Comments

1
actually uber, lyft and any rideshare is still patently illegal, but enjoy your non-regulated, super libertarian/conservative/free-market transport while you advocate for so many other non-libertarian/non conservative things.

because, no one hates a hypocrite.
2
wow, Kshama Sawant voted for this?
3
@1 Goldy?
4
Ansel, why do you care so much?
Uber is not cheaper nor is it better.
It just has less insurance & caters to young people who think it is kool.
Go ahead but why make Uber/Lyft some sort of moral matter? It's nothing personal; it's just business.
5
@4

Ansel likes this because his present political sympathies are largely Arnachist. To the young, naive Anarchist, an enormous, unregulated investor-capitalized corporation like Lyft appears to be less "coercive" than a local and locally regulated industry.

So smash the state! Rah rah rah!
6
And the 50% of the population that doesn't have a smartphone gets disenfranchised in one more direction.
7
Extant Taxi companies in Seattle have notoriously crappy customer service and reliability. Why would anyone besides their employees or shareholders want to defend them? Liberalism (classic or leftist) has nothing to do with disliking bad businesses that had basically been regulated into being the only game in town.

People are for jitney cabs because legit cab companies in Seattle suck. There's nothing hypocritical about being against shitty but regulated business unless one holds the job of government to be to maintain the well-being of these established and regulated business over and above less established or regulated companies.
8
@6 traditional, landline phones can call these companies for a ride. Cell phones sans internet can text them. Computers with an internet connection can use their website. Granted, this leaves out people without access to any modern technology or the ability to hail a driver, but that's a much slimmer segment of the population than those without a smart-phone.
9
@6

Sure, but if you pack the poor into apodments (and if they're not old or infirm and don't have kids or other yucky problems) they can just walk to their minimum-wage jobs in the capitol-hill restaurants where Ansel and the rest of the staff at The Stranger dine.

And then, well-fed, our proud local members of the "creative class" can repair to their hired cars, and congratulate themselves all the way home on their ever so progressive choice of livery service.
10
@8, bullshit. No one uses those methods. You live in a bubble from which 90% of America is excluded. These apps are for the App People and the App People alone.
11
@10, I got my first smart phone this year, and used all of those methods previously. So maybe you're in the bubble.
12
...unless you're being facetious, which reflection indicates may be the case.
13
"actually uber, lyft and any rideshare is still patently illegal, but enjoy your non-regulated, super libertarian/conservative/free-market transport while you advocate for so many other non-libertarian/non conservative things."

Well apparently the socialist taxi system means you don;t actually gets fucking taxi when you need one.
15
Just who is it that uses cabs/"ride shares" so much? Who can afford to do so? Can you, Ansel? If not, don't tell other people to use these services.
16
And O'Brien's right; this will be an insurance nightmare.
17
Nothing irritates me more than a liberal-leaning city sold wholesale on this idea that AirBNB/TNCs are some kind of co-op sharing its requisite services/wealth with others.

Looking forward to the day we all can work for employers that invest nothing in getting their companies' job done, because it'd be our responsibility to do so after we've got a bunch of smoke blown up our asses about the disruptive nature of the "sharing economy."
18
I am struck by how much hate there is for the taxi companies. And I must admit I share it. I've only ridden a cab a dozen or so times, but nearly every experience has been bad.

I imagine Uber and Lyft will evaporate once their venture capital runs out, but hopefully some local companies will be able to break into the market.
19
@16, unless, you know, the driver just tells the insurance company they were driving to pick up a friend.

Like all those people who break their new gadgets within the first few weeks of purchasing and then do a return/exchange pretending it was faulty.
20
"Multi-billion-dollar corporations?" Surely not. They don't even have fleets of vehicles..
21
I'm with @5 and am looking forward to the inevitable "I Told You Sos" proving O'Brien right: that "Rideshare" is just "Taxi" and requires the same kinds of regulation. To be followed fairly quickly with "why the hell is this such a surge-pricing rip-off".

Since this is America and we can't do the sensible thing until we've repeatedly injured ourselves exhausting every fucked-up alternative first, run to it Anarcho-Capitalist-Libertarians: injure yourselves for me!

