Lyft vs Uber: which is less scummy?

[Cordeos]

They are the most terrifying form of robot to me. As bad as people are, I trust them as drivers more than as system designers.

 

Humans are the cause of ~90% of car crashes. 

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/12/human-error-cause-vehicle-crashes

 

Compared to: Urmson said that over 1.7 million miles of driving had resulted in only "light damage" and "no injuries". Google said each of the incidents was the fault of a human driver, and that "minor fender benders" were usually involved due to another driver rear-ending the car.

 

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/12/google-self-driving-cars-accidents

 

That's a problem with capitalism, not a problem with self-driving cars.

So much this!

 

 

I take Lyfts because they show up when I want them, they get me where I'm going and they LET YOU TIP OVER THE COST OF THE SERVICE. Which afaik, Uber does NOT let you do so I always tip my Lyft driver a ton. I hate dealing with taxis who also don't take cards since I usually don't carry cash.

 

One Lyft driver I had said Uber was taking a cut of his tips.

[JonCole]

Well, "worst thing to happen to the [car driving] labor market" is a little dramatic. Undoubtedly a self-driving car business will create/replace many jobs due to the cost of administering such a program, lobbying, regulation, maintenance, support (phone, whatever), etc. I imagine it won't be a 1:1 replacement, but it could be pro-labor in some non-obvious ways.

[Twig]

 

I take Lyfts because they show up when I want them, they get me where I'm going and they LET YOU TIP OVER THE COST OF THE SERVICE. Which afaik, Uber does NOT let you do so I always tip my Lyft driver a ton. I hate dealing with taxis who also don't take cards since I usually don't carry cash.

 

Uber does let you tip, but drivers are not allowed to solicit them, and it's only cash. Not that that matters to you, since, as you said, you don't carry cash, but I figured it's worth pointing out.

 

I think I will start using Lyft now, though, precisely because of the tip thing. I mean I hate, absolutely detest, and fucking despise tipping... but this is America and I know people in tipping-industries get underpaid otherwise... As much as I hate tipping, I hate feeling guilty about not tipping even more. I actually tend to tip pretty well, unless the service absolutely sucks. Most people laugh at me when they see how much I tip. ): Well f u 2 buddy!

 

 

One Lyft driver I had said Uber was taking a cut of his tips.

 

That honestly sounds like some shenanigans to me. How would Uber even know who's getting tipped? It's all cash! The app just straight up doesn't support it.

 

Actually now that I think about it I'm an idiot and it probably all has to be reported for tax purposes, doesn't it? So that's how Uber would know.

[Cordeos]

That honestly sounds like some shenanigans to me. How would Uber even know who's getting tipped? It's all cash! The app just straight up doesn't support it.

 

Actually now that I think about it I'm an idiot and it probably all has to be reported for tax purposes, doesn't it? So that's how Uber would know.

 

Tips are supposed to be reported, but its easy not to. I am not 100% sure what he meant. I thought Uber had tip functionality in the app like Lyft, but I guess they don't. He could have been lying, in any event he was no longer doing Uber. 

[SuperBiasedMan]

Humans are the cause of ~90% of car crashes. 

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/12/human-error-cause-vehicle-crashes

 

Compared to: Urmson said that over 1.7 million miles of driving had resulted in only "light damage" and "no injuries". Google said each of the incidents was the fault of a human driver, and that "minor fender benders" were usually involved due to another driver rear-ending the car.

 

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/12/google-self-driving-cars-accidents

My concern is not the safety, but the idea that a company/a few companies get to be in control of how the cars drive. This thread is not a glowing review of a business creating a system for people.

 

Tips are supposed to be reported, but its easy not to. I am not 100% sure what he meant. I thought Uber had tip functionality in the app like Lyft, but I guess they don't. He could have been lying, in any event he was no longer doing Uber. 

The system may have also changed since the driver quit.

[Mangela Lansbury]

My concern is not the safety, but the idea that a company/a few companies get to be in control of how the cars drive. This thread is not a glowing review of a business creating a system for people.

 

A scarier proposition is that Uber doesn't want to stop with cars. Uber wants to be the travel company. They want to do it all.

 

Their surge pricing theory is predatory. They had an ad campaign that basically said, "Hey, if your driver is an attractive lady, maybe she's a hooker! Ask and find out!" They have no problem with people who say and do truly terrible things in the name of the company, often just suspending them for a brief period or moving them to a less public-facing role for a while. Uber is awful, and they want to get rid of the marginalized workforce they already prey/rely on, replacing them with robots and furthering their takeover of every kind of travel.

