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Uber In Retreat Across Europe
HughPickens.com writes: Mark Scott reports at the NY Times that Uber is rapidly expanding its ride-hailing operations across the globe but some of Uber's fiercest opposition has come in Europe, where the culture clash between the remorseless competition of the US tech industry and the locals' respect for tradition and deference to established interests is especially stark. In Frankfort, Uber shut its office after just 18 months of operation spurred in part by drivers like Hasan Kurt, the owner of a local licensed taxi business, who had refused to work with the American service. Uber antagonized local taxi operators by prioritizing its low-cost service, and then could not persuade enough licensed drivers to sign up, even after it offered to pay for licenses and help with other regulatory costs that totaled as much as $400 for new drivers. "It's not part of the German culture to do something like" what Uber did says Kurt. "We don't like it, the government doesn't like it, and our customers don't like it."
Uber also pulled out of Hamburg and Düsseldorf after less than two years of operating in each of those German cities. In Amsterdam, Uber recently stopped offering UberPop, in Paris and Madrid, Uber has been confronted by often violent opposition from existing taxi operators, while in London, local regulators are mulling changes that could significantly hamper Uber's ambitions there. Uber's aggressive tactics have turned off potential customers like Andreas Müller who tried the company's Frankfurt service after first using Uber on a business trip in Chicago. Müller said he liked the convenience of paying through his smartphone, but soon turned against the company after reading that it had continued operating in violation of court orders and did not directly employ its drivers, who are independent contractors. "That might work in the U.S., but that's not how things are done here in Germany," says Müller. "Everyone must respect the rules."
Uber also pulled out of Hamburg and Düsseldorf after less than two years of operating in each of those German cities. In Amsterdam, Uber recently stopped offering UberPop, in Paris and Madrid, Uber has been confronted by often violent opposition from existing taxi operators, while in London, local regulators are mulling changes that could significantly hamper Uber's ambitions there. Uber's aggressive tactics have turned off potential customers like Andreas Müller who tried the company's Frankfurt service after first using Uber on a business trip in Chicago. Müller said he liked the convenience of paying through his smartphone, but soon turned against the company after reading that it had continued operating in violation of court orders and did not directly employ its drivers, who are independent contractors. "That might work in the U.S., but that's not how things are done here in Germany," says Müller. "Everyone must respect the rules."
It's what sets Europe apart from the oligarchies and part of what the city slickers want to get rid of in the UK.
Who would have thought?
Here in Belgium (Brussels for me) lots of people used Uber, even after the threat to close them down. Its cheaper and more convenient than the expensive and slow taxi service. Most everyone I know has used them at least once and everyone (in my circle) was not happy with them pulling out of Brussels after threat of legal action.
I think if you talk to anyone who isn't a taxi driver or associated with the police, you'd find they like Uber and are not happy with the monopoly of the taxi service on this industry.
Of course, Belgium is well known as a 'fuck the rules' sort of country. But we're also the seat of the EU so the irony is not lost on me about this story.
Still, most people would have been happier if our fucking governments had found a way to work with Uber instead of just bowing over to the taxi unions.
Biassed much? This has jack shit to do with the "remorseless competition of the US tech industry and the locals' respect for tradition and deference to established interests".
It has to do by following the rules. They keep saying that they are not a taxi company, while they are. They try to get around all different kinds of laws, especially labour laws and that is not a good thing to do in Europe.
The thing I see is that when they follow the rules, they are NOT cheaper than the traditonal taxi companies.
So what "remorseless competition" means is actually "illegal operation of a business". It is like calling Corleones way of selling insurance "remorseless competition of European family businesses".
Uber is welcome if they play by the rules. They tried and did not make any money.
Do understand that in many places you can just become a taxi-driver by getting the correct papers. Not everywhere there are fixed limits or medaillions.
What the taxi companies should take away from this (and other places as well) is that people like the ease of use, especially in payment. People like the cashless society. There are options for taxi-drivers. I pay with my bank card if possible and that is something that is widely accepted.
The App is also a nice thing and I could see a role for Uber (or others) there. Set up a system where multiple companies can join so you can get a taxi easily. e.g. something like http://www.pizza.be/en/ where people can order from many different places in Belgium.
Do that on a European or even worldwide manner and you are golden.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A socialist pipedream in which college education is free.*
Good luck paying off your college loans, and your children's college loans, suckers.
____
*Free because college graduates pay back more in taxes to the government in 6 years than the cost of their education.