For everyone whinging about how the regulated model means you can't get a cab when you want one, guess what? You'll have a distinction without a difference because the "rideshare" folks will quickly recognize (as anarcho-capitalists have since the dawn of time) that if scarcity doesn't exist, you have to create it artificially. The taxi model does this by limiting medallions...Uber and Lyft will do the same, dynamically, with "surge pricing" to kill demand...so yeah, you might be able to order a "cab" but you won't be able to pay for it...so you'll still be waiting for the bus in the rain, prole.
22
Help! Help! I can't afford a yacht! I'm being disenfranchised of my use of the ocean!

If you can't afford the surge pricing or a cell phone, use the alternatives: your feet, your friend, the bus, the taxi.
23
@22 - my point is that arguing that yachts are some kind of populist solution is entirely specious at best - more like disingenuous.

Of course people will be taking the alternatives, which likely won't include taxis either...it basically turns out that cars-for-hire are pretty much a luxury good - that's the economics. That's fine too, just don't lie and pretend "it's to empower the little guy". Either the little guy seeking to make a buck "sharing" in the "sharing economy" (what a load of marketing horseshit that whopper is), or their customer.
24
Wow, that's a lot of sour grapes.

Cabs in this city have SUCKED for a very long time. The last time I rode in one the driver made me stop at a sketchy ATM in the middle of the night so he could be payed in cash. Safety? He didn't give a fuck about my safety.

You reap what you sow.
25
I don't use taxis much but I have never had a bad experience.
In fact I used East Side Taxi (to/from Seatac) a while ago and they were very good.
How odd.
26
@ 25 But of course your experience is different/better than mine and everyone else's. I believe you.
27
I love that the person who is on here all day long and commenting on everything is concerned that the technology is going to disenfranchise them. Like you're writing your comments on parchment and delivering them to us by Pony Express?
28
The people insisting this is only a service for rich people aren't thinking this through. One reason I strongly support making it more plausible to forgo car ownership at various income levels. Anyone who purports to be a progressive should support support such a goal for a variety of important reasons.

Car ownership costs, on average, $9K a year. If you don't have an employer who provides a bus pass, that can run from $1-2K a year. That means I can spend hundreds of dollars a month on rides, and still save money over owning a car. But, of course, taxis make that difficult for all the reasons that have been well-covered here. The city and region have done a pretty terrible job of constructing adequate bus service for such a goal--while transit provides many, probably most, of the trips of a typical middle class carless person, there are inevitably gaps that need filling. The way too few taxis, delivered with indifferent and inconsistent (at best) service, are wholly inadequate to fill that gap.

What TNCs (along with Car2go and zipcar) do is they make it much more possible. Those people who insist on clogging up our streets with one car per driver contribute to a number of problems caused the amount of limited space devoted to storing their stupid cars, both in motion and in rest. Reducing private car ownership is both a) an important progressive goal, and b) one that leaves real money for the occasional ride in a budget. I rarely see anyone say "who can afford 9K a year to own your own car." The occasional ride, filling gaps left by transit, is trivial by comparison, if it allows a individual to go carless or a household to reduce one car. There are things to not like about these companies, but the status quo prior to them made abandoning car ownership considerably than it should be, especially given the horror show of negative externalities car ownership comes with.
29
@28

You omit the fact that livery services (including ones structured like Lyft and Uber) carrying single passengers put more cars on the road than single-occupancy vehicles (due to travel between fares) and burn more oil (due to idling, and again to travel between fares).

Chauffeured hired cars don't reduce congestion and fossil fuel waste; they exacerbate these problems.

In terms of ecology and traffic flow, one passenger per car is actually worse than one car per driver.
30
@29 Assuming that each person who chooses to go carless uses a livery service for every trip they make. This is, of course, false.
31
@30

Erm, are you are assuming that car owners never take the bus, walk, or use a bicycle?

At any rate, the comparison in question is not between car owners and people who don't own cars; it's between using a chauffeured hired car, and personally driving yourself to where you're going, be it in a vehicle you own yourself, or via a vehicle pool service (e.g. zipcar, car2go).