 

(I don't think Uber will ever be the end-all, be-all of travel, but when digital archaeologists uncover this forum post in 400 years, they might be assassinated by Uber's History Reassessment Team before they can release their findings to the public)

[JonCole]

I have really mixed feelings about surge pricing. I know that most of the population thinks that it's predatory, but it makes sense from a supply-demand perspective. But it definitely does feel icky. There was a recent Planet Money episode about a similar issue, starting off with a story in which some Coke executive proposed that vending machines would change price based on time of day (demand goes up when temperature goes up, so should price in order for there to be adequate supply for sufficiently demanding customers) -

 

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/17/415287577/episode-633-the-birth-and-death-of-the-price-tag

 

Basically, I don't know why it feels so bad when price adjusts for demand. And I don't know why we tolerate it for some items versus others.

[Professor Video Games]

A fun one:

 

http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/uber-fake-ride-requests-lyft/index.html

[Twig]

Honestly I have significantly fewer problems with their financial/pricing approach than I do with the way they treat People. The former is just shit that happens in every industry all the time, as unfortunate as that is, but the latter is gross manipulative bullshit that I can't really tolerate (and it seems like they're getting worse and worse and worse about it - it wasn't nearly this bad when I last researched this junk).

 

Bleh.

 

But to touch back on self-driving cars: In my opinion, transportation should just be something that's easily and cheaply available to anyone, and I think self-driving cars can provide that service fairly easily. I mean, it'll take work, so maybe "easily" isn't the right word. It's a somewhat-distant future kind of thing, but it's a future that's approaching little by little and will definitely happen. And I think that's good. There is public transportation, of course, but in a lot of cities (especially in America!!) it's just absolute garbage (see where I currently live, Dallas).

[Mangela Lansbury]

I have really mixed feelings about surge pricing. I know that most of the population thinks that it's predatory, but it makes sense from a supply-demand perspective. But it definitely does feel icky. There was a recent Planet Money episode about a similar issue, starting off with a story in which some Coke executive proposed that vending machines would change price based on time of day (demand goes up when temperature goes up, so should price in order for there to be adequate supply for sufficiently demanding customers) -

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/17/415287577/episode-633-the-birth-and-death-of-the-price-tag

Basically, I don't know why it feels so bad when price adjusts for demand. And I don't know why we tolerate it for some items versus others.

We tolerate it in some things, like gas, because the people who force it on us have so much money and power that we can't really do anything about it. Gas prices are based on oil futures, and futures trading is pretty much the exclusive trade of the very wealthy, and it's one of the more complex financial markets. Prior with little money and power have no say on it whatsoever.

In Atlanta, they had surge pricing for converted HOV lanes. You could use them for a few cents a mile at 3am or a few dollars a mile during rush hour. People have a say in that predatory practice because of politics, so it went away.

The big problem with applying supply and demand to something like cabs is that the supply deficiency is artificial. They are a single service and could surge their staffing to meet demand instead of putting the onus on the consumer, but they don't because they treat their work force like shit and taking that kind of logistics on themselves would increase their overhead and probably mean them paying their workforce more.

 

EDIT: Also, the latest series from Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything, Instaserfs, was about a guy in San Francisco trying to make things work by taking part in the sharing economy (Uber, Lyft, etc.). It was interesting and people should listen to it if that kind of thing interests them!

[JonCole]

Calling the supply artificial seems disingenuous to me for the reasons you mention; while it's possible to adjust supply by hiring more drivers, the overhead and logistics that you mention aren't trivial and I don't think it's unreasonable for a company to have a cap on their overall scope. I think that there's probably a medium to be found, because I don't think that adjusting price for demand is inherently a bitter pill to swallow. It's mostly when we see the 300%+ bumps that put a single trip to $30+ that we really get angry about it.

 

There's also weird price thresholds that we irrationally want companies to adhere to that also piss us off - examples including the cost of food/drinks going up and manufacturers reducing the portion size, aka a Coke bottle getting smaller to stay at $1 rather than increasing price over the $1 threshold. I feel like this plays a part in taxi-analogous services; paying anything more than $10 or so will just feel wrong regardless of how justified the increased price is.

