
The frustration and quasi freedom of being an Uber driver - danso
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/uber-lyft-uberland-algorithms.html
======
SirensOfTitan
The interesting bit here is that the exertion of control: encouraging drivers
to accept rides more indiscriminately, constraints around car cleanliness and
modern make, and a rider centered experience are the elements that make Uber
bearable compared to Taxis.

I recently rode back from Newark Airport into New York with my girlfriend. We
were tired so just grabbed a NJ cab. We were given a ticket for a 51 flat
fare. What they didn’t say was that the fare didn’t include the toll or an
almost 6% credit card fee. The car we took was filled with trash and it took 5
minutes for the driver to get his trunk to close. It took us about 25 minutes
to get home and was about 100 altogether. Uber, Juno, or Lyft were flat about
60 not including tip. These kind of experiences were commonplace before Uber:
and drivers are lobbying to get the same kind of awful regulations that kept
taxis from competing toward better service everywhere.

I realize the issues with my perspective, I just don’t have much sympathy for
drivers who could easily stop driving if the economics don’t make sense for
them.

~~~
econner
I imagine a lot of drivers do not have the luxury to stop driving if it
doesn't make sense because Uber has encouraged many to take on financing
(either through Uber or elsewhere) for these luxury / more recent vehicles
that they would not otherwise have bought.

~~~
danso
When I first moved to Palo Alto in 2014, I didn't have my own car so I used
Uber several times a week for almost a year. I would have to estimate at least
a third of my UberX rides were in Priuses, and a few of my drivers had talked
about how they had financed their Prius through something related to Uber.
Since 2017, I honestly can't remember the last time I had an UberX driver with
a Prius -- it's almost always Honda Civics/Accords or similarly low-priced
vehicles.

It also seemed in 2014-2015 that far more of my drivers seemed happier, more
professional, and enthusiastic about talking how much money they made.
Nowadays I rarely if ever have that conversation.

~~~
ska
If I understand correctly they were making significantly better money in that
time frame.

~~~
swampthinker
The VC money that flowed into these drivers has essentially dried up as gig-
economy startups push towards sustainability / profitability. As was
predicted.

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metildaa
Ah, so Uber is using the same model as Amazon uses to deal with sellers?
Support is a brick wall that can only provide scripted responses, and
escalations go to an offline team you never get to talk to, plus they rarely
respond.

~~~
felix_nagaand
The trick to getting a human response off the script is to actually reply to
every communication as if someone wrote it.

------
radoslawc
Uber is definitely changing for worse when it comes to customer experience.
I've been using uber for a long time. Practically since it was available in
Poland, for a long time experience was quite good, last half year something
changed and cars are messier and cheaper (Uber Select in Fiat Tipo, come on),
but the worst and most infuriating thing is canceling rides. Here how it goes:
very often I'm traveling for short distances away from city centers. Drivers
don't see where's destination, only how far is pickup, so they pick up
everything, and when pickup is far, and driving distance not so much, they
either cancel (there's cancellation limit, from what one driver told me) or
just riding around (they have to start driving in some time after pickup) so
I'll cancel, this way they are getting money if I cancel after 2 minutes. To
put this into perspective: I had to go to some meeting, it took me 47 minutes
to get a ride, 4 drivers cancelled before I got one, that btw said is riding
as hobby, because he likes to talk with people. And doesn't matter if it's
UberX or Uber Select, same thing happens.

~~~
icebraining
You can request a refund when you're forced to cancel. I've never had one
denied.

~~~
alex__c
Sure you can, but their point is valid: you don't care about the money, you
care about getting a damn car ASAP.

------
village-idiot
One thing that has really stood out to me is that we need to clamp down on
companies outsourcing risk and cost by declaring what are actually employees
as “independent contractors”, including Uber and Lyft.

Story time: my car was hit by a bike delivery guy. Not my fault, and the
bicyclist was thankfully ok. When we called the company he worked for, their
response was basically “he’s an independent contractor, not our problem”.

Really? An “independent” contractor working how many hours a week with a
company branded bike? Managed by the company? At this point companies are just
blatantly dodging employment law, and that needs to stop.

------
ape4
Freedom until you offend a drunk rider who gives you a 1 star rating.

