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The title and content of this article couldn't be farther from the truth. 1. Uber and Lyft's absence has created a huge void that remains to this day. There a

by jdrock 10y ago

The title and content of this article couldn't be farther from the truth. 1. Uber and Lyft's absence has created a huge void that remains to this day. There are crazy long lines at the airport. 2. There are multiple ridesharing companies that have sprung up in the meantime. Arcade City is just one of them. 3. I'm pretty sure Arcade City will disappear once either (a) U/L return or (b) one of the newer companies (Fare, Fasten, etc.) get more drivers. Transportation in Austin is terrible right now. Arcade City hasn't changed that fact.

joeblau 10y ago
Are the residents of Austin doing anything to let their state representatives know that the situation is as bad as you're painting it? From what I've read (not sure if it's factual or not), it seems people impacted by the loss of U/L either didn't turn up to vote or were potentially confused by the language on the ballot.
- jdrock 10y ago
  The consensus is that U/L's aggressive political campaigning prior to the vote backfired big time. They really screwed up on messaging by not understanding their audience. Had they made it about losing 10,000 jobs, they might have won. Hell, if they had just not called people multiple times without consent, they might have won. There are multiple efforts going on as a result of the vote. Former U/L drivers are trying to put together a rally. A non-profit group (Ride Austin) has sprung up to replace U/L. Certain council members are trying to fight the rest of the council. The state legislature is consider a bill that would pre-empt city legislation.
  - joeblau 10y ago
    Thanks for the summary of what's going on. I remember when the news broke, but I haven't seen much about what's going on since then.
  - tn13 10y ago
    That is absolutely right. Uber most certainly needs to fire their PR people. If I had to design a campaign to ensure Uber loses the vote, that is how I would designed the PR. It was unbelievably bad. Asking for votes is essentially an emotional argument and you need to play on people's emotions just the way Coke sells their soda or Axe sells deodorants. Uber should have shown "we are creating well paying jobs". "We are helping women", "we are helping environment" type of emotional arguments showing babies, blondes, mothers and cats. Just to give an example how horrible Uber is at PR: Uber's surge pricing is an excellent feature. But why on earth would you name it "surge pricing"? It is like BMW calling its cars "Overpriced Metal". Both "surge" and "pricing" are bad words and combined they are the worst possible naming for a feature. The correct naming for surge pricing should have been "Uber Urgent" or "Uber VIP". The way it should have been designed is that: 1. Drivers opt in for Uber Urgent. Whenever there is a surge in demand driver goes into Urgent Only mode. 2. Let the passengers wait for the usual low fares or select Uber Urgent and get their rides quickly. In fact asking passengers to bid in 3-4 levels would make a lot of sense. Uber Urgent could have been advertised as: 1. Empowers drivers to earn more by helping those in urgent need. 2. Helps people in need get the cars faster 3. Reduces traffic on road during rush hour. 4. Skip the line as if you are VIP. No more waiting.
    - zaidf 10y ago
      You're underestimating the value of being a company that always has a cab for you within minutes. With your approach, the default in the public's mind would be "there is no uber till 3am!" vs. "Uber is the on the way...btw it's 25% extra due to the rush." A name like VIP is bad because it discourages regular use. It sounds like something you use once a year on special occasions.
      - eric_h 10y ago
        Not to mention that Uber already has a VIP concept in their product that's quite interesting. Pairs frequent customers with the highest rated drivers. Amusingly, in less Uber dense neighborhoods in NYC (i.e. anything that's not Manhattan) Uber VIP is a worse option for getting a quick ride. For me, when I'm in the outer boroughs I opt for regular uber x, but when I'm in Manhattan I do Uber VIP.
  - ufo 10y ago
    What message were they using before the vote?
    - theli0nheart 10y ago
      Their big message was that fingerprinting does a worse job of filtering out dangerous drivers than Uber or Lyft's internally-used background checks.
      - vkou 10y ago
        What background checks? [1] [2] [1] http://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/nenshi-not-very-good-at-apologies-uber-dustup-continues-to-pose-questions http://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/nenshi-not-very-goo... [2] http://observer.com/2016/05/uber-driver-charged-with-attempted-murder-had-an-extensive-criminal-record/ http://observer.com/2016/05/uber-driver-charged-with-attempt...
        icebraining 10y ago
