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London Mayor Boris Johnson Condemns Random Uber Pick-Ups
An anonymous reader writes: The mayor of London Boris Johnson has written a column in the Daily Telegraph condemning the way that Uber drivers in the UK capital can effectively circumvent black cabs' legal monopoly on being hailed by random passengers. Whilst supporting the principle of free enterprise, Johnson has no solution to the legal quandary, except to hobble Uber's business model in an absurdly Luddite move, or else level the playing field and condemn the well-outfitted but expensive black cab trade to extinction. Johnson is reluctant to ask such a thing of Parliament, noting that many people there don't 'have apps'.
Seriously, google him. Trump's hair has nothing on that.
...then what uber drivers are doing, by not being licensed black-cab operators, is against the law.
If I understand it correctly, London is a lot stricter with their drivers than most other cities, such that to simply drive a cab one must pass a fairly difficult testing process before being able to obtain a license.
At this point I'm not really sure why this is a Slashdot story anymore. It's about a livery company whose legally questionable practices and claims have drivers that are picking up hailed fares. There isn't even a technological angle on this aspect of the story, not that cell-phone dispatch is anything especially novel.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"Uber's business model in an absurdly Luddite move"
Uber in Germany now does a registered Taxi service, where their drivers comply with all the taxi regs AND Uber still lets passengers book them.
In Germany it will pay the drivers registration, which is a mandatory step for all businesses and self employed people in Germany to ensure they have the proper business setup, taxes, and comply with the regs like insurance, vehicle standards, registrations etc.
This is a false dichotomy, Uber could offer a proper taxi booking service and comply with local laws, and does in countries where its banned.
But before Ubers trolls pop in with their "Uber is Rosa Parks" nonsense.
1) Ubers maps show fake taxis to lure people into booking. This is similar to Ashley Madison running fake women accounts to lure people to pay for their site. This is fraud.
2) Uber surge prices, Taxis are regulated prices.
3) If Uber is cheap now (largely by the advantage of not complying with laws), once its got the taxi market unregulated, it will take all the profits for itself... marketing 101. Taxi fixed pricing was introduced because once taxi monopolies formed, they ripped people off!
Uber is not breaking some unjust or unfair law. It's breaking basic taxi regs. It is not a Luddite business model, right now you can book taxis across many websites and they book LEGAL taxis, registered and compliant with taxi laws. Uber itself does this in some countries where it can't get away with breaking the laws.
Uber is not special, it just has a nastier political attack machine than most.
...but this article summary seems somewhat biased.
Can you be picked up after calling a friend to come get you? If yes, why not when you "call" an Uber?
For the same reason that I can put my penis in a friend if they ask me to, but I can't pay them to encourage them to ask.
Your "where's the line?" argument is weak sauce.
This subject seems to get pushed here ridiculously frequently. Every story is excessively shrill in support of Uber, with no objectivity (on Slashdot, hah!) or balance. Is some of Uber's big budget being spent here on astroturfing?
Uber is paying Slashdot. I know this because I work for a news website that targets Eurocrats. Uber approached us for a spinsorship, but the deal fell apart because we would not sacrifice edirorial integrity (they wanted to be able to "guide" one article a day). One of our competitors, politico.eu, took the money and sure enough these kinds of articles started hitting their homepage. I think politico learned their lesson because they quit the relationship after six weeks, which was the contractual minimum Uber was after when they spoke with us.
I don't blame slashdot; Uber is offering a lot of money and their PR folks make it sound benign. After you sign they activate the fine print and make you publish shit (really, shit). However, that is what this scuzzy company has obviously done here and we should call them out in it.
