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Only in hacker news do you find people who think the taxi industry is some bastion of freedom and some poor victim of Uber. Does no one know how the taxi indus
by farmerstan 4y ago
Only in hacker news do you find people who think the taxi industry is some bastion of freedom and some poor victim of Uber.
Does no one know how the taxi industry works and the insane levels of corruption involved? Most taxi drivers start their shift IN DEBT, every single shift. They owe the taxi company $100 at the beginning of their shift to rent the taxi and then have to work to pay off this debt every shift. Once they have earned it they can keep whatever money they earn. If they need to stop working in the middle of the shift, they are net negative.
They need to pay for their own gas, they need to clean the taxi, and if someone pukes in their car they have to clean it themselves.
There is no vacation pay, they have no freedom at all.
Most Uber drivers are happy. That’s a fact. I dare you to ask your next driver. I just took 2 Ubers today and they were happy. My second driver told me he felt lucky because he had Uber to fall back on during the pandemic. You get a small number of professional drivers who want to destroy uber and journalists that want to as well so you get completely slanted articles like this. Somehow Lyft is the hero and Uber is the bad guy, when both do exactly the same things.
The simple fact is Uber provides a great service and most drivers are happy. In terms of investment, post-IPO it has been largely dead money but the idea is never going away.
Taxi companies are not the heros here. They were even more predatory than anything claimed here about Uber which are mostly twists or flat out lies.
- smilespray 4y agoI haven't seen many people defending the cab industry, which is clearly broken in many markets, including mine. I get that you hate cab companies. I do, too. However, I'm just not sure that I like Uber any better. Most of the issues you describe with taxi drivers apply to Uber drivers as well. As for your happiness metric, I'm not so sure about what you call facts. Asking your driver isn't going to provide useful data. One type of dysfunctional business just got replaced with another.
- farmerstan 4y agoThe vast majority of Uber drivers are part time by choice. You don’t have that option with taxi driving. One driver I had would wake up early and drive people to the airport before work and that helped him pay off his car sooner. Uber is extremely flexible and the engagement model isn’t predatory. You make money from your first trip and everything is clearly spelled out. You can even work for Lyft and Uber at the same time. Flexibility is the key for most drivers. Is every driver happy? No. Is every google software engineer happy? No. Some would accuse google of being predatory but just because some people say that doesn’t make it real. Go ask most of the drivers and you will see that it’s a part time job to them and for what it is it’s fine. They don’t look to it like some career and they shouldn’t.
- Ekaros 4y agoI wonder if the Uber drivers aren't lying, so they get better ratings. Would seem logical, after all making customer feel bad might affect their rating and in future their income. So I would call the unreliable source in context...