are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st
century. Most of the problems they were needed for no longer even _exist_ in a
world with technology.

Whether they can warp the original regulations meant to protect consumers into
a superfluous protection racket to prop up their outdated, inefficient
business models is still up in the air.

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antihero
Why on earth wouldn't normal taxi regulations apply to Uber? Surely it should
be counted as essentially a cab company with a fancy app, and this would solve
all of these issues?

There seems to be a distinct lack of compassion for drivers who are basically
just trying to make enough money to feed their family - my dad was a cabbie
for a stint. The drivers themselves are not greedy fat-cats that are using the
regulations to hoard money.

The problem is, large companies have less overheads and thus can crush local
competition. Perhaps this is more efficient, but not necessarily ethical or
good in the long run - for instance take Tescos or Sainsburys. They've crushed
local competition which cannot compete on price (because of various unethical
tactics used in their supply chain which they can do due to being utterly
massive), so local competition has to raise prices or go bust, and residents
stop being able to afford their produce.

In fact, this is a great example of why capitalism isn't always great - it
makes the biggest, baddest kid in the playground able to do what they want and
tread on the little guys, and then everyone becomes stuck with them, resulting
in poorer produce, less consumer choice, and the destruction of family
businesses and trades.

It favours efficiency and ruthlessness, which aren't necessarily qualities
that are good for anyone except shareholders.

The counter-argument would be that if people cared enough about local
businesses, they'd support them, but when people are getting squeezed as they
are (and remember, large companies push wages down as much as possible because
they simply do not care about their workers), this becomes difficult or even
impossible - and remember, capitalism incentivises the most efficient,
cheapest option.

So go ahead, with the free market, allow ruthlessness and size to dominate,
enjoy a soulless, miserable world dominated by giants.

~~~
gedrap
That's just a guess, but maybe good lawyers combined with slow bureaucratic
processes?

~~~
antihero
I'm sure. And I'm not saying that the taxi companies are 100% in the right,
but there's a question of balance - fair competition versus the
careers/families that would lose out.

There are better, more ethical ways to do something.

~~~
gedrap
Yeah that's true. It's a bit like Industrial Revolution, when workers were
breaking and burning machines. Progress has a cost, and it's not completely
morally right in this case.

But drivers, companies and governments are picking the wrong fight. Even if
they shut down Uber, there will be more similar companies which will find
loopholes and etc. It's better to spend the energy, time and money on making
cabs more attractive and competitive. Because like I've said in other comment,
cabs haven't changed in the last decades, while everything else around us has
changed a lot in the last decade alone. Less than 10 years ago, a cellphone
playing MP3 was omg.

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Nursie
Strangely enough, this just seems to be a London thing. In Southampton we have
a variety of cab companies, they all use meters and a few of them have apps to
order them and track where the car is right now.

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codeulike
Actual title is 'London's anti-Uber taxi protest brings traffic to standstill'
\- in one place, for about an hour. That's a long way from 'gridlock'.

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adamio
They should be improving their service or reducing prices. If you want to
lose, protesting, blocking traffic, and eliminating service is how you do it.

~~~
Nursie
They can't. They have legal restrictions on how they have to operate which
Uber either don't have to obey or don't think they have to obey.

This is what the protest is about. Not just "OMG competition!"

~~~
stdgy
I don't think that is what these protests are about at all. For instance, in
France, the protest leaders have called on instituting required time-delays
for all Uber pickups(15 minutes). They've also called for a nationalized taxi
hailing application that would exclude Uber, and have called for Uber's app to
be disallowed from showing driver locations.

Similarly, Britain's protesters have demanded Uber to do away with fare
estimates.

Notice how these complaints aren't in the form of: Let us do what Uber is
doing. Rather, they take the form: Stop letting Uber do what it's doing. The
Taxi owners want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to continue to
protect their business models by placing artificial limits on competition, and
they seek to disallow novel technology that would make their fare structure
less opaque.

~~~
Nursie
The 'official' line I heard on Radio 4 this morning was that it was the uneven
playing field that had got them riled up, and that minicab operators were also
fuming because they had been restricted from operating in this way too,

But you're right, the individual cab drivers probably just want competition
outlawed.

>> they seek to disallow novel technology that would make their fare structure
less opaque.

FYI - In London the fare structure is not opaque, it's set out on a notice in
every Taxi and the meter is set up and sealed by TFL.

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neves
I Brazil I also spent 1h more to go to work due to an Uber Protest. They were
maybe 20 cabs, enough to stop a main street. I hate you guys!

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thecosas
Ummmmm [http://blog.uber.com/UberTAXI](http://blog.uber.com/UberTAXI)