Enough calling these battles Luddite. No government is talking about banning mobile apps to organise businesses, or automated cars/more efficient services. What they are doing is banning an ILLEGAL business model which is trying to establish a monopoly. History has shown us time and again that the only monopolies which should exist should be government owned monopolies. The Taxi industry is one of these monopolies. Power companies, water companies, and telecommunications infrastructure companies are all entities which should be government owned/run to achieve wider economic objectives than just short term profit. America has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to get the telcos to upgrade to fibre and it hasn't worked. If the US government had said screw you, and built the fibre directly, the USA would have had FTTH to every home in the early 2000s. This fantasy that UBER is some magical company with amazing ideas that should just take over the world is retarded. We KNOW UBER is planning to sack all their drivers once the cars are automated. Their CEO has admitted this many times. It would be much better for the UK/US/AUS governments to own the automated cars and booking systems and capture the revenue from the automated car services, than allowing more wealth be siphoned out of their respective economies to a couple of billionaires in North America. UBER's business model is predatory, monopolistic and exploitative, and they're selling it under the guise of convenience/cost. These people are planning to take on the entire transport industry once they've taken out taxis. Expect them to start going for freight/road/rail services next. There is a strong humanist argument that as we phase out entire industries for automation, that the profits raised from those automation efforts be used to raise the living standards of everyone, not just a tiny minority that came up with an obvious idea. This is only going to get worse as we start to automate all service/manufacturing/primary production jobs. UBER really is the test case for how we deal with phasing out entire workforces and replacing them with no new jobs.
Interesting that the debate seems to be centred on the Black Cabs of London, omitting the role of TFL (Transport for London = tfl.gov.uk - hint in the URL) and of minicab companies.
Minicabs are normal cars for hire, they don't look like "London taxis", their drivers don't have specific training just for working in London and they can ONLY work via advance bookings. The phone booking requirement is a major difference in relation to official Black Cabs who can stop anywhere when you see them and ask for a ride.
The minicab companies are easy to find as they advertise at train stations and leave leaflets and business cards in many businesses and even through home letterboxes. If you are at a major train station, hotel, etc. you'll find a queue of Black Cabs waiting for passengers, the runs are metered and you can fit 5 adults. Some of their seats have a child seat built in, so that's another nice thing about that funny shape of car.
The minicab companies tend to have self-employed drivers. They bring their own car, typically a 4 door saloon or a 7 seat people carrier and they pay the fuel and insurance from their own takings. They also pay the minicab company for the dispatcher service. Some 5 years ago this was something like £90 per week, which means that between car expenses, the insurance and the dispatcher service, there is a lot of money to pay before the driver sees any profit. The insurance is extortionate in London, even more for working in this kind of trade. Memory fails me, but I think I was something like £3000 per year, again, 5 years ago.
So, before Uber and Hailo turn up, there is a very regulated competition between the Black cabs and random drivers trying to make some profit from their old Toyota Avensis even if they don't speak the language very well. The Black cab drivers are notorious for being picky about the areas served, but they do know the inner London boroughs very well - The Knowledge is a real thing, it's like they have all street names and POI in their heads and use satnav mostly for traffic info.
The TFL has a role to play in all this, as they have their name on the licence for both types of taxi business. Probably they take some money from them all. The TFL website is a very good one, for knowing about train, underground and river services, but when it comes to road services, you can find out about buses and road works, the taxi service being quite secondary. That's what I think that they should be working on, rather than having everyone complain and litigate.
The way I see it, the taxi apps reveal something very crucial that disrupts that peaceful coexistence between minicabs and Black cabs: passengers want to know time and place for their ride, like they do for other transport, rather than always get the same answer from the minicab phone dispatcher "they'll be there in 5 minutes".
If TFL does not work on providing this service to passengers, then the disruption is that Black Cabs will actually deliver a worse service than minicabs in very important factors: the certainty about when the driver will turn up; the price that will apply; the form of payment available to passengers.
While in the past, minicabs were the shoddier alternative to Black cabs, now "the Knowledge" and being able to hail a taxi from the street become less important. Before, the self-employed driver was sharing a lot of revenue with the mincab company as a barrier to entry, but now they can have more of their costs turn into variable rather than a fixed rent.
