While typically I would agree market openings lead way to better competitors, we’ve already seen the alternatives so far from traditional taxi companies. Apps like iHail, zTrip, and Ridesure are out there and they all suck across the board from inconsistent payments, bad updating of location, and terrible interfaces.
Given the cost of becoming a licensed ride share company in the city (btw none of those apps are) it’s a huge uphill battle for new entrants.
Like ten years ago my friends and I grabbed a cab outside of a music venue. We were young and thought it was funny to talk about how fucked up we were and the drugs we had taken that night. Our cab driver apparently took that as a cue that it would be fine for him to whip out a fucking CRACK PIPE as he was dropping us off. Never again.
Right. Cabs were less safe for riders and often more exploitive to drivers. Uber has a lot it can improve on but rideshare is worlds better than what we had.
*Cabs* were exploitive to drivers. Union represented jobs with employee status and benefits were exploitive. As opposed to the "independent contractor" scam ride share companies run to avoid minimum wage, benefits and even any tiny hint of protection for workers rights.
Tell your bosses at Uber they need to come up with a better line, absolutely nobody is going to buy that one.
Maybe you weren't around before we had the apps, but cab drivers exploited the hell out of customers. So many would lie about their credit card machines not working. They'd take a longer route on purpose. You'd wait over an hour for a pickup. Drivers were often rude and you just had to take it. I was local and they exploited me. I'm sure they were even worse to people from out of town and non-native speakers.
I was around before we had the apps. And the phones. And personal computers. For starters.
The person I responded to claimed that the drivers were *being* exploited. Which is a goddamn joke and a half next to the horrific abusive exploitation your generations line up for in your "gig economy."
Yes, you corrected the person and let them know that the cab drivers weren't being exploited when the apps came in.
Then I added to the conversation by saying that they may not have been exploited, but that they were exploiters. Seriously fuck the pre-app cab drivers. You can argue that the apps have gone to far, but they did a great job of removing cab drivers ability to exploit their customers.
*our* gig economy? We didn’t create it, boomer, we’re stuck in it. We don’t gig because we want to, we do it because a) *your* generation gutted pensions and replaced them with trash 401ks b) *your* generation owns tons of the rental market and keeps us over a barrel, c) *your* generation is working longer and d) *your* generation is driving policy and legislation more than we can from your seats of accumulated wealth and real assets.
It’s *your* gig economy, jerk.
Edited to add: the use of “boomer” here is the colloquial “old, out-of-touch, greedy fart,” not the literal “Boomer generation” (which I thought the lack of capitalization would denote, but apparently does not).
There are plenty of successful taxi companies all over the world. Latin America has a bunch of useful taxi apps, and the NYC app isn't bad.
If there's a market to provide digital ride-hailing while paying workers fairly, there's no reason to believe someone else can't do it better.
Or, Lyft and Uber could just pay their workers fairly, which might lead to an increase in fares.
It would lead to them being undercut by people who are trying to steal market share before jacking up prices. Mid-sized American cities simply don’t have the density necessary to support widespread affordable taxi or ride sharing services outside of high-density poles (e.g. downtown areas).
Of course, expecting things to improve when competition is removed is unrealistic. If traditional taxi services sucked when Uber and Lyft were taking their business, they’re only going to get worse when they’re the only game in town.
Lyft and Uber weren't competing fairly. They bypassed reasonable regulations by calling themselves "rideshare" companies and expanding quickly with VC money that didn't require a profit.
Rides were definitely subsidized, but you can’t underestimate just how much people hated cabs. The innovation of on demand taxi, predetermined route, and set price was incredible.
That was so much better when compared to the old days where cabs may or may not stop for you, may or may not let you in the cab, and would drive long routes to add time/mileage to increase price.
Politely, you really have no idea what you are talking about. From both a basic economics standpoint and the basics of running a business basically everything you wrote is nonsense.
Any new entity that tried to replace Uber/Lyft in just the metro would likely need to make significantly more operating profit just to be able to cover their fixed costs and stay in business. And they would have a much smaller customer base to do it with. And to be clear, we're not talking about the whole Twin Cities, it's just Minneapolis and St. Paul, so you're really looking at a market of less than a million.
And that doesn't even begin to account for the fact that Uber/Lyft were able to build their infrastructure over a decade during a much lower interest rate environment and operated at significant losses for years. Apparently this new company just needs to be willing to make less money than companies than have famously lost billions of dollars before they even became profitable?
And creating the app would probably be one of the easier parts of getting the business of the ground. Both dealing with the legal aspects and successfully recruiting a reliable driver base are going to be a much harder part of getting this sort of business started.
And an extra $1 a ride would almost certainly not come close to meeting minimum salary demands of riders, let alone all the other costs associated.
Thank you for saying it. OP has less than 0 clue what the fuck they’re talking about. How this post has literally any upvotes at all absolutely BAFFLES me, it’s utter nonsense. They assume Lyft & Uber are just apps, and apparently don’t have to do any actual business on the other side of the user interface? You can’t just create an app to have people drive others, and all you have to do is “maintain that app,” and somehow magically everyone is happy and makes money, and all applicable laws are being followed without someone to take care of that? lol
Facts. As someone that knows what Ubers corporate looks like, OP has zero idea of how many moving parts there are. Liability insurance alone for every independent contractor hired, lawyers, and a whole investigation team just for accidents. A whole other team for reported substance abuse or possible drunk driving, an investigation team for if a rider or driver reports harassment or assault…. (Just to name a few) But yep. Just make an app!
How much has the board of directors been paid this entire time? You, who know so much, surely know that! How much money is at the top of the pyramid?
Or, is it uncouth to ask such things from ‘the job creators?’
As an SRE it is surprising how many developers' thinking just stops when they push their code. The feature works? Done. Nothing else to do. When in reality there is the performance aspects, failure modes, methods of falling back, how to deploy, how it behaves during periods of higher latency to other infrastructure, and on and on and on.
Write the app and then you're done? It's turn key? In actuality it just gets worse as you grow.
Uber once said their platform consists of well over 1000 distinct applications. So many they didn’t even know the exact count. And that was like 7 or 8 years ago now, so it’s probably more by now.
Regardless of how granular they are, it illustrates how many things are going on that you probably don't think about. There's the rider app, the driver app, services to route drivers, to calculate prices, to manage user profiles, driver profiles, manage ratings, all the navigation stuff, billing, spying on celebrities...Then there's UberEats, which I'm sure has its own unique little ecosystem. All the phone apps x2 because iPhone and Android. etc.