I think they are not succeeding in countries with well established and (maybe) good quality taxi services. This is not the case for Bucharest. Here the taxi drivers are guys with no education that would not get a job otherwise. They always expect tip and can become violent if this is not provided (especially to women). They smoke even if you ask for a non smoking cab and some of their cars are pitiful (I don't expect leather but I want the heating to work). Uber imposes some rules on cars and you can rate drivers (and the rating is actually used by Uber as opposed to taxi firms). This makes their drivers act nicer, the cars are better and the whole experience is better. And not having to deal with cash money and tip is cool also.
Forcing people into dept so they can get an education. This is just another scheme by the rich to keep the poor down.
The problem is that not everyone is in equal opportunity to invest. To some families/individuals, the cost of college in the US is trivial. To others, it's hugely prohibitive. This imparts a bias in which it's far easier for a certain segment of the population to pay for college than another (much larger) segment, which discourages the latter from attending college, which discourages a large portion of those who would actually be good at a particular career from getting the background and degree that they need to pursue it - leading to said positions being filled by less qualified individuals who simply came from personal (or more often, family) backgrounds with more money.
That's not to say that individuals from poor families can't reach success - far from it. But in this regard money is like the difficulty setting on a video game. Sure, someone who's really skilled may still beat it on the hardest setting, while someone who is lousy at the game may still lose on the easiest. But playing the game at a particular difficulty setting is going to skew the percentage of people who succeed at it. The "high scores" - the job market - is based around those who won the game without regard to what sort of difficulty setting they played at, and so naturally it's going to be skewed toward those who played at easier difficulty settings, rather than being an accurate list of who is really best at the game.
Beyond the base economic issues of wanting your nation's workers to be able to reach their maximum potential rather than having potentially brilliant scientists and engineers working retail, there's also the issue of happiness. Because people tend to work harder at jobs that they enjoy. But if someone gets locked into a particular career path that they don't enjoy or aren't good at, high costs of tuition (as well as a lack of a "safety net", such as universal healthcare) make a career change a hugely, often prohibitively costly endeavour. Where tuition is cheap and a safety net stronger, people who realize that they've headed down the wrong career path are much more likely to switch career paths and find one that they actually do enjoy and are good at, rather than being unhappy and unproductive for decades in the workforce.
Safety nets and universal tuition do have a cost, don't get me wrong. But having workers in the wrong career and not having people meet their potential has an even bigger cost.
Shiny New Australia.
*Free because college graduates pay back more in taxes to the government in 6 years than the cost of their education.
OK, I've heard of a lot of statements regarding our college graduates, but this bullshit takes the cake.
Why? Well because technically you need a fucking job in order to actually pay taxes on it.
This is about Uber pissing all over labour and transport regulations and getting in serious trouble because of that. ... ... sort-of-dependable here in Düsseldorf. ... idiots.
And competing against dependable and solid public transport networks.
Well, OK, scratch that
If only Rheinbahn could sync their online, offline and station timetables, that would be a huge plus
There's also a cottage industry of ride-sharing going on in Germany for quite some time now (roughly a decade) with platforms such as mitfahrgelegenheit.de or blahblahcar.de covering some interesting parts of the market that Uber tries to target. In terms of ride-sharing Uber is actually quite late in the game by German standards.
As for transportation and labour laws: I took a taxi just this moring because I'd've been late with the tram & bike combo I usually use. The ride took approx. 16 minutes and costed 22 euros, tip included. The car was a Mercedes (almost all Taxis are Mercedes in Germany), the drive has to have a special training and "Personentransport" (it's what you think it is) drivers licence, he gets paid - not very big but he can live - and is tied in to healthcare and all the other stuff every citizen enjoys in Germany.
Bottom line: With public transport and the occasional luxurious taxi ride when time is short I see not that much of a market for Uber. And as for them getting legal flak for not following regulations - that's a thing I'm quite OK with.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yeah, poor "innovators".
Look, here is what really happened:
We have existing taxi services that are actually quite good and regulated to the advantage of customers (for example, by law a taxi cannot refuse to drive you just because it's close by and he would prefer to wait for a higher fare customer).
My hometown, Hamburg, is mentioned, and for all my life my experience with taxis there is that it is easy to get one, they are clean, drivers speak good german and know the roads, fares are transparent and fair and for years before Uber appeared, there were already Apps that allowed you to order a taxi to your current location with a few clicks.
I don't know the situation in the USA, but over here not many people even saw the need for something like Uber. If you "disrupt" something that works reasonably well, you are acting destructively.
