Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac · 2 Sep 2019 · 444pp · 127,259 words
of the day, why even show up to the game? At Uber, winning meant the obliteration of any opponent. There wasn’t enough room for Uber and Lyft to coexist, he believed. The game was zero-sum. Every single ride-hailing car on the road in every single important market should have an
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city-level as well as national politics. In Portland, Uber hired Mark Weiner, one of the most powerful political consultants in the city. In Austin, Uber and Lyft paid $50,000 to the former Democratic mayor to lead their campaign against regulation. Later, as Uber matured, the company’s staff swelled to include
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. Now, each tweet was a presidential proclamation. Where once the public and media had adored Big Tech—Facebook and Twitter gave people a voice, while Uber and Lyft gave anyone a ride—now the public devoured stories of state-sponsored hackers using vast databases of personal information to influence the election. Suddenly, nefarious
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unions, and used forums like UberPeople.net to congregate, share information, and organize walkouts and other protests. Harry Campbell, an aerospace engineer who drove for Uber and Lyft on the side, started a personal blog to document tips and insights. He called it The Rideshare Guy. Drivers were starving for more help and
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interview landed in late March, quelling public ire for just a little over two weeks. Then another bombshell hit. By this time, the competition between Uber and Lyft had become a famous rivalry. Kalanick didn’t just want to beat Lyft; he wanted to bankrupt them. On April 13, 2017, it became clear
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: Weise, “This Is How Uber Takes Over a City.” xiv the advertisements said: Alyson Shontell, “10 Ads That Show What A Circus the War Between Uber and Lyft Has Become,” Business Insider, August 13, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/10-uber-lyft-war-ads-2014-8#heres-a-similar-ad-that-suggests-ubers
What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee · 18 Nov 2015 · 265pp · 69,310 words
luxury services, as well as delivery and logistics, but for now UberX makes up the bulk of its business. It makes sense to talk of Uber and Lyft in the same breath, despite their different images, because they have ended up offering essentially the same service. When, after a campaign by Peers and
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others, California became the first state to create a separate set of rules for what it called Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), Uber and Lyft were the main beneficiaries.21 The TNC framework has since been adopted by Colorado, as well as Seattle, Minneapolis, Austin, Houston, and Washington. While there
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Uber itself has stepped in and takes as much of the fare as do medallion holders. One of the complaints that taxi companies have against Uber and Lyft is that they are subject to different standards, and that the taxi standards are more onerous than those that the ridesharing companies have to follow
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find appropriate accommodations (there is no way to search for listings that provide disabled access, and few listings say whether they are accessible).66 Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft each take steps to nudge or encourage their service providers to provide disabled access, using language that emphasizes their commitment to helping disabled people. But
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Uber’s system. Uber drivers are not told where to drive, so they may avoid what they consider as “sketchy” parts of town, and both Uber and Lyft have been accused of “redlining”: not providing services to poor and minority neighborhoods.68 Numerous comments on social media suggest that one of the appeals
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of Uber and Lyft to young and well-off early adopters was that the drivers matched their age, educational-level, and social background more than did taxi drivers. Instead
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ratings that I collected from the ridesharing web site BlaBlaCar, on which over 98% of ratings are five stars. Ratings are not publicly available for Uber and Lyft drivers and riders, but both sites are known to “de-activate” drivers from the site if their rating drops below a cutoff in the range
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is a detailed and careful analysis that comes to the same conclusion about Sharing Economy ratings as did Wired magazine’s Kat Kane, a regular Uber and Lyft customer. She admits to giving five-star ratings after white-knuckle rides, and her experience tells her that ratings are no indication of quality: “I
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of people staying in hotels, but when it comes to economic impact, it compares its impact to the same number of people staying at home. Uber and Lyft compare their environmental impact to people driving private cars rather than to people riding buses or taking the subway. They claim that their relatively small
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on the hook if things go wrong. Successful Sharing Economy companies also avoid the expense of providing universal access provisions. In Chapter 4 we saw Uber and Lyft claim that access for the disabled is not their problem; suggestions that Airbnb’s platform inadvertently enables the propagation of racial profiling have met with
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have done so in a self-interested way that continues to leave cities frustrated. Successful Sharing Economy companies have learned how to minimize insurance costs. Uber and Lyft started by arguing that no commercial insurance was necessary for private rides, and ever since have made efforts to minimize the coverage they provide in
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was an employee of the company.22 The company will appeal the ruling, but it is a positive sign for Liss-Riordan’s cases against Uber and Lyft, which, as of May 2015, are headed to a jury trial. The employment status argument will no doubt drag on for a long time, and
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Uber Driver in NYC Is Nearly $100,000.” Entrepreneur, May 28, 2014. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234289. Wieczner, Jen. “Why the Disabled Are Suing Uber and Lyft.” Fortune, May 22, 2015. http://fortune.com/2015/05/22/uber-lyft-disabled/. Wilhelm, Alex. “Analyzing Postmates’ Growth.” TechCrunch, March 4, 2015. http://social.techcrunch