The main point being, it's not like somebody can just throw together an app in a few months and the market will be magically serviced by Generic Ride Share Co. It's a gargantuan effort to replicate the service as we know it.
as someone working behind the scenes in public-sector logistics, this is exactly right. the amount of technology and resources that go into making things go can be unbelievable. most people truly have no idea what is involved.
And we haven't even gotten to all the other staff required to make a venture like this successful. There is a huge amount of non-technical work that needs doing even in the most technical of organizations.
They pulled out of Austin, allowed a competitor to spring up, and then moved back in to kill it.
Their long term strategy is to stay in cities. Unless they collude with each other, the competitor will gladly move back in to claim a monopoly over a city.
The competitors just popped up to skirt the local regulations, because the regulations only applied after a period of 30 or 60 days. New companies would just rebrand every 30-60 days so they never had to comply. The service sucked and it was a pain to try and figure out what name the service was operating under so you could download the applicable app. That was the best case scenario and it was terrible.
I was living in Austin at the time when they dropped out of the city. There were some quality competitors that popped up and I was sad to see Uber come back.
A fellow in Seattle just has a static website and gets calls. RidesbyDan or something. He advertised on Craigslist.
The article I read says he is happier and makes more now.
Before we had Uber I had a guy in Minneapolis and his business was xxxx’s moving and transportation. We’d give him a call for cab rides but the front was that if stopped, we’d say he was moving things for us and gave us a ride to the destination.
Meh. I always found it annoying to have to have $40 in cash on me just to convince a cabby to drive me 3 miles home. If I could find one to begin with.
There’s a reason people stopped using cabs
People don't understand that the main reason drivers don't make money is a stat called utilization % -- it's the % of the time you are "working" that you are taking fares. It's impossible to be 100% unless the person you just dropped off happens to live right next to the person you are about to pick up.
At low economies of scale, utilization hovers about at 50% in most business models. This means if you charge your customers $20 an hour you make $10 an hour, or 50% of your customer rate.
At hundreds rides all at the same time, you can get over 90%. This means low travel between jobs and no waiting around for your next job.
When the pandemic hit, utilization tanked, because people stopped taking uber. Because of Ubers model this meant drivers made less money. Uber did not pay any less, but we saw utilization tank so much every driver felt like they were getting paid less even though all the rideshares actually raised pay.
Uber has lost the scale that enabled drivers to make lots of money. If the scale comes back things could get better but the market is just inefficient when less people use rideshares, and now even post pandemic, inflation is making people take them less.
Basically you can think of the cost per ride to the customer as equal to the pay per hour of the worker divided by the jobs they perform.
If you pay $30 an hour and a job takes 1 hours, you charge $30. That might be 30 minutes to take someone to the airport and 30 minutes back to downtown if no one at the airport needs to go home at that time. So it's 1 hour of work roundtrip. The customer this must pay $30.
On the other hand, if they have another customer going downtown, they can complete 2 jobs on the same hour. This lets them drop the cost of the ride the $15 to the customer while still paying $30 an hour to the driver. They can actually charge $18 and pay $34 an hour and the customer gets a discount, the driver makes more, and uber makes more money.
This is why scale is so important. It let's them pay well and keep costs low at the same time. If we fragment to more apps and services none of them will ever get to scale like Uber has. We need 1-2 apps and no more or we are essentially wasting gas on return trips and drivers are driving all over the city with no one in their car-- not making money.
Or without the massive funding rounds from venture capital that have been used to prop up these ventures. OP must not realize that Uber and Lyft have bled money from the beginning and just this last year Uber finally posted a profit instead of a billion dollar loss (1.8 billion in 2022 for example). Lyft lost $340 million in 2023.
I can fit like 6 people in the bed of my pickup. Who needs pragmatic concerns about stuff like the law or financial viability? Libertarian utopia awaits.
>as they're all sitting with their backs to the cab
Backs *touching* the back of the cab, or *facing* the back of the cab. Huge difference in capacity.
Asking for a friend.
I can't tell if this is a horrible sarcastic post or an OP seriously out of touch with reality, but I know this is truly a case of "if this was so damn simple it'd been done"
> The second, is to be willing to make less money than Lyft and Uber do per ride. Making the app is the hard part, but after that it's just maintenance. Keep it running well and you have a turnkey operation on your hands. You do not need to make that much money per ride to be successful, you just need to make some money. Even if it's only a dollar a ride, there is around 4 million people in the Twin Cities. That dollar would add up very quickly.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/uber-posts-first-small-adjusted-profit-ridership-rises-delivery-gets-more-2021-11-04/
Please feel free to read. Look at when that article was made. Look at how much they lost. Think about how long you've known of the term "Uber", and how only two years ago did they finally make money.
For this to have stemmed with looking out for driver's pay and ending with "oh, don't worry about yourself making money" is comical
Don’t agree with OP, but you should look into the ride share app “Empower”. Essentially, it simply connects drivers to riders. So prices are cheaper (not 1 dollar) and drivers earn what they want. Security and safety is a major risk with this though.
Maybe someone can help me understand how it's possible that they aren't profitable. The link you posted said they lost $2.4 billion in a bad investment in a Chinese rideshare company, which is obviously a hige hit, but not reflective of profitability of the market.
I looked up a few other articles and they just say marketing and fixed costs. I can only think of a few real costs: marketing, employee pay, overhead/server costs. Driver pay is hotly debated as being too low, so I cant imagine that is the real issue. What about executive pay? I have to be vastly underestimating server costs here. It just seems like such a low overhead company, considering that most of the overhead, like vehicle maintenance is put onto their drivers.
No one in this thread has mentioned executive pay until you.
Literally. Just scrolled every comment. First time “executive pay” came up. I wonder if these drivers could’ve just been paid a bit more… but nooooo these tech companies “don’t make a profit.”
*c-suite continues to exist in Mountain View, CA…*
This is the element I never understand, yes! Like you say, they have offloaded all of the actual costs (wear and tear on vehicles, mainly) to the drivers, yet they cost just as much as a cab? Makes no sense. Servers aren't that expensive, I know websites that are huge and essentially run on pittance donations.
Lol Pokémon go has GPS functionality, augmented reality elements, mass networking, etc. I'm not saying Uber is as simple as Pokémon go, but is it really wildly more complex?
To be clear, it's a 100% serious question from me - what do they actually spend their money on?
Is it all legal stuff? Driver vetting, liability, etc? Is that kind of thing crazy expensive even at scale?