[Professor Video Games]

In Atlanta, they had surge pricing for converted HOV lanes. You could use them for a few cents a mile at 3am or a few dollars a mile during rush hour. People have a say in that predatory practice because of politics, so it went away.

 

This still exists and they are actually expanding it.

[Badfinger]

I think the first couple of comments on that Planet Money drive really hard at why we feel bad about some prices changing and not about others. With the example of the Coke changing cost at different times of day for fixed but seemingly arbitrary reasons, we get upset because we have no say in that whereas if you go to buy a coke right now you have already mentally agreed to the fixed cost of it before you plunk down money. Even if the rising and falling costs match demand and are what the market will bear, it is not what every individual will bear but there's no one to haggle with. If the vending machine is setting the price, you can't offset the guy who always wants to pay $1 and is willing to spend his time bargaining with the guy who just wants a damn Coke and will pay $5 to not be bothered, or vice versa from the consumer's perspective.

[Mangela Lansbury]

This still exists and they are actually expanding it.

 

haha oh wow

 

They had just put it on hold when I moved

[Twig]

I will say that a taxi from my workplace to my homeplace is about 18 on average (with tip) across three different trips, whereas an Uber is 7 bucks TOPS without tip, which they discourage.

 

Which is an insane difference! I think 7 bucks feels too cheap, and it's usually 5-6. I pay 5 bucks for a daily pass on public transportation (actually I pay 80 for a monthly pass, but let's assume I just need one trip). Uber wins in terms of convenience and comfort by a long shot, so add this nice price on top and it's no surprise people like to take Uber.

 

This isn't me defending Uber, just making observations since everyone's talking about price right now.

[BobbyBesar]

Consumer Surplus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus#Consumer_surplus

 

At the market clearing price, some people are paying less than they would theoretically be willing to pay, that difference is their consumer surplus. If you can segment the market to get everybody pay exactly what it's worth to them (see: various "Pay what you want" restaurant concepts), it makes people very uncomfortable.

 

There are some details that vary here, but that's the same basic concept.

[pkirkner]

Well, "worst thing to happen to the [car driving] labor market" is a little dramatic. Undoubtedly a self-driving car business will create/replace many jobs due to the cost of administering such a program, lobbying, regulation, maintenance, support (phone, whatever), etc. I imagine it won't be a 1:1 replacement, but it could be pro-labor in some non-obvious ways.

 

Yeah, that was clearly hyperbolic, and the automation of motor vehicle transportation will undoubtedly be a boon to everyone who doesn't work in that industry, but I don't see how removing drivers from the equation will create much in the way of new jobs. The infrastructure you describe already exists, and just needs to be modified slightly, not replaced. Meanwhile, a little under 4 million jobs will go the way of the buggy whip salesman.

 

 

I take Lyfts because they show up when I want them, they get me where I'm going and they LET YOU TIP OVER THE COST OF THE SERVICE. Which afaik, Uber does NOT let you do so I always tip my Lyft driver a ton. I hate dealing with taxis who also don't take cards since I usually don't carry cash.

 

I also prefer Lyft to Uber for that reason, and I prefer both to taxis because they're more likely to show up if my destination isn't in the wealthy part of town.

[Argobot]

Sorry if someone already posted this Philadelphia City Paper article on a reporter who went undercover as an Uber driver: http://citypaper.net/uberdriver/

 

There is a reason Uber is half the price of a cab ride and it's not a good one. Part time and contracting labor is on the rise in this country, in part because sharing economies like Uber are becoming large forces in the labor market. Contractors are afforded very few protections and can therefore be heavily abused by companies and since contractors far and away are from lower economic classes, we should not be supporting companies that propagate their abuse. Cheap Uber fares also encourage people to not take public transportation, which will prevent cities from being pressured into actually investing in decent transit.

 

I have a strong dislike for Uber and Lyft from a labor view, and also from a customer service view. Very few of the Uber drivers I've had in Seattle know the city well and exclusively rely on their GPS to navigate. That has created more than a few instances where a driver either accidentally took a wrong turn that added more time to the drive, or took a longer route because they were directed to by the GPS, because the GPS does not take into account time of day or construction when calculating the most efficient way to get from point A to point B. Compare that to taxi drivers, who are required to take tests demonstrating that they know how to navigate in a given area. Those tests vary in rigorousness depending on what city you're in, but overall, taxi drivers are required to know how to get around with relying on maps or GPS devices. This makes for a much better riding experience, where I never have to direct taxi drivers, but I often find that I am giving my Uber drivers directions on how to get to really basic landmarks in Seattle.

