Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
Yes, I certainly don't want to ever convey the idea that NZTA is somehow on the side of Uber. They would seem to be exerting such powers as they have. Which would seem to be nowhere near enough, in this situation. They don't have the power to prosecute a company for violating the taxi/private hire service laws of the country when in a legal sense Uber disavows even being such a thing, and has no legal presence as such at all in this country. It operates entirely through proxies, and for the most part those proxies are the drivers themselves.
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I modeled in simulation what would be required to slip below the dreaded 4.5 from my own rating of 4.88. If the distribution that my rating must be based on is a "real" underlying distribution of what riders would think of my service then I have effectively a near zero chance of ever slipping below 4.5 from random variation. But anyone towards the bottom of the 4.5-5.0 range (which, you will note, rounds to 5, and is effectively synonymous with what "5 star service" actually means on even the most pernicious measure, let alone more sensible measures), has quite a high chance of losing their right to work just from the random variation that can happen in who they pick up. A few one stars in a row would do it. The driver could have one bad night where they were feeling not particularly pleased with passengers, and let it slip through the carefully erected mask of bonhomie/servitude, and bang, there goes their job.
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Or, as another driver put it: We give 5 star service for 1 star pay.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
For reference, btw, I know Arden, who is quoted in that article. He has the most extreme rating of any driver I've yet seen, in the low 4.9s. He drives a late model Skoda with heated leather seats, always details it before rides, provides water, mints, newspapers. Dresses in a suit, opens the door for every passenger. This is a guy who goes well beyond the extra mile in customer services. For this, he gets well below minimum wage. This is the level of exploitation that Uber have engineered.
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I just got quoted in the Newstalk ZB bulletin after calling in. Sounds like most of the callers rang in with the love-fest for Uber, expressing near unanimous disinterest in how much drivers were getting paid. Which goes a long way toward my own feeling that action coming from the direction of consumers is not going to lead to any changes at all. I do think that sharper users might be able to almost directly rid the roads of non-compliant drivers just using the pernicious rating system. It's a system literally designed only to punish, with the most extreme left skew I've ever seen in anything that could claim to be a distribution based on real world data. You literally have the entire range of driver ratings crammed in the 4.5-5.0 range, the whole curve. Which means it's extremely susceptible to outliers, and a committed and quite small rider base who consistently downrated non-compliant drivers could remove them from the road in quite a short amount of time.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
NZTA has been 100% consistent about all of this all along. Any time anyone calls, this is what they have been told.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
Presumably they are a long way further down the track of building a large association of drivers. If we did that here, it could easily be ignored at the moment. With 500-1000 drivers it might be a different matter.
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It's a bit of a worry if refusing to take a job driving illegally for Uber is now grounds for losing your benefit.
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Interesting turn. Now WINZ is taking jobseekers down to the Uber Green Light office (for obvious reasons they stopped calling it the Partners office) to get a job. I think this shit just got political.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
Sounds like a good idea. Carpooling is in some ways a better solution to real mass transport problems, which Uber have really only added to. I'd think carpooling would work for commuters, whereas the Uber model is better for people going drinking.
Apparently uberPOOL is an absolute nightmare for all involved, drivers and riders alike.