[symkat]

I believe this is the model for taxis -- at least it was about 20 years ago when I worked as a taxi dispatcher in a small town for a short time.

Drivers rented taxis, and the taxi company only made money based on renting out the fleet of cars. It was something like $80 for 12 hours.

Drivers were independent and made money from the customers directly. The drivers I talked to most were a husband/wife pair who rented the same taxi and they told me about having a CPA that wrote off basically everything. Haircuts, clothes, the majority of what they bought was written off their taxes because it was for business.

The dispatcher (what I did) answered the phone and got an origin/destination/name, and radioed drivers until one of them accepted it.

I think the whole operation was a couple dozen cars, a tiny rented building, 3-person rotation of dispatchers, a general manager, mechanic, and an owner.

[s1artibartfast]

That's a pretty different model than an LLC where are the individual owns the car. Seems similar where are the LLC gets contracts/ dispatches from a different company

[symkat]

> where are the individual owns the car

You're right -- the city required that taxi cars had medallions to be allowed to pick up passengers, and the one who owned the medallions on cars there was the owner. With a medallioned car you could pick people up in front of bars, night clubs, off a random street corner, etc.

I don't, however see it as any different from an LLC. At the end of the day the taxi drivers worked directly for themselves, had their own clients, optimized for themselves on finding places to get hailed customers. At least the one I talked to about money stuff had their own CPA, if they filed as self-employed or formed an LLC/C-Corp/S-Corp, I don't know. They were paid by people they picked up, directly, rather than the taxi company.

They had a B2B relationship with the taxi stand, they rented a car with a medallion rather than go through the process and cost of buying one, they earned money directly from the people they picked up, making themselves a B2C.

And if you bought a medallion, you didn't need to rent the car from the taxi stand, so you could do it totally yourself and cut them out. You gain maintaining the car, the capital expense of the medallion.

[s1artibartfast]

I think we basically agree.

I think this is the better model minus the medallions.

Uber should simply act as a dispatching service, and get a commission for connecting customers to drivers.

Im sure some people will still claim the are expliting the driver LLCs, but at least they wont have to deal with the headache of the contractor/employee debate.

I think in most states a B2B relationship is solid defense against claims that someone is a misclassified employee.