Maybe Uber is cheaper, but it is not as transparent or fair with its various surcharges and basically auction system. I'd rather know I will spend 20â to get to the airport than leave it up to chance and maybe today I'm lucky and pay only 15 - or maybe 30, who knows? If you want cheap, most of Europe has pretty good public transport (from my house to the airport: just over 3â and only 10 minutes longer than by taxi).
And then Uber came in with arrogance and hubris and basically said "fuck you all" not just to the taxi companies but also to regulators, police and the law. Sorry, but we here don't share the american "all government is the evil spawn of Satan" attitude. Sure we bitch about tax laws and we think our politicians are corrupt, incompetent imbeciles, but we also value the rule of law and wouldn't want to live in the wild west. We don't think companies and people who break the rules are innovators, we think they are assholes.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
His head is not in his arse - you might want to check yours. Leaping to conclusions (as you appear to want to do) is not a sign of a well-functioning brain.
Most of the natives that died as a result of Europeans arriving in Americas died because of infection. This does not make it good but it is not a killing you make it be.
As for US Americans and their corporations and political elites destroying all the their EU counterparts being better - I have serious doubts. Take Merkel for instance and you will find a ruthless bitch that destroys all that stands in her way (of staying at power). Morals are used here only as a means to that end. The only advantage European countries may have is the size of the country which makes removing of elite leaches a bit easier - it is still damned difficult anyway so that is rather theoretical. You take TTIP&CETA perspective and you will see that actually what happens is that international corporations are undermining the state and societies skimming them all and destroying if need be (in the sake of free trade and spreading of 'liberal and open' society of course).
In principle it is the the old conflict between power that be and the rest and which is fought over and over again with front lines that are not always clear marked. Uber is a good example of that. There are clearly no benefit for people in northern Europe of having it - the services it offers are already available, the taxi services usually good enough. The only real advantage they offer is unified service like in McDonalds so that especially business travelers have their lives made a little bit easier. That advantage is more than offset but pumping the profits outside of respective markets (to some tax heavens usually). How that benefits local societies is not quite clear to me and is (in my view) justified only if services provided benefit from centralization which they do not here. There are services that benefit from such centralization of services however - search machines are one such example (it does not mean there should be only one of course).
I think after two attempts they noticed that it doesn't work.
The US are still in the learning phase.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Has anyone here met an Uber driver who is making a comfortable living driving for Uber full time? I haven't.
All the drivers I've spoken too are doing it for extra cash or barely scraping by.
This is my problem with Uber and the so-called sharing economy. The future looks like multiple part-time jobs and low pay to me.
Maybe it's more that in Europe countries have not been taken over by commerce to the degree that has happened in the US.
If that were true, then your taxi companies would not have succeeded in purchasing your minds so effectively that you champion your own lack of freedom at every turn.
Indeed, when you want to do a business in a country, you obey simple rules,
Those laws are not only not simple in their effect, they are anticompetitive.
you obey simple rules, nothing more, apparently Uber has issues with that, and perhaps that attitude is typically American, who knows.
Perhaps it is. Don't be too proud of your willingness to follow the party line and maintain the status quo. We've seen what that looks like in Europe, and it is not pretty. There are flags, and marching, and jackboots.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nonsense. Tuition in the US is free for the poor: there are sufficient grants to cover poor students who earn a place in college by performing satisfactorily on entrance exams and by demonstrating solid work in their high school years. The actual problem is twofold: first, that many poor children, like their parents before them, are not sufficiently intelligent to pass those exams or not sufficiently diligent to perform well in school; and second, that the parents do not value education enough to encourage their children to go to college. The two problems are not unrelated.
Still blaming the poor for being poor, eh? The corollary would be that if everyone worked hard and was smart enough there would be no poor; everyone would be rich and successful. Is that your position? Under our economic system, do you think that's possible? Would McDonald's employees be driving Bentleys if they were smart and industrious enough? Or would there simply be no McDonald's employees? Or is your argument just rubbish?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
With each post your perplexing signature makes more and more sense. You are so incredibly apt to lump all kinds of disparate people together under one simple label, to judge away and ascribe whatever motive you want to their actions. No wonder you are so confused about nearly every topic you discuss here.
When I would ask my grandfather what the difference was between the U.S. and Europe, he used to tell me that America was made up of the descendants of the European people who were willing to work hard and take the risk of a better life in the New World. Europe was made up of the descendants of the European people who were too lazy or frightened to leave the Old World.
What I don't understand is why they don't value money over absolutely everything else. What's wrong with these people?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Good job, Mallory. Keep it rolling. We have to convince the slaves that responsibility for workforce development is not on our backs, else there won't be a flood of college-trained workers for us to pick from. If people stop getting self-directed college education, we'll get a labor shortage, and you know what that means: we have to take up entrants, train them, send them to college, pay for it, and then give them fair salaries and good benefits so they don't leave for a better employer. That would be horrifying; they're supposed to be serfs, not human beings!
