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Can Ride-Sharing Startup Lyft Survive the SoCal Heat?
First time accepted submitter Kyle Jacoby writes "The app-powered on-demand ride-sharing startup, Lyft, has brought its trademark pink mustaches to San Diego. After a successful venture in San Francisco about a year ago, Lyft has since expanded to offer their services to other congested cities, like Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. Despite the utility of the service, Lyft (and related services Sidecar and Uber) has recently come under fire from the city of Los Angeles, whose department of transportation issued cease-and-desist letters to the startup. It seems that the service has the taxi community in an uproar, who believe that Lyft ride-share drivers should be required to obtain the permits similar to those required of taxi drivers." Nothing like some regulatory capture for Independence Day. Amid the ongoing strike of BART workers in the Bay Area, I bet some people are using on-line organization tools for ride-sharing with a similar upshot.
"Passengers and drivers rate each other after every ride. If you rate a driver below 4 stars, youâ(TM)ll never be matched with that driver again. If a driver's average falls below 4½ out of 5 stars, they are removed from the Lyft community. It's our way of maintaining high-quality standards."
Can anyone tell me what the point is of a 5 star rating system if anything below 4.5 stars gets you kicked out? All this is going to end up doing is artificially inflating ratings. Basically everyone will be a five star driver or a zero star. It makes no sense whatsoever. I would think any logical system would have at least 3 stratas of "Excellent/Well above average", "OK", and "Average, but would ride with again".
For what I can see, you pay for the Lyft ride. That's a taxi, not a carpool. Perhaps I'm wrong.
Carpooling should have the same license as a taxi?
What utter crap.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you have 100 four stars you will be kicked out. The system is basically saying you need to give any driver you want to keep five stars, all the time. This makes a 5 point rating system pointless and it might as well be a boolean "Keep? Yes / No" flag that is averaged.
Do you not see how other people drive on the road? Now you want to get in their car and let them drive you?
WTF
A company out of San Francisco which advocates "ride sharing" and using a pink mustache as a logo? Some jokes just write themselves.
If taxi cabs aren't regulated, we can't have food inspections! Or roads! Or firefighters! Go live in Somalia! There are no taxi cab regulators there.
LA's public transportation system covers a phenomenally large area, and is ubiquitous and cheap. I used to ride it all the time before moving to Chicago, where I'm still a little amazed at how much smaller and more expensive it is.
I'm surprised any 3rd party transportation system can make enough money to survive in LA, but I'm not surprised by the cease-and-desist. Public transportation is kept cheap by subsidies and limiting other services. For instance, you can't hail a cab -- it's illegal for them to pull over for you. These services are likely seen as pulling and end run-around the regulations that licensed taxi companies need to follow.
No, the distinctive thing is that you're paying for a ride. That's a service.
Not saying that the city/state whatever needs to be involved, but I *am* saying that to pretend this isn't a paid service to the rider is disingenuous.
Suppose a taxi driver was thinking of going downtown to Bruno's for a good pizza slice. Turns around, heads down Broadway, there you are, waving your hand. You get in and tell him, Bruno's, please! Did that suddenly turn the taxi ride into not-a-taxi-ride? No, of course not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This will last until the first major accident where someone's car is totaled and their insurance company won't pay. Lyft provides liability insurance up to $1,000,000 which is great for protecting you against injury lawsuits but it isn't going to replace your car. Better have an honest talk with your insurance agent to make sure your vehicle is covered for this type of use. And I wonder if your vehicle would need to be registered for commercial use.
and gas and other car costs come out of that $35hr.
Also lyft likely takes a cut as well.
Chii... :-(
Huh.
I thought this story was going to be about SoCal Lyft cars overheating due to those giant mustaches blocking the airflow to the radiators.
Thyr nym ys ydyotyc.
The LA DoT is a bunch of fucking Nazis! There, I said ir.
Ezekiel 23:20
As has been pointed out, if the the driver's drunk and car wreaks and you're hurt, are your medical bills paid? Can you be sure the driver is going to charge uphold his end? Couldn't he get there, realize you're about to be late for an Airplane w/o time to call, and then charge more?
