[xorcist]

> you can see your trip, its aproximate cost, the driver's rating

Here's the thing: I don't want to rate my driver. I want to be able to rely on a third party that all available drivers are punctual and competent. It is not a choice I want to make.

Too much responsibility is already dumped on consumers under the guise of choice. Quality control of services I utilize is something I expect to pay for.

[fabioborellini]

Has centralised quality control for taxi drivers worked somewhere?

Our "grand old" taxi company in my town who advertises for being the only reliable option with professional drivers failed on me five times on a row. On successive rides I got a standard neo-nazi lecture about immigrants, my Visa credit card was refused apparently for transaction costs, two of my drivers got lost and one tried to drive to my destination using mostly sidewalks for driving on.

I sent feedback each time to only receive a generic "we are sorry, we have failed our quality controls and this will never happen again" copy-pasted message. Maybe it's more straightforward to advertise than getting rid of drivers who can't behave.

With Uber I know my bad ranking (I have always rated my drivers 5 stars, so far) has at least some effect on the misbehaving driver.

[pnongrata]

Some points about my personal experience with Uber in my city: 1. Drivers listening to evangelical stations very loudly, spewing hate between musics. Most get angry if you tell to lower the sound. God forbid you ask to change the station; 2. Many drivers trying to rig the system, which in turn costs me money. Uber gives me credit for most complaints, but I can only use it with Uber, so my lost money is good for them either way; 3. I've rated many drivers negatively. Whatever happened to them? Who can tell?

[bbczfvhmj]

“ Has centralised quality control for taxi drivers worked somewhere?”

From what I hear.... London !

[Zach_the_Lizard]

It's also produced cabs with very high pollution [1], up to 30x that of a regular car.

Here in New York we don't have the same kind of unusual taxicabs, but we do strictly regulate taxi and Uber drivers.

I personally find taxis here insufferable. I live in Queens and regularly had to help them "remember" where Queens is. Or remember the TLC regulations about accepting a credit card.

I've not had the same song and dance with Uber.

If this is the quality that the regulations enforce, count me out.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/black-cabs-taxis-a...

[CaptainZapp]

Has centralised quality control for taxi drivers worked somewhere?

Yes. I can provide you with multiple examples.

Use a cab in Singapore or anywhere in Japan and be amazed.

The "cabs are terrible" argument seems to me to be a very localized view.

Terrible cabs exist. So does fantastic service via the most efficient route by a driver who actually knows the city.

[eyko]

It's not like Black cabs in London are guaranteed to be safe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Worboys

[Cougher]

Given that there are something like 20,000 black cabs in London, I'm seeing your one outlier from 10 years ago as a pretty solid argument in favor of them. And that's before we start debating about the merits of driver vetting processes and vehicle maintenance requirements.

[isostatic]

Private hire drivers are vetted, and their cars have to undergo enhanced MOTs

[lhopki01]

And this is why Uber lots it's license. It wasn't properly vetting private hire drivers. It's not hard. Follow the rules and they'll get their license back.

[Jommi]

I'm just perplexed. What are you even commenting on? Uber isnt the one vetting private drivers, they just check if they have the private driver license or not. This is up to tfl.

[isostatic]

The onus is on TFL to vet the drivers.

Uber lost the license because they were 'not fit or proper', nothing to do with vetting, seemingly because of a feature of the website that seemingly allows drivers to upload new photos and get other people to drive for them

> A key issue identified was that a change to Uber's systems allowed unauthorised drivers to upload their photos to other Uber driver accounts.

Other minicab firms of course don't have a photo on an app, and the passenger has to check the photo once they've got in the car (I believe PHV drivers have to show their PHV license from TFL), which puts passengers in a far worse situation when the driver doesn't match. I wonder how many small minicab firms have been determined to be not fit or proper.

[Cougher]

Color me convinced by your exhaustive comparison.

[isostatic]

What difference in vetting is there between Black Cab drivers and Minicab drivers in London?

What difference in vehicle maintenence?

The vetting process may be flawed, but it's flawed in both hackney carriage and phv licensing. This was acknowleged by say Milton Keynes, which gave a Hackney + PHV license to an applicant with convictions for rape and other serious sexual offences [0]

I have no confidence in London that the vetting process works, and the authorities are far more interested in retaining an obsolete cartel. Rather than fix their vetting procedure (which has always allowed dodgy minicab firms, which were never a threat to the powerful black cab industry), they concentrate on Uber.

[0] https://www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/pressreleases/2014/aug/taxi...

[chillydawg]

I think the driver ratings could be largely derived from app data. How close to pickup do they get on average? How close to drop off do they get on average? How erratic is their driving? Do they speed a lot? Other traffic violations? A lot can be gleaned from the GPS and other data. The only remaining factor would be the human side of things: are they nice, is their car nice to sit in?

[Jommi]

You really want to rely on a single third party instead of a curation by democratic process?

[Terretta]

> I don’t want to rate my driver. I want to be able to rely on a third party...

You sure can’t rely on the Uber, Lyft, Juno ratings. It’s 5 stars or bust. The social pressure on 5 stars is enormous.

Netflix moved to thumbs up, thumbs down. YouTube did the same, after showing a graph of the 5s and 1s:

https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/youtube-comes-to-a-5-star-...

I relentlessly give an average delivery or ride 3 stars, but feel bad every time. When the ride is quite good, 4 stars, and exceptional, 5 stars. Exceptional is the exception.

Three stars doesn’t make you a bad rider or a bad driver, just average. If it’s not the bulk of the ratings you give, you’re an unreliable rater and not helping the ratings anyway.