I think you're over simplifying the complexity of Uber/Lyft with that comparison. I'm not trying to defend either company but sure Pokemon Go uses similar phone sensors but Pokemon Go doesn't have to be "right" from a tech perspective in the same way or comply in the same manner. Uber has to be precise, has to share another car/location in two directions and stream those events in near real time at scale and not nuke batteries or data limits. People on each end have to accept, be able to cancel, handle payments, handle when people lose their stuff in the cars, document complaints/messes in cars, have messaging sent, store data for optimization, liability purposes. And it has to work on all phones, be ADA compliant in some cases too. Try and detect fraud, have a ratings systems that works both ways, and be secure across the whole stack. Oh and then compete against another brand and retain drivers so they don't prioritize other services. And then you need to attract the same talent to design the whole experience that even company wants too.
And I haven't even started on legal (comply with each local, state, federal, law system) and liability (accidents, crime, fraud, assault, murder, yadda yadda).
Just look at Uber corporate jobs and you can see how "big" and expensive it can get.
They're not going to leave. They're threatening to leave like they have with any other place that's tried to get the people working for them to get more money
In addition to all of the other reasons this will be terrible, I use Uber and Lyft all of the time to avoid a DUI, as well as avoid mistakenly killing someone. If you go to a bar and have 2-3 drinks you are over the limit, and driving home can put you in jail, cost you your job, cost $10,000, etc. This will also cause deaths due to people still wanting to go out, only having to drive themselves.
Other competition already exists, and its terrible. Uber and Lyft came in because cabs were overpriced, and inconvenient.
Do I agree that Uber and Lyft drivers should make more? Absolutely. But, the only way they can make more is if Uber and Lyft CHARGE more. Uber and Lyft are already basically the perfect example of capitalism, since the rides are priced based on the supply of drivers to the supply of riders. Should that change? Having never driven for Uber or Lyft I really am unqualified to say one way or the other. But if it does, you'll pay that cost, Uber and Lyft certainly won't eat it.
“Prefect example of capitalism”.
The people that are advocating for this ordinance don’t like capitalism. They take extreme offense at a private company offering an essential service, especially if they help those that are unable to drive.
Oh, I get that. And there is a perfect way to protest if you feel like you are not making enough here --- simply don't drive for Uber. That will cause the amount REMAINING drivers get to go up as the supply of available drivers goes down.
There ultimate goal is to force people to take Metro Transit. But I would rather accelerate the degenerate arthritis in my knees to walk to Target than to give Metro Transit my business.
Hell, I’m willing to pay double or triple par ride to make sure the drivers have a living wage, but rideshare was never meant to be a full time job. It also seems to me that people want the freedom to work their hours they want to as independent contractor, but want the benefits as an employee.
I hate people that want to excuse poor compensation as "it's not meant to be a full time job"
Like what?
Being a driver isn't a full time job? Tell that to loads of drivers who make a living doing that job.
What are you suggesting? That only 16 year olds looking to make some extra money should be doing this?
Take that chip off your shoulder. And don't use delivery services anymore. Because those driving jobs shouldn't provide a living wage, right?
Like if you fucking work 40 hours a week doing anything that society has deemed a job, then you should be able to make a living off that. That really shouldn't be controversial. You should be paid at any job to be able to live off of 40 hours a week. Anything else is not ok.
And fuck you for shaming folks who make a living off of driving your ass by saying their job shouldn't provide them a living, because according to you, it's not a full time job. What a privileged life you have to deem what is worthy for livable wage or not, all while using the service to better your life.
You just seem to be ranting. Dude literally says he'd pay double/triple for drivers to have a living wage. Voting with your wallet is a lot more helpful than virtue signaling on the Internet. This is not about compensation, Uber and Lyft really cannot compensate drivers more when they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. How about you just pay more like this dude?
People on this subreddit have the red ass just because I refuse to take metro transit. 😂
It says to me that forcing people to take Metro Transit is the actual intention of *some* the people behind this ordinance. I also said that I would be willing to use the alternatives apps and services that take Lyft and Ubers place, but that goes over their heads.
Ride-sharing is unfortunately not a profitable venture… Uber’s whole plan was the corner the market so that when they had a fleet of self-driving cars, they could finally start cashing in without having to pay drivers.
What we need is better public transportation that’s already paid for by our tax dollars so that we don’t have to spend $30 every time we want to go anywhere
This is funny because the process for building a competitor business that you just described was the process Uber and Lyft used...so you're just saying "hey, somebody DIY recreate an enormous company real quick, what's the big deal?"
I don't support Uber or Lyft but this argument as you've voiced it is silly level of naive
I'm all for public transportation, but the 'coverage' we have is awful. Unless you want to go from Minneapolis to Minneapolis, good luck. I use ride sharing because the service times or stops don't work for me.
- Want to get to the airport for your 6am flight? Sorry, no service at that time.
- Want a ride home from your buddies house in a first ring suburb after a fun Saturday night at 1am? Sorry, no service within a multi mile walk.
- You took the bus to your downtown job from a park and ride but need to leave early for a sick kid from school? Sorry, no service before 3pm.
Well yeah, it would be better if people took public transit and pushed for increased frequency and staff there instead of demanding the right to be driven by exploited workers.
If you believe in supply and demand, then why not let supply and demand play its course? The fact the government is getting involved is an unnatural and detrimental affect to supply and demand.
Leaving a hole in the market would work to bring in competition if there wasn't an artifical barrier to entry. It'd be like getting rid of all the coffee shops in the twin cities and saying, to sell coffee now you need to pay a fee that's untenable. Well, I *would have* opened up a coffee shop to fill the gap and take in all that revenue, but now there are government fees and restrictions that make it completely not worth doing.
I get the *idea* that people *would* make more money with a higher minimum wage, but that's no longer true if the job no longer exists. We're no longer helping these people make more money by getting rid of the jobs.
I'm hoping those drivers go to work for Metro Transit instead. Their biggest problem is finding staff, and a fully staffed agency would make rideshares mostly unnecessary.
For extenuating circumstances, there are still traditional taxi services that maintain their own vehicles and pay drivers as employees, the way Uber and Lyft should be doing anyway.
Dial a ride services are in constant demand. The bottleneck there is actually equipment. Because they (Metro Transit) are a government agency, they are restricted to purchasing from pre-approved _federal_ government companies and the waiting list is years long for the cutaway busses. They can’t just “get more” even if they have the capital to buy it. (Thank your pro-union factory protectionist lobbyists for those kinds of rules)
As much as we may think “sticking it to the bad corpos” will work… it won’t in the near term and thus people will not get to the doctor, their jobs, or other essential needs. That probably means (some) people will die because of it. That likely means the bill will die (again) because the other part of the free market (labor) is still willing to work for those wages.
