There's probably a balance to be struck, because part of the ridesharing design's efficiency is that if demand drops they can drop their rates paid to drivers, and the drivers who don't want to drive at those prices will stop.
So if Lyft starts to say "we always want X drivers available as a base load, and we'll open up to contractors to fill in the demand spikes" it might make the contractor role too unreliable for anyone to bother doing it. At the very least, their costs would go up for both the employed drivers and the extra contractor drivers. Since their valuations comes mainly from a cheap labor pool, that presumably kills it.
But in the current situation, if all their drivers at the airport sign off and say "I'm not driving at these prices," you get surge pricing to make it worth driving, that increases costs too. That's what happens when you're buying labor from independent contractors - if they don't want to sell it to you at a particular time for any reason, they don't have to.
The real question here is "If Lyft recognizes when these organized sign-offs are happening, calls their bluff, and refuses to activate surge pricing, what happens?"
Do the drivers really refuse to drive at the regular pricing and go home? Or do they all give in to a more tamper-resistant algorithm and keep driving at regular rates?
Can we please stop referring to these services as "sharing"? Lyft actually started as a company that coordinated the sharing of rides, i.e., no money was involved. But the "sharing" pretense has long since past for all of these companies.
Right? It's nonsense. A grocery store isn't "food sharing", and a barber isn't "hair cut sharing". It's one party paying another for a product/service. Uber/Lyft's killer feature is the app pairing those two parties. But no one is "sharing".
We need a new word for "taxi companies with cute apps, unsustainable pricing/wages and lots of Silicon Valley venture capital propping them up" to distinguish them from old-school taxi companies if we're gonna quit saying "rideshare".
While this is accurate, I think the subtext of it conflicts with the common anecdotal claims (including mine) far preferring Uber over actual licensed taxis.
You know what it's caled when a bunch of people put up capital or labor in exchange for a portion of the retrun from coordinated activity. It's called buying a share -- from adventurers to publicly traded corporations.
Lyft isn't ride sharing because people aren't dividing up cars to rides, not because money is involved. Car2Go/Flexcar are car sharing. Carpooling is ride-sharing.
> Or do they all give in to a more tamper-resistant algorithm and keep driving at regular rates?
I wonder if they will change the algorithm to just tell the drivers what they want to hear. To wit - Introduce a new multiplier for drivers based on their behavior. This will factor into the final price, but be obfuscated. Then Lyft can tell the drivers they are receiving a greater surge than what the rider sees, and pays.
I think they'd retain some of that valuation. Unlike traditional cabs, they show up (I've been stranded by more cabs called by phone then I've taken, not hyperbole). But the value of some unified dispatcher framework, with penalties for abandoning customers probably isn't in the tens of billions. Maybe in the hundreds of millions? Either self driving cars change everything, quite quickly, or some people are going to lose a lot of money.
"And suddenly Uber/Lyft are like any other Taxi company just with a massive valuation." . . . which valuation would be rapidly evaporating.
I suspect this will happen one way or the other, as something that cannot be sustained will not be -- something's got to give, either rates will go up, costs will go down, or the companies will fold.
Rates probably have some room to rise. My limited experience is mostly airport rides, where they are cheaper than limo's taxis. But I'd still pay the same as the competing services, since Lyft has always been more reliable and pleasant. The main competition is parking.
Lower costs? I don't think so, short of automation. The drivers' costs & compensation have already evidently been pushed to the limit, as they are starting to strike.
Will they sort out either? I'm not buying either stock, even at the discount prices...
Not quite. Real taxi corporations have approval of city/state assembly to do business so that they control the amount of taxi cars being part of daily street flow. (Im ignoring the fact that this system is broken and corrupted)
So if Lyft starts to say "we always want X drivers available as a base load, and we'll open up to contractors to fill in the demand spikes" it might make the contractor role too unreliable for anyone to bother doing it. At the very least, their costs would go up for both the employed drivers and the extra contractor drivers. Since their valuations comes mainly from a cheap labor pool, that presumably kills it.
But in the current situation, if all their drivers at the airport sign off and say "I'm not driving at these prices," you get surge pricing to make it worth driving, that increases costs too. That's what happens when you're buying labor from independent contractors - if they don't want to sell it to you at a particular time for any reason, they don't have to.
The real question here is "If Lyft recognizes when these organized sign-offs are happening, calls their bluff, and refuses to activate surge pricing, what happens?"
Do the drivers really refuse to drive at the regular pricing and go home? Or do they all give in to a more tamper-resistant algorithm and keep driving at regular rates?