Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Dan Salmon,
Oh, and of course one of the other protections is related to cost, so I'll put that separately here. The driver literally can't rip her off, aggressively demanding some arbitrary fare at the end. Drivers have no control over the charging at all, except in so far as starting and stopping the ride is concerned. They could drive off without stopping the ride, but when you get the bill you also see the route. If it goes to your house, and then drives all the way back to the city, request a fare review. Uber comes down on that shit hard. They will kick the driver out if that happens. And they'll cut the fare back to something more reasonable, or quite possibly refund the entire amount.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Dan Salmon,
Stepping outside the cost issue, the question i keep coming back to, is if my 14 year old daughter was catching a cab home at midnight would i prefer an uber driver or a reputable cab company, and without some sort of regulation there’s very little protection.
Yes, I’m hoping to deliberately avoid the cost issue here. I’d say that Uber made both the changes at the exact same time so as to muddy the debate. I focused entirely on the compliance drop here. Of course there’s plenty to say about the whole issue of cost, fairness to passengers and drivers, etc. And since compliance is a cost, a barrier to entry, it’s impossible to strictly separate the debates. I’ll get back to that one in a later post.
In terms of the safety of your daughter, there is the whole way Uber works to consider. Even with an uncompliant driver, she will still have all those protections. You’ll know who she was picked up by, where they went, how much it cost. She can still rate the driver down if they were a creep. But without the P Endorsement she can’t directly complain to the authorities, the way she could with, say, me. She only has to remember “bwilson1”, written in big letters on the endorsement itself, and then call the police, and they can find out who I was. If the complaint is of a very serious nature, having only Uber as recourse for tracking the driver down seems very suboptimal to me. They could refuse to give the information to the police. Probably, they wouldn’t. But they could. Especially if it was a very high profile crime like a rape, abduction, assault, etc.
But all this said, I think the way the protections offered by a standard non-Uber taxi service are actually a lot less, especially up until last week. A drunken traumatized passenger will quite likely not remember my unique identifier. They wouldn’t even know where to look, and if I was going to do something like that, I could always hide the P Endorsement just beforehand. So to that end, I think Ubers are much safer. This is backed up by hundreds and hundreds (no joke) of my passengers saying that directly to me. Drunk girls late at night are a major Uber demographic. I wouldn’t want to lose them – it’s one of the best parts of the service that it’s made the world a slightly safer place for them.
ETA: Oh, you edited out your post. I hope I answered your revised question here anyway?
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I’m surprised they’d want to bugger this up, but maybe they’re propertarians and not happy unless fighting the evil guvmint..
Yeah, it seems they were just biding their time, and our compliance honeymoon is over. I doubt they did it without a conscious plan. It's not like this is the first place any of this has happened.
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Hard News: How the years flew by ..., in reply to Rich of Observationz,
which just as the Reserve Bank is mandated to control general inflation, is expected to manage house prices: for instance to target a 1% annual drop for the next 10 years.
That would never happen!! No way would that get voted in by anyone who already owns a house. But it could be mandated to keep the inflation down, just like with all other inflation. Hell even if it the rules just changed so that it was counted as inflation, that would do the job. Because it bloody well is inflation, and it's extremely important inflation because it's on something that everyone needs, and forms the biggest part of their life's expenses, by far.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The cops could bust every illegal Uber driver without leaving the warmth of their office, which must be an attractive prospect.
You're talking about Uber giving them a list of their illegal drivers, and a list of every trip they do? Ain't gonna happen by Uber's choice. I have no idea how the police or anyone could force them to do that.