From a passenger's point of view, what Boris and TFL should be working on is not protecting the Black taxi trade through more legislation, like the ridiculous proposal that was made last week (discussed on wired.co.uk) that was a set of laws tailored to sabotage Uber. They should have geo-location on all Black cabs right now, and a proper dispatcher service so that people can make bookings through the TFL website and pay with the Oyster card like they can for train, tram, bus and river services. Right now minicabs are changing to become better for passengers, be it with Uber, Hailo or with smaller dispatcher companies. Black cabs could do the same if they wanted.
Obvious shill story is obvious. Ill informed use of "random" in title on slashdot. Together enough to keep me away from Uber.
It made perfect sense to me. When money is not involved, i.e. it's not a contract (offer, acceptance, valuable consideration), then it's different to a transaction involving the exchange of $$$.
If GP's friend invites the P without prior mention of money, then it's not covered by commercial law.
If GP's friend is given money to invite the P, then it's a commercial transaction, and subject to commercial law.
If GP's friend invites the P, then asks for money afterwards, no court is going to believe it wasn't a commercial transaction.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Can you be picked up after calling a friend to come get you? If yes, why not when you "call" an Uber?
Because you're paying the fucking Uber driver.
I really can't believe that people are still trying to pretend that Uber is just a ride-sharing service like giving your dear old mum a lift to the shops.
It's a commercial service, and therefore should be treated the same as other commercial transportation services.
Contrary to what the libertarians/extreme right wing free marketers think, not all human interaction is based on the cash nexus.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Just saying "legal monopoly" doesn't mean much without details.
Licensed black cabs are the only vehicles that are allowed to be flagged down for in London. They're governed by Hackney Carriage laws in the UK[1] and also by some London-specific laws. Getting a license is relatively cheap (no medallion system), but does require passing a test that checks that has questions like 'what is the fastest route from A to B, assuming that it is rush hour and road X has road works?' There are 'mystery shoppers' who audit the taxi system: they flag down black cabs and take rides and, if the driver does not take the most direct route then they can lose their license. The mystery shoppers have varying ethnicities and manners of dress, and refusing to carry one will also result in a loss of the license. Black Cab drivers all know that if they break the regulations requiring them to carry anyone or try to scam a customer, then there's a chance that the customer that they're scamming may have the power to take their license on the spot.
The distinction between taxi and hackney carriage is increasingly irrelevant. I can't flag down a car owned by Generic Taxi Company #47 that's waiting near where I'm standing, but I can call the telephone number printed on the side from my mobile and have the dispatcher tell me that the car next to me is now assigned to me, and then get in. Before mobile phones were widespread, it was very different - you could only call that kind of taxi if you were near a landline (or used a public call box, which added a fairly significant amount to the cost for shortish trips). Uber and other taxi apps are the next step in this. It's now more convenient to press a couple of buttons on the phone than to flag down a passing cab, but the taxi that you get is not regulated in the same way. Uber attempts to claim that their reputation system and pricing model means that they don't need government regulation.
[1] This has caused some confusion in previous discussions: In the UK, legally speaking, a vehicle that can pick up people who flag them down on the street is called a hackney carriage, any vehicle that carries people for money is a taxi. In common usage, taxi is used for all categories.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Really? The liberal London douche mayor is against the working man and for big business and big unions? WOW, who knew (besides anyone with a brain)?
*sigh*
Boris Johnson is a Tory (Conservative). He's probably a "liberal" by American standards in the sense that he doesn't (publicly) believe in slavery or oppose votes for women. He is broadly in favour of business and certainly no lover of trades unions, big or small. I'm not sure what you mean by being "against the working man" unless you only classify Uber drivers as real working men.
So, apart from the fact that you are factually wrong on every point, thanks for your contribution.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The question is, is Uber comparable to a Minicab service. And if it is, how come the drivers do not have to pass the same checks as other minicab drivers? Looks like a Minicab service to me.