        In your first link the mayor later said “I am not aware of anyone convicted of a sexual offence clearing the background check used by Uber in Calgary. Watching the video, I realize that I did not explain myself clearly at all. I apologize for any confusion that I have caused.”
  - jellicle 10y ago
    What jobs? Uber insists they don't employ anyone.
    - Cookingboy 10y ago
      Self-employed jobs are still jobs.
      - hawkice 10y ago
        I know we are pretty far through the looking glass as far as the semantics here, but surely if someone is self-employed, they would be the business entity that created their job? "Job creation" is kinda a nonsense thing to brag about, so I have no idea what the standards are, but just linguistically speaking I'd assume self-employed=self-job-created.
        Sacho 10y ago
        So they're investing in local businesses!
        snowwrestler 10y ago
        Any given job has many parents. Yes, it takes someone to sign the contract to do the work (for self-employed), or post the opening and hire someone (for an employee). But it also takes investment. Many self-employed jobs sit on a platform that someone else is investing in. For example many construction workers are self-employed, but there needs to be a construction project for them to work on. Many folks in the film industry are self-employed, but there need to be movies for them to work on. And in the case of Uber and Lyft, even if we call the drivers self-employed, they can't employ themselves in that particular way without the platforms that Uber and Lyft provide. The software is a big part of it, but so is the customer base (an asset in its own right), and the marketing that keeps and grows the customer base. That's the extent to which Uber and Lyft can claim to create jobs. It's more like they create an environment or platform that enables other people to create their own jobs, but that is hard to fit into a soundbite.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dbg31415 10y ago
  Unfortunately not much. The people who used Uber are up-in-arms, but the people who voted against it were people who didn't use the service and don't know / care. Our city council is stocked to the brim with people who hate any form of progress. Those dipshits are the reason we have such horrible traffic here in the first place... for years and years and years their mantra was, "If we don't build it, they won't come." And they purposefully made roads much much smaller than they ought to be -- and continue to make roads much much smaller than they ought to be to accommodate growth. Uber / Lyft played their hand so poorly. Instead of talking about jobs, and the reduction of drunk driving (a huge issue), they let the city and taxi union play them. The campaign, to suburbanites who probably don't use rideshare services anyway, became about safety and how Uber / Lyft drivers would rape you because there was one guy one time who had statutory raped someone before becoming a driver and Uber / Lyft let him drive anyway... The old mayor came on, drummed up fear in the old folks... so then the nursing home vote thought there were these roving rapists being paid billions of dollars by SF tech companies and driving up their taxes. I wish I was making it up. Oh, and the ballot language was confusing. So yeah, nobody really knew what they were voting for. Of course the crazy guy shooting people up north didn't help... but anyway now we're back to being fucked. Ways we are fucked: * Taxis... are 2-3x more expensive than Uber, if they even show up at all. When I need a ride to the airport I'm back to asking neighbors since I can't rely on taxis showing up on time. * Since Taxis don't have to show a GPS of where they are going, they take you round-about ways. It took me a minute but yeah, after getting picked up by the airport, I should have been taken down 71 to Mopac to get to Circle C. The guy literally took me to 35 then across Slaughter... stoplights galore. Intentionally driving slow the whole way... speed limit was 75, he was driving 55. * Taxis aren't clean. They're filthy in fact. No water either. * Taxi drivers aren't from here. So I get this is racist, but at least with Uber / Lyft we knew it was our neighbors. They spoke like we did. There were no communication issues around where you wanted to go. Ways we can get unfucked: * At the moment, unclear. We need a new city government... but because the nursing home / Luddites vote and the tech / younger crowd doesn't... we can't reverse the decision. And Uber and Lyft seem unwilling to pay for the background checks the city now requires. Anything else that pops up... it'll be a temp thing until the city cracks down on it and imposes the same sort of shit they tried to push on Uber / Lyft. (I fucking hate the "old guard" so much, and all the people who got to vote on rideshares who never even used them... it's such bullshit. Hooray.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mc32 10y ago