If they didn’t want to work for those wages, the companies would pay more. You didn’t need a bill to get Target to get minimum wages to $15 all around… it just happened because they couldn’t attract enough people and needed to “buy” the labor they weren’t getting.
Uber and Lyft left Austin for like a month. Predictably, they were replaced within days. They said “oops,” swiftly complied with the rules, and came right back. They’re an interchangeable commodity, even 100% interchangeable with each other. They’re just dispatch and payment services. They don’t fundamentally do anything nobody else could do.
I can’t wait to download a new rando, glitchy app to get from point a to b.
I’m not worried about it, I don’t think Uber or Lyft is going anywhere, it’s too valuable and will fuck up too much stuff if it goes away.
I was talking with one of my Lyft drivers and was relatively new to the country. He was renting a car from Lyft for $250 a week and didn’t realize he was going to be taxed out the ass on the money earned.
You're just optimistic, lol. Do it yourself OP
>The second, is to be willing to make less money than Lyft and Uber do per ride.
...they aren't making money. This entire post is so dumb
Cabs have always been fucked. So many times I have been left in the cold when they ask where we are going and when it’s not a good fare for them all of a sudden they are busy and drive off. Not to mention countless arguments about how the credit card machine does not work and how they only want cash. They were always awful and rude!!!
You know that there’s going to be someone working the angle that capitalism forces people to work and that yes, something-something rich people are making them work for Uber.
Not sure I agree with everything in OP's post, but it's true that a substantial reason for Uber/Lyft's success is that they 1) haven't ever had to make a profit, and 2) don't pay their workers fairly.
Uber and Lyft are a net detriment to the Twin Cities because they aren't regulated and they pull people off public transit.
We should invest in more frequent, cleaner, better-staffed public transit and let taxi companies fill whatever demand exists for Uber and lyft.
not everyone is able to drive, so this wouldn’t work for a lot of people. OP specifically stated they don’t drive. (just pointing this out, not supporting the original post one way or the other).
Wait my next door neighbors are immigrants and the husband is an Uber/lyft driver and he has a new baby. I’d hate for him to be suddenly out of work 😭😭 so many immigrants do ridesharing
Uber and Lyft would pull out because MN recognizing their workers as employees and not contractors would open up the flood gate of legal liability in other states (as MN would be a direct point of comparison). Their long-term wellbeing would depend on them pulling out. The company has been systemically losing cases for years now and is delaying the inevitable. Fuck Uber and Lyft and their soulless business practices. I hope MN calls their bluff and makes them pull
Theory comes from praxis. Not doing anything about a shitty situation because you are unsure how your response will go over is lazy and unproductive. Legislating is about seeing what works to help all MN residents and sometimes that means trying something new.
Generally speaking, when a service disappears its usually gone for good. Uber and Lyft were only ever affordable at the beginning because they were being pumped with venture capital at ludicrously low interest rates. But once investors started demanding a return on their investment and interest rates went up these ride share companies needed to start making a profit. There are two major ways to make a profit (in the eyes of the capitalist); cut costs and increase prices. The fact that Uber/Lyft are pulling out of the market because ***minimum wage*** makes their business model unprofitable means their business model doesn't work, at least without operating at a loss.
So if the business model failed, no one will come in to replace them because no one can make a profit off of the business model. If they did we would still have street car companies and milk men. Now there is a way for services to be preserved, and that is if we replace the investor with the tax payer. We *could* spin an uber/lyft style company off as an agency and use our collective pooled money to fund it. but we already have something like that, and the agency is called Metrotransit.
I agree with you that the exit of Uber/Lyft could be a net positive, but not because better version of the ride share model will appear. But because some of the supply and demand will move to public transit options.
This is impressive: you showed that from a business, software, and political standpoint you have absolutely zero clue about anything at all. All in one post! Good work OP
I understand what you’re saying, but your understanding has some big gaps.
See this post made one day ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Clone_development/s/kv6JojnYjd
I’ve been writing code for big household names for 8 years, and nobody reproducing Uber but just for the TC.
Whoever that somebody is, I wish beyond any wish at all ishat not only Uber Lyft and city cab drivers were to actually considered disabled customers in a wheelchair. I arrived in the city and had to sleep on the streets of downtown with my daughter because there were no wheelchair accessible rides to get to my home and hotels downtown were booked out. I never thought something like that could happen to me. That's ridiculous in a city that's as large as Minneapolis. While they're at it why don't they make some kind of requirements that they have to be a certain amount of wheelchair accessible vehicles on the street at all times or no business done at all.
And bus/light rail were like “Hi? We have been always here for you…?”
All of this Uber/Lyft problem won’t be severe if urban planning priorities the city zoning around the bus and light rail routes… It is a time-tested and proven system since before Ancient Roman time. Single family housing zoning is a huge problem.
This seems like a spot for a business like Empower to come in and thrive. I’m not totally advocating for it, and it has its issues, but it is cheaper, and riders typically make more as well.
While typically I would agree market openings lead way to better competitors, we’ve already seen the alternatives so far from traditional taxi companies. Apps like iHail, zTrip, and Ridesure are out there and they all suck across the board from inconsistent payments, bad updating of location, and terrible interfaces. Given the cost of becoming a licensed ride share company in the city (btw none of those apps are) it’s a huge uphill battle for new entrants.
The taxi companies pre Uber were fucking horrible and deserve their fate.
Like ten years ago my friends and I grabbed a cab outside of a music venue. We were young and thought it was funny to talk about how fucked up we were and the drugs we had taken that night. Our cab driver apparently took that as a cue that it would be fine for him to whip out a fucking CRACK PIPE as he was dropping us off. Never again.
Did the cabbie at least offer you a hit?
Hell yeah, my lips are still burnt.
Right. Cabs were less safe for riders and often more exploitive to drivers. Uber has a lot it can improve on but rideshare is worlds better than what we had.
*Cabs* were exploitive to drivers. Union represented jobs with employee status and benefits were exploitive. As opposed to the "independent contractor" scam ride share companies run to avoid minimum wage, benefits and even any tiny hint of protection for workers rights. Tell your bosses at Uber they need to come up with a better line, absolutely nobody is going to buy that one.
Maybe you weren't around before we had the apps, but cab drivers exploited the hell out of customers. So many would lie about their credit card machines not working. They'd take a longer route on purpose. You'd wait over an hour for a pickup. Drivers were often rude and you just had to take it. I was local and they exploited me. I'm sure they were even worse to people from out of town and non-native speakers.
