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Don't Sass Your Uber Driver - He's Rating You Too
HughPickens.com writes David Streitfeld reports at the NYT that people routinely use the Internet to review services from plumbers to hairdressers, but now the tables are turned as companies like Uber are rating their customers, and shunning those who do not make the grade. "An Uber trip should be a good experience for drivers too," says an Uber blog post. "Drivers shouldn't have to deal with aggressive, violent, or disrespectful riders. If a rider exhibits disrespectful, threatening, or unsafe behavior, they, too, may no longer be able to use the service." It does not seem to take much to annoy some Uber drivers. On one online forum, an anonymous driver said he gave poor reviews to "people who are generally negative and would tend to bring down my mood (or anyone around them)." Another was cavalier about the process: "1 star for passengers does not do them any harm. Sensible drivers won't pick them up, but so what?" In response, some consumers are becoming more polite and prompt. "The knowledge that they may be rated is also encouraging people to submit more upbeat reviews themselves, even if the experience was less than stellar," writes Streitfeld. "When services choose whom to serve, no one wants to be labeled difficult."
Between the liability/risk issues of potentially not having commercial insurance, the looming threat of municipal regulation, the increasing prices, and now the disclosure that some drivers may be just as petty as riders, it sounds to me like these ride-sharing companies are eating their own. Makes me question how long-term-stable the business model is.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Seems like a mixed bag to me. On the upside if it motivates customers to be on their best behaviour; to be polite, prompt, etc. That's only a good thing.
On the other hand, if its just creating a circle jerk of good reviews that's not doing the system any good.
Driver only ran over one child; and the odor in the vehicle was less rank than the vehicles state of cleanliness would have suggested it would be. Could not hear radio over soothing rattles and squeaks. Would ride again! 10/10. A+++++
I think you put a "t" where the "p" is supposed to go!
He's rating your poo?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
> "The knowledge that they may be rated is also encouraging people to submit more upbeat reviews themselves, even if the experience was less than stellar,"
Ebay had the same problem with sellers threatening to give buyers crappy feedback ratings if they weren't first given a perfect rating. Eventually ebay changed their system so sellers could not rate buyers. That's imperfect too, but seems to be less imperfect than the previous iteration. I have no opinion as to whether a similar change would be a good thing for Uber, I don't use their service.
Uber was a disruptive (read: sketcky) concept to begin with. Several cases of assault by drivers and even a rape in india are documented occurances in the Uber ecosystem that seem to be shrugged off by the company as "isolated incidents." And since everyones an independent contractor in Uber theyre fairly insulated against things like state or federal investigations into any problems. Then theres surge pricing, which is the combination of words that come out of a rich mans cocksucker when they mean to say price gouging. Basically, its unregulated and the fruits of such deregulation cut both ways. Uber black is predicated upon the deceptive idea that people in very nice cars would like to play taxi, whereas in the real world their time is worth far more than an uber pittance. In a regulated taxi service you have rules and regulations to adhere to in order to maintain your taxi cab license, so you follow those rules.
In Uber, there is no palpable consequence for driving a family of 4 to a corn field instead of Disney land because once hes finished his negative review of you, you're now stranded somewhere without a taxi and locked out of uber.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So, first Uber thinks they're exempt from the laws, and now they expect their customers to fawn over them to protect their fucking fragile egos?
These guys sound like uber assholes.
Sorry, but nothing I've ever heard about this company makes me think I'd ever want to have anything to do with them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
AirB&B faces a similar issue where they need to have service providers and guess rate each other.
What Air B&B does to prevent people leaving less than honest reviews out of fear, is to have both sides finish rating the other before they can see what each other left for feedback.
That way you can leave an honest review without fear of getting dinged.
The summary tries to cast a lot of shade on Uber for allowing this but honestly doesn't this put them 1000 years ahead of the cab industry where you cannot even see ratings for cab drivers AT ALL?
If you really want to imagine future issues, think of this - an obnoxious rider of the future who only cab companies will serve. Can you not imagine some kind of law passed requiring a driver of any service to pick up even the most threatening person for the sake of "fairness"...
Should it be possible that a person annoying or violent enough cannot get cab service at all? Or is cab service a right...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't help but wonder how long it will take the less savory drivers to develop code words for the following:
"Too black."
"Too Jewish."
"Lives in a neighborhood that's too black."
"Too black, and was rude when I called him a nigger and accused him of trying to carjack me because he wouldn't give me a tip of ten times the fare."
Uber is about a hundred different kinds of lawsuits that have found a place to happen.
Now, it's 101.
If customer A consistently gives lower-than-average ratings, scale their reviews upward to that a "3" from them is a "5" from someone else. If they consistently give "5" rating but give a "1" to a particular driver, then pay attention to that deviation.