[dangus]

Your inability to follow the cultural norm is actually at fault here, not the rating system. What you’re doing is akin to tipping 5% in restaurants in the US and only tipping 15% when you have an outstanding experience. In reality, restaurants workers in the USA would expect 15% to 20% unless they dramatically fucked up. I don’t like the tipping system either, but I’m also not going to be that asshole who tries to change the system all on my own without anyone else agreeing to it.

Just use the rating system like everyone else and get over it:

If the driver was great it’s 5 stars with all the “what did I do great” options checked and a note for the driver.

If the driver didn’t fuck up it’s five stars.

If you don’t want to be matched with the same driver again but they didn’t do anything egregious it’s three stars.

If you were outright disgusted at your ride it’s 1 Star.

That’s it. It’s simple. Your own personal usage of the ratings system is not helpful.

Actually, for another example of why your ratings method is bad, let’s compare three stars to grades in school. Three out of five stars would be 60%, which is a D- in most schools. That’s not an average grade. Someone who completes all the homework and does an average job would expect a B, which would be 4 stars. Someone who didn’t get any questions wrong would get an A, 5 stars.

If your Uber driver took you to your destination with a reasonably clean car that’s an A. There’s no such thing as exceptional. It’s a car ride not a physics exam, what do you want exactly?

Uber wants a driver to maintain over a 4 rating, something like 4.5 or 4.2. When you give that driver a 3 rating you’re not saying “thanks, you were acceptable and average.” You are saying “you kind of suck” and Uber won’t actually even match the driver with you again. So if you continue to give all your drivers 3 stars just because you wish the rating system worked a different way than it does, you’re even screwing yourself by reducing the number of drivers that can match with you.

[gjulianm]

From what I have heard from drivers, anything less than 5 stars is bad. Not only with Uber, but with all those companies pushing customers to review their employees. The system is counterintuitive and most people get it wrong at the beginning. Compare what makes you rate 5 stars when you buy a product to your Uber rating system.

However, the think that irks me the most is that rating everyday experiences is just dumb. Most taxi drives will be average and that's it, because we all just want it to be good enough. It's as if my local supermarket made me rate the cashier with 1 to 5 stars. I don't want to do that, because that person just needs to do their job. Anything above "good enough" is unnecessary. Significantly bad experiences should be a "reported to the manager" (or any similar mechanism), filtering out trivial complaints that you'd get in a 5-star scale and getting actual useful information on how to improve the system.

The US restaurant example is funny because the problem is the same. Instead of paying by default fair wages and paying attention to customers that complain about workers, they delegate the 'rating' part to customers, which means that there's no feedback on which they can improve and that their salary is determined by arbitrary people judgements.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> let’s compare three stars to grades in school

That very much depends on which country you're talking about. That's the case in the US, but try telling a teacher in France you deserve 16/20 because you did an average job!

[Izkata]

> What you’re doing is akin to tipping 5% in restaurants in the US and only tipping 15% when you have an outstanding experience. In reality, restaurants workers in the USA would expect 15% to 20% unless they dramatically fucked up.

This is actually the sole reason I don't go to restaurants/diners. These rules aren't what I grew up with (yes, in the US, I've never left the country), seem to be different every time I hear them, and usually keep creeping higher. I just never know what to tip, so it's either fast food and no tip, or go a bit hungry until I can get home.

[dangus]

That’s kind of an unreasonable solution to this problem. I don’t think the 15% rate has changed any in the last multiple decades. I think many people tip 20% because the math is easier.

Tipping doesn’t need to be a source of anxiety. If the act of figuring out your tip is the sole reason you don’t go out for a nice meal on a special occasion, I think this is something to talk to a therapist or confidant about.

[user5994461]

While that's on point, the US school grades are even more obscure and meaningless than the taxi rating to the rest of the world. Many countries are using numbers like out of 10 or 100 and doing an average job on the homework will land you the average like 5 or 50.

It's kinda funny how everything is connected: school grades, restaurant tips, taxi ratings.

[Terretta]

Not inability, choice.

If enough people make the right choice instead of the herd behavior, the commons will be less tragic.

“If the driver didn’t fuck up it’s five stars” is aggressively harmful to any above average or excellent drivers out there, with no reward for trying to be either.

[newswasboring]

Maybe they should scale your ratings based on your rating pattern. I don't know how to do it mathematically but there must be some way to normalize scores if you have enough data. Anybody knows how to do this?

[jankassens]

I’d start with assuming everyone’s experience is normal distributed. Someone who always voted 3 stars probably had the same experience as someone who always voted 5 stars. I’d try out computing the normal distribution of the rater and see where on the distribution this particular vote fell.

[CaptainZapp]

That's exactly what bugs me so much about Trip Advisor ratings. Even then, when they still had some utility.

When you have a 5* scale for rating a restaurant my description would be:

  *      A disaster level lousy place
  **     Sub par. Probably wouldn't visit again
  ***    Quite OK. Probably not my fave anytime soon, but 
         fine
  ****   Above average. Excellent food, service and 
         atmosphere
  *****  An out of this world dining experience. Perfect in 
         every aspect

I realise that there is a certain amount of relativity and subjectivity and that a 5* Trip Advisor review is not necessarily equal to three stars by Guide Michelin.

But it should mean something and when most restaurants have something between 4 and 5 stars (Let alone that the #1 rated restaurant in London was one, which didn't exist[1]) the value of such ratings become very questionable.

You can see the exact same with Airbnb ratings where 4 -, or 5 star does not mean that you will have a great experience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich

[ward]

I used to think like this (and still do for movies and such), but recall reading that a driver under 4.6 or 4.7 rating will barely get any clients matched any more.

[ceejayoz]

I desperately wish they’d just adopt an “it was fine” and a “something wrong or exceptional” button.