The hired chauffeured car creates more congestion and uses more energy than the car driven by the traveler.
32
@4, UBERx is indeed cheaper than a cab. Case in point, my ride this morning at 7am. Pulled up UBER and found one that was 3 minutes away - I was in South Park at an industrial park - he took me 3.21 miles to my destination. Total cost including tip before their summer discount of 25%; $10.60. After discount, $8.69. Same ride in a taxi: $11.17 + tip, which I would have given $2. I guess I could have taken a bus, but that would have taken over an hour due to the locations I was traveling between. Could have walked, still, would have taken an hour.
33
robotslave,

You're simply wrong. First, by focusing on cars in motion you ignore the problem of car storage. Because car owners expect convenient access to various locations around the city, we give over a massive amount of land, much of it extremely valuable, to car storage--a total of 3-5 slots per private car. This has tremendous costs for livability. Second, as wasl points out, most of those who go carless simply cannot afford to use TNCs/taxis for every trip. Imagine someone who is middle class, and owns a car but doesn't want to. He may take the bus occasionally, or walk for short trips, but given the heavy sunk costs of car ownership and the added convenience, he probably uses his private car for 50% or more of his trips. If he's going to get rid of it to save money, he's going to need to reorganize his habits and life to up the percentage of his trips done via transit/bus/bike. But some trips just can't be done without a car, due to location, time of day, and so on, so TNCs and/or Car2Go are needed to fill that gap. This person isn't entirely hypothetical. It describes a couple of people I know pretty well.
34
Also forgot to include: a good deal of traffic in high volume areas is people cruising for parking. (This makes up 30% or more of cars on the road in many cases). When people use cars for hire rather than drive their own cars, traffic flows better because we get these parking cruisers off the road.
35
@33

I'm not ignoring the problem of car storage; I'm bringing up the chauffeured hired cars' problems of congestion and energy use, which you seem to be completely unwilling to talk about.

Shared vehicle pools are a much more responsible choice, socially and environmentally, than livery services.

And at least in terms of congestion, energy use, and pollution, privately owned traveler-driven cars are also a better choice than chauffeured hired cars.
36
@34

Cruising for parking (which happens on only a fraction of traveler-driven trips) takes up less energy and causes less congestion than travelling between fares (which happens on almost all chauffer-driven hired-car trips) and idling outside pickups waiting for the fare to board (which alone would average more time per trip than circling for parking).

Do yourself a favor-- just don't bring up livery services when you're advocating reduction in car ownership (but please do continue with that advocacy).
37
@ 31 I think I'm assuming that a former car driver will hesitate to hire a taxi or rideshare when faced with the per trip cost whereas they would gladly get behind the wheel of their own car in the past. Meaning, they will use the livery service less often than they would have otherwise driven.

I get that you can look at something like carbon footprint and say that one trip in livery is equivalent to 2 trips alone in your car (or something like that). My point is that someone with a car will drive more than two trips for every one that they might take in a cab if they had no car.

I base this assumption off of nothing but my own experience, there could be evidence that I'm wrong. I'm a car owner but I use the light rail daily, Zipcar 2-3 times per week for work and a rideshare 1-2 times maybe per month when I failed at time management and planning and need to get from A to B quick. I use the minivan to drive the baby around and for weekend activities.
38
smartphone use will expand faster than the traditional taxi fleet would expand without disruption. 50% is actually a very impressive figure relative to the penetration of a few years ago

transport, housing and schooling need more neoliberalism
39
@11: I've never heard of any phone number to call and arrange an Uber pickup, are you sure? They used to do pickups by text message but stopped that this year/last year sometime. As far as I know, you have to use the app or use the website from a mobile phone (doesn't work from a computer).
40
Stop calling these gypsy cabs "ridesharing services." "Sharing" is me giving you half of my sandwich, or letting you crash on my couch for a night. Driving someone to someplace I ordinarily wouldn't go, for a calculated fee, is a taxi ride.
41
@40 I haven't heard someone use gypsy to put someone/something down since my grandpa died.
42
Fnarf, you seriously, seriously need to get off this "app people" kick. Lower-income people with smartphones is such a thing that we get regular finger-wagging bullshit from the conservative press about how it proves that they're clearly welfare-cheating moochers, and long rants elsewhere about how that's ridiculous.

