This kind of concerns me. I have a T4/T5 spinal cord injury from a snowboarding accident 4.5Y ago. I have good hand and arm function but that's it no abdominals etc. I drive myself to work everyday and transfer in and out and fold up my wheelchair.
London's black cabs all have ramps. UBER is making big inroads here and I'm worried that eventually it'll be tricky to get a black cab. I can transfer into a regular car but I would need the driver to put my wheelchair in the boot (trunk) and given busy streets, harassed drivers, needing to pull right up to the kerb etc. I've not really had the guts to try it. It's particularly relevant here as the tube is mostly inaccessible and the buses painfully slow.
It's worth noting that this is due to a legal requirement that all licensed taxis (i.e. black taxis) must be wheelchair accessible. I think that requirement came into force around 1999 and it resulted in a lot of older taxis that weren't wheelchair-accessible being sold on the second-hand market when their owners were forced to upgrade.
So, in addition to successfully completing the Knowledge[1], black taxi drivers must operate using a compliant vehicle (which is inevitably more expensive than a normal vehicle, which Uber drivers typically use), and they must pick up anyone (including a disabled person who hails them while their light is on (if they ignore you or refuse to carry you without good reason, you can complain to the Public Carriage Office, which can take away a driver's taxi license).
In return for complying with all these requirements, licensed taxi drivers are allowed to pick people up on the street and calculate the fare using a taximeter.
Other cab drivers (driving what are typically referred to as minicabs or "private hire vehicles") are supposed to agree a fare with the passenger up front and are specifically prohibited, by law, from using a taximeter.[2]
London's licensed taxis drivers' view is that the Uber app is effectively a meter, and therefore, Uber drivers are breaking the law. The High Court will rule on the matter this summer.[3]
Follow all these regulations and we'll let you do business on the public streets.
or
Do business in private, via the phone or internet, and you don't have to follow these regulations.
---
Don't force the choice by saying regulations apply to everyone, even people who aren't going to get any benefit out of it. Uber doesn't have to use wheel-chair accessible vehicles, but they also can't respond if someone hails them on the street. This isn't a problem because they're fairly successful, but I imagine in a more competitive environment they'd actually feel the pinch by seeing other people picked up by random cabs, or black cars but they can't even interact with the customer who is 5 feet away from them because it's not via the app.
You may do transportation business on our roads if you follow our regulations, with no regard to how the ride was arranged.
Non-disabled rider's fares subsidizing accessibility for the disabled is no different than how health insurance works. Why would we allow Uber to freeload? Because they're "innovative"? Or "disruptive"?
No. Follow the rules Uber or GTFO out of the market.
In London there are two sets of regulation: the regs for black cabs and the regs for mini cabs.
Uber doesn't want to comply with either set of regs.
There are some considerable problems in UK minicabs avoiding their duties under disability discrimination laws -- not turning up; refusing to carry; refusing dogs (and not because the driver has an alergy; over charging and stealing from some users (eg blind people or those with a learning disability). So Uber is not unusual there.
> Non-disabled rider's fares subsidizing accessibility for the disabled is no different than how health insurance works.
Well I guess I'm of the belief that health insurance is a doomed concept, and the government should directly manage and subsidise and industry of health care not insurance, and pay for it by directly taxing the citizens rather than expecting a private group to somehow work better than democratic process.
> Other cab drivers (driving what are typically referred to as minicabs or "private hire vehicles") are supposed to agree a fare with the passenger up front and are specifically prohibited, by law, from using a taximeter.
Their lives must be miserable without The Queen's "taximeter"!
I think the UK situation is fair. If the uber app lets you go to random destinations, or charges you extra per the mile, then it is a meter.
Uber should be just like a black car service: point A to point B, with no extras. If Uber doesn't find this as profitable, they're free to open a segment of their company that actually is a taxi service and follows regulation in exchange for picking up the public and being able to run a meter on public traffic.
The problem is that taxi regulation doesn't make any sense to begin with. As you said, people get transported from Place A to B for a fee.
Fundamentally, it's as simple as buying a pound of cheese from a supermarket. It's just a transaction between people.
So why should taxi drivers have to get "licensed"? What exactly is that license? What does it represent besides going through a burdensome ordeal? How would getting licensed increase safety in any way? It's not like anyone wants to experience a car crash.
The real point of the exercise is to maintain a state-supported taxi-cartel. Higher prices for the masses, and higher profits for the cartel. Desperation and hardship for the debt-slave drivers.
> So why should taxi drivers have to get "licensed"? What exactly is that license? What does it represent besides going through a burdensome ordeal? How would getting licensed increase safety in any way? It's not like anyone wants to experience a car crash.
All businesses must be licenced. Taxi licensing is special because of their special circumstance. They conduct their business primarily on public streets, and without licensing to ensure fair pricing and service to clientele they may:
(a) 'forget' about picking up people of a certain skin color (b) refuse fare to a certain district they don't like (c) arbitrarily set fares depending on what they see as people's willingness to pay--like say setting the fare for single women outside nightclubs to 3x the normal rate.
All of these things I've seen in unregulated environments and to a lesser extent (a & b ) in regulated environments too.
Why? Why the hell would a grocery store need a license and what for? I'm not asking for "because the government says so", because the government says a lot of things that don't actually make sense. Is there a good, objective reason for all businesses to have to be licensed and how would the license help?
> Taxi licensing is special because of their special circumstance.
What does that mean? What are the special circumstances? It's just people with cars and people who need to go places.
> (a) 'forget' about picking up people of a certain skin color
Suppose there was no regulation for taxis. Now suppose a big taxi company had emerged. Let's call it "Toober". Now Toober, just like most companies, wants to make as much money as possible.
Do you think people accusing its drivers of racism would be conducive to that goal, and if not, do you think Toober would do something about racist drivers?
What about the drivers? They want money too, right? So if there was a racist driver working for Toober, and he knew Toober doesn't tolerate racism because it's bad for their image and thus, bottom line, don't you think the driver would refrain from behaving in a racist way so that he could keep his job?
