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.
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.
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.
The VC money that flowed into these drivers has essentially dried up as gig-economy startups push towards sustainability / profitability. As was predicted.
It’s a shame that Uber seems to be encouraging their drivers to get less fuel efficient vehicles. Given the number of Uber/Lyft miles driven a year we could save a lot of carbon if they incentivized hybrids or EVs
> 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.
This is an incredibly privileged statement. Uber is how many people put food on the table. Many of these people do not have a better option available.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.