First, the background checks are meaningless, and Uber also does meaningless background checks, so they have parity there. They also get logged via the Uber app, so there is the digital equivalent of "a paper trail allowing them to be located quickly if they are involved in crimes". Actually, while you're transporting a fare the app actually tracks your activity, so it's even better than what the minicabs have. So all that's missing is licensing and regulation of the offices, but since Uber cars operate completely different to taxis, there's no need for that.
If the state wants public transportation to serve the disadvantaged and handicapped, then the state should provide it, at the people's expense. It shouldn't be pushed off onto an industry attempting to serve willing customers in a voluntary arrangement. So that blows away the last argument.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I didn't read the article but I presume they want them to operate as minicabs, rather than black cabs. Therefore, they are not expecting them to pass the knowledge (e.g. have knowledge of the streets) but rather that they are licensed in the same way as minicabs. Effectively, Uber is an unlicensed minicab operator and that is illegal. The app makes no difference, since many minicab operators have apps where you can book a cab, get real time vehicle tracking, etc, etc.
There is no 'legal quandary' (like the summary suggests) because if you pick people up for money you must be a taxi. Whether you are a black cab or a minicab (private hire) you must be licensed. Uber is neither.
Except for London, everywhere in Europe I have been:
1. Taxi drivers are incompetent and rude.
2. Taxi's are way to expensive.
In London however:
1. Black cab drivers can find the quickest way to the smallest street in a complex city.
2. Taxi's are very reasonably priced.
3. Private car hire is allowed, for those long trips where taxi's would be too expensive.
London does not need Uber. But mainland Europe needs it. Badly!
The background checks are not meaningless. Uber's might be, but the state ones are anything but. Being logged in to an app is clearly not the same thing as having your entire registration, license, insurance, and tax details in the public carriage office's systems.
If Uber wants to play the game, they have to play by the rules. Taxis in London are currently very well regulated, and it shows. Uber can't just complain and pay off websites to speak favourably about them in hopes that an already-working system will be degraded to allow their business model to shit over everything and everyone.
Blindly following GPS in London is what will get you all screwed up. It simply does not compare to taking the Knowledge. Uber is perfectly capable of running as an actual minicab company, but they'd have to make sure all their drivers are licensed to drive a minicab. They don't want to do that (because it's expensive and decreases their driver pool), so they are complaining that somehow they are special and the hundreds of years of successful regulations which ended up with one of the best taxi services in the world should be defenestrated because some startup wants to make money by worsening the entire market.
But you're not suggesting improving anything, just removing a system which is working very well. This is London, not New York. Don't confuse the two otherwise you'll end up looking rather foolish...
You're not paying the Uber driver. They dont see that money. Uber collects from the passenger electronically then calculates a commission based on that fare (80% where I am) and pays the driver om sunday the aggregate commissions earned.
Technicality, yes. But in law those are two distinct transactions. Many business models work this way paying on commission only, so why does Uber get the short end of the stick?
And that is the same technicality that taxi drivers have. You are giving money to the company they drive for, not to them. They get paid by the company. Only the tip (which you presumably also give an Uber driver) goes directly to the driver.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Lol. This isn't civil disobedience! Where is the human rights violation?? This is a money making venture that is entirely self-interested.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I can't believe you think that's what I am saying. I am not saying they ARE the same. I'm saying, legally, HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT.
Legally, if I take a girl out on a date and I pay for a nice dinner and we have sex afterwards, it's not prostitution. That's because - although she might not have had sex with me if I didn't pay for dinner - there was no expressed or implied contract (offer, acceptance, exchange of value) saying that she DEFINITELY would have sex with me SPECIFICALLY in exchange for free dinner. Likewise, if a friend drives me somewhere and I offer to pay for gas, my friend may or may not take me up on it but will still drive me. If my friend said "if you agree in advance to reimburse me for gas and pay me for my time, then I will drive you there," then yes you have a contract for transportation services.
When you catch an Uber ride, there is a legal, contractual exchange of money happening explicitly for performance of services. It's not a very gray area at all. Legally speaking.
"95% of all Slashdot