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Uber’s Background Checks Missed Convicts.” 62 Said, “As Uber, Lyft, Sidecar Grow, so Do Concerns of Disabled.” 63 Wieczner, “Why the Disabled Are Suing Uber and Lyft.” 64 Trautman, “Will Uber Serve Customers With Disabilities?” 65 Strochlic, “Uber.” 66 Redmond, “Does Airbnb Have an ADA Problem?” 67 Peterson, “Uber Does Not Care
The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone · 30 Jan 2017 · 373pp · 112,822 words
rides in February 2012 via its apps for the iPhone and Android smartphones. Though it went out of business in 2016, outfinanced and outmaneuvered by Uber and Lyft, it can lay claim to being a pioneering ridesharing company.20 Anyone—not just taxi drivers or licensed chauffeurs, but your uncle Frank in his
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(or vice versa, for that matter, though both companies clearly drew heavily from each other’s product features and rhetoric). In the Zimride founders’ view, Uber and Lyft were entirely different. “We didn’t think of them as similar to us,” Zimmer told me. “Our vision has always been every car, every driver
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, lawmakers were ready to change the rules. “Demand is too great,” Miami mayor Carlos Gimenez told the Miami Herald. “I’m not going to drag Uber and Lyft back into the 20th century. I think the taxi industry has to move into the 21st.”3 Uber was entering adolescence, winning political battles, growing
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up. Such a tragedy had been eminently predictable, and yet Uber, it seemed, hadn’t been ready for it. (That March, three months later, both Uber and Lyft introduced up to $100,000 of supplementary insurance to cover this gap.14 In 2014, the State of California passed a law mandating the companies
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their own cars.27 In New York, Lyft would look like the original incarnation of Uber, deploying only licensed drivers. From there the battle between Uber and Lyft devolved further. In public, they accused each other of slogging—ordering and canceling rides and proffering rewards to each other’s drivers to defect.28
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Allegretti. “The votes are there.” The bill was proposed the next day, and it was as bad as Uber could have imagined. Under the legislation, Uber and Lyft could grow their supply of drivers by only 1 percent a month while the congestion study was conducted, which could take a year or more
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-profile opportunity to argue once again that workers were being stripped of protections. In 2013, Boston plaintiff lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan brought such lawsuits against Uber and Lyft in the two states where she thought the law was most favorable, California and Massachusetts. She had previously brought similar, largely unsuccessful cases against FedEx
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who are doing the jobs shouldn’t get benefits and the protections of employment,” she says. “That is the reason we have these laws.” Both Uber and Lyft tenaciously fought against the cases, arguing that the great majority of their drivers didn’t actually consider themselves full-time chauffeurs and wanted to remain
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independent and free to take other work. The cases against Uber and Lyft drew widespread media attention and produced an unrealistic expectation that they might somehow change the nature of the sharing economy and undermine Uber’s business
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, such as giving drivers explanations if they violated company rules and got kicked off the app and creating an appeals process for those decisions. But Uber and Lyft drivers were going to remain contractors. “Drivers value their independence—the freedom to push a button rather than punch a clock, to use
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Uber and Lyft simultaneously, to drive most of the week or for just a few hours,” wrote Kalanick in a blog post titled “Growing and Growing Up” that
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copyedit. A big thanks also to Doug Young at Transworld Publishers for championing this book in the UK. I’m grateful to everyone at Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft who saw value in a deep look at a momentous era in Silicon Valley history. At Uber, thanks go to Jill Hazelbaker, David Plouffe, Nairi
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, 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/09/big-uberx-price-cuts/. 8. Ellen Huet, “How Uber and Lyft Are Trying to Kill Each Other,” Forbes, May 30, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/05/30/how-uber-and-lyft-are-trying-to-kill-each-other/#4a7e6b063ba8. 9. Carolyn Tyler, “Mother of Girl Fatally Struck
Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat · 22 Oct 2018 · 343pp · 91,080 words
chauffeurs, and truck drivers are part of the Uber workforce, but others have no primary occupational identity as drivers, even as they drive for both Uber and Lyft. Their stories are all too often tales of folks on the margins, of workers in transition, of people who are part of a new wave
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drivers, but Uber’s “consumer” spin provides a simple out for the company. I interviewed Kofi in the fall of 2017. He drives for Uber and Lyft in Washington, DC, and he was formerly an assistant attorney for the government in his country of origin, Ethiopia. He responded to the provocation that
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drivers, and they gave me a sense of regional differences in Uberland. Most of the drivers I’ve spoken with have found work with both Uber and Lyft where both are available. Strategically, I used multiple ridehail apps to speak with Uber drivers, which generally works because drivers often start with Uber
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for Uber’s rejection of established norms and laws that govern employment. Driving for Uber has benefits as well as disadvantages. Michael drives for both Uber and Lyft. To do so, he commutes into Atlanta from Marietta, about an hour away. When I interview him on a mild afternoon in spring 2017,
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dad, flexibility at work is important to him, because it enables him to see his younger children. Similarly, mothers of young children who drive for Uber and Lyft have told me they appreciate their ability to work in their spare hours without killing themselves to arrange childcare during an obligatory shift at Walmart
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destinations of passengers before he accepted their ride requests.72 Another optimizer, Nicholas Stewart, is a former high school teacher who quit to drive for Uber and Lyft full time in Atlanta. He’d been driving for four years, though he planned to return to teaching in 2018–2019. When I interviewed