> (b) refuse fare to a certain district they don't like
Don't like? Because it somehow displeases them like Justin Bieber's music displeases a lot of guys? What sense would it make for a taxi to leave money on the table because he finds a district distasteful?
> (c) arbitrarily set fares depending on what they see as people's willingness to pay--like say setting the fare for single women outside nightclubs to 3x the normal rate.
Again, imagine Toober getting complaints about discrimination. On the other hand, getting home safely from a night out is a more valuable service than just getting from Place A to B in less dangerous situation, so maybe it's alright to charge a bit more.
Sure, three times the normal rate would be too much, but another taxi company would be free to offer a better rate, and people would take it.
Do you see why regulation is not necessary at all? Whenever the government says it's doing something for your safety or for fairness, you can be 100% sure the results and real reasons are different.
The real reason why we have taxi regulations is to maintain a state-supported taxi-cartel.
In the UK the Black Cab drivers have special rights. E.g. they are allowed to stop on cycle lanes, hairpin corners, etc. They are allowed to use engines which has 3x more emissions than a VW Golf 1.6TDI.
So they are licenced to serve the selfish customers who don't care whether they endanger others with hailing a taxi at a place they should not and they don't care others who have to inhale the fumes.
The logic for street hails is that it's fundamentally impossible to negotiate prices or quality of service ahead of time. Enforcing a uniform price & service standard lends predictability to the procedure.
- How much for taking me from here to <Place X>?
- That would be $40.
- Alright, let's go.
Quality of service would involve various things, but there could be a big taxi company called Toober, for example, with a good reputation, so you could reasonably expect to receive at least decent service from their drivers, and there would be no problem.
If you were feeling more adventurous, you could opt for a small(er) provider without an established reputation, but it would cost a bit less than Toober. Most likely, there would be no problem.
Uber in the UK uses licensed taxi drivers the same as any other Private Hire firm. I think they'd have an extremely hard time claiming that they are exempt from UK and EU law. Furthermore, Black Cabs are an entirely different taxi group and the competition between them is regulated AFAIK.
I think what we'll eventually see are Uber drivers purchasing their own ramps and Uber marking them as wheelchair-friendly, with the customer given the ability to request a wheelchair-friendly car. In turn this would probably pressure other Uber drivers to also get ramps so they're able to compete, and the majority of fulltime Uber drivers will eventually get ramps.
Edit: this might also extend to things like baby seats and various other specialized passenger modifications.
They won't compete. There's a reason that the ADA exists and it's not because people are mean, it's because it's more expensive to support people with disabilities. And because disabled customers are a very small portion of the total customers service providers would just forgo their business. The end result being there is no competition and without a legal requirement, there would generally be no accommodations.
The issue isn't that Uber is discriminating. In fact, the subject of the article was a twice weekly user of Uber for two years. A single driver didn't think the wheelchair would fit in the car. It seems like something that should be reported, and the driver should be dealt with. To take an issue that happens less than 1% of the time and make it sound like it's UBER is a bit absurd.
The question is, does Uber have training in place on what rights a disabled passenger has? Do they discipline or dismiss drivers who receive disability complaints?
It sounds like Uber's response has been that it has no duty to support or enforce the ADA.
Uber is forcing taxis out of business. One of the reasons that taxis are regulated is that they are bound by law to transport the disabled. If we are going to let Uber put them out of business, then we have to aggressively protect the rights of the disabled.
Taxis are regulated primarily because they do business on public streets. If the only way to get a taxi were to call them up, there'd be far less of a reason to regulate them.
In any case, in many locales it's almost entirely unheard of to street-hail a taxi. To name two places I've lived, in Boston and Silicon Valley, you always need to call for a taxi, unless you happen to be staying at a hotel in a downtown area.
If taxis do not generally pick up people from the street, then they should not be forced to conform with special regulations designed for taxis that pick up the public on the street.
However, they should additionally be barred from picking up clients on the street.
Do you mean to say that it's okay for private operators to discrimate based on whether their potential client is disabled or not (when it has nothing to do with the safety of the client or the driver)?
You're using discriminate in an odd way. Is it discrimination to not set yourself up to be able to provide service for someone because of an additional cost?
That part of the story is just an example. The point of the story is the argument Uber is using in the lawsuit. Uber maintains it's not a taxi service and therefore not responsible for the drivers actions or the accessibility of the vehicle. Additionally, suggesting that this is a 1% problem like it's a minor edge case bug is outrageously insensitive. This problem impacts real people.
I can kinda get that companies might want to skip around accessibility issues when they're first getting started. But once you reach a certain point (somewhere well before billion dollar valuations) it's unconscionable to ignore accessibility.
> [Tim] Cook replied [...] that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
> companies might want to skip around accessibility issues when they're first getting started
So, if it's inconvenient, you get to pretend it doesn't exist because you're a "startup"?
That kind of mindset is what's wrong with the startup community. "Disrupt" isn't a synonym for "break any laws you don't like" and "startup" isn't a synonym for "I am above the law!"
Yes, you do. Accessibility laws generally include exemptions for small businesses. The Americans with Disabilities Act definitely does. Title III goes out of its way to only require "reasonable accommodation" that is "readily achievable" and not overly burdensome to the small business.
A company, like Uber, that has raised several hundreds of millions of dollars in financing, is definitely not a small business and doesn't get to claim that exemption.
The post I replied to was talking about the "startup community," so I was addressing that. A startup isn't breaking the law by not having the same level of accessibility as a large company. Uber has 2000 employees (excluding the drivers); they definitely wouldn't qualify.
I'd really like to see you try and claim that loading a folded-up wheelchair that the occupant themselves regularly loads into a car on her own, is "overly burdensome".
I know the american legal system is pretty much fucked, but surely even you lot would have to accept that putting a folded wheelchair into the boot/trunk of a car is "reasonable accommodation".
In New York, there are thousands of wheelchair accessible taxis ( http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/passenger/accessible.shtml ), but there are also thousands of taxis that aren't wheelchair accessible. The ones that aren't accessible aren't breaking the ADA (then again, the ADA requires "reasonable accomodation," so the ones that aren't wheelchair accessible probably still have to make an effort to put a wheelchair in the trunk, if requested).
