Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
That was my thought as well, but it turns out it isn't carpooling -- it's a paid service, and a fairly steep one at that.
http://www.lyft.me/drivers
From the "become a driver" page: "Drivers are making up to $35/hr + choosing their own hours."
It sounds like a taxi service, except Lyft doesn't have employees, doesn't have to pay unemployment or workers comp insurance, and then if there is an accident, will the driver's private insurance which most likely assumes you are not being a public carrier, pay out?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
You do need a special license to run a day care service, and you should need a special license to drive people around unless you have a few million in the bank to pay for the damage you cause.
Lots of people work in the underground economy to avoid taxes, and while there is some short term gain to be had be outside the system, there are reasons why the system exists. Some of it bullshit, like wars and NSA and so forth, but some of it comes out of the labor movement and is designed to help and protect workers. Things like unemployment and workers comp. By working under the table, when something goes wrong, you are really screwed. And big business is always looking for ways to shift the costs of doing business onto the worker. This is probably one of those ways.
I don't know about every state, but one of the big games businesses try to play is telling people to become independent contractors. They think that if their workers are ICs, they won't have to pay workers comp premiums. Except the WA state statute doesn't talk about "employees" -- it talks about "workers where the essence of the contract is personal labor." So a while back, it was a popular way for taxi companies to shirk their responsibility by leasing cabs to drivers and making them independent contractors. Didn't work and they got spanked because the drivers provided only personal labor.
In the case of this company, where they act as dispatcher arranging payment, pick up, drop off and act as boss (they'll essentially fire you if you don't live up to their standards) -- that's personal labor. And while you may provide your own car, that isn't good enough to get beyond the "worker" definition (been tried). So anyway, if this company is operating in WA and not paying premiums, it's going to get fined, and if a worker gets hurt while driving, they'll be on the hook for all the claim costs.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Requiring 4.5 stars out of 5 is not a 90% approval rating. A 90% approval rating would have a "Do you approve of this driver? Yes/No" poll and require 90% to be yes.
A 90% approval rating on a 5 star program would mean 90% of people must rate at 3 stars or higher. Not that the average rating be 4.5 stars or above. It is TOTALLY different.
Your comments point out the problem perfectly. " I imagine that a driver that does their job on time, is safe, and doesn't smell too bad gets an automatic 5 stars.". So what does one do to get 3 stars? Stink of onions, run red lights, and be late? That's a 3 star driver?
Then what is a 1 star driver, someone who runs over your wife and then spits on the corpse?
By designing the rating system this way they are FORCING a skew to the right. It's idiotic. The only reason I can see them doing this is for some marketing tactic where they can claim they have all 5 star drivers without explaining the meaning.
I work for a limousine service, here's just a couple of things I can think of off the top of my head. Insurance, which was mentioned earlier. If you get in an accident, is this guy's private not-for-hire insurance going to cover you? We drug test, I can't imagine an individual drug testing himself. We monitor employee's hours making sure that they get enough sleep and we see them in person when they pick up cars. We're able to judge their appearance to make sure they look fit and healthy enough to drive and are also dressed professionally. We wash our cars every day. We have an office that keeps track of things and can send another car to pick up a passenger should something unexpected happen. If you use Lyft and schedule a pickup and then your single and only driver needs to make stops or gets stuck in traffic, what do you do next? We check their DMV record and straight up fire people if they get into 2 accidents in too short of a time span. We do regular maintenance on the vehicles constantly to make sure they're in top operating condition. In this industry, you get what you pay for. We're a business and we're good at what we do and have streamlined processes for making our business run efficiently. If you go with some Joe off the street, he's going to be learning all of this from day 1.