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they drive. These differences can have significant impacts on drivers’ experiences. For example, many drivers, especially recreational hobbyists, cite the social connections they make through Uber and Lyft as a main motivation for working. Both occupational and part-time drivers may also enjoy this aspect of work: some are eager to practice their
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primary source of income unless drivers hew to the shifting wage incentives Uber provides over time. Drivers Who Value a “Good Bad Job” Driving for Uber and Lyft is a “good bad job” for some, especially for those who have a criminal record or limited education.27 Cody, in his mid-twenties,
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the design of ridehail technology. Pierre-Alexandre, who is originally from Haiti, used to drive for Yellow Cab in New York before he started with Uber and Lyft while pursuing his MBA at an online college. During our interview in 2017, he references specific features that improved his sense of security: “The
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For Pierre-Alexandre, the design and affordances of ridehail app technology offer a kind of safety that taxis do not.28 Many newer drivers prefer Uber and Lyft to their alternative workplaces, but it is also typical for drivers to overestimate their earnings when they start. Drawn in by company advertising with claims
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real earnings.32 However, any claim about hourly earnings is complicated by Uber’s dynamic pay incentives, which I discuss later. For some, driving for Uber and Lyft are still better than their alternatives. Dontez, who drives only for Lyft full time, about fifty to sixty hours per week in Atlanta, Georgia,
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job prospects too: in a forum, drivers debated a post from the summer of 2017 about whether you should quit your job to drive for Uber and Lyft full time. It garnered hundreds of likes and comments, covering the map of views drivers have about the different markets. One driver from Los
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to the city. There, unlike in other markets, drivers are regulated by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and their capital costs to start driving with Uber and Lyft are higher. They need to pass fingerprint-based background checks, get a TLC license and plates, pass tests, take a class, and obtain commercial insurance
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, Uber pays his tickets, just as they do for underground drivers in Montreal. When I share stories of Montreal’s underground ridehail drivers with Uber and Lyft drivers in Atlanta, several interviewees remark that they used to be illegal at the airport, and they would pretend to be picking up a loved
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work he does stands in stark contrast to the grand narratives of wealth and entrepreneurship that Uber presents. Another driver, Thomas, lost his job with Uber and Lyft when those companies left Austin, Texas, in the spring of 2016, in a show of protest against regulations passed by the municipal government.6
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turn over on average every three months.”21 Uber’s high churn rates may be rooted in the sore feelings harbored by drivers. Thomas, an Uber and Lyft driver in Austin discussed in a previous section, is jaded by his experience of the repeated rate cuts that Uber implements. “And every time,
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no cancellation fee despite their having requested it and despite their certainty that they waited six or seven minutes just to be sure. Tim, an Uber and Lyft driver in San Francisco, whom I introduced in chapter 1, has worked in customer service for twenty-five years. Our interview continued for hours
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they presume that all the other drivers are following them and, therefore, negating the premium levied for “low supply” compared to “high demand.” Doberman, an Uber and Lyft driver in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, whom I interviewed in the fall of 2017, said, with a thick Italian accent, “Unfortunately, I have two reasons why
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In Los Angeles, Jose and I are chatting in his car when I ask him if he ever avoids certain neighborhoods when he drives for Uber and Lyft. He admits he stays away from areas like Compton, but his voice wavers off before he completes his sentence. Destination-based discrimination is frowned
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already has a long-standing history of not stopping to pick up black (and particularly male) passengers.1 There are many concerns that drivers for Uber and Lyft perpetuate this type of discrimination, too.2 Going silent, Jose removes his smartphone from its mount and covers it with his left hand, pressing
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respective Uber apps. Data surveillance does not produce accountability automatically for all users of the Uber platform, however. Leticia Alcala, who used to drive for Uber and Lyft in California, relocated to Dallas, where she continues to work for both companies. She administrates multiple driver forums online, too, and she is especially proactive
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a greater toll in an employment context because drivers depend on these CSRs to resolve questions related to their livelihood. Ramon, who drives for both Uber and Lyft in Atlanta, told one story in our interview about a passenger who accused him of drunk driving in the “passenger feedback” comments. When I
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for political entrepreneurs who want to move the needle on data-collection and privacy debates. Kofi, whom I discussed in the introduction, is an Uber and Lyft driver I interviewed in Washington, DC. He was appalled when he learned first from the media in December 2017—rather than directly from his employer
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has been waiting. There are a few ridehailing apps in this city of thirty-two thousand people, like Juneau Taxi and Tours. The spread of Uber and Lyft prompted local taxi businesses to build their own apps in many local cities across the United States and Canada, such as Plattsburgh, NY (Plattsburgh
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that companies hold. When cities try to reign Uber in, municipal regulations can backfire. Consider what happened when Austin, Texas, passed municipal legislation to require Uber and Lyft to comply with fingerprint-based background checks. Both companies pulled out of the city in May 201627 and continued to lobby the state to pass
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legislation friendly to its business model.28 Uber and Lyft succeeded a year later, when House Bill 10029 passed the Texas State Senate30 and was signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott shortly afterward.