Black cabs are more accessible by default, but I'd assume if I called ahead for any taxi I'd need to let them know of any special needs, the same as if I needed to let them know I wanted a taxi for 7 people?
Shouldn't there be an area for adding special requests such as accessibility? You filter to the vehicles that are able and willing to take this passenger's money.
I can only assume that, as contracted drivers, they have to worry about scratches that may be caused by loading and unloading wheelchairs? Am I overlooking some kind of personal discrimination expecting people to be better?
The point here is that no special accommodation is required!!! The subject's chair fits anywhere a second passenger or a large suitcase would go. These two drivers didn't even want to try, and the second driver harassed her all the way to the airport, even after she put her chair in the car herself.
The special request feature wouldn't be hard to implement, but I'm not sure that it benefits drivers to respond to it unless there was also a system to incentivize them.
I'm sure I'm not the only person seeing ads from Uber to use my own car for extra income. For the record, I haven't signed up.
My own car is not wheelchair accessible. It is spacious, and could fit a collapsed wheelchair. But I don't have a lift. Even if I were to sign up as an Uber driver, I can't say that I'm a kind enough soul to add a wheelchair lift or other equipment to make my car wheelchair accessible.
I might be willing to do so for the right incentive. If Uber were to get me a discount on the modification, or promise to buy my car from me when I no longer want it, or give me a higher percentage of the fare when I pick somebody up, etc. But I, personally, wouldn't foot the bill for purely altruistic reasons.
As far as I can tell, Uber's argument is that its drivers are independent contractors, and if anybody's breaking the law it's the drivers and not Uber (because, frankly, that's always Uber's argument).
Taxis are also independent contractors. Not every taxi cab must be wheelchair accessible to comply with the ADA. Therefore it stands to reason that Uber's drivers don't necessarily need to modify their cars to comply with the ADA. I will concede that Uber drivers have a requirement to make a reasonable accomodation for disabled passengers.
It still isn't established if Uber's drivers really are independent contractors. But if they are, I don't see how Uber is in violation of the ADA. Individual drivers may well be. And Uber will need to sort things out if it expects people to continue to sign up as drivers.
Uber is clearly the one provisioning the service to the customer, and is a large company. The drivers are contractors who do work for Uber, not for the customer. The customer pays Uber, Uber pays the driver. Uber is the car service, and must support its disabled customers.
I think that particular argument is pretty weak. Uber notifies the drivers of a pickup opportunity and they have the option of taking it and doing what the customer says for a while.
There's a lot of things that suggest Uber to be an employer, but the rides themselves seem very contractor-y.
Taking a percentage fee for putting driver and customer together leans away from employment, in my view. There are a lot of types of middlemen that are not employers.
> As far as I can tell, Uber's argument is that its drivers are independent contractors, and if anybody's breaking the law it's the drivers and not Uber (because, frankly, that's always Uber's argument).
I have a fun experiment. Let's ask the IRS if Uber's drivers truly are "independent contractors" as they argue, despite the regulations they impose on drivers which are surprisingly close to regulations you'd impose on an employee.
It happens all the time. And often the parent company is trying to avoid taxes (well, in theory the amount of taxes stays the same, it's just a question of who pays and who keeps the records). In this case, Uber's also trying to avoid learning about and complying with local, state and federal regulations (and, so far, they've been successful).
Can anyone submit a letter of determination to the IRS asking them to determine if Uber is operating legally with regards to its independent contractor worker classification?
I doubt it. But anybody can tell the IRS that they believe a person or company isn't paying their full share of taxes. I suspect that the IRS would prioritize complaints from, say, disgruntle corporate accountants, but it should be possible for anybody to report what they believe is tax fraud.
The IRS probably already knows about Uber. They probably haven't audited the company or asked for details, but they must be vaguely aware of how the company operates.
> "startup" isn't a synonym for "I am above the law!"
It kinda is. Hear me out.
Commerce is bound to be political. Offering up a product or service for sale isn't always going to be acceptable to everyone. So we pass laws to tell people what they can and can't do. So far, so good.
Except that if this continues, the business landscape changes due to the collective weight of all these laws. Existing organizations that understand the growing burden of the necessary law that has to be complied with are eventually the only entities that can do business.
There needs to be some mechanism to operate in the opposite direction, to deprecate laws and allow smaller companies, who don't have the operational capacity to obey every single law that's ever been passed, to do business.
Law is an imperfect instrument, it remains imperfect no matter how much social good it does, it never foresees all the different ways that society can evolve. The startup, the small, scrappy player that seeks out market opportunities and creates businesses out of them, has to be willing to break laws, has to be willing to believe in itself and its ability to help society evolve.
Small economic actors have always played this role in society, there's nothing magic about Silicon Valley-style startups in this regard.
They do. Law enforcement resources are hopelessly and perpetually under-allocated. One can fly under the radar for a long, long time, so long as they don't start openly and flagrantly beg the "long" arm of the law to pay attention to them.
If you're both an under-privileged minority and you live in a heavily-policed area, this may not apply to you. But everyone else can operate based on a pragmatic assessment of the likelihood of getting caught.
Start a business that violates the law, so long as it's not one that invites the cops to bust through your doors, (i.e. drugs) your ability to operate will rest on society's judgment.
"Should be allowed" is language that hinges on a belief that the law is an inviolate arbiter of right and wrong. It is not. Crowd-sourced judgment is that arbiter. The law is just that arbiter's proxy.
That's not the right question to ask. The right question is whether we think Uber is innovative enough to change the laws for.
You've got your thinking backwards. It's not us that has to conform to the law, it's the law that has to conform to us. The right thing to do, IMO, is to make Uber conform to disability law, and do away with the other laws that seem to be doing nothing at this point besides protecting rents, like the taxi medallion system.
There are also other questions like whether we should consider Uber drivers to be employees or contractors. Any decently innovative startup will raise lots of these questions. Uber does just that.
Of course, it would require too much political capital to just do away with the taxi medallion system at this point. So we have to tolerate the grey state of affairs until the legal and political issues are wrangled.
Uber deserves to be rightly rich for being pioneers in this space.
> Uber deserves to be rightly rich for being pioneers in this space.
I have never been more disgusted by an answer on Hacker News. My apologies for that.
Uber's "wealth" is merely an artifact of VC money rushing into a space with an unjustifiable valuation predicated on the violation of transportation and disability laws.
Uber will be the Web Van of the mobility space. Cool idea, replaced by self-driving vehicles owned and operated by organizations willing to follow laws of the jurisdictions they operate in.
> predicated on the violation of transportation and disability laws.
You forgot labor laws.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I've attempted to lay out a rationale from as close to first principles as I can reasonably approach for the right relationship startups should have with the law and society and you've ignored it out of disgust.
No alternatives given for fixing the problems that legislation engenders for commerce, just irrational hatred.
And "the law" is not the only measure of what's right. Just because it may end up being legal for Uber to discriminate against disabled doesn't mean they aren't major dicks.
There's a fundamental rule for living in the world: Don't be a dick. Uber is breaking that rule, through sociopathic sophistry.
there are many related fundamental rules, like "everyone is considered a dick by someone" and "you're a dick if you blame a group for the actions of a few."
mainly, though, none of these are actually rules because your subjective notion of what being a dick means isn't transferable outside of your head, even if it really, really feels like your opinions are right.
But by saying it, I hope to convince others. Because I really, really want "defending a corporation's right to condone and tolerate disabled discrimination" to be seen as being a dick.
No one is claiming Uber has an out due to "startup" status. OP said "(somewhere well before billion dollar valuations)", which sounds like a clear shot at them.
Point is, early on it is understandable that Uber would take this kind of stance. Now, it's unconscionable.
But going the other way hinders progress in the name of very few people (if any) who may benefit from this kind of measures in very early stages. When the company gets a broad audience, then it becomes a concern.
And since the founders have growth in mind anyway, they'll be sure to make it possible to implement the measures later on (or they'll pay the price in court, either way all is well).
If i'm building an MVP I might not even fully support all of the popular browsers, let alone the correct standards for screen readers, and my page layout will probably break if you increase the font size. Similarly my website is probably only in one language.
(I'm not sure what my point is... I'm just thinking out loud.)
The Internet's a bit different, it's more of a virtual wild west... at least it used to be. If your service has a real world presence and you cut corners then you're more likely to bother someone - especially if you want to be ubiquitous.
Because you're catering to much smaller markets? I think the view above is something like a food delivery service not offering gluten-free or vegetarian options?
If you can't run a business by following relevant laws and regulations, can you really say you have a viable business model?
I don't care what stage of running your business you're in, you shouldn't get to ignore laws and regulations that apply just because you don't like them, or it would be too expensive right now.
Ask any number of companies that skirt the law (mining/extraction) or who are powerful enough to simply evade the law (most pipeline incidents aren't fully accounted for in terms of environmental/damage cost because lax laws shield the companies that maintain/build pipeline).
It's a question - if your business is big enough to essentially buy off legislators or judiciary, is it your company's fiduciary duty to go into legally gray area for higher profits?
Pretty sure that being a legal entity requires you to act in a legal manner.
I do not buy the 'business must do everything inside and outside the law to make money,' schtick, but then again, I'm not willing to look at companies as more important or the most important part of society either.
Thank you for this quote. I often think that this gets overlooked in our industry, and I'm no exception. A recent Hanselminutes podcast[1] touched on this. It pointed to a great resource[2].
Well Uber is trying to say the law doesn't apply to them. Let's say that they find a technicality that means the law doesn't actually apply to them, should they address the underlying issue or not?
Presumably they should be saying "We will fix this issue regardless of whether we're obliged to by law or not."
Company set up to lower prices by avoiding regulatory overhead tries to avoid regulatory overhead - film at 11.
FWIW: It seems really unlikely Uber will be able to play both sides of the coin on this one for much longer.
Just in case anyone thought "courts have never considered things like Uber and the ADA before", they have.
Search for "demand responsive transportation ADA"
The fact that the drivers are or are not employees will not matter.
Also
"49 C.F.R. § 37.171 - Equivalency Requirement for Demand Responsive Service Operated by Private Entities Not Primarily in the Business of Transporting People"
Whoops.
Oh well, there goes any argument about not being in the business of transporting people ...
In places where Uber is just another taxi company, it likely has to follow all the local regulations that apply to taxi companies.
It's only special in the places where Uber pretends not to be a taxi by claiming it's some kind of "ride sharing". I think that isn't going to last very long.
My point is precisely: It is not special, for ADA purposes, in any of these places, regardless of the outcome of the "we aren't really a taxi company" argument they make.
I think I understand Uber's stance here. From a business perspective their drivers are all independent contractors. This is an important part of the discussion because if they start telling them what the can and cannot do during their time then they start to look more and more like employees (something they absolutely do not want).
An example of this are the popularly discussed drivers that run jewellery or other businesses out of their car while also driving. The moment Uber says you cannot do this on while a contractor for us the legal waters become murkier.
It may be the case that once someone challenges in court an Uber driver (not Uber itself) and wins on the grounds that not accepting a disabled passenger is illegal then the company will have the grounds (and precedent) to enforce that their contractors do not break the law.
To drive the point home, even if Uber wants to prevent their drivers from doing certain things doing so moves them closer to the realm of employees not contractors.
Edit: To clarify I don't necessarily believe that Uber drivers should be considered contractors, but until a case is brought against them and they lose and all drivers become employees they're going to be as hands off as possible to maintain their ability to defend the position. Also providing instructions to a contractor (provide water) does not make them an employee.
Uber has built its business skirting the laws on taxis and other transportation companies-- exploiting a loophole.
If the ADA law gets applied to them, it'll be a legal precedent for treating them like every other transportation company. So now they have to fight it- not because they care about people with wheelchairs, but because it's an existential threat to the foundation of their business.
What makes the situation interesting is that Uber could have avoided this whole fiasco by being ethical in the beginning, and making "you have to help people with disabilities" a part of their new-driver training. Then this would never have become a legal issue, and they wouldn't have the public shame of fighting against people with disabilities, or the threat to the core of their business.
Engaging in litigation claiming you don't have to follow the ADA simply because you don't want to deal with the tax implications of doing so is unbelievably low.
> if they start telling them what the can and cannot do during their time then they start to look more and more like employees (something they absolutely do not want)
Uber may not want it, but their drivers are undeniably employees, not contractors.
Whenever I see this discussed, people bring up that Uber satisfies some of the criteria for being employees but not others. However, that's not the way the IRS works. To the IRS, those criteria are all sufficient, not necessary - Uber doesn't need to satisfy all of them in order for the IRS to consider them to be employees.
> It's low in the same way that if a non-profit starts to use your IP or trademarks you must go after them for doing so.
Incidentally, this is common legal advice on Internet forums, but is not really true, as lawyers like DannyBee have explained more than once in other threads. It's a misconception that litigating companies tacitly condone, because it paints them in a more sympathetic light, but it's not actually "required" by any stretch of imagination.
If your mark is actually at risk of losing secondary meaning, then there is a risk to not doing so, but it takes a long time to get to that point. It's like saying that every time you have a beer, you're slowly developing cirrhosis - unless you're already drinking heavily and have been for a while, a single drink has literally no impact[0].
Also, since you say "IP or trademarks", not just trademarks, you're applying this principle to copyright and patents, which is also not true at all. Failure to enforce copyright rights is not tantamount to a free, irrevocable license.
> View this from the position of a business with investors they're beholden to, not from an emotional standpoint.
I'm viewing it with the exactly the same line of thinking that got us these antidiscrimination and labor protection laws in the first place.
[0] The liver is capable of regeneration, and cirrhosis only happens if you repeatedly subject it to levels of alcohol that it can't regenerate from faster than your intake. Likewise, losing secondary meaning isn't going to happen because you failed to go after a small non-profit that was using your mark in a way that wasn't really intended to confuse customers with your mark in the first place.
If you have IP that you know a non profit is using without an explicit licence, you do not have to "go after them" - you own the IP and if you feel they're a worthy cause worth supporting, offer them "support" in the form of a no cost licence for your IP.
> View this from the position of a business with investors they're beholden to
I'm pretty sure even the most vindictive of VC investors can't compel a startup to break the law "because profits".
I suspect you've not seen a copy of the Terms for Uber drivers. They provide a lot of instructions, on a lot of issues, most of them far less legally crucial than the ADA. Down to what to say to passengers.
There will always be excuses, but "we'll look like an employer, therefore disabled people can go fish" is pretty ignoble.
Where I'm located existing taxi drivers are also independent contractors (freelancers) running under taxi brands. Those taxis are still regulated by authorities to make sure they comply with laws and charge standard price bands - they do spot checks and the licenses are revoked if problems occur. Technology companies shouldn't be given a free ticket just because they're the next big thing.
I believe Uber's implicit argument is that the individual drivers should be fined for not complying. If that actually happens, and drivers stop signing up, I would expect Uber to come up with some kind of program to limit driver liability.
Surely I can tell a web developer contractor they can't build insecure/shitty code without turning them into an employee? They tell their drivers all sorts of instructions already - turn down tips, offer water, be courteous, etc.
You certainly can advise your contractors. You can stipulate in your contract that the work must be completed in a certain way. As this relates to uber I'm sure that they tell all their drivers to not break the law (covers speeding, running red lights, and also discrimination).
The onus in this case is on the users to out the drivers to Uber through the review system. Maybe they need a submit button on the review page that says 'my driver broke the law'.
I don't. It's a hypothetical. Why can't Uber say "you must comply with the ADA" to their drivers if I'm able to say to a web developer contractor "website must be accessible to the visually impaired".
If governments cannot crack down on Uber for this issue, then presumably they could start going after the individual contractors who don't comply with the regulations? I can't imagine this going well for Uber either way without some sort of change in their policy for obtaining contractors.
I imagine it, and I don’t care. Uber is trying to play it both ways (regulating their drivers heavily while not having to obey regulations that everyone else has to follow) and I have no sympathy for them at all.
This really saddens me. I used to love Uber, it was one of my favourite companies. I remember when I first used it - I'd gone down to London and was going to try UberLux out, just for the one trip. I ended up using it about four times that day, even though it was far more expensive than a taxi. It was incredible and worth every penny because unlike taxis, Uber was professional[1]. The driver was polite, you got a bottle of water to drink and there was stuff to read too (and not rubbish either, quality stuff like the FT).
For a while, it seemed like Uber was about the high-end - as Travis himself said, he created Uber to have a more "baller" way to travel around San Francisco - but then they started to care more and more about being seen as affordable and UberX is now clearly the company's top priority. And as prices drop and margins are squeezed, articles like this are the end result. People will complain that luxury isn't important (and they might be right) but Uber had a really good service that was different. Now they're just like all the other ride sharing companies.
I really, really wish they would shut down UberX. I know they won't. But I want to love Uber again - but with all of these stories, almost all regarding UberX drivers - I feel obnoxious if I use them. I don't want to support them.
Love the service, hate the company.
[1] I was recently in a taxi where the taxi driver said a number of very racist things, directly insulted me, my fellow passenger and pretty much anyone he came into contact with during the ride (other cars, pedestrians, etc) and swore repeatedly. This isn't the first time I've experienced this (although it was the worst). I'm somewhat shy and find taxis to be, on occasion, somewhat intimidating. I've never felt that way in an Uber.
But, why? They've always been boisterous and exploitative. Just because someone provides a "do what I want" button doesn't absolve them of all their koala-fueled tyranny in the background.
It turns out when you allow cutthroat capitalism with no regulators or oversight (or regulators that lag by 5-10 years), it becomes easy to abuse so many features of our shared economy. Startups figured this out about 7 years ago and are going full steam ahead with exploitation at the speed of business model evolution.
> he created Uber to have a more "baller" way to travel around San Francisco
so, uber is basically 100% BroTaxi, just not so obviously branded. Then lyft is half BroTaxi ("mustache rides!") an half HippyTaxi (we'll be super dope BFFs forever! (at least until the end of this transactional ride)). What if transportation fractures like online communities fracture? Does each online message board get its own taxi service? That could potentially fix the quality problem since you would only be associating with people already like yourself. "MRA-only taxi service, hackernews-only taxi service, ..."
Know the most 'baller' way to travel around San Francisco? Spend an hour trying to get somewhere 5 miles away on public transit then focus on fixing the system itself. Don't try to elevate yourself above what you perceive to be the oh-so-dirty unwashed masses. Remember: melting-pot, not gilded tower.
Of course, all this people-taxi drama is time limited until we have self aware cars fulfilling our every transportation wish (let's just hope they don't get too clairvoyant).
> But, why? They've always been boisterous and exploitative.
Agreed. I'm not saying that I'm proud that I supported them. Previously, I bought into the "taxi mafia" story that Travis spun. I was at a talk he gave and, well, he was convincing. I think at the time, he was probably telling the truth: there probably was a lot of corruption in the taxi industry (and probably still is). But now, after he's used it time after time to justify treating drivers and customers poorly (fighting against insurance, for example), I feel like a fool for believing him.
> so, uber is basically 100% BroTaxi
I don't think he was using the term "baller" seriously, it was most likely a joke. UberExec/Lux certainly doesn't feel like it's for "bros", it feels like it's for professionals.
That's a great point. Start a new exploiting service under the guise of freeing people from an already exploiting service. That tactic provides cover, plausible deniability, and an automatic anti-establishment camaraderie following. Though that's basically the same tactic taken by every politician in every election these days ("Washington is CORRUPT! It's full of insiders and lobbyists and lifers. I will be expose the corruption and fight FOR YOU!").
By the time people realize you have become the new corrupt rent-seeking entity, it's too late for people to fight you and your $6 billion VC war chest (yes, uber has raised 6 billion-with-a-B dollars in "funding" — they seem to be taking the PayPal model of just giving people free money in exchange for loyalty (subsidies paid for by middle america retirement funds invested in VC funds)).
> I was recently in a taxi where the taxi driver said a number of very racist things, directly insulted me, my fellow passenger and pretty much anyone he came into contact with during the ride (other cars, pedestrians, etc) and swore repeatedly.
Please do always reprt this! I know you shouldn't have to; I know it happens far too often. But please do report it.
Thanks for those links, I didn't realise it was that easy. However, this was in a private taxi and not in London, but yes, I could have reported it.
Honestly though, my problem isn't with the occasional awful ride, but the far more frequent slightly annoying rides. The ones where the driver won't stop talking or asking about local women or good bars in the city or the latest football gossip. I can't complain about that (nor do I really have the right to) but it's a huge reason why I prefer the Uber service.
Interesting - I've only been using Uber for ~2 years now but I came across it from the opposite direction. I couldn't afford them until UberX came out. I took an UberX last night and the driver didn't know the cross street in Harlem I told him to go to. He insisted on me finding the street address and putting it in the app so that GPS could guide him. Then he asked for five stars before I left. His car had random water bottles in the back seat.
But none of that bothered me.
I want to get to point B from point A - that 15 minute user experience isn't really important to me. So all I care about is cost and, atleast here in NYC, UberX can sometimes be cheaper than a yellow cab.
That's fair enough. I certainly couldn't afford to use UberLux every day but I only rarely get taxis (maybe a few times a month) so I'd rather pay for a premium service when I do.
A perfect situation I feel would be if Lyft concentrated on the affordable end and Uber went high end. Immediately, there'd be no more Lyft vs Uber nonsense and Lyft would get all of the aggression from the taxi industry instead of Uber, as Uber would no longer really be competing with taxis.
I've had a similar experience with Uber. Awesome at first, but then the horror stories started emerging, and what was upsetting was Uber's lack of initiative to abate the problems.
I can understand their position in trying to keep their drivers as independent contractors and therefore less controlled and regulated. But it seems that they are not even trying to show a willingness to appease to their own trodden customers and conscientious user base.
If I understand what Uber is really trying to do, I think the drivers are Uber's customers. Riders are simulataneously customers of the drivers, and the product being sold by Uber to drivers.
Really? You think it's more likely that their competitors have made up junk stories, than a company which has a known public history of ignoring rules and regulations, is breaking more rules and regulations?
Considering how many other taxi companies break regulations like this, but nothing said.
Uber does it, and its a massive issue.
I've lost count how many disabled unfriendly private taxi's there are, how many times the card machine "stops working". The industry in general is scummy. In general Uber is better than average.
I'm not saying this is one of those stories, but a huge quantity are. Especially when they mention other taxi companies in a good light, it makes it obvious.
Here is the thing with "sharing" economy - the moment money exchange hands, this is no longer sharing but commercial activity. So you must abide to the regulations. You cannot cherry pick only the rules that suit you.
They've been able to do it to the tune of a tens of billions of dollars valuation. So has Airbnb. Why change now? They'll get their IPO before anyone has to answer for anything, so investors & founders will be happy. Keep running the marketing machine with the "sharing" moniker right until the check clears, and after that, it's the shareholders' problem.
Being immoral can hurt your profits, because customers might be repulsed and boycott you. Breaking the law can hurt your profits, because the government might take action against your business.
Those are the sole reasons why you would avoid doing immoral and illegal things. If the benefit outweighs the negatives, then businesses will do those things. If they don't do it, they will lose against other businesses that are willing to do it.
Fortunately, the downsides can be quite big, which means that most of the time businesses will "stay in line". A huge boycott from the people or hard damaging actions from the government really hurts profits, so it's very rarely a profitable thing to be immoral and break the law.
Drivers pay for the vehicle as well as all maintenance and operational costs. They also pay for insurance. They aren't covered by workers compensation if injured while on the job.
One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens...
The way I see it is that there is no such thing as "commercial activity". There is voluntary activity of all sorts, and all kind of transactions happen, whether it be through payments, barter or goodwill. If I'm exempt from the ADA when inviting friends over, so should you be when you rent your room on AirBnB, and so should the motel across the street. All exist on a continuum, and the "sharing economy" is now making that continuum more explicit than ever before.
Decreeting that some activity is commercial and subjecting it to government rules merely because it involves money is arbitrary and unfair. Laissez faire, laissez passer.
How can there be no such attribute if there is a continuum of that attribute?
Picking thresholds is not unfair. It's the fundamental way that life interacts with the world around it. You physically cannot examine everything that could affect you with infinite precision.
The job of regulation is not to pick a mythical "perfect" result for every possible case, it's to force a good guideline into place. This is partially arbitrary, and that is okay. It doesn't matter if that fine is $200 or $220, the regulation just needs to work.
What I mean to say is that the attribute isn't categorical, even though it is treated as such in the discussion. I'm also not saying the regulation cannot "work" by picking a threshold, I am appealing to our moral intuition that regulating private behavior is wrong to explain why regulating "commercial" behavior is also wrong.
But how does it explain that? The situations are clearly very different on either end of the spectrum, so you can't directly use the intuition from one end on the other. The only thing you've really shown is that the categorization will be mildly imperfect.
There's rarely such a thing as a perfect category in real life. Arbitrary categories are still categories, and still work with moral intuition, they just take slightly more care around corner cases.
Extrapolating from one case is a bad idea when categories are fuzzy. You find such things as the sorites paradox.
Airbnb, Uber, and the unbonded money transmitter of the month, are all making obscene amount of money breaking the law and investors keep rewarding them.
It's really easy in home construction to make a profit if you hire illegal immigrants, pay them an illegal wage, don't carry insurance, don't pay payroll taxes, and don't pay overtime. If only I could hide all that behind an app, I'd call it a startup and become a billionaire!
It's to the point where I have serious issues with the morals of people working for and investing in such outright abusive companies. You might "just" be a programmer, but you're still earning your paycheck breaking the law and skimming money away from businesses that are legit, protect their customers, and exercise the base level of ethics. But I guess you personally didn't abandon a handicapped person on the side of the road, or deny a trip to a black neighborhood, so you don't feel like you did anything wrong?
I agree with you, but take in account that if these companies didn't exist like this (and I'm not saying this is a valid excuse) a lot of programmers (and other positions) wouldn't exist. A lot of folks here go with the 'I rather work at a startup then a corporate job', but the truth is, if these ventures didn't exist, they wouldn't be able to get a 'normal' job at a boring company, since those actually care about following the law and standards and what not. Most of these 'senior' developers in the new startup flavour of the week wouldn't be considered much above juniors in other industries.
Which really only work if you're in the majority. Some groups of people rely on the rest of us to subsidise the services they require.
If we allow companies to only service the group of people that are the most profitable, we risk excluding others from purchasing that service altogether. That's the exact same reason why Obama-care (sorry I don't know the correct name for it) disallows the insurance companies from excluding people with pre-existing conditions.
I understand rule and service levels are different around the world, but allowing Uber, AirBNB and other to pretend that all the rules are solely in place to keep competition out is doing society a disservice.
I think it's been clearly shown that part of the regulation is harmful to both drivers and riders. Also that some of the beneficial regulation goes unenforced.
In many cities it's definitely possible to make a system that's better than the old one for everyone (except for certain investors).
That's not true though, hypocritical advocacy can logically be effective. If you convince just 2 other people to make the change you are arguing for, you've exceeded the change that you can personally effect.
> you've exceeded the change that you can personally effect.
That's not true though. You're still not effecting the change that would result from you yourself taking action. In your example, you're shy the result of 1/3 of possible change.
In your reply you are just ignoring my intended meaning with "personally". You obviously understood what I said. If you think a different phrasing would be better, feel free to suggest that.
Yeah, if you get everyone else to not use Uber, you won't be able to use it either because it will be in business anymore. I have never used them but they sure hope to avoid all existing laws... some cities have even written specific laws that apply only to them because of that.
Not entirely - that's one of the reasons government exists. They can force Uber's hand even if you're still using them.
That said, I do agree with the spirit of what you're saying- wherever I can, I've taken Lyft instead of Uber for at least a year, after the last shady thing Uber did (it's happened so many times I've lost track)
The real model of many "disruptive" startups is to come into some regulated industry and only handle the easy cases/jobs/customers. Because they are only doing the easy cases, they can do it cheaper and make the experience more streamlined or friendly.
Their regulated competitors are required to handle all cases.
Since the easy cases are usually them most profitable, and the hard cases might even be money losers that are subsidized by the easy cases, this can be very bad. The disruptive startup might even kill off the competitors, and then those people who are the hard cases can be left unserved until regulators manage to catch up and put the startup under regulation.
I just closed my account. Unfortunately, this requires sending an email to support@uber.com. It's inconvenient, but gives you a place to explain that you will not use the service until they comply with the ADA.
This is a terrible business approach. It's just begging for crusader retaliation from legislators and district attorneys - exactly the sort of negative relationship that Uber needs to avoid. Acting "above the law" makes the people who represent the law WANT to cut you down to size.
Uber's success may make its founders arrogant enough to think they're too big to mess with. They've been fighting municipal governments so far, not Washington. Washington crushes entire countries.
It doesn't matter what the law says, in my opinion. Discrimination is discrimination. You wouldn't stop an African-American from getting into your car, right?
Uber drivers regularly discriminate based on race by discriminating based on location of drop off... hence the high rates of 'cancelled' riders Uber users in SF and NYC see when traveling to certain neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that just happen to have higher percentages of non-white residents. This is why we have laws against drop-off discrimination here in NYC. But Uber being Uber sees them as bureaucratic red tape that shouldn't apply to them. Just like disability access laws. And ethics.
My understanding is that Uber drivers don't see the dropoff location until they pick up the passenger, and at any rate you can simply not enter the destination and tell the driver where to go.
I'd like to think an Uber driver who did would be dropped by the company, but given what this article says I'm beginning to wonder. I recall reading a while back[1] that driver ratings were so important that some drivers were canned after just a few mediocre reports and forced to undergo training that they had to pay for themselves. I can't imagine a driver who discriminates getting a good review, and if it becomes a pattern they should be suspended based on Uber's own policies. But it sounds like Uber is circling the wagons here.
>> Parisi says the driver called her an “invalid” and said she “must not be a Christian” and needed to “develop thicker skin.” At the end of her ride, Parisi says the driver asked her if was going to give her a bad review.
Maybe the driver should have thought of the possibility of a bad review before berating a customer. I don't know, maybe that's just me. Causality might not be a real thing.
I've found myself using ride sharing services less and less lately, mostly because I've found uber drivers to be more and more annoying they want to talk non-stop and half the time have no idea where their going or how to get there properly since whatever mapping system they uses seems to constantly fail for whatever reason lately
It depends on how you define doing the right thing. If you mean telling drivers to be accomodating of passengers with disabilities, then yes I agree. If you mean fielding an entire discrete service of vehicles across the world to service a small, non uniformally distributed number of users without actually employing their drivers; that's a bit harder. I'm not saying that Uber shouldn't deploy such a discrete service, but I'm not sure it's fair to say that ADA compliance in this context is cheap or easy.
ADA compliance is almost never cheap or easy. That was the knock on the law when it was being debated and any business owner will tell you it's still every bit the costly nightmare people said it would be at the time. It's a terrible law and most of it should be repealed (the rest should devolve to the states, which unlike the federal government have the constitutional authority to impose it), but the fact remains that courts have upheld it and it is the law. There's no reason one taxi company should have to follow it and not another.
> but Uber claims that because it’s a technology company, not a transportation service, it doesn’t fall under the ADA’s jurisdiction.
What the ? Come on ,They don't get to decide what law they should follow. Or maybe they know that all these lawsuits cost them less than having to respect the law, I don't know. All I can say is that Uber displays an unbelievable level of arrogance.
They make an app that allows people to charge for driving services. I wouldn't call that as Uber providing a transportation service, personally.
Remember, just because it "seems obvious" that they are "somehow" a company related to "transportation", doesn't make them a "transportation service" by whatever definition is used by the government for transportation service company regulations (or whatever that law is called).
As much as I think individuals should follow the intention of laws, rather than the 'letter'. We have to be realistic. Either we petition to have the 'letter' of the law changed to encompass what we 'think' the definition should be, or we accept that the definition is a reasonable demarcation of what constitutes and doesn't constitute a transportation company.
And lets not mix emotions into it in some sort of fit of outrage that 'they dare not' pretend like they're not a 'transportation company' when we think it's obvious.
They make an app that allows people to charge for driving services.
No, Swipe is an app that allows people to charge for driving services. Uber is how the car is ordered, ride metered and payment processed. Oh, and the people driving are Uber's 1099s.
I don't have the background to say anything about whether the court will hold Uber liable in this suit. But on the question of classifying Uber, I find it incredibly unlikely the court will be receptive to the idea they're functionally equivalent to swipe.
Apparently it's any company that (a) wants people to think it's hip and cool, and (b) doesn't want to play by the same rules as its competitors. Get out of the way; we're INNOVATING here!
This kind of thing isn't going to fly in court. Judges have a long history of following the duck principle: if it looks like a taxi company and acts like a taxi company, it's probably a taxi company. Like any observant human, the judge is going to conclude that Uber is a taxi company and will require that it follow the same laws as other taxi companies. This will be the simplest case on the judge's docket this year.
What about a website like Just Eat in the UK, which offers an online ordering interface to thousands of independently run takeaways in the UK, are they are technology company or a food company?
They're primarily a tech firm. Particular distinctions from Uber are: You know which restaurant you're ordering from, you sometimes pick it up from the restaurant itself. They never try to make it sound like they're the service; they're saying that they connect customers and businesses. The businesses stand up on their own; they're just brokering the deal.
The difference is that with UberX, Uber is the service from end to end; they perform every single role of the taxi firm; they tell the drivers where to go, they pay the drivers, etc.
Neither. I'd probably call that business services or retailer/reseller.
There's also the salient difference that those takeaways are not being paid as contractors by Just Eat (if anything it's probably the other way around). If they were, Just Eat would be a takeaway. If Just Eat made a piece of software for sale that other companies could use to provide takeaway resale services, it would be a technology company.
You know, everything about Uber's structure and approach to the market has been designed with the sole purpose of evading the law. It's only a matter of time before some ambitious US Attorney starts thinking about tying all this stuff together with RICO.
Using Uber with certain disabilities appears to be a real problem, this is true, but there's a very real risk that regulating Uber to within an inch of it's life will make it just another cab company -- and then what? What's the point?
The goals here are not in question: Uber should not be turning these customers away - ever - and currently it seems to be deficient in that regard. But Uber's success is testament to the fact that the old system was also deficient, just in different ways and for different people. Solving this problem optimally is a big thing to ask of a centuries old legislative/political machine, and it's quite likely it just plain old won't manage it - some absurdly moralistic view such as "all Uber cars must be capable of accommodating wheelchair passengers" is a far too predictable outcome, if we let it get that far.
There is almost always a better way, and we should be very careful about going on a witch hunt with things like this, lest we allow the old guard to slowly destroy this exciting new world minutes after we build it.
I would imagine that self driving cars will be much easier to design for accessibility seeing as other design considerations become less relevant (such as needing the driver to be in a certain position and facing the front in the vehicle). If I were to design an autonomous car today I would design it with one huge top hinged door on each side and a ramp that makes it easy to drive a wheelchair straight in. Have all the seats facing each other and ensure that at least one folds up/swivels to the side to make room for the wheelchair. This would also benefit people traveling with over-sized luggage.
The only thing Uber will get from this is bad PR. Their seeming arrogance (not only in this matter) is a real turn off.
London's black cabs all have ramps. UBER is making big inroads here and I'm worried that eventually it'll be tricky to get a black cab. I can transfer into a regular car but I would need the driver to put my wheelchair in the boot (trunk) and given busy streets, harassed drivers, needing to pull right up to the kerb etc. I've not really had the guts to try it. It's particularly relevant here as the tube is mostly inaccessible and the buses painfully slow.