[JonCole]

Yeah, that was clearly hyperbolic, and the automation of motor vehicle transportation will undoubtedly be a boon to everyone who doesn't work in that industry, but I don't see how removing drivers from the equation will create much in the way of new jobs. The infrastructure you describe already exists, and just needs to be modified slightly, not replaced. Meanwhile, a little under 4 million jobs will go the way of the buggy whip salesman.

 

I'm not really convinced that this is true. You're talking about the concept of self-driving cars, not the technology of self-driving cars. The current model of self-driving cars is fully autonomous; each vehicle makes decisions independently (based on similar logic, but they're not connected) thus no networking is necessary. But if I attempt to conceptualize the reality of a whole field of self-driving cars, benefits of networking them become apparent - traffic can be diverted in the event of major accidents or natural disasters, traffic can be managed to prioritize service vehicles, etc. Developing this technology would create jobs. Producing the infrastructure to support this would create jobs.

 

This is pie-in-the-sky type thinking and the implementation I'm suggesting is far from assured, but my point is that technology will produce needs (and thus jobs) that are difficult to anticipate. 50 years ago, nobody could have guessed the number of jobs that would require sitting in front of a computer all day. I'm sure that we will see an inflection point in the near future where computers and AI do completely and totally replace labor, but right now that march forward is pretty localized.

[Twig]

FWIW, when I lived in San Francisco for a year, most of the taxi drivers absolutely used GPS. And they'd also ask me how to get to where I live after I'd already provided the address (and not so much in the "which path do you want me to take" kind of way). All of them missed the turn to get to the road I lived on even with the GPS, so that I got into the habit of saying "right there, now, go right". It was rough, especially because most of the time I was taking a cab, it's because I was drunk and didn't want to deal with thinking for myself!

[Argobot]

Ah far enough! Out of curiosity, where were you taken cabs to and from in SF?

[Twig]

I lived in Burlingame, so not strictly in SF proper, but the cabs went between there and many various points in the city. It's definitely possible that "Burlingame" threw them off. (Although I did take a decent number of cabs within Burlingame only, usually from the last BART stop because Caltrain was already closed, and similar things happened.)

[Mangela Lansbury]

Calling the supply artificial seems disingenuous to me for the reasons you mention; while it's possible to adjust supply by hiring more drivers, the overhead and logistics that you mention aren't trivial and I don't think it's unreasonable for a company to have a cap on their overall scope. I think that there's probably a medium to be found, because I don't think that adjusting price for demand is inherently a bitter pill to swallow. It's mostly when we see the 300%+ bumps that put a single trip to $30+ that we really get angry about it.

There's also weird price thresholds that we irrationally want companies to adhere to that also piss us off - examples including the cost of food/drinks going up and manufacturers reducing the portion size, aka a Coke bottle getting smaller to stay at $1 rather than increasing price over the $1 threshold. I feel like this plays a part in taxi-analogous services; paying anything more than $10 or so will just feel wrong regardless of how justified the increased price is.

I don't really think it is disingenuous! Uber has awful labor practices. If they put in the effort of a business trying to service its customers instead of having them underpay sometimes and overpay others, they could provide more consistent service and their drivers would probably be better off! Instead, they focus solely on the consumer because the labor force will come anyway due to broader economic conditions. Employers like Uber only really gain power because they prey on job seekers who don't really have any other choice.

[marblize]

Uber accused of booking 5,560 fake Lyft rides

 

This is Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft

[pkirkner]

This is pie-in-the-sky type thinking and the implementation I'm suggesting is far from assured, but my point is that technology will produce needs (and thus jobs) that are difficult to anticipate. 50 years ago, nobody could have guessed the number of jobs that would require sitting in front of a computer all day. I'm sure that we will see an inflection point in the near future where computers and AI do completely and totally replace labor, but right now that march forward is pretty localized.

 

I agree that its impact will be localized in the transportation industry, but that's a big industry. 3.74 million Americans are employed as motor vehicle operators in the US. That's 2.77% of all US employees, and more than all the country's engineers and software developers combined. The vast majority of them are long-haul truckers, which are likely to be the first to go since most of their job takes place on highways, where the self-driving problem is easier to solve. On a macro scale, that's a good thing in many ways, but finding a way to transition those folks into gainful employment in other industries is going to be a huge undertaking.