In reality, you can now buy prepaid Android phones at drugstores for under $40 (not a negligible amount for someone on food assistance, but also far from insurmountable), and one of the many reasons that people like Uber/Lyft/Sidecar better than medallion cabs is that you can actually get a car if you are some combination of "not downtown" and "not visibly white".

Also: Apple and Samsung saturated the high-end market for "smartphones" sometime back around 2010. The volume growth for this industry is all on the lower end. By 2018, you're going to have to look really hard to find a phone that doesn't run apps of some sort, at any price point at all.
43
Smartphones and "apps" were never what this is about...that's the hocus-pocus BS to make you think this is somehow revolutionary and different - it's not. It's calling a cab with a freakin' app. Yes, the apps and technology replace the function once performed by dispatchers. Other than that, exactly ZERO changes about the business/economic model.

Which brings me to @38: what exactly has changed in the past 80 years about the fundamentals of those three sectors which will somehow obviate the need for the standard practices and regulatory frameworks under which those mature sectors of the economy operate?

It's one thing to talk about "creative disruption" when the technology replaces the majority of the functional and operational infrastructure of a particular business - market makers (which is really all the "creative tech disruptors" have ever successfully replaced) are a wonderful example: you don't need a trading floor of humans when you can do it with a transaction engine. But until teh goog gives us self-driving cars, the taxi cab business isn't really changed. It appears that "neo-liberalism" in de-regulating the trucking industry has done wonders for jacking up the accident rates for drivers...I'm looking forward to the Tracy Moragan v. Walfart suit.

Last I checked, robots aren't building houses and Coursera, EdX, et al, seem to be struggling with replacing human teachers with chatbots.

So, what exactly has changed?
44
@43 I'm not a tech fetishist. the app is just the vehicle for collecting lobbying money and consumer interest to the end of breaking down incumbent political shields. doctors, teachers, auto companies, homeowners r still strong enough to arrest neoliberal rejiggering in the other sectors I mentioned. Obamacare is gonna have some pleasant fx in this regard, tho slowly

cars r very cheap. people who can drive cars r plentiful. methods of identifying market participants and recording transactions r cheap and plentiful and public. transport infrastructure is hideously expensive to build, publicly-owned transport units often have expensive staff, no seatbelts and few passengers. i'v been to 3rd world and found transport of diverse forms (buses and vans of various stoppage patterns and levels of luxury) more often and more cheaply than here or in Eurp

also the dealerships r an obv anachronism

healthcare costs a lot. the AMA should exercise less control over the number of doctors eligible for practice in the US, from foreign countries and from domestic medical schools. nurse practitioners should perform more duties. also, some rearrangement of the patent system or replacement of the patent system by fat reward payments that do not protect exclusivity would b nice. I mean neoliberalism on the supply-side, not the demand side - we can't all b Singapore. obv demand side imitation of Canada or another OECD peer would b preferable to radical neoliberal reform of the demand side - chaos sucks.

housing supplies in important jurisdictions r limited more by height and usage regs than by technical capacity or demand. for its diversion of AD from more dynamic sectors, for its arrest of the populations of the most productive, most labor-hungry jurisdictions it is a major constraint on global, popular wealth and a source of hardship for renters. if Sea/SF/LA/DC/NY, London were building like they could the world would b much better and much wealthier

edu neoliberalism is charter schools, which probably won't perform much better than traditional schools but will cost the state less and socialize childcare duties by keeping longer hours

I should've mentioned the military and military tech as needing more neoliberalism, too
45
@42, most of the people I know are lower/middle class, 30k to 100k. Less than half of them own smart phones. Many of them don't want smart phones. Fnarf is right, there is a group of "App People", and Uber/Lyft is designed for them, for all they have other, minor, less well supported options.
46
@45 half of the people is a lot of people

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