Hey Uber drivers… welcome to the wonderful world of unregulated for-hire, where the TNCs can just cut you off without notice, for any reason and any time, and you have absolutely no legal recourse:
“My rating went to a 4.6 (out of a five-star rating) and they suspended me. They just turned my phone off. They didn’t give me a warning; they didn’t give me a week’s notice. I just woke up in the morning to go to work and my phone was off. And they’ve done that to a lot of people,” said former Uber driver, Will Anderson. “That’s huge—if you make an investment in a vehicle and you have a family you need to feed.”
Hooray for the free market and the efficiencies it imposes! No doubt Uber knows what it is doing, so we should just trust them.
A panel of TNC and town car drivers will be holding a public forum to air concerns about Uber’s “predatory practices” on Sunday, April 13, 2 pm, at the Yesler Community Center, 917 E Yesler Way in Seattle. Seattle City Council members Kshama Sawant and Mike O’Brien are scheduled to be there.
What’s wrong, this solves the problem it was designed for- fixing the minor inconveniences of life for tech bros. Who wants to ride with a 4.6 star driver when there are hordes out there to drive at 4.8?
Wow. Drivers have all the risks without any of the regulations or support.
Say anything in public that Uber doesn’t like. Turn off their account.
Must be nice for Uber X. Shut up and drive.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....eview.html
While they don’t mind cheating the taxi system, they don’t like it when people hack their system.
He generated them 2K of referrals, he earned it.
Uber is coming across worse and worse.
No surprise here, except I might have expected Uber to be more subtle about exploitation of the drivers until they were more firmly established in the society and economy, but they are creative entrepreneurs, so I guess its ok.
This is a bogus rating system that really only consists of five stars and everything else. Many people just routinely give 4 stars to perfectly competent drivers unless they were really impressed. Buy how excited is the passenger going to get about going from point A to point B? Usually about 4 stars.
And if you consider that many UberX customers are drunken A-holes who will mark down the driver who warned them not to puke in their back seat, you can see how a perfectly good driver will over time get an unacceptable 4.6 rating just by working.
@5 Impossible! Apps cure everything! Consumers have all the information they need to make informed decisions! Markets!
@6 (Goldy), c’mon dude, what more do you want?! Stars are a universal and objective system of quality ratings assurance. If you’re not smart enough to figure it out, just take a cab driven by a fur-ner or a smelly bus full of plebs with the rest of your Trotskyite friends. Be an individual! Don’t succumb to the collectivist, ugly state-run transit system! Ride in a black-tinted air conditioned boxes staffed by nice white people in suits that smells like freedom — all at the low, low cost of 50 cents a mile!
If you are from Minnesota, and say things like “That meal was not half-bad!”, you might give the nice UberX driver three stars. You would like to give him 2 1/2 but the app doesn’t allow it.
@6, why don’t you try calling a random taxi from the yellow pages from Sea Tac airport sometime and request that you be picked up by one of the top rated cab drivers. Until you magically pick Yellow Cab from all the others, you’d legally be denied and I doubt dispatch even has access to the driver’s complaint history/feedback.
Do you know what it’s called when employers use customer feedback to determine which of their employees and/or contractors are doing a good job, and act accordingly? The real world.
Taxis are terrible for all sorts of reasons, but among them is the practical inability of customers to provide feedback on drivers–and even if they did, it seems doubtful a taxi company would do anything about it. Why would they? What’s the incentive?
How exactly is it that Uber cars are generally extremely pleasant and their drivers are polite and friendly? Do you think it’s magic fairy dust?
@10 I don’t have to be polite and friendly. I’m a stockholding capitalist with a comfortable income from dividends. Therefore, I don’t have to drive a taxi, make sandwiches, or be nice to anyone. So go fuck yourselves. Go ahead, give me zero stars, I dare you! We capitalists enjoy special privileges in society and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
@11 So what’s your point? If you’re saying that a small fraction of people are so wealthy that they don’t need to work, and hence aren’t answerable to anyone for their attitude, sure, that’s true. If you’re then going on to say since those people exist, no one should have to answer for their attitude, wow, I really don’t want to live in your world.
Time for Uber drivers to pool their talents and form a Seattle-based co-op. I’m sure we have the local software talent to come up with the high-tech part.
Why be dependent on some California zillionaire venture capitalists?
@13 That’s actually not a bad idea. Uber et al have already shown us how a good app should work. The technology itself is nothing cutting edge.
In fact, one doesn’t even need to build an app. One only needs to publish an API. Then app makers and transaction servers could compete for building a better user experience on top of an open network. And the coop funds itself by taking a small piece of every transaction.
@ 14
You could help them lower their costs by donating the old HA server.
@14 This is a simplistic view of how APIs spread in the real world. Generally speaking, software developers don’t support APIs on the come, as it were; they follow users.
The way the process works is really some variant of this:
1. Launch user site/app.
2. Build user base via virality/buzz/marketing/incantations/whatever.
3. Developers pester you to build an external API so they can reach your users.
4. You build and launch the API.
5. Developers come.
To think that someone would just build a back-end for scheduling taxis (or whatever), and then prior to user zero, developers would rush to support it—candidly, it’s naive. It’s just not like that.
I’m not against this sort of thing. I could imagine a co-op-centric ridesharing service as a cool thing. But it would have to attract users before developers would support it. That implies app development and some sort of marketing campaign.