Same for drivers: if B frequently gives "1" ratings to passengers, then that's a roundabout way of saying that B is a difficult jerk and you can ignore those.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Attractive female customer did not respond well to aggressive sexual advances" - Uber Driver #756234
A lot of economists view and post on this board, so maybe one of them could explain something to me.
The libertarian view would seem to apply here: a capitalistic system taken out of the free-market model and run by well-meaning regulation to prevent certain bad practices. Taxi rides must be regulated by government, lest the rides become unsavory, price gouging, and unsafe. Taxi rides are considered a necessary infrastructure, and thus a natural monopoly.
(And to be clear, having safe, reliable transportation in a city brings a lot of benefits: tourism, visiting businessmen, and so on.)
Despite the well-meaning reasons for all this, the taxi medallion system does not live up to it's purported goals. Taxi rides are the subject of satire, sarcasm, and mockery.
Here's a typical first-hand report.
Taxi medallions sell for multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. The money is used to fund the regulatory system surrounding taxis, and one would *suppose* that with this much money available that there would be a lot of infrastructure keeping things clean, safe, and reliable.
And yet, taxis are neither clean, safe, nor reliable. Here's a series of articles from Boston on the situation. From those articles:
[...] Passengers hurt in accidents often run into denial and evasion by poorly insured firms
[...] fleet owners get rich, drivers are frequently fleeced, and the city does little about it
It's abundantly clear that the government-regulated, natural monopoly solution simply *doesn't work*.
So here's my question: It would seem on first reading that the Libertarian view, of "remove regulation and let the free market decide" is the better solution. We have two models both active in the same market (taxi medallions with regulation, versus app-driven Uber) and it would appear that the Libertarian model is better.
Why is the Libertarian view on this particular narrow situation not the correct view?
Actually, I travel a lot in Europe, and take a lot of taxis. I have only had very positive experiences with taxi drivers . . . because I treat them with respect.
Taxi drivers are the eyes and ears of a city . . . the NSA should drop all this online monitoring crap, and just put some taxi drivers on the payroll. They know everything. I was joking with one in Brussels, and asked him if he knew the address of the mistress of the Prime Minister. He answered, "Which one of his mistresses?"
Which is why this scares me a wee bit, when I hear that Über or whoever is harvesting data on passengers. And who will have access to that data . . . I think you know who.
Anyway, I have recently been in Delft, Holland, Paris, France, not Hilton, Nice, France, Birmingham, Southampton, UK, Brussels, Belgium, Zürich, Switzerland, Böblingen, Germany, Stuttgart, Germany, Darmstadt, Germany . . .
And where-ever you are . . . there you go. There is a taxi driver who will take you to where ever you need to go . . . if you treat him or her with respect!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Why is this reverse feedback mechanism not in every business?
Other businesses do this. For instance, eBay allows both buyer and seller to rate each other. Airbnb allows both hosts and guests to post reviews.
Sellers can not leave negative feedback for buyers.
They used to be able to in the good ol' days, but eBay got rid of the feature after too many complaints that sellers were waiting to see what their review was before rating the buyer.
Creating a system where buyers can extort and outright steal from you with little recourse and no mechanism for warning others of their behavior was a GREAT idea. I should be able to neg a guy for buying my item and not paying for it so that his identical item at a higher price could sell. I should be able to neg someone for a chargeback after the item's been delivered. I should be able to neg someone for trying to return their damaged item in place of the good working item I sent.
They've created an environment where the buyer has nothing to lose from bad behavior.
The quote from that Time article says it all:
"Taxis are pretty much a public utility. Like subway and bus systems, the electric grid or the sewage system, taxis provide an invaluable service to cities like New York, and the government should play an important role in regulating them."
If you're the type who supports public utilities thinks an expansion of them would be a benefit to society, then sure -- you're not going to be a friend of any services like Uber.
I'd have to 100% disagree. Taxi service is *not* equivalent to a public utility by any stretch of the imagination. Public utilities won a monopoly status primarily because they were trying to distribute a needed service (like water, natural gas or electricity) where a large infrastructure was required, which had to terminate at the endpoint of each customer's residence. If you allowed competing power companies, you'd suddenly be facing problems of companies wanting to run their own lines everywhere, cluttering everything up (or being hugely disruptive if the cables were buried underground and one company or another was always tearing up a road or yard to access them). At some point, you'd even reach a point where new entrants would be physically prevented from selling their service due to lack of space. (How many water or sewer lines can you fit in a given neighborhood?)
Taxi drivers simply operate standard sized motor vehicles, along with every other licensed driver on the roadways. If each taxi company had to build out their own road and highway infrastructure to operate on -- then sure, you'd have an argument for a regulated public utility. It's not like that.