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that Uber and all its practices are inevitable. The National Employment Law Project, together with the Partnership for Working Families, provides another analysis, suggesting that Uber and Lyft deploy a two-stage “shock doctrine” to get their way. In the first stage, they manufacture a crisis with a municipal regulator, such as Austin
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however, is that if regulations were left to municipal governances, the company would have to accommodate a messy patchwork of requirements. In forty-one states, Uber and Lyft have successfully lobbied politicians to pass laws that erase or mitigate how localities regulate these companies.32 While this approach is rational (it’s technically
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has demonstrated toward existing laws). It’s no wonder that any number of Uber stakeholders might feel uneasy in their alliances with the company. After Uber and Lyft left Austin in 2016, I flew there to find out how drivers felt about being left behind. As I reported for Motherboard while conducting
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opportunities.”42 In other words, Uber’s expansion is synonymous with the expansion of digital economies. Governor Cuomo’s signature on the bill to legalize Uber and Lyft symbolizes the pathways these companies blazed for the future of work, yet these platforms have their local detractors. Initially, Westchester County, adjacent to New
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cold night in Toronto, Shelly shares her story with her riders about the consequences of impaired driving and how her life was changed forever.”61 Uber and Lyft both joined the cause against drunk driving, marketing their services as a hedge against death. And yet, New Year’s Eve is also a
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advice and warnings, answer questions, and provide a rare sense of camaraderie. Another driver, Doberman, who is also an administrator of a forum group for Uber and Lyft drivers, in Louisiana, says about his own group, “I didn’t create the group to learn something from somebody, but to get together with
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the group dynamics of online forums derive from a common sense of the inequities that affect all drivers. At an individual level, some of the Uber and Lyft drivers I interviewed shrugged off pay discrepancies, while others were disturbed by them. (The combination of tipping and up-front pricing can also produce surprising
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the forums have developed membership requirements and gatekeeping processes over time, meaning they technically aren’t open to the public. Often, drivers work for both Uber and Lyft, and even when drivers start Uber-focused forums, these quickly expand to include members who work for multiple employers. Drivers I spoke with in person
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many cities, having Uber is the mark of being on the cutting edge, or at least being part of the global technology-business marketplace. When Uber and Lyft turned swiftly on their heels and left Austin, Texas, in May 2016, in a show of protest against regulatory efforts to impose requirements on
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some cities, a default method of private transit for many. In May 2017, a Painesville, Ohio, municipal judge ordered convicted DUI offenders to download Uber and Lyft onto their phones as part of the conditions of their probation.13 To consumers, the experience of traveling to an Uber-free zone can feel
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conversation. I also focused on observing how drivers worked and on their car environment, such as how they managed ride requests from multiple apps, like Uber and Lyft, often from multiple phones. I’d observe the ways drivers personalized their cars (or not), or the placement and number of charger cords, whether
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usually involve a few questions that I might ask a driver I interview more formally, such as their motivations for driving or their views on Uber and Lyft generally. I still gather information on the driver experience through my observations and engagement as a passenger. The book draws on these trips as
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referrals. I also conducted formal interviews with two businessmen in the chauffeur industry so that I might learn about their perspectives on the advent of Uber and Lyft as part of my formal research. While much of my recruitment relied on my personal outreach to drivers, in some instances I received referrals from
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Lyft had 23.4 percent of the ridehail market share in the United States and Uber had 74.3 percent.3 The corporate practices of Uber and Lyft in managing drivers aren’t identical, but their similarities vastly outnumber their differences. They both track drivers’ ride-acceptance and cancellation rates. Both dispatch
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and change the rates at which drivers earn their income. Finally, for users, both apps function in much the same way. In major markets, Uber and Lyft are both viable options: in San Francisco, for example, the two ridehail companies each make 170,000 trips per day, according to a report in
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and about 50,000 active drivers in Canada. Still not defining active, Lyft says its active drivers increased to 700,000 by November 2017. Yet Uber and Lyft are so similar in the ways their drivers are dispatched, evaluated, and managed that drivers often treat them interchangeably, to the point where some
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Uber’s CSR’s, though I see frustration across both companies with automated replies. Ramon, whom I introduced earlier in this book, drives with both Uber and Lyft in Atlanta, Georgia. He told me about one of his most memorable incidents: while he was taking several passengers to their destination, another driver slipped
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on Uber’s model, the key may be simply to treat drivers with greater consideration and respect for their side of the story. Frank, an Uber and Lyft driver whom I interviewed in Dallas in 2016, assessed the differences between the two companies according to their passenger bases. He observed, “Uber passengers
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“You’d rather go to Target for a bit better quality, but Walmart is cheaper so you usually go there.” Despite the different cultures of Uber and Lyft, most drivers describe the actual business practices of the two as interchangeable. However, the fact that Lyft gets so much less flak than Uber does
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political scapegoat for unwashed feelings people have about technology and society. In my travels, some regional differences have emerged over time in how drivers assess Uber and Lyft. In Salt Lake City, Lyft seems to offer enough work that drivers don’t need to seek work from more than one company. When
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Legally Operate in Quebec,” Global News, October 22, 2016, http://globalnews.ca/news/3019867/uber-can-now-legally-operate-in-quebec/. 20. Julia Simon-Mischel, “Uber and Lyft: Where Are We Going?” (panel presentation, Continuing Legal Education for the Pennsylvania Bar Institute, November 28, 2017); Training Assocs. Corp. v. Unemployment Comp. Bd.
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for Human Management, www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/state-and-local-updates/pages/florida-legislature-approves-ride-hailing-driver-bill.aspx; Dara Kerr, “Uber and Lyft Messed with Texas—and Won,” CNET, June 20, 2017, www.cnet.com/news/uber-lyft-toyed-with-texas-to-get-their-ride-hailing-way/; Kimberly
WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly · 9 Oct 2017 · 561pp · 157,589 words