This is the perfect time for an upstart to provide a service which does conform with city regulation and it or they will be able to swoop in when or if other cities institute similar requirements to the dismay of the incumbents.
- asquabventured 10y ago
  Perfect! More bifurcation in the industry due to regulatory overreach. What a great time to be alive!
  - mc32 10y ago
    What? This is like saying requiring iodine created bifurcation in the salt industry? Salt, never the less is a commodity (exceptions for pink Himalayan salt, etc.) Taxi services are similar. Just for context, we used to have thousands of local taxi operations, so it's not like we don't have experience with bifurcation and further, these "platform" taxi services were an additional distinct bifurcation into the traditional industry.
  - rodgerd 10y ago
    So just to be clear you think the ideal outcome is a monopoly by Uber?
    - briandear 10y ago
      Better than the existing taxi monopoly. The taxi monopoly used regulation to support a monopoly. That's wrong. Less regulation means more competition. Re: ISPs.
      - mc32 10y ago
        But taxis are not a monopoly. There are thousands of cab companies. If you mean they were regulated into some kind of uniform service whose results were suboptimal, ok, but that's not what people tend to call a "monopoly".
sna1l 10y ago
I recently visited Austin, and I completely agree with you. Getting around was a nightmare. All the apps felt way jankier than Uber and Lyft.
andrewfromx 10y ago
wow you are really calling out https://twitter.com/fitztepper https://twitter.com/fitztepper as a reporter. He got the story just completely wrong?
abhi3 10y ago
Can someone explain why Uber had to shut down? Couldn't they have just complied with the regulation?
- briandear 10y ago
  I would rather they shut down to protest the regulation. Consenting adults should be entitled to their own risk assessment. The government need not regulate everything. Over regulation is what led to the taxi monopolies. If people didn't feel safe in Uber, they weren't forced to use it. It isn't like school buses or teachers where there aren't other easy alternatives. If an Uber driver was unsafe, the market would correct for that. Are AirBnB hosts fingerprinted? Are hotel employees required to be fingerprinted? Hotel employees could enter your room and kill you while sleeping -- how is that any different than the risk posed by a rogue Uber driver?
  - bsder 10y ago
    > If people didn't feel safe in Uber, they weren't forced to use it. Except that Uber is using venture capital money to subsidize rides to undercut the price of rides. That's great, until they drive the properly compliant ride services out of business and become their own monopoly. Keeping the ridesharing services market share fractured instead of monopoly is what really benefits the consumer.
    - studentrob 10y ago
      You're not wrong. Uber operates where I live in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and rides are dirt cheap. They cost $2-$3 when a taxi is $3-$5. Both Uber and AirBNB have been ruled illegal in Taiwan. Uber continues to operate and pays the fines of drivers and passengers when they are caught. If a driver is caught 5 times, their license is permanently revoked [1] I like the idea of ride sharing apps, and I can respect Uber's attempts to try some civil disobedience. I don't think this investment will pan out for them. Taiwan just elected a new government that is even more focused on Taiwan-centric businesses than the last government. Uber would need to generate a lot of public support to become an exception. I don't see that happening. I see VC money flowing in and staying here. And like Austin, a legal competitor will pop up eventually with services that satisfy the public enough that they forget about Uber. I could be wrong. It seems to me Uber doesn't have much left up its sleeves. They seem primed to accept that there are many viable competitors. [1] http://international.thenewslens.com/article/36548 http://international.thenewslens.com/article/36548
natrius 10y ago
Multiple ridehailing companies have sprung up, but that's not a solution. It's the problem. As long as multiple networks split the market, wait times and prices will always be worse than Uber was. Arcade City has a chance to work around this problem by building a network no one controls. The network effects of decentralization are strong—perhaps strong enough to compete even when Uber returns.
brianbarker 10y ago
Arcade City has worked really well via the FB group. You post a ride request, multiple drivers respond. Many link their uber/lyft profiles. Then the client chooses their driver (big key to AC's premise) and a ride is arranged. AC is also launching an app to replace the FB group and be directly p2p, which will be fascinating to watch. Also, as of this last weekend, Fare has tons of cars and had cheaper-than-uber prices like Lyft. Very good, very stable app. The RideAustin app also is showing cars, but Fare looks better. I'd recommend Fare. It sucks that visitors won't know, but maybe Fare can get a sign at the airport?

by jdrock 10y ago

joeblau 10y ago

Are the residents of Austin doing anything to let their state representatives know that the situation is as bad as you're painting it? From what I've read (not sure if it's factual or not), it seems people impacted by the loss of U/L either didn't turn up to vote or were potentially confused by the language on the ballot.

jdrock 10y ago
The consensus is that U/L's aggressive political campaigning prior to the vote backfired big time. They really screwed up on messaging by not understanding their audience. Had they made it about losing 10,000 jobs, they might have won. Hell, if they had just not called people multiple times without consent, they might have won. There are multiple efforts going on as a result of the vote. Former U/L drivers are trying to put together a rally. A non-profit group (Ride Austin) has sprung up to replace U/L. Certain council members are trying to fight the rest of the council. The state legislature is consider a bill that would pre-empt city legislation.
- joeblau 10y ago
  Thanks for the summary of what's going on. I remember when the news broke, but I haven't seen much about what's going on since then.
- tn13 10y ago
  That is absolutely right. Uber most certainly needs to fire their PR people. If I had to design a campaign to ensure Uber loses the vote, that is how I would designed the PR. It was unbelievably bad. Asking for votes is essentially an emotional argument and you need to play on people's emotions just the way Coke sells their soda or Axe sells deodorants. Uber should have shown "we are creating well paying jobs". "We are helping women", "we are helping environment" type of emotional arguments showing babies, blondes, mothers and cats. Just to give an example how horrible Uber is at PR: Uber's surge pricing is an excellent feature. But why on earth would you name it "surge pricing"? It is like BMW calling its cars "Overpriced Metal". Both "surge" and "pricing" are bad words and combined they are the worst possible naming for a feature. The correct naming for surge pricing should have been "Uber Urgent" or "Uber VIP". The way it should have been designed is that: 1. Drivers opt in for Uber Urgent. Whenever there is a surge in demand driver goes into Urgent Only mode. 2. Let the passengers wait for the usual low fares or select Uber Urgent and get their rides quickly. In fact asking passengers to bid in 3-4 levels would make a lot of sense. Uber Urgent could have been advertised as: 1. Empowers drivers to earn more by helping those in urgent need. 2. Helps people in need get the cars faster 3. Reduces traffic on road during rush hour. 4. Skip the line as if you are VIP. No more waiting.
  - zaidf 10y ago
    You're underestimating the value of being a company that always has a cab for you within minutes. With your approach, the default in the public's mind would be "there is no uber till 3am!" vs. "Uber is the on the way...btw it's 25% extra due to the rush." A name like VIP is bad because it discourages regular use. It sounds like something you use once a year on special occasions.
    - eric_h 10y ago
      Not to mention that Uber already has a VIP concept in their product that's quite interesting. Pairs frequent customers with the highest rated drivers. Amusingly, in less Uber dense neighborhoods in NYC (i.e. anything that's not Manhattan) Uber VIP is a worse option for getting a quick ride. For me, when I'm in the outer boroughs I opt for regular uber x, but when I'm in Manhattan I do Uber VIP.
- ufo 10y ago
  What message were they using before the vote?
  - theli0nheart 10y ago
    Their big message was that fingerprinting does a worse job of filtering out dangerous drivers than Uber or Lyft's internally-used background checks.
    - vkou 10y ago
      What background checks? [1] [2] [1] http://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/nenshi-not-very-good-at-apologies-uber-dustup-continues-to-pose-questions http://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/nenshi-not-very-goo... [2] http://observer.com/2016/05/uber-driver-charged-with-attempted-murder-had-an-extensive-criminal-record/ http://observer.com/2016/05/uber-driver-charged-with-attempt...
      - icebraining 10y ago
        In your first link the mayor later said “I am not aware of anyone convicted of a sexual offence clearing the background check used by Uber in Calgary. Watching the video, I realize that I did not explain myself clearly at all. I apologize for any confusion that I have caused.”
- jellicle 10y ago
  What jobs? Uber insists they don't employ anyone.
  - Cookingboy 10y ago
    Self-employed jobs are still jobs.
    - hawkice 10y ago
      I know we are pretty far through the looking glass as far as the semantics here, but surely if someone is self-employed, they would be the business entity that created their job? "Job creation" is kinda a nonsense thing to brag about, so I have no idea what the standards are, but just linguistically speaking I'd assume self-employed=self-job-created.
      - Sacho 10y ago
        So they're investing in local businesses!
      - snowwrestler 10y ago
        Any given job has many parents. Yes, it takes someone to sign the contract to do the work (for self-employed), or post the opening and hire someone (for an employee). But it also takes investment. Many self-employed jobs sit on a platform that someone else is investing in. For example many construction workers are self-employed, but there needs to be a construction project for them to work on. Many folks in the film industry are self-employed, but there need to be movies for them to work on. And in the case of Uber and Lyft, even if we call the drivers self-employed, they can't employ themselves in that particular way without the platforms that Uber and Lyft provide. The software is a big part of it, but so is the customer base (an asset in its own right), and the marketing that keeps and grows the customer base. That's the extent to which Uber and Lyft can claim to create jobs. It's more like they create an environment or platform that enables other people to create their own jobs, but that is hard to fit into a soundbite.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dbg31415 10y ago
Unfortunately not much. The people who used Uber are up-in-arms, but the people who voted against it were people who didn't use the service and don't know / care. Our city council is stocked to the brim with people who hate any form of progress. Those dipshits are the reason we have such horrible traffic here in the first place... for years and years and years their mantra was, "If we don't build it, they won't come." And they purposefully made roads much much smaller than they ought to be -- and continue to make roads much much smaller than they ought to be to accommodate growth. Uber / Lyft played their hand so poorly. Instead of talking about jobs, and the reduction of drunk driving (a huge issue), they let the city and taxi union play them. The campaign, to suburbanites who probably don't use rideshare services anyway, became about safety and how Uber / Lyft drivers would rape you because there was one guy one time who had statutory raped someone before becoming a driver and Uber / Lyft let him drive anyway... The old mayor came on, drummed up fear in the old folks... so then the nursing home vote thought there were these roving rapists being paid billions of dollars by SF tech companies and driving up their taxes. I wish I was making it up. Oh, and the ballot language was confusing. So yeah, nobody really knew what they were voting for. Of course the crazy guy shooting people up north didn't help... but anyway now we're back to being fucked. Ways we are fucked: * Taxis... are 2-3x more expensive than Uber, if they even show up at all. When I need a ride to the airport I'm back to asking neighbors since I can't rely on taxis showing up on time. * Since Taxis don't have to show a GPS of where they are going, they take you round-about ways. It took me a minute but yeah, after getting picked up by the airport, I should have been taken down 71 to Mopac to get to Circle C. The guy literally took me to 35 then across Slaughter... stoplights galore. Intentionally driving slow the whole way... speed limit was 75, he was driving 55. * Taxis aren't clean. They're filthy in fact. No water either. * Taxi drivers aren't from here. So I get this is racist, but at least with Uber / Lyft we knew it was our neighbors. They spoke like we did. There were no communication issues around where you wanted to go. Ways we can get unfucked: * At the moment, unclear. We need a new city government... but because the nursing home / Luddites vote and the tech / younger crowd doesn't... we can't reverse the decision. And Uber and Lyft seem unwilling to pay for the background checks the city now requires. Anything else that pops up... it'll be a temp thing until the city cracks down on it and imposes the same sort of shit they tried to push on Uber / Lyft. (I fucking hate the "old guard" so much, and all the people who got to vote on rideshares who never even used them... it's such bullshit. Hooray.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

