Voting With Dollars: Politicians and Their Staffers Roll With Uber

The Center for Public Integrity, an anonymous reader writes, has conducted an analysis of the relationship between one interesting group of riders (275 federal politicians and political committees) and ride-sharing services like Uber. From their report, it seems this group "together spent more than $278,000 on at least 7,625 Uber rides during the 2013-2014 election cycle." That's a roughly 18-fold spending increase from the previous election cycle, when federal committees together spent about $15,000 on Uber services. It represents a veritable monopoly, too: Almost no political committee used Uber's direct competitors, Lyft and Sidecar, according to the analysis, and traditional taxi use declined precipitously. Bipartisan love of Uber abounds, with politicos of all stripes composing a de facto Uber caucus, voting with their money for a wildly popular but controversial company.

Comments

Hate for Uber

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll never understand the hate for Uber. It reminds me of the middle class voting against their best interest. I don't use Uber, but they are here to provide YOU with competition in the taxi market. This is a net win for YOU. Have you used yellow taxis in the US? They are invariably old and decrepit and don't seem to be particularly safe. Every Uber cab I have seen seems to be nice and clean and well maintained.

Again I don't use Uber as it seems strange to me to enter a car with a freelance stranger driving who was hired by an Internet company. But I see plenty of people use Uber cars in my area (DC). They seem to be technologically pretty savvy as a company and are a positive disruptive influence. I don't understand the hate. I also don't understand the hate for BitCoin here. You don't like Uber or Bitcoin? Then don't use them.

Re:Hate for Uber

[IamTheRealMike]

I'll never understand the hate for Uber.

You may not agree with it, but surely you must understand it? For what it's worth I am ambivalent about Uber and I am a Bitcoin developer, so I'm hardly someone to have kneejerk reactions against libertarian positions. But I do fully understand why Uber makes people uncomfortable.

The basic issue here is we are all raised in a social environment where it is assumed that law and morality are the same thing. Children aren't exposed to the difference at all - if a child asks their parents "why can't I do this thing?" and get an answer like "because it's against the law honey" then they aren't likely to enquire any further, and if they did, it's unlikely their parents will launch into a deep discussion of the history and theory of state power. It's just something you don't do because it's against the law.

In parallel children observe something else - things that are illegal are very often bad, and things that are bad are very often illegal. If a kid doesn't like it when her older brother steals her toys, and then her parents tell her that (a) stealing is wrong and (b) stealing is against the law, the link between law and morality is reinforced. Keep doing this over and over and the two notions develop as one.

Eventually, when we're much much older, we may start reading in the newspapers about miscarriages of justice. We realise the system is flawed. We may encounter laws or regulations that don't make much sense. We may decide that laws in other countries are unjust. But the notion that breaking the law is inherently immoral is ingrained very deep and is very hard to discard. Does English even have a word for an act which is illegal yet moral? I can't think of one. The closest is the concept of civil disobedience, but somewhere along the line that notion got linked with the idea that you have to put yourself up for arbitrary punishment as part of the "protest". So all governments have to do is make the punishments incredibly severe and hey, now there's no civil disobedience anymore, thus all law must be moral, right?

Laws are especially important because they are intended to give people stability, certainty and the ability to make long term plans. Some philosophers argue that the entire purpose of the state is to give people the ability to make long term plans. Certainly, stability is how regimes like the PRC justify their existence. The ideal body of law is precise, easy to understand, minimal, just and yet robustly enforced - thus everyone knows where the line is drawn and everyone can stay on the right side of it. Of course, real law falls short of this ideal quite often.

Now throw technological change in the mix. Larry Page once observed that it seems every time someone invents something new it starts out by being illegal. I can't quite remember where he said this unfortunately, so I can't give a citation. It might even have been some internal Google event. But he's said very similar things in the past in public.

So, enter companies like Uber. Or Lyft, or AirBnB, or even PayPal (it had a world of legal pain in the early years). Does anyone seriously think it'd be possible to build a service like Uber in the legal way? Bear in mind that many of the taxi regulations that governments want to mindlessly enforce specify details of things like how CB Radio is to be used (irrelevant with smartphones), how to print license information in the vehicle (irrelevant with smartphones), that the vehicle should be bright yellow so it can be spotted from the street (irrelevant with smartphones) .... in India they even specify that you must have a minimum of 12 phone lines going to your New Delhi based HQ! And you can forget about just asking nicely for change. Taxi regulators appear to be pretty much the opposite of dynamism, and taxi regulations are so boring that no parliament

Re:Hate for Uber

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Uber, but its not for the driver safety reason.

Here we have an app that is putting the entire taxi industry out of work, while the apps creators become billionaires. So all the drivers, dispachers, mechanics, etc employed in the entire taxi industry are facing job losses. Instead of taxi money supporting thousands of families in every city, the same money is going to support a part time job, and fill Uber's bank accounts.

Disruptive capitalism at its finest. Sure uber is cheaper for the consumer, but is it better for society? The money is feeding fewer people, and making a tiny number of silicon valley elite uber-rich.

As a Canadian, my taxi money isn't even staying in the country! Do taxis really need to be colonialist?

Re:Hate for Uber

[IamTheRealMike]

Here we have an app that is putting the entire taxi industry out of work, while the apps creators become billionaires

As opposed to the owners of New York taxi medallions, who do no work at all whilst still getting rich?

Disruptive capitalism at its finest. Sure uber is cheaper for the consumer, but is it better for society? The money is feeding fewer people, and making a tiny number of silicon valley elite uber-rich.

Eh? Uber, at most, replaces the taxi cab dispatchers at the other end of the phone line. The cars still need drivers. If anything they're creating more jobs by making it easier to go everywhere by cab, so increasing the demand for the labour intensive service of driving.

Now when Uber start to phase out drivers entirely in favour of robots, then you'll have a point. But it'll be another round of the same debate that's been rolling for centuries.

As a Canadian, my taxi money isn't even staying in the country! Do taxis really need to be colonialist?

What, you only get driven by immigrants who cross the border each morning? I think you'll find plenty of the money goes to the driver and some gets kept by Uber. Well, why not use the Canadian competitor to Uber then? It's not like they have any kind of cutting edge technological advantage. It's just a mobile app and some databases.

Re:Uber is the perfect example of free-market fail

[Anonymous Coward]

I and most other reasonable professional adults are carrying massive amounts of insurance, health insurance, umbrella, long term disability, short term disability, life insurance. You have to because you cannot control what someone else's insurance will and won't pay. And because of Uber's advertising the passenger as covered when the accident inevitably happens the insurance company will go after Uber and get their money. The people who are really at risk are the Drivers as their insurance policies do not cover the car for hire and realistically insurance companies prefer to keep the limited market cash cow that is commercial taxi insurance. The truth is Uber is getting big enough that they should branch into the insurance business and market policies to their drivers that they arrange through an insurance company to administer.

Hiring Obama's campaign manager was a smart move

[mi]

Hiring David Plouffe was a smart move for Uber. The man knows, how to improve pubic perception of anything. Not that I disapprove of his current employer, but to sell the country the shit-sandwich we have in the White House today — that's a sign of a true master.

While we are repeatedly told to hate on rich donors like Koch brothers, it is people like Mr. Plouffe, who really run the country...

Of course, the first sign of his coming onboard at Uber was the spike of spamming by the company. And not just the specials and discounts, which are legitimate things a business may send to existing active customers, but propaganda crap like "women equality at Uber" or "Uber for safer cities". I was disgusted and now begin my search for a ride with Lyft, but it must've been a win with most of their customers...