Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
Gah, math fail. 6,000 * $500/week = $3,000,000/week in fares for Uber. They take 20-28% so it's only $600,000 - $840,000 per week. So $93,000 doesn't even represent a single day of their operation.
I can't know if $500/week is accurate. I just base that on the idea of doing part time for around 10-20 hours/week. The pattern of work Uber encourages is pretty much to work on Friday and Saturday night, right through. Any other time the demand is not high enough to make it worth while, so they argue that you can't expect to make a full time job out of it. Of course that just encourages people for whom it is their only job, or who have another job as well, to do dangerously long hours.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Uber cars appear to carrying now more passengers than taxis.
Very hard to be sure about that. It looks that way to me, but they might not be taking that much away from taxis, it may be that demand massively increased due to the lower prices. I find it hard to believe there is no impact, but when it comes to actual revenues from the taxi people I've spoken to that have access to statistics rather than anecdotes, they seem to feel the impact is surprisingly small.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
The last couple of days I have done a drive throughthe CBD of Auckland for several hours in business hours and have noted the increase of Uber cars in the area.
Yes, it's very likely. It's a pity that the journo in the article you link to didn't pick up on my suggestion to estimate the number of totally non-compliant drivers as the number of letters of warning that NZTA issued, and instead based his number on my guess which was in turn based on the number of letters at the last time I'd heard about it, many months ago. Since they've now issued over 4,000 letters, this is the best guess at the number of non-compliant ones, and the compliant ones are probably a further 1,000-2,000.
So my best guess now is that there's 5-6,000 Uber drivers in NZ, and the ratio of completely illegal to as-compliant-as-an-uber-driver-can-be is somewhere between 3:1 and 5:1.
6,000 drivers making $500/week means Uber is collecting $300,000 in fares every week. So you're right, I don't think enforcement is making an impression at all. Clearly not, because since all this enforcement began the number of Uber drivers has roughly tripled, and most of the new adds are zero compliance.
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Speaker: Shenzen's hire-bike explosion, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Heh...love it. We should have those, whether they're viable or not, just on account of the kookiness.
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Classic. I love how it doesn't even appear to have an electric drive train. It's the magic solution to traffic, rather like how Uber has solved the commuter problem using cars, because Ubers turn up by digital magic.
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Speaker: Shenzen's hire-bike explosion, in reply to Moz,
Environmentally those exact trips are not as good as a bus, but it's better than taxis and much better for the passengers
For sure. I'm more interested in whether it's a viable business model in Auckland, if for some percentage (call it x) of the extraordinarily cheap bike trips, there's also effectively a bus trip rounding up the bike. Hence my point about Auckland's geography - if it were flat then the bikes would distribute around where people wanted to go and x would be small. In Auckland you have to also factor in whether people are prepared to expend a lot of physical energy getting there. Also, having expended that, whether they might not prefer to then use all that potential energy back up again with a zero effort ride back down the hill. This is particularly compelling when our bus/train/ferry nexus is at the bottom of town. In Auckland, x could approach 100%.
Put it this way, If I were a tourist using these bikes in Auckland, I would hire the bike on K-Rd and meander downhill exploring. Once at the bottom of the hill, if for some reason I actually had to get back to higher altitude, at that point it would be much less effort to walk it, and catching a bus would be compelling if I could not be bothered.
If I hired it at the bottom of town, it would most likely only be to go along the waterfront. Considering that westerly is the predominant wind, this makes for a pleasant ride along Tamaki Drive as far as you want to go, then turning around and realizing that you're going to fight a headwind all the way back to the city, along what is a well used bus route. I can see a lot of these bikes strewn variously along Tamaki Drive.
Presumably a serious business would have to price accordingly. A single bike left at St Heliers requires a 10-20 km trip in a van to redistribute it somewhere more useful.
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TBH, I think sprawl is less our issue than hills. But electric drive trains as a solution change the dynamic massively, since the bikes need to find their way to charging stations periodically.
One part I don't understand about this model, btw, is how the bikes get distributed to where they are wanted. If everyone wants to go everywhere all the time then I guess it works itself out. But I'd be much keener on hiring a bike on K-Rd and leaving it locked up at Downtown than the other way around. Wouldn't the bikes find themselves at the bottom of valleys all the time?
Presumably you can build it into the points system? Gain points by leaving the bike at higher elevation than you found it. Gain points by bringing it from some remote location to a busy one?
Further presumably, they actually have to pay people on a daily basis to redistribute the bikes to where they are most wanted. A big trailer going around during the night and returning all the bikes to hills and ridges, and collecting them from remote locations and valleys where they've just been left.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
If Uber has decreased the volume of Taxi work by 80% then why did the heads of Corporate Cabs and the Taxi Federation tell me they could barely detect the effect of Uber, and Blue Bubble say they are down maybe 10%? If you give me a link to some credible figures…. but the way they were telling it, it seems that Uber has either created a market out of people who would usually just not use it, or it’s coming entirely out of the small chains and individuals. From whom the evidence is only ever anecdotal.
Which doesn't make it right, what they are doing.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
in the meantime all the poeple not playing the game coreectly are fucking it for the operators who do play correctly
I'm not sure if that's entirely true. If by the "operators who do play correctly" you mean the taxi industry generally, then the impact of Uber would seem to barely have been felt. It would seem revenues are barely down at all. If you meant "the drivers who did go through as much compliance as possible within Uber" then yes, the uncompliant Uber drivers did have a direct impact on them, competing directly in the same exact market, Uber customers. Their very existence was timed to coincide exactly with the pricing drops.
But the way that Uber signs people up, those drivers could certainly be argued to not even really be aware of how much they're breaking the law. It's a pretty powerful sign up machine, which tells outright and barefaced lies through the mouths of the children it has working for it. This is not something most people would expect when being induced to work for a corporation that is being openly tolerated and indeed encouraged by the elected government. The first hint many ever get is when the letter from NZTA triggered by the vetting process warns them of the illegality of driving without the requisite licenses. But if they go to Uber to confront them with this letter, more barefaced lies are told about how they're working with the government on changing the grey areas of the law and that Uber will support them 100%. 100% support would be to not lie about this in the first place and pay for the drivers to have the right compliances if they really need drivers so badly. Uber's 100% support is to deny even operating a transport operation in NZ.
So this argument that the only way to deal with Uber is to just turn away from them doesn't convince me. They have to be confronted directly. It's a can of worms that will only open from the inside. Those on the outside are both powerless and/or unwilling to do a damned thing.
That's quite aside from my own personal interest in helping the MAIN group who are actually victims in all of this. The drivers themselves are the biggest victims here. The riders aren't - they get cheap rides and love it. Maybe one day one of them will get killed, but that happens in taxis too. Taxi drivers have hardly been affected, the way the heads of the industry told it to me. But drivers who were compliant are forced to compete directly and internally with those who aren't, and were mostly signed up more than 8 months ago and were never warned that the expense they went to would lead to this. The drivers who are not compliant are running huge risks of strong legal consequences. And both groups are poorly paid and worked hard, providing a service that is constantly being rated by riders as much higher than taxis.
It takes time to break something like this apart. Time, energy, effort and money. Not lazily withdrawing and condemning the efforts of others from behind an anonymous internet handle.
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Hard News: Public Address founder…, in reply to nzlemming,
I didn't even vote because baby boomers.