mc32 10y ago

This is the perfect time for an upstart to provide a service which does conform with city regulation and it or they will be able to swoop in when or if other cities institute similar requirements to the dismay of the incumbents.

asquabventured 10y ago
Perfect! More bifurcation in the industry due to regulatory overreach. What a great time to be alive!
- mc32 10y ago
  What? This is like saying requiring iodine created bifurcation in the salt industry? Salt, never the less is a commodity (exceptions for pink Himalayan salt, etc.) Taxi services are similar. Just for context, we used to have thousands of local taxi operations, so it's not like we don't have experience with bifurcation and further, these "platform" taxi services were an additional distinct bifurcation into the traditional industry.
- rodgerd 10y ago
  So just to be clear you think the ideal outcome is a monopoly by Uber?
  - briandear 10y ago
    Better than the existing taxi monopoly. The taxi monopoly used regulation to support a monopoly. That's wrong. Less regulation means more competition. Re: ISPs.
    - mc32 10y ago
      But taxis are not a monopoly. There are thousands of cab companies. If you mean they were regulated into some kind of uniform service whose results were suboptimal, ok, but that's not what people tend to call a "monopoly".

sna1l 10y ago

I recently visited Austin, and I completely agree with you. Getting around was a nightmare. All the apps felt way jankier than Uber and Lyft.

andrewfromx 10y ago

wow you are really calling out https://twitter.com/fitztepper https://twitter.com/fitztepper as a reporter. He got the story just completely wrong?

abhi3 10y ago

Can someone explain why Uber had to shut down? Couldn't they have just complied with the regulation?

briandear 10y ago
I would rather they shut down to protest the regulation. Consenting adults should be entitled to their own risk assessment. The government need not regulate everything. Over regulation is what led to the taxi monopolies. If people didn't feel safe in Uber, they weren't forced to use it. It isn't like school buses or teachers where there aren't other easy alternatives. If an Uber driver was unsafe, the market would correct for that. Are AirBnB hosts fingerprinted? Are hotel employees required to be fingerprinted? Hotel employees could enter your room and kill you while sleeping -- how is that any different than the risk posed by a rogue Uber driver?
- bsder 10y ago
  > If people didn't feel safe in Uber, they weren't forced to use it. Except that Uber is using venture capital money to subsidize rides to undercut the price of rides. That's great, until they drive the properly compliant ride services out of business and become their own monopoly. Keeping the ridesharing services market share fractured instead of monopoly is what really benefits the consumer.
  - studentrob 10y ago
    You're not wrong. Uber operates where I live in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and rides are dirt cheap. They cost $2-$3 when a taxi is $3-$5. Both Uber and AirBNB have been ruled illegal in Taiwan. Uber continues to operate and pays the fines of drivers and passengers when they are caught. If a driver is caught 5 times, their license is permanently revoked [1] I like the idea of ride sharing apps, and I can respect Uber's attempts to try some civil disobedience. I don't think this investment will pan out for them. Taiwan just elected a new government that is even more focused on Taiwan-centric businesses than the last government. Uber would need to generate a lot of public support to become an exception. I don't see that happening. I see VC money flowing in and staying here. And like Austin, a legal competitor will pop up eventually with services that satisfy the public enough that they forget about Uber. I could be wrong. It seems to me Uber doesn't have much left up its sleeves. They seem primed to accept that there are many viable competitors. [1] http://international.thenewslens.com/article/36548 http://international.thenewslens.com/article/36548

natrius 10y ago

Multiple ridehailing companies have sprung up, but that's not a solution. It's the problem. As long as multiple networks split the market, wait times and prices will always be worse than Uber was. Arcade City has a chance to work around this problem by building a network no one controls. The network effects of decentralization are strong—perhaps strong enough to compete even when Uber returns.

brianbarker 10y ago

Arcade City has worked really well via the FB group. You post a ride request, multiple drivers respond. Many link their uber/lyft profiles. Then the client chooses their driver (big key to AC's premise) and a ride is arranged. AC is also launching an app to replace the FB group and be directly p2p, which will be fascinating to watch. Also, as of this last weekend, Fare has tons of cars and had cheaper-than-uber prices like Lyft. Very good, very stable app. The RideAustin app also is showing cars, but Fare looks better. I'd recommend Fare. It sucks that visitors won't know, but maybe Fare can get a sign at the airport?