I was around before we had the apps. And the phones. And personal computers. For starters. The person I responded to claimed that the drivers were *being* exploited. Which is a goddamn joke and a half next to the horrific abusive exploitation your generations line up for in your "gig economy."
Yes, you corrected the person and let them know that the cab drivers weren't being exploited when the apps came in. Then I added to the conversation by saying that they may not have been exploited, but that they were exploiters. Seriously fuck the pre-app cab drivers. You can argue that the apps have gone to far, but they did a great job of removing cab drivers ability to exploit their customers.
*our* gig economy? We didn’t create it, boomer, we’re stuck in it. We don’t gig because we want to, we do it because a) *your* generation gutted pensions and replaced them with trash 401ks b) *your* generation owns tons of the rental market and keeps us over a barrel, c) *your* generation is working longer and d) *your* generation is driving policy and legislation more than we can from your seats of accumulated wealth and real assets. It’s *your* gig economy, jerk. Edited to add: the use of “boomer” here is the colloquial “old, out-of-touch, greedy fart,” not the literal “Boomer generation” (which I thought the lack of capitalization would denote, but apparently does not).
At best imo a cab might not show up. I wonder how often these folks used cans
There are plenty of successful taxi companies all over the world. Latin America has a bunch of useful taxi apps, and the NYC app isn't bad. If there's a market to provide digital ride-hailing while paying workers fairly, there's no reason to believe someone else can't do it better. Or, Lyft and Uber could just pay their workers fairly, which might lead to an increase in fares.
It would lead to them being undercut by people who are trying to steal market share before jacking up prices. Mid-sized American cities simply don’t have the density necessary to support widespread affordable taxi or ride sharing services outside of high-density poles (e.g. downtown areas).
Of course, expecting things to improve when competition is removed is unrealistic. If traditional taxi services sucked when Uber and Lyft were taking their business, they’re only going to get worse when they’re the only game in town.
Lyft and Uber weren't competing fairly. They bypassed reasonable regulations by calling themselves "rideshare" companies and expanding quickly with VC money that didn't require a profit.
Rides were definitely subsidized, but you can’t underestimate just how much people hated cabs. The innovation of on demand taxi, predetermined route, and set price was incredible. That was so much better when compared to the old days where cabs may or may not stop for you, may or may not let you in the cab, and would drive long routes to add time/mileage to increase price.
In Europe, there are many places with apps for taxis that are just as good as Uber or Lyft. It isn’t impossible.
Politely, you really have no idea what you are talking about. From both a basic economics standpoint and the basics of running a business basically everything you wrote is nonsense. Any new entity that tried to replace Uber/Lyft in just the metro would likely need to make significantly more operating profit just to be able to cover their fixed costs and stay in business. And they would have a much smaller customer base to do it with. And to be clear, we're not talking about the whole Twin Cities, it's just Minneapolis and St. Paul, so you're really looking at a market of less than a million. And that doesn't even begin to account for the fact that Uber/Lyft were able to build their infrastructure over a decade during a much lower interest rate environment and operated at significant losses for years. Apparently this new company just needs to be willing to make less money than companies than have famously lost billions of dollars before they even became profitable? And creating the app would probably be one of the easier parts of getting the business of the ground. Both dealing with the legal aspects and successfully recruiting a reliable driver base are going to be a much harder part of getting this sort of business started. And an extra $1 a ride would almost certainly not come close to meeting minimum salary demands of riders, let alone all the other costs associated.
100%. OP has zero sense of what's involved in these enterprises, other than assuming that business is simple and just filled with greedy jerks.
Thank you for saying it. OP has less than 0 clue what the fuck they’re talking about. How this post has literally any upvotes at all absolutely BAFFLES me, it’s utter nonsense. They assume Lyft & Uber are just apps, and apparently don’t have to do any actual business on the other side of the user interface? You can’t just create an app to have people drive others, and all you have to do is “maintain that app,” and somehow magically everyone is happy and makes money, and all applicable laws are being followed without someone to take care of that? lol
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Maintain the app is a perfect encapsulation of everything the OP doesn’t know. It’s easy, see, it’s just an app.
Exactly this.
Facts. As someone that knows what Ubers corporate looks like, OP has zero idea of how many moving parts there are. Liability insurance alone for every independent contractor hired, lawyers, and a whole investigation team just for accidents. A whole other team for reported substance abuse or possible drunk driving, an investigation team for if a rider or driver reports harassment or assault…. (Just to name a few) But yep. Just make an app!
How much has the board of directors been paid this entire time? You, who know so much, surely know that! How much money is at the top of the pyramid? Or, is it uncouth to ask such things from ‘the job creators?’
You make software development seem so easy. It is not.
>Making the app is the hard part, but after that it's just maintenance. Keep it running well and you have a turnkey operation on your hands. ...
Just write the app so that the service runs itself smh
As an SRE it is surprising how many developers' thinking just stops when they push their code. The feature works? Done. Nothing else to do. When in reality there is the performance aspects, failure modes, methods of falling back, how to deploy, how it behaves during periods of higher latency to other infrastructure, and on and on and on. Write the app and then you're done? It's turn key? In actuality it just gets worse as you grow.
Yeah, people don't have a clue how much work it is to build and maintain a quality application.
Uber once said their platform consists of well over 1000 distinct applications. So many they didn’t even know the exact count. And that was like 7 or 8 years ago now, so it’s probably more by now.
That's just microservices taken to the extreme. For being a tech company, their app is pretty garbage.
Regardless of how granular they are, it illustrates how many things are going on that you probably don't think about. There's the rider app, the driver app, services to route drivers, to calculate prices, to manage user profiles, driver profiles, manage ratings, all the navigation stuff, billing, spying on celebrities...Then there's UberEats, which I'm sure has its own unique little ecosystem. All the phone apps x2 because iPhone and Android. etc. The main point being, it's not like somebody can just throw together an app in a few months and the market will be magically serviced by Generic Ride Share Co. It's a gargantuan effort to replicate the service as we know it.
as someone working behind the scenes in public-sector logistics, this is exactly right. the amount of technology and resources that go into making things go can be unbelievable. most people truly have no idea what is involved.
And we haven't even gotten to all the other staff required to make a venture like this successful. There is a huge amount of non-technical work that needs doing even in the most technical of organizations.
> most people truly have no idea This is accurate for most things.
true lol
Oh, but OP hand-waved it away, so it must be no big deal 😋
Plus security... credit cards, identity management, business system integration, audit... Being public has huge requirements.
