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Virginia DMV Cracks Down On Uber, Lyft
An anonymous reader writes 'Talk about regulatory capture! As radio station WTOP reports, "The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles says that ride services Lyft and Uber are violating state law and must stop operating immediately. The DMV sent cease and desist orders to both companies Thursday." Who benefits most? It's not the people who are voting with their dollars and feet — seems more like the current stable of taxi drivers and others blessed by the state of Virginia. Good thing there's no call for or benefit from greater per-car occupancy, or experimentation more generally with disruptive disintermediation. Given enough bribe money down the road, I'm sure a deal can be struck, though.'
Most taxi services have an "anti-serial killer" clause in their contracts. If you are a serial killer, they won't hire you. This is accomplished by swearing on the job application form that you are, in fact, NOT a serial killer. If they find out later on that you ARE a serial killer, they will terminate the contract and you will no longer be able to drive the cab, thus keeping the taxi industry 100% serial killer free. As far as I know, niether Lyft nor Uber have taken any steps whatsoever to prevent serial killers from working for them, which means that as a rider you have no idea if your driver is going to murder you, after having already murdered someone else. (It takes more than one murder to be a serial killer).
So yeah, this is a good thing.
I am not sure trying to pass Uber as an environmentally friendly solution will pass muster. Uber drivers operate essentially as unlicensed taxi cab drivers, rather than true "rideshare" or carpool services. They pick up new clients wherever requested and drive them to wherever client wants to go. These are trips that would not have happened otherwise. Since these services are, generally, cheaper than licensed taxi cabs (though, curiously, not by much in the area I just checked) - they may prompt people to call for and use an individual car, whereas otherwise the same riders might have chosen less convenient but cheaper public transportation.
I know you're joking, but interestingly enough, the reverse is so much more likely. Given the nature of the payment system, a bunch of missing Uber passengers would quickly be tied to the killer. The general anonymity and cash payment system of taxis would be entirely more preferable for a predator.
Puerto Rico has these "third world" jitney services.
They're actually pretty cool, when I was there all the drivers of the vans knew each other, and had their own cellphone social network going on, so if you called one for a pickup, and they weren't close to you, they would call another driver who was available to come pick you up.
Even better, they would do their own vanpooling of passengers, kinda like the airport shuttles work here in the US, but coordinated over their social network. So you might be going from town to town, and stop somewhere briefly to pick up and drop off some other paying passengers who called in and just happened to be along the way.
So much efficiency could be achieved...
Disclaimer: I essentially wrote my master's thesis on running mass transit networks more like a jitney service, with smaller, more flexible vehicles:
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/...
Of course, Virginia still gets some points for tolerating "Slug lines"... the instant carpools where people headed in or out of DC could pick up strangers lined up at bus/train stations so they both could ride the HOV lanes in.
In related news, Airbnb thinks they are exempt from food safety regulations.
http://goo.gl/LC73vZ
Newflash- if you offer goods or services to the public for money, you are not part of some new and different "sharing economy" just because it involves an iPhone app. You are part of the old fashioned economy and you need to play by the existing rules.
People are voting with their dollars and their feet EVERYDAY.
And people would buy toys with lead paint in them too if the price was low and they weren't aware of the risks of lead paint. Does that mean the regulations preventing them are wrong?
Similarly people will get into a car operated by a driver without sufficient insurance or any gaurantee that the vehicle is operating correctly and safe, and if its cheaper they won't care either... at least... until there is an accident.
Which is how the regulations came into effect in the first place -- the public was tired of getting into cabs that weren't insured or maintained properly.
The public seems to have a very short memory.
Every few decades there is a movement or two that discovers that things are cheaper if you skip the rules, and they look around and can not see horrible things happening so they assume that things simply don't go wrong (as opposed to there being a regulatory structure that is helping)... but after a while things go wrong, people get sick, people get hurt, long term consequences start becoming visible, and those injured by the workarounds start demanding regulation so it does not happen to others... then wait a decade for people to forget again.
EVERY Uber ride I've ever had has been in a nicer and better-maintained car than any cab I've ever been in in my life.
a) Then UBER should have no trouble meeting the requirements establishing that the cars are in fact safe
b) No idea where you live / travel, but I've never been anything but clean and excellently maintained cabs.
AFAIK, Uber guarantees insurance on all of their drivers as well.