~~~
sanarothe
The shittiness of their system goes both ways -- It's not fun running a couple
blocks down the road trying to get to an uber that won't drive to you, only to
have them cancel and collect the $5.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
You get that money back if you contest it, which obviously isn’t ideal, but
it’s not like there’s no recourse.

Lyft I noticed has some decent algorithms to detect obviously bad behavior.
One recent ride I called just started driving the opposite way entirely and it
allowed me to cancel with no fee. So Lyft at least has a few ways to detect
when a driver is obviously acting in bad faith.

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kerng
What articles like this seem to miss is how good/bad the old cab system is in
comparison. I would be curious to get that full vertical compared, also what
changed for customers.

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ilaksh
What will happen to drivers when self-driving cars roll out?

In the meantime there is a long shot of a way to improve this type of thing.
Which is to replace proprietary centralized platforms like Uber with open
decentralized platforms that would allow multiple providers to share a common
market and infrastructure and still compete. That would give drivers the
ability to choose the nicer company but still have the large market.

~~~
raverbashing
Self-driving cars is Uber's end game

~~~
toomuchtodo
Uber will exhaust its financing before self-driving cars arrive.

~~~
village-idiot
Depends on the market.

For the pedestrian heavy cities with inclement weather (New York, Chicago),
you are probably right. For the car-heavy cities that never rain or snow (LA,
Phoenix), they’ll probably make it.

------
zackmorris
Required reading for all future AI headlines:

[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

------
frgtpsswrdlame
interesting write up that provoked a lot of thoughts in me.

>So there’s the issue of opacity, not necessarily transparency but what’s
happening across the system because drivers have their own experiences,
compared to the God view that Uber has to see what’s happening with the whole
system.

This makes me think of Foucault's panopticon. Uber is at the center always
looking in, but your view is restricted.

>To any queries that didn’t have a ready-set template response, drivers would
just be hitting their head against a wall trying to remedy missing wages or
trying not to get matched with a harassing passenger again, and so it’s not
bad that you have an electronic system for responding to driver inquiries and
managing your workforce. The problem is can they be confident that they will
be treated fairly when they do face challenges?

I see a connection here to Hirschman's _Exit, Voice and Loyalty._ Modern
corporations find Voice to be quite annoying so they're attempting to
completely cut it. Is a world where your only options are Exit and Loyalty
actually going to be better? It doesn't seem so to me.

>There’s no actual reason for that. But … is freedom and flexibility real? It
implies a certain kind of partnership, it’s attached to rhetoric about drivers
being entrepreneurs, and at the end of the day Uber has the power to
unilaterally control the rates at which they earn and could cut them sometimes
or even raise them. Drivers can only negotiate for a lower fare, not a higher
one. Uber constantly experiments with their pay with different features, and
they can’t build a client list and build a business. There are limits on the
kinds of freedom that is implied when it is paired with rhetoric about
entrepreneurship.

And this makes me think of Byung Chul-Han:

 _Neoliberalism forms a free entrepreneur out of the oppressed worker, an
entrepreneur of himself. Everyone is a self-exploited worker of his own
enterprise. Everyone is master and servant in one person. The class struggle
is also changed into an inner struggle with oneself. Whoever falls today
accuses himself and is ashamed. One problematicizes oneself instead of
society._

\---

Uber is so interesting because it represents one of the starkest
representations of the society we actually live in. Uber's employees are
'free' in the ways we have been taught that being 'free' matters. But it
becomes harder and harder to actually say they are free. Our language is
failing our conception of what actually matters and it becomes obvious that
Uber drivers live in a system which is exerting massive amounts of coercion on
them all the time. Apologies for the disconnectedness of my comment.

~~~
jld
Thanks for this. I have been thinking about getting an academic yet beginners
education in neoliberalism. Can you suggest a good primer?

~~~
danharaj
Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown

~~~
teachrdan
_Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism 's Stealth Revolution_

 __Summary __

 __Tracing neoliberalism 's devastating erosions of democratic principles,
practices, and cultures. __

Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in
jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the
image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the
constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the
Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos
disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the
mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty
submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves
into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal
democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic
dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal
reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises
to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law,
political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common
sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it
must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-
demos](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos)