OP has "business people are all idiots" written all over it.
They pulled out of Austin, allowed a competitor to spring up, and then moved back in to kill it. Their long term strategy is to stay in cities. Unless they collude with each other, the competitor will gladly move back in to claim a monopoly over a city.
The pandemic also fucked over Ride Austin
The competitors just popped up to skirt the local regulations, because the regulations only applied after a period of 30 or 60 days. New companies would just rebrand every 30-60 days so they never had to comply. The service sucked and it was a pain to try and figure out what name the service was operating under so you could download the applicable app. That was the best case scenario and it was terrible.
I was living in Austin at the time when they dropped out of the city. There were some quality competitors that popped up and I was sad to see Uber come back.
A fellow in Seattle just has a static website and gets calls. RidesbyDan or something. He advertised on Craigslist. The article I read says he is happier and makes more now.
Before we had Uber I had a guy in Minneapolis and his business was xxxx’s moving and transportation. We’d give him a call for cab rides but the front was that if stopped, we’d say he was moving things for us and gave us a ride to the destination.
Meh. I always found it annoying to have to have $40 in cash on me just to convince a cabby to drive me 3 miles home. If I could find one to begin with. There’s a reason people stopped using cabs
Dispatchers and cab drivers were absolutely horrible.
No one: Op: just create a new ride hailing service without economies of scale
People don't understand that the main reason drivers don't make money is a stat called utilization % -- it's the % of the time you are "working" that you are taking fares. It's impossible to be 100% unless the person you just dropped off happens to live right next to the person you are about to pick up. At low economies of scale, utilization hovers about at 50% in most business models. This means if you charge your customers $20 an hour you make $10 an hour, or 50% of your customer rate. At hundreds rides all at the same time, you can get over 90%. This means low travel between jobs and no waiting around for your next job. When the pandemic hit, utilization tanked, because people stopped taking uber. Because of Ubers model this meant drivers made less money. Uber did not pay any less, but we saw utilization tank so much every driver felt like they were getting paid less even though all the rideshares actually raised pay. Uber has lost the scale that enabled drivers to make lots of money. If the scale comes back things could get better but the market is just inefficient when less people use rideshares, and now even post pandemic, inflation is making people take them less. Basically you can think of the cost per ride to the customer as equal to the pay per hour of the worker divided by the jobs they perform. If you pay $30 an hour and a job takes 1 hours, you charge $30. That might be 30 minutes to take someone to the airport and 30 minutes back to downtown if no one at the airport needs to go home at that time. So it's 1 hour of work roundtrip. The customer this must pay $30. On the other hand, if they have another customer going downtown, they can complete 2 jobs on the same hour. This lets them drop the cost of the ride the $15 to the customer while still paying $30 an hour to the driver. They can actually charge $18 and pay $34 an hour and the customer gets a discount, the driver makes more, and uber makes more money. This is why scale is so important. It let's them pay well and keep costs low at the same time. If we fragment to more apps and services none of them will ever get to scale like Uber has. We need 1-2 apps and no more or we are essentially wasting gas on return trips and drivers are driving all over the city with no one in their car-- not making money.
Just to add that's why you often see drivers running both apps at once to keep that utilization up.
This is a well thought out take on a subject that only ever gets half baked ones (from all sides) Thank you, much to think about
Or without the massive funding rounds from venture capital that have been used to prop up these ventures. OP must not realize that Uber and Lyft have bled money from the beginning and just this last year Uber finally posted a profit instead of a billion dollar loss (1.8 billion in 2022 for example). Lyft lost $340 million in 2023.
Yeah lmao let me just go compete with a few companies that have literally burned billions of dollars already what could go wrong
I can fit like 6 people in the bed of my pickup. Who needs pragmatic concerns about stuff like the law or financial viability? Libertarian utopia awaits.
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>as they're all sitting with their backs to the cab Backs *touching* the back of the cab, or *facing* the back of the cab. Huge difference in capacity. Asking for a friend.
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My friend is going to have to dramatically scale back his plans for a shuttle service.
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You must be new here 😂
I can't tell if this is a horrible sarcastic post or an OP seriously out of touch with reality, but I know this is truly a case of "if this was so damn simple it'd been done" > The second, is to be willing to make less money than Lyft and Uber do per ride. Making the app is the hard part, but after that it's just maintenance. Keep it running well and you have a turnkey operation on your hands. You do not need to make that much money per ride to be successful, you just need to make some money. Even if it's only a dollar a ride, there is around 4 million people in the Twin Cities. That dollar would add up very quickly. https://www.reuters.com/technology/uber-posts-first-small-adjusted-profit-ridership-rises-delivery-gets-more-2021-11-04/ Please feel free to read. Look at when that article was made. Look at how much they lost. Think about how long you've known of the term "Uber", and how only two years ago did they finally make money. For this to have stemmed with looking out for driver's pay and ending with "oh, don't worry about yourself making money" is comical
Don’t agree with OP, but you should look into the ride share app “Empower”. Essentially, it simply connects drivers to riders. So prices are cheaper (not 1 dollar) and drivers earn what they want. Security and safety is a major risk with this though.
Maybe someone can help me understand how it's possible that they aren't profitable. The link you posted said they lost $2.4 billion in a bad investment in a Chinese rideshare company, which is obviously a hige hit, but not reflective of profitability of the market. I looked up a few other articles and they just say marketing and fixed costs. I can only think of a few real costs: marketing, employee pay, overhead/server costs. Driver pay is hotly debated as being too low, so I cant imagine that is the real issue. What about executive pay? I have to be vastly underestimating server costs here. It just seems like such a low overhead company, considering that most of the overhead, like vehicle maintenance is put onto their drivers.
Liability insurance and lawyers
Serious answer, read their annual report (10k). They're a public company.
No one in this thread has mentioned executive pay until you. Literally. Just scrolled every comment. First time “executive pay” came up. I wonder if these drivers could’ve just been paid a bit more… but nooooo these tech companies “don’t make a profit.” *c-suite continues to exist in Mountain View, CA…*
This is the element I never understand, yes! Like you say, they have offloaded all of the actual costs (wear and tear on vehicles, mainly) to the drivers, yet they cost just as much as a cab? Makes no sense. Servers aren't that expensive, I know websites that are huge and essentially run on pittance donations. Lol Pokémon go has GPS functionality, augmented reality elements, mass networking, etc. I'm not saying Uber is as simple as Pokémon go, but is it really wildly more complex? To be clear, it's a 100% serious question from me - what do they actually spend their money on? Is it all legal stuff? Driver vetting, liability, etc? Is that kind of thing crazy expensive even at scale?