Right now it's self regulating because it's new, and there's a lot of venture capital in the system making that work. But give it 5 or 10 years after the VC funds run out and those same VCs want their ROI and corners start being cut. Then add the fact that a safely and well regulated business (Taxicabs) is now gone because they couldn't compete, and they'll stop kicking drivers out because, hey, they're makin' money off the bad drivers and the good.
I suspect people who know more about it can give a bigger list of why taxi cabs are regulated, but what I'm getting at is that there is a _reason_ we regulated things in the first place, and it's very often a good one. Sure, regulation can be a pain, but you take the good with the bad because before it life was nasty, brutish & short.
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Do people understand why taxis are licensed? Do you know where the whole licensing came about? It has to do with public safety (try taxis in Mexico City, you just might find yourself abducted). Yes it is a big regulatory beast these days, but at its core taxi-licensing is for the safety and security of the consumer. What is Lyft? Totally random strangers getting into other totally random strangers cars to go for a ride. I can tell you Ted Bundy would love to be alive today with this sort of deal going on...
I saw a car with the pink mustache in San Francisco, and I just think it's UGLY!
Surely there's a more aesthetic, yet noticeable, logo!
This is another case of regulatory capture. The LA DOT gets paid permit fees by taxis and none by commie-pinko ride sharers. Now the DOT is acting in the interest (being regulated by) those whom it was supposed to regulate.
If they are that explains the S&D order.. I believe California politicians whether dems, or rep, support and kiss the unions ass. I the company Lyft holds a high standard on there own which matches if not exceeds California's idiot DOT. That would explain the childishness by LA politicians.. Again another things unions are good at, destroying anything that makes other lives easier because they can't get in on it.
It'll just drive the movement underground.
Well, sort of like BART.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
They should ask five-ish specific questions like :
(1) Was the driver on time? If no, how late?
(2) Did the driver and vehicle seem safe? If not, explain.
(3) Was the driver polite?
(4) Was the vehicle clean?
(5) Was the driver friendly, curt, etc.?
Some questions like (1-4) are used to qualify drivers. Any personality questions like (5) are used to match up people with drivers they'll like more, but influence the qualification only minimally.
Down side, if they're matching up curt drivers with curt people, and bubbly drivers with bubbly people, then when they occasionally cannot make that match, they might need to warn the user : "Apologies. We think you're an anti-social bump, so usually we trying pairing you with similar drivers, but we just kicked out our only surly driver here for not bothering to remove the jagged rusty metal spikes from his passenger doors. So today all we got is the bubbly flower child who'll drone on about chakras and vegetarian recipes. I hope you don't mind. She's very safe. Ask her were to buy weed during your visit."
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Call BART Simpson. He'll know what to do.
It seems that the service has the taxi community in an uproar, who believe that Lyft ride-share drivers should be required to obtain the permits similar to those required of taxi drivers." It seems that the service has the taxi community in an uproar, who believe that Lyft ride-share drivers should be required to obtain the permits similar to those required of taxi drivers."
We have freedom! Taxi drivers have the permits to prove it! If you don't have a permit you can't drive a car with someone else in it! That's freedom! Fourth of July Fuck yeah!
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Rideshare is an industry term in Transportation Demand Management. It refers (oddly enough) to any of the following modes of transportation:
--Walk
--Bike
--Carpool
--Vanpool
--Bus
--Train
Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar are all well-aware with the misuse of the term and they defend is with the simple statement that "two people going to the same place in/on the same vehicle is a carpool." Detractors aptly point out that it's actually one person with that genuine destination with the other (the driver), being paid to take the passenger to that destination.
So Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar changed their systems early on. No longer would there be fares or fees, but "expected minimum donations" and the driver's weren't for "hire", they were FRIENDS!
"This is my pal, Steve! My app told him to come pick me up and we're going to be best of buddies because he's taking me somewhere I want to go while expecting (though not requiring) a donation!"
In reality, the systems function as taxi services. No rational person can deny that. They need to be insured and everything else at the same standards that taxis are. The end.