as the pace of innovation increases. AI-powered personal agents like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, the Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana are unicorns. Uber and Lyft too are unicorns, but not because of their valuation. Unicorns are the kinds of apps that make us say, “WTF?” in a good way. Can
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the way that they are reshaping our society. I’ll examine what we can learn about these platforms and the algorithms that rule them from Uber and Lyft, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook. And I’ll talk about the one master algorithm we so take for granted that it has become
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development itself, shaping content sites like Wikipedia and eventually enabling a revolution in which consumers would become co-creators of services like on-demand transportation (Uber and Lyft) and lodging (Airbnb). I was invited to give a talk at the same conference in Würzburg. My talk, titled “Hardware, Software, and Infoware,” was very
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the map correctly, all of its components will show up in other companies that are building twenty-first-century services. A BUSINESS MODEL MAP OF UBER AND LYFT One company at the center of many emerging trends is Uber, a center it shares with Lyft, its biggest competitor in the United States; Didi
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early Facebook employee turned venture capitalist who became an early investor in Uber, noted that the smartphone is becoming “a remote control for real life.” Uber and Lyft drive home the notion that the Internet is no longer just something that provides access to media content, but instead unlocks real-world services. Uber
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Meredith Beam drew for Southwest Airlines. What are some of the core elements of this business model? Replacing Ownership with Access. In the long run, Uber and Lyft are not competing with taxicab companies, but with car ownership. After all, if you can summon a car and driver at low cost via the
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DVDs. They are replacing ownership with access. “I tell people I live in LA like it’s New York. Uber and Lyft are my public transit station,” said one customer in Los Angeles. Uber and Lyft also replace ownership with access for the companies themselves. Drivers provide their own cars, earning additional income from a resource
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often idle, or allowing them to help pay for a resource that they are then able to use in other parts of their lives. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft avoid the capital expense of owning their own fleets of cars. Passengers Who Expect Transportation On Demand. Much as Michael Schrage outlined in Who Do
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You Want Your Customers to Become?, Uber and Lyft are asking their consumers to become the kind of people who expect a car to be available as easily as they had previously come to
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expect access to online content. They are asking them to redraw their map of how the world works. Uber and Lyft recognized early on that many young urban professionals had already given up on owning a car, but for their business to spread beyond major urban
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and make the switch. The reliability, convenience, and coverage offered by the application are not enough to achieve this ambition. That is what is behind Uber and Lyft’s quest for ever-lower prices. Prices must be so low that calling an Uber or Lyft is not just vastly more convenient than owning
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Just a Company. A traditional business that wants to grow must hire people, invest in plants and equipment, and build out a management hierarchy. Instead, Uber and Lyft have created digital platforms to manage and deploy hundreds of thousands of independent drivers, trusting the marketplace itself to ensure that enough of them show
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wages when there weren’t enough workers to meet demand.) This is a radically different kind of corporate organization. There are those who argue that Uber and Lyft are simply trying to avoid paying benefits by keeping their workers as independent contractors rather than as employees. It isn’t that simple. Yes, it
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to provide a five-minute response time over a far larger geographical area than traditional taxi and limousine companies. Management by Algorithm is central to Uber and Lyft’s business. It would be impossible to marshal the workers, connect drivers and passengers in real time, automatically track and bill every ride, or provide
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without being on the payroll—is a complex problem. Unlike the taxi industry, which creates an artificial scarcity by issuing a limited number of “medallions,” Uber and Lyft use market mechanisms to find the optimum number of drivers, with an algorithm that raises prices if there are not enough drivers on the road
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this for granted in a future where the cost of these services continues to come down? The biggest strategic question in my mind is how Uber and Lyft deal with the problem of driver turnover. Are the wages and working conditions sufficient to achieve a steady-state supply of drivers or are they
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superficially have many of the same features as Lyft and Uber. But they are often unable to meet the expectations for price and availability that Uber and Lyft have established because they don’t have a liquid marketplace. They offer a fixed number of cars and drivers, limited by city taxi licenses (medallions
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for quick, reliable pickup at the busiest times, those cars would inevitably be idle at other times. It is no accident that a majority of Uber and Lyft drivers are part-time; it is one of the intrinsic advantages of the model that supply rises to meet demand and slacks off when demand
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9, the right answer is to develop a social safety net and regulatory frameworks as flexible and responsive as the on-demand business model itself. Uber and Lyft (and Airbnb) have taken the approach of asking for forgiveness rather than permission for many of their innovations, relying on swift consumer adoption to give
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conscious choices about what’s important, rather than discovering too late that it broke a key part of what had made it successful. For example, Uber and Lyft have made much of their plans to incorporate self-driving cars into their future. With a shallow understanding of their business, you might quickly conclude
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fleet of vehicles, requiring investments in interoperable control and dispatch. (Tesla seems to have other plans, though, forbidding their drivers from using their cars for Uber and Lyft, with the intention of rolling out its own competing service. A business model does not exist in isolation; it must adapt to the competition as
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peer fractional car rental. It is likely that the reality will be a mix of both. Finally, if the augmented worker is indeed central to Uber and Lyft’s business model, perhaps the right way to think about self-driving cars is as a further augmentation, enabling new kinds of services. Once driving
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that tries to capture the essence of multiple companies, it’s important to recognize that neat categorization is a fool’s errand. For example, like Uber and Lyft, Airbnb is a networked marketplace, but it’s a network of apartments, homes, and rooms, and only secondarily the network of workers who clean up