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Then your grandfather was an intellectually lazy bigot.
We have a number of them over here.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You seem to be thinking the state of taxis in western Europe is similar to that in the US. In great swathes of Europe there are countries being targeted by Uber, which have great taxi services. People like the taxis - they are prompt, cheap, well maintained, and driven by trained professionals. Uber comes along and starts ignoring the rules, claiming "oh we do ride sharing, not taxis!" seemingly unaware of the massive popularity of ride sharing across Europe, and that said popularity means no-one believes their claims. Uber threatening a system which the people like is nothing to welcome. The rules work, and people like them. They are not competitive, at least no more than someone who wants to be a doctor or lawyer must get professional accreditation to be able to practice.
Don't jump to conclusions, and don't wander off talking about jackboots - if you want to convince a European that you have a good argument, that is the best way to have people laugh at and ignore you.
Having done a fair amount of genealogy, I'd say one of the biggest factors for coming to the US was having very little to lose.
Successful people tend not to pick up and leave everything and everyone they know. It's the people who didn't see a future in Europe that came to America - because of the local economy, or because they were raised as farmers but had no land to farm, etc.
It's not the paradigm itself, it's that there's a lot of shady employers out there who want to call their employees "contractors" simply to shift all the risk - and none of the benefits - to them.
If you can afford to pick your jobs, good for you. Most people do whatever is available, and that means anything that makes it easier to screw them - such as getting called a "contractor" rather than an employee - is a threat and gets treated that way.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Yes, they are refugees."
Isn't it odd how as a percentage there are so few women, children and old people along with these 20 something male "refugees". Now either the demographics are so screwed in their countries that most of the population is 20 something males, or they're cowards who fled and left their families behind, or just maybe they're not refugees at all but uneducated economic migrants who have nothing to give but plenty to take.
Rich kids are guaranteed higher education, if they want it.
Poor kids have to work at it.
My only problem with this is that the Rich kids don't have to work for it.
It depends on the time period, and which group of people you're talking about.
When the Irish came over during the famine, they didn't come for "greater opportunity", they came because their local economy was a disaster and they were starving (thanks to the asshole British). They were then mistreated and abused in their new home, but at least there was work for them and they could eat.
When the Puritans came over, they came because they were a bunch of wacky religious nuts who were unliked by the local populace in Europe and they wanted a place to practice their silliness without being hassled about it. At that time, there was no "America" as a nation, it was unsettled.
When Tesla came over, America was a rising industrial power in the midst of the Gilded Age, so for someone really smart and technologically-inclined from Serbia (not exactly an industrial power at the time), it was certainly a "land of opportunity" relative to his current home. It wasn't like he was sailing off to some undeveloped continent full of tribal natives.
*Free because college graduates pay back more in taxes to the government in 6 years than the cost of their education.
OK, I've heard of a lot of statements regarding our college graduates, but this bullshit takes the cake.
Why? Well because technically you need a fucking job in order to actually pay taxes on it.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
How US students get a university degree for free in Germany
By Franz Strasser BBC News, Germany
3 June 2015
While the cost of college education in the US has reached record highs, Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike. An increasing number of Americans are taking advantage and saving tens of thousands of dollars to get their degrees.
More than 4,600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. At the same time, the total student debt in the US has reached $1.3 trillion (£850 billion).
(Hunter Bliss, South Carolina.)
Each semester, Hunter pays a fee of â111 ($120) to the Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of the most highly regarded universities in Europe, to get his degree in physics.
Included in that fee is a public transportation ticket that enables Hunter to travel freely around Munich.
Health insurance for students in Germany is â80 ($87) a month, much less than what Amy would have had to pay in the US to add him to her plan.
To cover rent, mandatory health insurance and other expenses, Hunter's mother sends him between $6,000-7,000 each year.
At his nearest school back home, the University of South Carolina, that amount would not have covered the tuition fees. Even with scholarships, that would have totalled about $10,000 a year. Housing, books and living expenses would make that number much higher.
Research shows that the system is working, says Sebastian Fohrbeck of DAAD, and that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.
"Even if people don't pay tuition fees, if only 40% stay for five years and pay taxes we recover the cost for the tuition and for the study places so that works out well."
I disagree. You can compare across time, and so it is perfectly fair to say that the majority of people are filthy rich (compared to our ancestors 10,000 years ago).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways