to be furious they have banned Uber from London?

[Acidophilus]

WTF?

Uber has itsbissues but this is ridiculous.

TFL have bowed to Black cab pressure and we will all pay massively for it. Or get mini cabs that are less safe and treat heir drivers worse.

Best news this week

Thing is Heathen4Hire once Uber had wiped out all the competition ( & they've put 1000's of people out of work already ) do you think they'd still be cheap? If they're the only cab around they'll charge what they bloody well like, and that's their aim.
Plus it's a myth that they're really cheap, they massively price surge at busy times.
It's also ironic that the people worried about 40,000 Uber drivers losing their jobs don't seem to mind if 40,000 black cab drivers lose their jobs, or any other cab driver for that matter. What's so special about uber?. Do you like using slave labour? because uber are a Tory dream, massive American business treating its workers like shit. & you're encouraging it.

What you pay for your Uber doesn’t actually cover the fare - it’s propped up by venture capitalists. So once they’ve driven all the competition out, expect that cheap and affordable fare to rapidly increase.

so they could just be driving a black/mini cab regardless

They couldn't be driving a black cab, though, unless they'd done The Knowledge, which can take years.

(Or unless they were ripping off someone else's licence, which I suspect is a criminal act in itself.)

surferjet
treating its workers like shit

How precisely? This mantra is simply ridiculous to keep on repeating.
An Uber driver can work whenever and wherever they want. They can choose if they work, when they work, for how long they work. If you don't have an approved car, you can get a loan from Uber to get you started, as opposed to other taxi firms including black cabs where you have to have your own approved car and there is no help if you don't. No Uber driver is tied in, they're allowed to work for competitors, they don't have to do any work at all to find customers as the app and Uber does all that work for them, they can take days off whenever they want, and if they don't like any of it they can leave the app immediately and work for whoever they like! How on earth is any of this is that treating them like shit?

greatbigwho
What you pay for your Uber doesn’t actually cover the fare - it’s propped up by venture capitalists.

I don't understand this statement. What has the fare to an Uber driver got to do with the funding tranches? Could you clarify?

Speaking as a born and bred Londoner, I know loads of people who use Uber who'd never dream of paying for a black cab except perhaps in an emergency

I agree. I'm not in London but a different European capital, and I very rarely used black cabs/minicabs before, but do use Uber frequently especially after nights out. Reasons:

• You don't need cash, or to waste time looking for a cashpoint, or crossing your fingers the cab will accept card payment.
• You don't need to wander round looking for a good place to hail a cab, or mess around trying to find a minicab number.
• You don't need to know the address where you are to tell minicab, you just stumble out of whatever pub you're in and press the button on the ap.
• You know the price in advance
• You know the driver will accept your trip, instead of refusing because it's too far away/not far enough as many licensed cabs used to do in my city
• Uber drivers much more friendly and polite
• You can see with the ap exactly where the car is and how long it will take to get to you, as opposed to ordering a minicab where it feels like a bit of a leap of faith waiting for it to turn up
• It is often (but definitely not always) cheaper. This is the least important reason for me.

FlowerPot1234
Are you an uber driver?

surferjet
Are you an uber driver?

No! Why, would your answers to my questions to you be different if I were? What a peculiar question!

Are you surferjet able to substantiate your claims of Uber treating 40,000 Uber drivers like shit, or not?

Again, this is not the revision of law!

Ok as you seem so excited on this topic, Bills are not Revised they are Amended in SC prior to final ratification. None of which alters the fact that these become Law.

Were you using Uber drivers decades ago?
Read my words. Cabs have been around a long time. In fact I was ordering cabs online before Uber came along. Guess what - they didn't invent cab ordering, they didn't even invent the platform economy.

Uber are not 'great Victorian industrialists'. They don't build housing, museums or do great public works. The workers bear all the risk of the capital investment in a car, the operating costs of that car etc.

Work changes with society and technology - you may not give a monkeys about the impact on people's lives, you may not be worried about the taxes which will be needed to support all these gig economy minimum wagers in old age and poor health because they sure as hell don't earn enough to build their own pensions. I do. Its really that simple - its possible to progress without endlessly moving the capital upward.

Seriously, what part of "you can work whenever you want, at whatever times you want, and for whoever you want" do you not understand about driving for Uber? Kindly answer that.

My face cream tells me it will make me young and beautiful - I know better than to rely on advertising.

One final word from me - Uber is not cheap. Every place I go to in the UK and abroad I compare Uber (and Lyft) with local services. They are never the cheapest, at best they are broadly inline with local mini cabs.

So this much vaunted consumer benefit isn't there either.

I hope Uber have learned their lesson, make the necessary improvements and are back giving the black cabs competition asap

I don't consider the two in competition really. Uber are minicabs, black cabs roam for hire - different models with different costs.

I agree with you that the 'roam for hire' model has a limited future outside the centre of cities, station forecourts etc.

I have spotted quite a few black cabs with Waze as their preferred SatNav option.

I'm surprised to hear people say they need cash in black cabs - I've been using plastic for years in them but that would be in central London, it may be different outside.