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move toward market demand rather than toward labor, because there are efficiencies to be gained from proximity to the market.” Networked Marketplace Platforms. Not just Uber and Lyft, but Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, Snap, Baidu, Tencent, and Apple draw a great deal of their strength from the fact that they are networked
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app allows consumers to hire occasional labor such as movers, house cleaners, or gardeners at the touch of a button, into the same map as Uber and Lyft. Even Upwork, which lets you tap into a global marketplace of professional programmers, designers, and other skilled workers for short-term “gigs,” is a clear
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were previously impossible. The amount of augmentation may vary. A service like TaskRabbit augments workers’ ability to find customers, but not to do the job. Uber and Lyft drivers have additional augmentation in their ability to navigate and find clients. Surgeons and oncologists might be working in traditional organizations but are cognitively augmented
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at about the same time. (It was still in private beta when Lyft launched publicly.) But by the time Sidecar went out to raise money, Uber and Lyft had already built huge venture capital war chests, and Sidecar was unable to compete in a capital-intensive business. It went out of business at
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systems, neither human nor machine, independent of their creators and less and less under anyone’s control. THE EVOLUTION OF PLATFORMS On-demand companies like Uber and Lyft are only the latest development in an ongoing transformation of business. Consider the evolution of the retail marketplace as exemplified first by chain stores, and
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number would be far higher. NETWORKED PLATFORMS FOR PHYSICAL WORLD SERVICES One way to think about the new generation of on-demand companies such as Uber and Lyft is that they are networked platforms for physical world services, bringing a fragmented industry into the twenty-first century in the same way that e
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of management. But focusing on the jobs that are lost is a mistake. Jobs are not lost so much as they are displaced and transformed. Uber and Lyft now deploy more drivers (albeit a majority of them part-time) than the entire prior taxi industry. (I have been told that Uber has about
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of what that might be in Uber’s early experiments in making house calls to deliver flu shots and bringing elderly patients to doctors’ appointments). Uber and Lyft are on their way to becoming a generalized urban logistics system. It’s important to realize that we are still exploring the possibilities inherent in
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that could sell out to an existing giant in a well-developed industry segment, they have had to build both sides of a new marketplace. Uber and Lyft started out with organic growth, but later accelerated it by deploying huge amounts of capital to acquire new drivers and new customers. Once a marketplace
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they have to pay to Apple for all the services it provides to the economy it supports. People also take for granted that platforms like Uber and Lyft take a cut from their drivers, and Amazon a cut from its resellers. So too, in a democratic society, people tax themselves to pursue
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know that these regulations do a poor job of ensuring quality or availability. A strong argument can be made that the reputation system used by Uber and Lyft, by which passengers are required to rate their drivers after each ride, does a better job of weeding out bad actors. Certainly, I’ve
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it is to give a one-star rating. However, this has not stopped opponents of the new services from claiming that the drivers provided by Uber and Lyft have been insufficiently vetted. While all of the new services perform driver background checks before they are allowed to offer rides, opponents argue that the
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enough because they don’t require fingerprinting and FBI criminal background checks, an onerous and time-consuming step that, from the point of view of Uber and Lyft, is undesirable because it would limit the participation of part-time and occasional drivers, who provide a majority of the service on these new platforms
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is to believe that the evolution of Google Search ended in 1998 with the invention of PageRank. For this multi-factor optimization to work, though, Uber and Lyft have to make a deep commitment to evolving their algorithms to take into account all of the stakeholders in their marketplace. It is not clear
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best way to achieve these objectives is to limit the number of drivers, and to certify those drivers in advance by issuing special business licenses. Uber and Lyft believe that their computer-mediated marketplace achieves the same goals more effectively. Surely it should be possible to evaluate the success or failure of these
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PARTIAL EMPLOYMENT There is no better demonstration of how outdated maps shape public policy, labor advocacy, and the economy than in the debate over whether Uber and Lyft drivers (and workers for other on-demand startups) should be classified as “independent contractors” or “employees.” In the world of US employment law, an independent
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at many retailers and fast-food outlets), “not enough hours,” and a host of other labor woes. The second scenario summarizes the labor practices of Uber and Lyft. Talk to many drivers, as I have, and they tell you that they mostly love the freedom the job provides to set their own schedule
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expensive health benefits. Cost optimization for the company, not benefit to the customer or the employee, is the guiding principle for the algorithm. By contrast, Uber and Lyft expose data to the workers, not just the managers, letting them know about the timing and location of demand, and letting them choose when and
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suspect that, over time, driver wages will need to increase at some rate that is independent of the simple supply and demand curves that characterize Uber and Lyft’s algorithms today. Even if there are enough drivers, the quality of drivers deeply influences the customer experience. Driver turnover is a key metric. As
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free trade, but are driven by fierce competition by companies to expand their market share, as Walmart and Amazon have done with consumer goods and Uber and Lyft have done with taxi fares. These upstarts upset the existing pricing equilibrium between companies and their customers in part as a competitive tactic, a way
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limousines on demand, and about the same time as Lyft started offering rides from ordinary people in their own cars, he was third in line. Uber and Lyft had both already raised massive amounts of money, and Sunil was never able to raise enough money to catch up. GROWING A BUSINESS WITHOUT VENTURE
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for work. You can argue that that is one of the key drivers at the heart of the on-demand revolution that includes companies like Uber and Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart, Upwork, Handy, TaskRabbit, and Thumbtack. The drawbacks of these platforms in providing consistent income and a social safety net shouldn’t blind
