Posts by BenWilson
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I do agree, though, that downrating a disabled passenger is very unfair. That's what anonymous rating systems are like. They're a system that allows prejudice free reign to coexist with genuine grievances.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Elpie,
Yet another unintended consequence of a rating system. Presumably Uber gives him a free pass to have a low rating because of his special needs?
I doubt I'd use Uber if I was disabled, although the price is probably as compelling for anyone else. Regular taxi services are much better at dealing with exceptions like this. Ubering really is predicated around fitting into a plain vanilla service and being quick about it. They're getting paid stuff all. The justification is the amazing efficiency. The flipside of that is it requires passengers to also be efficient for the service to be even barely viable. So I'm not surprised a wheelchair bound passenger is not liked. When your job is barely a living, it sure feels rich when people expect you to run it like a charity.
The sad thing is that there are so few disabled passengers that it could have been a really easy win for Uber to just give them an extra pump by paying the driver a little bit more. Instead, their uberASSIST service routinely just costs the drivers money. But this failing isn't hung on Uber, because their marketing machine is the bomb, and drivers are easy pariahs. One step up from beneficiaries, it would seem.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Don’t know. I’ve never given a passenger anything less than a 5. I probably should have written about that. There is a huge inequity in the fact that a driver has to rate the passenger immediately before they can even be available for other trips. Very often the passenger will sit there watching you doing it.
But the passengers can rate you any time they like. Up to months later. So even if they don’t watch you, if they see their rating go down an hour later, guess what they’re likely to do? Downrate you. And guess who that little battle hurts more? Ask Sreeman.
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If you're paying $2500 for the bike, paying for regular maintenance just makes sense. Of course minor tweaks can be done by oneself, tyres changed etc. But this thing is slotting into the space where a car usually goes, and it should receive increased diligence and professional care. You'll be doing big miles (for a bike) on it, and at high average speeds (for a bike). It's important that it's kept in good shape, considering just how vulnerable cyclists are.
The economics to compare with are not those of a bicycle, they're those of a motor scooter. Would you try to fix the brakes or electrics on your scooter yourself? Not if it seemed difficult. This is your workhorse and you need it going tomorrow. You need it to pass muster at WOF time.
Part of the joy of a bike is it’s so simple* that there just isn’t that much that goes wrong – add the electric assist and that simplicity starts to decline.
This was quite a bit of why I'm back on pushbikes. I just don't find 10km a trip bad enough to endure the headache of thinking about batteries, and the few hundy that the bike is now worth means I don't have to make up reasons to ride it to get my money's worth.
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As a side note, riders would also appear to have a very different standard as well. Here’s a 3.73 happily still riding.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Ubers intentions around this it only a way of using there non compliant drivers and as we know they are already using non compilant drivers in the commerical sector.
The guy used in the link Sacha gave above, who appeared in a televized interview in which Uber announced its amazing carpooling service tells me that he actually never has used the feature to actually commute, despite it having been in place for many months now. All it is is the ability of drivers to set a preferred destination twice a day. The rider still pays full fare, so it's not carpooling at all. The rider is actually unaware of anything different.
Which is why it won't actually be used for commuting. Commuting during rush hour involves riding during the worst surges of the day - the Uber will be as expensive as a normal taxi. Nice for the driver, who is getting both a trip to somewhere they want to go, and being paid above the odds for it. But not so good for the rider. Which is why it's not getting used.
Also amusing in the television interview: You can clearly see that the car is non compliant, it doesn't have the necessary stickers in the window, and when he does his staged trip for the camera, the P Endorsement is nowhere in sight.
But we still get a rare interview with Richard Menzies claiming that this service has big uptake in other cities. Of course it does, it's a feature for the drivers, they might as well have a go. Whether they actually get any real use out of it is unknown. It's been operating here for months anyway, and no driver I know of has found any joy from it. Even the guy in the featured article has told us that. I really don't see this feature saving us from Auckland's transport woes.
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Definitely seeing a lot more of these on the road, which is great. I e-biked for many years until finally finding I was generally peddle fit enough to just not need it any more. But that's a good thing, a great outcome from the technology, that it got me back on a bike at all. And that was with a very much lesser bike than what Russ is showing off here. Lead acid, brush motor. It was just enough to get me to the city and back and I'm a big guy, back then I'd have been 105kg.
This was also a second hander, that I picked up for $300. I think I sold it about 4-5 years later - for $300. Net cost to me was electricity and some tyres and brake pads, and I did replace the cog set because I wanted a different ratio setup - I was regularly carrying kids on it. Probably cost me $200 all up for 4-5 years of riding.
Since then it's been my $700 brand new commuter bike. But I'm not saying that's better, it just works better for me now. These e-bikes are a great solution for getting people who would otherwise not be cycling out there, and that's good for all cyclists.
Motions Rd??? That's extreme. I doubt I could get all the way up that on my pushbike at all. Not without being absolutely buggered. I did go down it on my electric once, and made my all time top speed on a bicycle, 70km/h.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Under the new regs the maxium you can earn under this pooling thing with one pax on board will only be 36 cents per Km
Yup, the concept is not "earning", I think, but "saving'. So the maximum you can save from one passenger is 36c/km. With 3 passengers, presumably you save 56c/km. It costs more than that to run a small passenger vehicle, so it's not earning, it's mitigated loss.
So if you're doing a 10km trip to the city (and back) every day, you could get maybe $11.20/day back in cost-sharing reimbursement for fully loading your car with other passengers. Since it's saving, I presume there is no tax to pay.
So given an hour commuting daily, you can "make" $11.20/hour for the trouble of picking up and dropping off 3-6 people (they might be different people on the way home) all of whom have to be in your car for an hour. Quite possibly complete random strangers. Presumably they will rate you on your service. For them, the commute will also cost $11.20, which is incredibly cheap for a door to door service giving them 20km of riding. You'd think they'd automatically give you a high rating. But, of course, the Uber experience tells us otherwise. In fact, they would judge you arbitrarily harshly, possibly even more harshly than they would judge someone getting "paid" a lot more for the same thing.
I'm not counting all the ticket clipping for Uber in this. There never ever has been any justification for them taking a percentage of driver fares, since longer rides cost them nothing more than shorter ones. But if they're the only people in the market, they can (and will) rip it as hard as they can get away with.
Hopefully they won't be the only ones in the market, though.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
It's competing with a bus. Gut feeling is that the numbers don't stack up. Yes it would be great for the owner of the car, but none of the other passengers. They would have to charge a lot less to outcompete a bus service.
I'd guess similar economics are part of why carpooling doesn't already trump buses. But we'll see.
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I don't quite follow how the guy in the article fits into the cost recovery model, though. Presumably he was actually getting paid for the rides at the normal rate - I'm not aware of any deal that Uber offers the trip at a carpool rate yet. Otherwise the downsides of carpooling for the non-drivers could be expected.
So he was getting regular Uber rides from people during rush hour who inexplicably took a full price Uber at the time when it surges the hardest, and goes the slowest, when it's the most difficult to get to passengers. You could fully expect to have to go backwards away from the city to pick up passengers.
Also he presumably has to sit there accepting trips that aren't to his destination in the morning, otherwise his rating will go through the floor and he'll get cut off. Also, if the passenger actually doesn't want to go to his destination, that's too bad. They changed their mind and want to go to the bus station - that's too bad for him. They didn't like his banter, downrated!
Also, there's no way someone paid the full compliance costs just to do commuter cost sharing on the regular Uber platform. So he probably doesn't realize that if he Ubers in the evening he's also probably breaking the driving work time laws. But one would need to keep a log book to even realize that.
