Posts by BenWilson
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Wicked, Rich, ta.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Excellent. Do you have any links on that? Keen to follow the progress, to see what's coming.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
but statute law always trumps a contract, or at least, that’s what I’ve been taught.
A way of saying you can't make contracts to break the law?
I don't know if blocking their credit card payments would be possible. The accounts are quite possibly not even held in NZ. But can the NZ banks be ordered not to process payments to specific offshore accounts? In which case only people using a foreign credit card could keep slipping under the radar.
But I'd think injuncting the business would mean that if it kept operating that all premises could be entered and anything there seized, and all staff held to the injunction. Even then, this might not stop Uber operating here, but it would hamper their ability to sign up drivers. But continuing to operate under those conditions is really, really asking for it.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Australia has pretty much killed the monopoly in the last month. Huge move on their part to legitimize Uber, although the devil will be in the details. If Uber is prepared to take the government here on over the mere $1500 or so in compliance costs per driver, I'll be pretty surprised if Ozzie betters that.
The problem there, as here, is that when the government finds under legal advice that they can't touch Uber, then there is no reason for Uber to comply to any law at all they don't like, no matter how minor.
The question in my mind is how it is that they can't touch Uber. It's quite a pathetic situation, really, that a company can essentially do business completely and utterly unimpeded by the law of the country in which they are doing it. I can't think of any other precedent for this, where the refusal to follow the simple rules of NZ has been met with such inertia at a high level.
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Hard News: Waterview: The giant up the road, in reply to M Thomas,
I think the proposed path leading to the bridge is a different one, and could be useful where the other is almost entirely scenic. It does not look like it's the trail beside the creek, but further up the ridgeline along the back of the Unitec campus.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
Unless current taxi companies lobby/pressure English, Joyce and Bridges as forcefully as Uber has done.
Which, of course, no local company has the power to do. For starters, any local company can be brutally punished for what Uber is doing – the legislation is designed for that, and it can and has been used that way in the past. But more importantly, Uber has huge resources and a willingness to litigate everything.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Yes, I don't have a problem with there being proposed changes coming. I have a problem with the softly-softly approach being applied inconsistently to favour only one company, whilst at the same time brutally targeting the actual workers for that company. It's hard to think of a more iniquitous way to approach this issue. Hurt the little guy, and all the law abiding rivals, and let the big multinational that pays no taxes get away with inciting massive scale violations of the law and profiting from that.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
That's a reasonable analysis. I'd go further and say that their only competitive advantage is that they've aggressively purchased market share. I don't think that's widely regarded to be a strategy that works on its own.
In so far as locking in drivers is concerned, they're worse than vulnerable. They have very much alienated their driver base, and the regulators in most countries that they operate, such that they may face higher barriers to entry than competitors would. Drivers in NZ are rushing to sign up with every other service they can, and Uber is only maintaining dominance by being the bigger player, by having got there first and bought customers.
Drivers have nothing at all to lose by signing up for alternative services. Zoomy has been particularly popular here. They have a ton of excess capacity, as far as I can tell.
Certainly Zoomy's promotion led to a surge in rides. Drivers signed up were reporting that they were getting around 1-2 Zoomy rides per shift. Enough to keep them running the service on their phone.
They'll probably live or die on whether they can get capital to just keep the race to the bottom price-war going. They have done that by wearing the cost themselves rather than passing it onto drivers so far. Can they sustain it?
If I were choosing to invest in one of the other as a kiwi who really likes the idea of the app based ride sourcing market, personally I'd be betting on one of the local alternatives. For ethical as well as financial reasons. Their model is basically the same as Uber's without the giant speculation into driverless technology (which again could be simply yanked from under them by competitors the moment it's actually ready, whichever century that happens in), and the massive alienation of regulators and drivers.
But all of them are vulnerable to the possibility of a driver funded cooperative open source model. These are already out there - and they could explode into the market blowing the rest away completely. We're talking about a not-for-profit model. This software is not rocket science at all. I'm envisaging something like the Apache web server or Drupal, but for app based ride sharing. A highly configurable base system that can be adapted to local needs for a comparatively small set up cost. Whoever writes it will have plenty of income from supporting the systems everywhere, without the massive need to take multinational corporate profits.
THAT would, IMHO, be an actual revolution in the model of work in this industry, and it could easily be adapted for many other parts of the gig economy. The devil is all in the detail. The only complication is how rides would be assigned out - on what basis? Offered to nearest? Or a bidding system? I envisage that a fair rating system both ways could make it an extremely competitive system. But it would need an organizational compliance gateway of some kind to ensure the minimal level is kept. In this country the detail that absolutely has to be sorted out is the damned law. The minister is endlessly promising that law changes are coming. A timetable for that, and detail about what has been firmed up for the changes. These things are 100% necessary to enable technological change. At the moment the limbo served up is helping no one but Uber, who don't give a crap about the law. It's coming across as deliberate organizational favoritism.
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Hard News: Waterview: The giant up the road, in reply to Russell Brown,
It is ugly. But I've got so used to ugly around Auckland it hardly seems exceptional :-).
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
how long before Uber tries that on?
There's no need. Ubers can't take street hails even if they wanted to. They don't carry any means to process payments other than the app, so unless the ride was booked in the app, the driver can't get paid for it. So you really, really don't want randoms jumping in the car. What if they won't get out, after stuffing around for a bit trying to work out how to book you as the closest driver? Offering to pay, and then expecting to do it with a credit card at the end of the trip, or with a $50 note? It's not worth the grief for drivers, unless they are actually also taxis. Which a great many Uber drivers/vehicles are.
But if they are a taxi, then they're allowed on a taxi stand. It wouldn't be Uber trying it on. And I'm yet to hear of the taxi driver that would prefer to use the Uber meter if someone could be put on the taxi meter, at twice the price.