I don't understand this statement. What has the fare to an Uber driver got to do with the funding tranches? Could you clarify?

Uber don’t charge enough to not run at a loss - their deficit is covered by investments from VC. So once** this funding runs out, they’ll likely put the fares up

Do you know why uber drivers themselves took uber to court FlowerPot1234?

& Why are you passionately defending a company who are so fucking bad that they've been kicked out?

Why are you defending a company whose workers sexually assault their customers?

Can you explain please.

@surferjet

& Why are you passionately defending a company who are so fucking bad that they've been kicked out?

Uber PR? GF? Just a point of view with which you will never agree? Mute and move on is more productive in any of those cases if the discussion isn't actually illuminating

C8H10N4O2

Gosh, you really are all over the place.

Ok as you seem so excited on this topic,
Says the poster who began a whole sub-thread about sub committee responsibilities..

Bills are not Revised they are Amended in SC prior to final ratification.
Says the poster who wrote Bills are revised in select committees

In fact I was ordering cabs online before Uber came along.
You keep on and on and on about cabs being around for decades, your experience of ordering cabs blah blah blah. So what? What on earth does your experience of using cabs have to do with my statement that Uber work is not replacing jobs, but creating Uber work opportunities? Your replies are completely mismatched and leading you down a rabbit hole.

Seriously, what part of "you can work whenever you want, at whatever times you want, and for whoever you want" do you not understand about driving for Uber? Kindly answer that.
My face cream tells me it will make me young and beautiful - I know better than to rely on advertising.

Ah, I see, you can't answer any of that. Well, you should have said..

Yes you're right C8H10N4O2, wasting my time. I'll ignore.
Thanks

To people saying that once Uber have driven all of the competition out of the market they will put their prices up sorry this isn't true if they want to stay in business. The barriers to entry for cab driving are very low i.e. all you need is a driving license. If the charges are high, someone else will enter the market offering cheaper fares and a better service and everyone will go to them.

How do I know this? This is exactly what has happened to black cabs. They thought they had a monopoly on central London taxi services, didn't move with the times, often the drivers are rude, their cars are uncomfortable and often dirty, hard to hail, don't work with modern payment methods, won't go where you want to go and are expensive so rivals saw a gap in the market. The second Uber starts to also rest on its laurels some other tech wizard will come around and take their market share.

Also black cabs didn't lose my custom to Uber, Uber pretty much created a new customer in me. I've only ever got black cabs in an emergency whereas Uber became a regular travel option.

When regular jobs with sick pay and some degree of pension plan are replaced with faux 'self employed', low paid, zero hours contracts which people can't live on the tax payer will end up picking up the difference between what they earn and a living wage and also the shortfall in employers national insurance. I'd rather people earned enough to live on from an honest day's work.

If you take political action (I would include minimum wage in this) to raise peoples salaries above what market forces would pay, replacing state subsidy with wage overpayments, you aren't reducing the subsidy, you are hiding it where you can't see it.

I'm opposed to hidden subsidies. If they are out in the open, as they are when low earnings are subsidised by the state, then we can see the size of the problem, and make decisions from time to time to try and alleviate it.

The fact that some people can't earn as much as we think they need doesn't go away when you artificially adjust the prices of anything, in particular their housing and health and education costs or labour income. Those price adjustments hide a problem, and damage the economy. A free market is in part a computer that places the correct price on things, with consequences for supply and demand. When you artificially alter prices you damage the computer.

Yes surferjet, best do what C8H10N4O2 does, ignore questions posed to you whilst others have the etiquette to reply to you and pretend everyone who doesn't agree with you must be some secret Uber spy.

Thanks to you both for the huge vacuum of unanswered questions, very illuminating!

And I said before this won't matter soon because all of the black cabs drivers and uber drivers will not be driving cabs in 5 years or so once Google driverless cars hit the road. The tech genie is out of the bottle, it can't be pushed back in.

I agree uber filled a gap in the market, absolutely. A lot of their customers never used black cabs as they couldn't afford them, uber appeal to the young and less well off. & yes, I'd far rather my dc jumped in a cab than got the night bus or walked home. But they have to play by the rules. If they do that then fine!

I had a friend refused service in one because she had a guide dog, and from what I've heard there's some shady stuff that they've been accused of. Banning, maybe a bit harsh on the honest drivers but if it gets the company's arse into line then it's a good thing.

I agree surferjet. I hope this decision forces them to sort their issues out (because they clearly have issues) as they provide a good service and I'd like to see them continue as a new improved Uber.

Uber drivers took Uber to court earlier this year because of their working conditions. We're sleep walking into a dystopian future here, and very few people seem to realise it. Just so long as we can have our cheap cabs/airfares/holidays/cheap shite from China via Amazon/cheap food deliveries we're alright. Meanwhile a very few individuals become incredibly rich (bosses of Uber/AirBNB/Amazon/Booking.com etc), small businesses are stretched paying wodges of commission to online booking companies who do very little for the huge amounts of money they make, most of the employees of these huge internet giants make minimum wage (and often not even that as has been proved with Uber and Amazon recently), and the companies pay little/no tax within the UK.