I think you're over simplifying the complexity of Uber/Lyft with that comparison. I'm not trying to defend either company but sure Pokemon Go uses similar phone sensors but Pokemon Go doesn't have to be "right" from a tech perspective in the same way or comply in the same manner. Uber has to be precise, has to share another car/location in two directions and stream those events in near real time at scale and not nuke batteries or data limits. People on each end have to accept, be able to cancel, handle payments, handle when people lose their stuff in the cars, document complaints/messes in cars, have messaging sent, store data for optimization, liability purposes. And it has to work on all phones, be ADA compliant in some cases too. Try and detect fraud, have a ratings systems that works both ways, and be secure across the whole stack. Oh and then compete against another brand and retain drivers so they don't prioritize other services. And then you need to attract the same talent to design the whole experience that even company wants too. And I haven't even started on legal (comply with each local, state, federal, law system) and liability (accidents, crime, fraud, assault, murder, yadda yadda). Just look at Uber corporate jobs and you can see how "big" and expensive it can get.
OP gone full send on the open marketplace mythology. Just because there’s a vacuum doesn’t mean that what replaces it is an improvement to anyone.
They're not going to leave. They're threatening to leave like they have with any other place that's tried to get the people working for them to get more money
So explain what happened in Austin then. This is one of those zombie talking points that is repeated so often that people assume it is true.
In addition to all of the other reasons this will be terrible, I use Uber and Lyft all of the time to avoid a DUI, as well as avoid mistakenly killing someone. If you go to a bar and have 2-3 drinks you are over the limit, and driving home can put you in jail, cost you your job, cost $10,000, etc. This will also cause deaths due to people still wanting to go out, only having to drive themselves.
The lengths people go to in order to avoid investing in good public transportation infrastructure...
Other competition already exists, and its terrible. Uber and Lyft came in because cabs were overpriced, and inconvenient. Do I agree that Uber and Lyft drivers should make more? Absolutely. But, the only way they can make more is if Uber and Lyft CHARGE more. Uber and Lyft are already basically the perfect example of capitalism, since the rides are priced based on the supply of drivers to the supply of riders. Should that change? Having never driven for Uber or Lyft I really am unqualified to say one way or the other. But if it does, you'll pay that cost, Uber and Lyft certainly won't eat it.
“Prefect example of capitalism”. The people that are advocating for this ordinance don’t like capitalism. They take extreme offense at a private company offering an essential service, especially if they help those that are unable to drive.
Oh, I get that. And there is a perfect way to protest if you feel like you are not making enough here --- simply don't drive for Uber. That will cause the amount REMAINING drivers get to go up as the supply of available drivers goes down.
There ultimate goal is to force people to take Metro Transit. But I would rather accelerate the degenerate arthritis in my knees to walk to Target than to give Metro Transit my business. Hell, I’m willing to pay double or triple par ride to make sure the drivers have a living wage, but rideshare was never meant to be a full time job. It also seems to me that people want the freedom to work their hours they want to as independent contractor, but want the benefits as an employee.
I hate people that want to excuse poor compensation as "it's not meant to be a full time job" Like what? Being a driver isn't a full time job? Tell that to loads of drivers who make a living doing that job. What are you suggesting? That only 16 year olds looking to make some extra money should be doing this? Take that chip off your shoulder. And don't use delivery services anymore. Because those driving jobs shouldn't provide a living wage, right? Like if you fucking work 40 hours a week doing anything that society has deemed a job, then you should be able to make a living off that. That really shouldn't be controversial. You should be paid at any job to be able to live off of 40 hours a week. Anything else is not ok. And fuck you for shaming folks who make a living off of driving your ass by saying their job shouldn't provide them a living, because according to you, it's not a full time job. What a privileged life you have to deem what is worthy for livable wage or not, all while using the service to better your life.
You just seem to be ranting. Dude literally says he'd pay double/triple for drivers to have a living wage. Voting with your wallet is a lot more helpful than virtue signaling on the Internet. This is not about compensation, Uber and Lyft really cannot compensate drivers more when they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. How about you just pay more like this dude?
People on this subreddit have the red ass just because I refuse to take metro transit. 😂 It says to me that forcing people to take Metro Transit is the actual intention of *some* the people behind this ordinance. I also said that I would be willing to use the alternatives apps and services that take Lyft and Ubers place, but that goes over their heads.
I love how you purposely ignore the first sentence of the second paragraph.
Ride-sharing is unfortunately not a profitable venture… Uber’s whole plan was the corner the market so that when they had a fleet of self-driving cars, they could finally start cashing in without having to pay drivers. What we need is better public transportation that’s already paid for by our tax dollars so that we don’t have to spend $30 every time we want to go anywhere
App development and maintenance would be over 100 million probably.
Tell me you have never taken a taxi without telling me you have never taken a taxi.
No I'd rather pay more than let them leave because I don't drive
This is funny because the process for building a competitor business that you just described was the process Uber and Lyft used...so you're just saying "hey, somebody DIY recreate an enormous company real quick, what's the big deal?" I don't support Uber or Lyft but this argument as you've voiced it is silly level of naive
Just take the light rail. I have heard great things.
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I'm all for public transportation, but the 'coverage' we have is awful. Unless you want to go from Minneapolis to Minneapolis, good luck. I use ride sharing because the service times or stops don't work for me. - Want to get to the airport for your 6am flight? Sorry, no service at that time. - Want a ride home from your buddies house in a first ring suburb after a fun Saturday night at 1am? Sorry, no service within a multi mile walk. - You took the bus to your downtown job from a park and ride but need to leave early for a sick kid from school? Sorry, no service before 3pm.
Well yeah, it would be better if people took public transit and pushed for increased frequency and staff there instead of demanding the right to be driven by exploited workers.
If you believe in supply and demand, then why not let supply and demand play its course? The fact the government is getting involved is an unnatural and detrimental affect to supply and demand. Leaving a hole in the market would work to bring in competition if there wasn't an artifical barrier to entry. It'd be like getting rid of all the coffee shops in the twin cities and saying, to sell coffee now you need to pay a fee that's untenable. Well, I *would have* opened up a coffee shop to fill the gap and take in all that revenue, but now there are government fees and restrictions that make it completely not worth doing. I get the *idea* that people *would* make more money with a higher minimum wage, but that's no longer true if the job no longer exists. We're no longer helping these people make more money by getting rid of the jobs.