Sure they do. To a faction of the limit than the state requires.
Meanwhile most Uber drivers I've met are effectively operating their vehicles as cabs, but are insuring them as pleasure and commuter cars.
Oh, I didn't realize that the taxis of yore carried continuously updated ratings and reviews from each and every passenger.
So now the number likes you have on facebook means I can trust you? The reputation system of Uber is a good idea, but 'other passengers' are hardly qualified to assess the mechanical condition of the vehicle, or the insurance held by the driver. Its good if I want to know if he speaks Chinese, is friendly, talks too much, or if I want to hear long winded complaints about how the previous passenger must have worn too much perfume that triggered an allergy attack but the driver got him to the hospital efficiently so A+++.
Also, why can't insurance companies start offering "Passenger Plans" for the wary consumer?
Really? So if you get sick at a restaurant, the restaurant shouldn't have any liability or insurance; you were suppose to have your own 'diners insurance'?
Fool; your mind is a fossil. Please, get out of my way.
That's the best you've got? The existing taxi system has lots of room for improvement and competition, and there is some regulatory capture (corruption even) but pretending uber is all rainbows and unicorns from the knights of good is a bit myopic too.
It is not the same in EVERY Virginia city, but in Norfolk whenI was a taxi driver, the city licensed a cetin number of cabs to operate. Like the commercial fisherman's license, if you had a license, you had every incentive NOT to operate a vehicle, but to rent it out to a licensed cabdriver for a rental fee of more than $100 per day. That's 1992 dollars.
Moreover, your incentive to maintain a working vehicle was almost minimal. So they were real pieces of trash, that harvested money from poor cabbies and poorer clientele, and redirected it into the pockets of the owner of each cab company.
That's the Virginia way of doing things. YMMV.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Just the ones in the open... The Republicans just have a wide stance....
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Taxis take your credit card after the ride is over. A serial killer has plenty of time to do bad stuff to you before your card is used. Uber knows who you are from the moment you hail the cab.
Well, there's the online bulletin boards that allow people to comment anonymously. It seems perfectly fine, but then little children find their way to the site, and start using terms like "fucktard", and all decent discourse is shut down. Eventually the site goes away, and another takes its place as the destination for mouth-breathing basement dwellers who can't even muster the courage to create a permanent account that other can use to keep track of them.
Who can think of another example for our dim-witted friend here?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Disclaimer: I am an uberX driver in Dallas.
In Dallas the city is rewriting the rules to allow ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft, and both companies have had a seat at the table while the new rules have been drafted. The old regs, bought and paid for by Yellow, limit the number of cars such that if I wanted to start a cab company with the present regs, I literally could not because Yellow is known to be squatting (i.e., bought but not using) about 300 car licences. The rewrite is of rules Yellow itself bought and paid for (Al Lipscomb, a Dallas city councilcritter, was acquitted by an appeals court, but only because they railroaded a guilty man).
A lot of people whine about the so-called "insurance gap." That problem has been resolved:
http://blog.uber.com/uberXridesharinginsurance
Uber has published the text of the policy; I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find it.
There ARE kinks to be worked out, but Uber is in compliance with insurance regs that require as much as $1 million in first-dollar coverage. Drivers' personal vehicles are covered for comp and collision damage while on the road as well. (I might like a smaller deductible, but it's better than what I thought Uber provided, which was nothing.)
Really, all this whining is about protecting entrenched interests. If you had good experiences in cabs, you've obviously never been to a place like Dallas. I hear stories all the times of cabbies assaulting passengers, kicking them out in the dark without knowing where they are, demanding cash at the end of a ride, after agreeing to take plastic at the start, refusing to take plastic when they clearly have the Visa/MC/Disc/Amex/Diners logos on their windows, refusing to use the meter and instead demanding an inflated price, adding excess charges for no apparent reason, refusing to run AC on 110 degree summer days, and having cars that are disgusting and have broken safety equipment (like cut up seat belts).
In Dallas, clients choose Uber because the taxi companies offer a shitty product, and they like Uber's product better. If Uber brings some attention to the problems of the taxi industry's shitty product, all the better.
But if you're going to complain, complain about the right thing. The insurance problem has been resolved. It's time to move on and complain about what's really bugging you: Uber is screwing with your business and you don't like it because you thought you'd bought and paid for your little monopoly years ago.