If Uber were to “play nicely”, there’s actually no reason why they shouldn’t be able to validate drivers and process issuing P endorsements themselves, just as the AA and VTNZ are franchised to process driving licenses
For sure. And even short of that, there's no reason that Uber could not hold the Transport Service License (TSL) which every driver must operate under. We are forced to either get our own one, which cost about another $400, another test, another wait for police checking, and then we carry the risk of getting fined as a TSL holder as well as a driver. Or we can operate under another party's TSL, and they can take a cut. This is what I do. Uber is saying that their drivers no longer need to operate under a TSL (also totally contrary to the law). The small group of guys who have been offering their TSL for a cut had a business model that was seeing them signing up literally hundreds of drivers. They were doing well, and IMHO, they offered a pretty good service for the money - training, mentoring, legal protection. It is only because of the existence of these guys that we're even in the prototypical phases of organizing ourselves as a group. They built the Facebook pages, organized the people, made sure the payments were all on time, trained us all, talked us into Ubering, etc. Now Uber has literally just shafted them. They're expendable assets that just got expended.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
IANAL, but isn’t Uber, by encouraging people to drive without a P endorsement, itself a party to each offence?
This is the discussion I was most hoping would erupt here. IANAL too. But there are plenty heaps of lawyers who read here....please comment!!
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I reckon that if you want to be a professional driver and carry passengers, you should need to do an advanced driving test and some form of local knowledge test – not London taxi standards, but knowing local landmarks, motorways, etc.
Yes, area knowledge, which used to be mandatory for taxis. Part of the review I linked to above is dropping that, on account of the rise of good navigation systems having made it less necessary. I think they've got a point.
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Hard News: How the years flew by ..., in reply to Luke Williamson,
Oh and, BTW, what is the answer cos I'm not quite smart enough to work it out.
This is the trillion dollar question.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Russell Brown,
Would that affect my rating as a rider?
No. Cancelled trips affect neither party's ratings. They typically involve higher cost for Uber, though, because a support person has to try to work out what happened and take some action. Emails have to be written, responded to. Manual changes to charges often result. Any rider that gets cancelled on too much could just be dropped as too expensive.
The other way, downrating the driver but taking the ride anyway, could result in revenge downrating. But the chances of this are exceedingly small, because the driver has to rate you immediately, whereas you can rate them at any time after the trip. We generally don't know who downrated us. So for the driver to downrate you, they'd have to think you were going to downrate them in the first place. If they give a downrating less than 4, they have to give a reason, and "I think the customer was pissed off I was totally non-compliant to the law" is not one of the reasons in the pick-list.
And also: is there anyway I can choose my driver? You know, maybe I’m prepared to wait for that driver I like…
I get asked this all the time. The answer is no, and yes. There is no way in the app to do it. But you could call the driver up, and ask them to come to your location, before you book them. Then they will be the closest, and will get the booking. But this is not really practical, unless you have a list of like 50 drivers you'd like, and are prepared to call/text, because there's no guarantee they're near you, or even working at the time. I've had my number requested by at least a dozen passengers. To date, I've never received a single follow up request for my services. The impracticality of the suggestion probably dawns on them when it comes time to book me and they realize I could be anywhere in the city at the time, and really, the reason they're using Uber is because of the app, not so they can go back to having to make phone calls to a driver service. Especially not a driver service with only one driver in it.
It's definitely an obvious enhancement that could have been implemented, the "preferred driver" list that each passenger could build up as time passes. I think it would work well, you'd get an ongoing relationship with your Uber driver (or already have one, and want to help out a friend). But it's all complexity in the app, and the matching algorithm (which is literally to offer the job to the nearest driver first, then the next nearest, etc).
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Nothing to do with the actual driver but definitely soured the whole experience.
I can't say I'm a fan of it myself. Mostly because it sours the experience, but also because the surge pricing is very weak information on how to maximize earnings. The idea is to encourage drivers to the areas of high demand. At that, it works extremely well. So well that it's barely worth doing at all, because the surge ends, and you drove there for nothing. It's the only indication of demand we get, and it's only an indicator - the surge is some function of the supply and the demand. So the outer suburbs can surge, on account of there being a few people wanting a ride, and no drivers out there. It's definitely not worth driving out to those areas. So it ends up being pot luck that the driver is in the area right on a surge, with someone desperate enough to pay the surge price on a long trip.
Far better information to us would simply be volume. A little sparkle, or a perhaps a fading alpha-blended blob, for every booking made. Demand doesn't have to be exceeding supply for driving to be profitable. Meeting demand is fine. I'd rather meet demand and be constantly busy than hanging out for hours to surge some customer and piss them off.