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aspects, 308–11, 323–24, 332–33 creativity-based, 312–19 displacement and transformation of, 94 and education/training, 303, 304 independent contractor status at Uber and Lyft, 59 labor globalization, 67 and new technology, xvii optimism about the future, 298–302 reducing work hours, 304, 308–11 replacing with higher-value tasks
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, 32–33, 34–35 jobs resulting from, 94–95 as manifestation of the global brain, 46 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations, 188–89 for Uber and Lyft, x, 62–64 self-service marketplaces, 91 sensors, xviii–xix, 33, 34–35, 40, 41, 85, 176–77, 326 SETI@home project, 26 sewing
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Tumblr, 229–31 Turbeville, Wallace, 246 Turrings Cathedral (Dyson), 45 Twain, Mark, 5 Twilio, 84 Twitter, 42–47, 102, 206–7 Tyson, Laura, 67, 245 Uber (and Lyft), xi, 31, 46–47, 54–57, 85–86 augmented drivers, 58–59, 69–70, 332 background checks on drivers, 184 building both sides of marketplace
Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy
by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle · 12 Mar 2019 · 349pp · 98,309 words
months I am going to be [sleeping] on a bench somewhere.’” Baran, twenty-eight, is a college student at a local university who drives for Uber and Lyft. In New York, app-based drivers have the same insurance and licensing requirements as taxi drivers, a cost that usually runs several thousand dollars. To
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“hosting guests” as she is renting her home out. TaskRabbit assistants and Kitchensurfing chefs aren’t “sharing” their services but being paid. Likewise, even though Uber and Lyft describe themselves as “ride-sharing,” charging for private vehicle transportation is simply a taxi or chauffer service by any other name. While Lyft (slogan: “Your
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.85 In the same way that a high percentage of cab drivers in New York are male (estimates range from 90 to 97 percent), all Uber and Lyft participants were male. Their ages ranged from twenty-two to fifty-nine, with 60 percent falling between twenty and thirty-nine years of age; the
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couriers full access to general liability insurance, auto excess insurance, and accidental occupational liability while on duty. Although most transportation and delivery services, such as Uber and Lyft, offer general liability insurance to protect individuals hurt by workers, the Postmates accidental occupational liability policy is otherwise unmatched by any competitor (as of this
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basically a piggy bank on wheels. You don’t want to make the opportunity for crime any easier than it is.”9 In part because Uber and Lyft drivers do not carry cash and are prohibited from picking up street hails in New York or accepting cash payments, there’s an expectation that
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week, I made about $1,200. So I was just saying, ‘All right, I made the right decision.’” Like many drivers, Hector drove for both Uber and Lyft, often deciding which app to activate based on the active guarantees and his own experience with passengers and demand. He described Lyft passengers as nicer
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no record of who was in the car. Hector believes that ride-sharing services may be especially appealing to drug dealers because the prevalence of Uber and Lyft cars in the outer boroughs of New York City may mean that they are less likely to draw the attention of the police. Hector’s
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home and the decision to accept a guest. It’s this worker control that sets Kitchensurfing and Airbnb apart from TaskRabbit and car services like Uber and Lyft. While all four services promote the entrepreneurial ethos and promise that workers can be their own bosses (see chap 2 for a more complete discussion
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percent), or hired someone online for a task/errand (4 percent). The Pew study also found racial differences by service platform. Car services, such as Uber and Lyft, have been identified as helping equalize the playing field by reducing the discrimination that racial minorities may otherwise experience in hailing a cab. Latinos (18
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fulfilling a real need. Indeed, while I was doing this research, one of my family members, seeking to soften a financial blow, began driving for Uber and Lyft. As he put it, driving was helping “make ends meet.” As critical as I am of the sharing economy and its lack of worker protections
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the number of hours actually worked (factor 12, regarding payment), is he an employee or an independent contractor? If a driver can work for both Uber and Lyft (factor 17, regarding working for more than one firm), but her rates are determined by the services (factor 3, regarding integration), where does she fall
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and probably avoid detection by the boss at least some of the time, the app-based tools allow for constant tracking. Thanks to GPS systems, Uber and Lyft know exactly when a driver arrives, picks up a passenger, where he goes, and when he drops them off. With required in-app communication, Airbnb
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University Press. Mahmood, Omar. 2016. “Uber Driver Suspended, Responds to Anti-Semitism Accusations.” Michigan Review, March 28. Mangalindan, J.P. 2014. “In Price Wars, Some Uber and Lyft Drivers Feel the Crunch.” Fortune, May 28. Mani, Anandi, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao. 2013. “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function.” Science 341(6149):976
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, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Vintage. Wingfield, Nick, and Mike Isaac. 2015. “Seattle Will Allow Uber and Lyft Drivers to Form Unions.” New York Times, December 14. Wise, Scott, and Jon Burkett. 2016. “‘He Was Trying to Kill Me’: Uber Driver Attacked on
Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl · 7 May 2018 · 491pp · 77,650 words
, but the fundamental question tends to be the same: should the same regulatory and licensing regimes apply to traditional transport operators and platforms such as Uber and Lyft? Historically, national and local regulators have imposed a large number of requirements on taxi companies, from licensing caps and price control, to * * * 36 Doublespeak driver
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the cheerful name ‘Hell’, is alleged to have targeted rival operator Lyft by ‘building up profiles of individuals and figuring out who was driving for Uber and Lyft. Uber then prioritized sending rides to drivers who used both apps, hoping to persuade drivers to abandon Lyft.’71 The company has suggested that Greyball
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. Julia Tomassetti, ‘Does Uber redefine the firm? The postindustrial corporation and advanced information technology’ (2016) 34(1) Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 239, 293: Uber and Lyft sublimate their agency in the production of ride services into algo- rithms, programming, and technology management. The metaphor of the ‘platform’ transforms
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Uber and Lyft from subjects into spaces. It evokes a passive space to be inhabited by active agents—drivers and passengers. For example, Lyft argues that drivers’ ‘low
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-system-on-demand-economy-uber-olive- garden, archived at https://perma.cc/CVU4-GEV7; Benjamin Sachs, ‘Uber and Lyft: customer reviews and the right to control’, On Labor (20 May 2015), http://onlabor.org/2015/05/20/uber-and-lyft-customer-reviews-and-the- right-to-control/, archived at https://perma.cc/9TNM-Y95X 52. Josh
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://newsroom.uber.com/nfb-settlement/, archived at https://perma.cc/YK2V-KPVP 6. Who’s Driving You?, ‘ “Ridesharing” incidents: reported list of incidents involv- ing Uber and Lyft’, http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/rideshare-incidents, archived at https://perma.cc/V4TM-YJMV. When UK tabloid The Sun investi- gated Uber-related complaints in 2016