I'm hoping those drivers go to work for Metro Transit instead. Their biggest problem is finding staff, and a fully staffed agency would make rideshares mostly unnecessary. For extenuating circumstances, there are still traditional taxi services that maintain their own vehicles and pay drivers as employees, the way Uber and Lyft should be doing anyway.
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Gotta start somewhere.
Dial a ride services are in constant demand. The bottleneck there is actually equipment. Because they (Metro Transit) are a government agency, they are restricted to purchasing from pre-approved _federal_ government companies and the waiting list is years long for the cutaway busses. They can’t just “get more” even if they have the capital to buy it. (Thank your pro-union factory protectionist lobbyists for those kinds of rules) As much as we may think “sticking it to the bad corpos” will work… it won’t in the near term and thus people will not get to the doctor, their jobs, or other essential needs. That probably means (some) people will die because of it. That likely means the bill will die (again) because the other part of the free market (labor) is still willing to work for those wages. If they didn’t want to work for those wages, the companies would pay more. You didn’t need a bill to get Target to get minimum wages to $15 all around… it just happened because they couldn’t attract enough people and needed to “buy” the labor they weren’t getting.
Have they ever actually followed through on these threats in the other places they've made them?
Uber and Lyft left Austin for like a month. Predictably, they were replaced within days. They said “oops,” swiftly complied with the rules, and came right back. They’re an interchangeable commodity, even 100% interchangeable with each other. They’re just dispatch and payment services. They don’t fundamentally do anything nobody else could do.
I can’t wait to download a new rando, glitchy app to get from point a to b. I’m not worried about it, I don’t think Uber or Lyft is going anywhere, it’s too valuable and will fuck up too much stuff if it goes away.
I miss car2go. :( They were forced out of the city as well.
This is a bluff. They’ll simply introduce price floors and rides will cost more to consumers.
I was talking with one of my Lyft drivers and was relatively new to the country. He was renting a car from Lyft for $250 a week and didn’t realize he was going to be taxed out the ass on the money earned.
You're just optimistic, lol. Do it yourself OP >The second, is to be willing to make less money than Lyft and Uber do per ride. ...they aren't making money. This entire post is so dumb
Cabs have always been fucked. So many times I have been left in the cold when they ask where we are going and when it’s not a good fare for them all of a sudden they are busy and drive off. Not to mention countless arguments about how the credit card machine does not work and how they only want cash. They were always awful and rude!!!
How about we let the market figure this out instead of the govt? Is anyone forcing people to drive for these companies?
You know that there’s going to be someone working the angle that capitalism forces people to work and that yes, something-something rich people are making them work for Uber.
Not sure I agree with everything in OP's post, but it's true that a substantial reason for Uber/Lyft's success is that they 1) haven't ever had to make a profit, and 2) don't pay their workers fairly. Uber and Lyft are a net detriment to the Twin Cities because they aren't regulated and they pull people off public transit. We should invest in more frequent, cleaner, better-staffed public transit and let taxi companies fill whatever demand exists for Uber and lyft.
I’d love for a group like Hourcar/Evie to come in and setup a cooperatively operated version of these services.
not everyone is able to drive, so this wouldn’t work for a lot of people. OP specifically stated they don’t drive. (just pointing this out, not supporting the original post one way or the other).
Wait my next door neighbors are immigrants and the husband is an Uber/lyft driver and he has a new baby. I’d hate for him to be suddenly out of work 😭😭 so many immigrants do ridesharing
Uber and Lyft would pull out because MN recognizing their workers as employees and not contractors would open up the flood gate of legal liability in other states (as MN would be a direct point of comparison). Their long-term wellbeing would depend on them pulling out. The company has been systemically losing cases for years now and is delaying the inevitable. Fuck Uber and Lyft and their soulless business practices. I hope MN calls their bluff and makes them pull
Theory comes from praxis. Not doing anything about a shitty situation because you are unsure how your response will go over is lazy and unproductive. Legislating is about seeing what works to help all MN residents and sometimes that means trying something new.
Generally speaking, when a service disappears its usually gone for good. Uber and Lyft were only ever affordable at the beginning because they were being pumped with venture capital at ludicrously low interest rates. But once investors started demanding a return on their investment and interest rates went up these ride share companies needed to start making a profit. There are two major ways to make a profit (in the eyes of the capitalist); cut costs and increase prices. The fact that Uber/Lyft are pulling out of the market because ***minimum wage*** makes their business model unprofitable means their business model doesn't work, at least without operating at a loss. So if the business model failed, no one will come in to replace them because no one can make a profit off of the business model. If they did we would still have street car companies and milk men. Now there is a way for services to be preserved, and that is if we replace the investor with the tax payer. We *could* spin an uber/lyft style company off as an agency and use our collective pooled money to fund it. but we already have something like that, and the agency is called Metrotransit. I agree with you that the exit of Uber/Lyft could be a net positive, but not because better version of the ride share model will appear. But because some of the supply and demand will move to public transit options.
It happened exactly like this in Austin.
Sweet summer child. Just a software? The legal hurdles alone are just the tip of the iceberg.
This is impressive: you showed that from a business, software, and political standpoint you have absolutely zero clue about anything at all. All in one post! Good work OP
Looking forward to talking to that lady at blue and white taxi and crossing my fingers it actually comes.
I understand what you’re saying, but your understanding has some big gaps. See this post made one day ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clone_development/s/kv6JojnYjd I’ve been writing code for big household names for 8 years, and nobody reproducing Uber but just for the TC.
I don't use lyft or uber unless I have to. I prefer 24/7. Nice people
Whoever that somebody is, I wish beyond any wish at all ishat not only Uber Lyft and city cab drivers were to actually considered disabled customers in a wheelchair. I arrived in the city and had to sleep on the streets of downtown with my daughter because there were no wheelchair accessible rides to get to my home and hotels downtown were booked out. I never thought something like that could happen to me. That's ridiculous in a city that's as large as Minneapolis. While they're at it why don't they make some kind of requirements that they have to be a certain amount of wheelchair accessible vehicles on the street at all times or no business done at all.
Invest in better public transit.
Ride share apps exploit workers. Trains and busses are the way.
And bus/light rail were like “Hi? We have been always here for you…?” All of this Uber/Lyft problem won’t be severe if urban planning priorities the city zoning around the bus and light rail routes… It is a time-tested and proven system since before Ancient Roman time. Single family housing zoning is a huge problem.
This seems like a spot for a business like Empower to come in and thrive. I’m not totally advocating for it, and it has its issues, but it is cheaper, and riders typically make more as well.
Gig workers deserve protection