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-in-uber-cities/, archived at https://perma.cc/GN7W-YLNN. Drink driving became one of the key argu- ments used by ride-sharing advocates once Uber and Lyft ceased to operate in Austin, Texas: Lindsay Liepman, ‘DWI arrests spike after Uber/Lyft leave Austin’, CBS: Austin (23 June 2016), http://keyetv.com/news
The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan · 12 May 2016 · 375pp · 88,306 words
through its primary consumer site Taobao), Alibaba has a significant ownership stake in and control over a number of its highly efficient logistics partners. Similarly, Uber and Lyft rely on systems that optimize their current pool of available drivers in real time. Thus, although additive-manufacturing technologies such as 3-D printers will
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highest-ever levels of occupancy and average daily room prices.29 The same is not true of Uber and Lyft’s impact on traditional taxicabs. The key difference is that, rather than being merely a differentiated service, Uber and Lyft also display higher quality across the board on most dimensions that customer value, except perhaps the
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_thriving_what.html. 30. Jennifer Surane, “New York’s Taxi Medallion Business Is Hurting. Thanks to Uber and Lyft.” Skift, July 15, 2015. http://skift.com/2015/07/15/new-yorks-taxi-medallion-business-is-hurting-thanks-to-uber-and-lyft. 31. Josh Barro, “Taxi Mogul, Filing Bankruptcy, Sees Uber-Citibank Plot,” New York Times, July
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we can’t get that done.”7 Of course, Airbnb is just one of many peer-to-peer platforms whose activities create new regulatory challenges. Uber and Lyft have faced regulatory pushback in a wide variety of cities looking to enforce taxi licensing laws. In particular, given its global footprint, Uber’s regulatory
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.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3:2013cv03826/269290/251. 4. Quoted in Dan Levine and Edward Chan, “Uber and Lyft Fail to Convince Judges,” Business Insider, March 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-and-lyft-fail-to-convince-judges-their-employees-are-independent-contractors-2015-3#ixzz3UIFTYbVy. 5. I have heard Teran discuss this
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’—that tap in and tap out as needed, and as suits them.”5 However, this description does not apply to all sharing economy providers. Many Uber and Lyft drivers, Handy providers, and TaskRabbit taskers make a significant percentage of their living through the platforms, and the fraction of the world’s workforce that
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what days of week to be available as a Handy provider to help people move. There is also variation in the level of pricing control. Uber and Lyft define prices in each of their cities, while Sidecar allowed drivers to set their own prices. TaskRabbit allows home cleaners to choose their own rates
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. Etsy sellers, Getaround providers, and Airbnb hosts have to invest significantly in merchandizing (photos, copy that describes their products or properties, and so on), while Uber and Lyft drivers are not called upon to do this, although this perhaps reflects the service being offered rather than the nature of the platform itself. Analogously
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, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 31. http://www.fastcompany.com/3057014/fed-up-with-uber-and-lyft-drivers-plan-to-launch-competing-app. 32. Lisa Gansky, “Collaborative Economy Companies Need to Start Sharing More Value with the People Who Make Them Valuable
Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler · 11 Jun 2018 · 246pp · 68,392 words
affordable royalty treatment was still falling. Under pressure to grow as quickly as possible, startups often discounted their services to attract customers and undercut competitors. Uber and Lyft engaged in a “price war” that would eventually in some cities make their services cheaper than public transportation. These price reductions were partially subsidized by
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venture capitalists who had invested billions in the companies, but they were also funded by cuts to drivers’ pay. As Uber and Lyft became prevalent, the startups continued to cut fares and increase commissions, claiming a higher percentage of each fare as a fee. Customers, if they were
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Economy’”;22 “Elizabeth Warren Calls for Increased Regulations on Uber, Lyft, and the ‘Gig Economy’”;23 “Elizabeth Warren Slams Uber and Lyft.”24 In her speech, Warren had acknowledged that talking about TaskRabbit, Uber, and Lyft was “very hip.” It seemed she was right. Sometimes politicians and labor leaders didn’t even need to frame their
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-gap technology, with companies employing people in the cheapest way possible until, eventually, it becomes cheaper to buy a machine. This is the case with Uber and Lyft, for instance. “The reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car—you’re paying for the other dude
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.boston.com/news/politics/2016/05/19/elizabeth-warren-calls-increased-regulations-uber-lyft-gig-economy. 24 Jopson, Barney, and Leslie Hook. Elizabeth Warren Slams Uber and Lyft. Financial Times. May 19, 2016. https://www.ft.com/content/abc00336-1de1-11e6-b286-cddde55ca122. 25 Trottman, Melanie. Employees vs. Independent Contractors: U.S. Weighs
Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky · 31 Mar 2017 · 190pp · 62,941 words
Center reported in 2016 that while 51 percent of Americans had heard of the concept of ridesharing, just 15 percent had used a service like Uber and Lyft, and another 33 percent were unfamiliar with them altogether. Surveys suggest that Uber has had a meaningful impact on the life of young adults in
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Hickenlooper, directly. In 2014, Hickenlooper signed a bill that lightly regulated Uber and its competitors, effectively legalizing the service. These battles played out almost everywhere Uber—and Lyft, often behind it—went. In early 2014, for example, the news site BuzzFeed counted seventeen active regulatory fights in various U.S. cities, counties, and
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taxis. In most instances a massive lobbying and public-relations onslaught succeeded in allowing the ridesharing companies to operate. But not everywhere. In May 2016, Uber and Lyft left Austin, Texas, after refusing to comply with the city’s fingerprinting measures. New ridesharing services willing to comply with Austin’s rules quickly offered
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driver perspective, Campbell has a take on all the important debates involving Uber. In 2016 a federal judge in San Francisco overturned an agreement by Uber and Lyft with their drivers in California and Massachusetts that would have seen Uber paying out $100 million to confirm the drivers’ status as independent contractors. The
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a mere 90 cents, which explains his surge-only practice. On the other hand, Snover deftly learned how to take advantage of the generous incentives Uber and Lyft have paid to build up their driver rolls. He said he got $500 for signing up his wife to drive for each service. Together with
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minimum-level bonuses, the two banked $1,400 from Uber and Lyft just for starting to drive. Many Uber drivers also follow a predictable path from excitement to disappointment to resignation. Bineyam Tesfaye, a former cabbie in
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