[AnthonyMouse]

> the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft.

I still don't get this one. You don't have to sign a long-term contract to drive for these companies. They don't own you. If you try it and it sucks more than working somewhere else then stop doing it. Your leverage is your ability to say no. But if it's better than your other alternatives then why isn't the complaint about the alternatives which are somehow even worse?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Vehicle depreciation is one big example. Any commercial vehicle operator knows that driving a car around causes its value to decrease substantially, 29 cents per mile on average as of 2018, and will (must!) account for that when running the numbers on their business. But most individual drivers don't have the expertise to intuit this, and Uber and Lyft don't tell them. So all but the most financially savvy drivers have an effective income significantly lower than they believe.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Any commercial vehicle operator knows that driving a car around causes its value to decrease substantially, 29 cents per mile on average as of 2018, and will (must!) account for that when running the numbers on their business.

People are always saying this and then you go to KBB. The average car is >12 years old, so let's suppose you're going to get rid of your Prius when it's 12 years old instead of allowing it to become older than average. Typical mileage at that age might be around 150,000 miles. Trade in value in good condition for a 12 year old Prius with 150,000 is ~$4300. Double the mileage to 300,000 miles, it drops to ~$2600. That's $1700 for an extra 150,000 miles, or around $0.01/mile.

$0.29/mile is from new or nearly-new cars which are then resold as nearly new. If you buy a new car and immediately roll the odometer past six digits its value is going to fall off a cliff. But if you start with a ten year old car which has already lost most of its value to depreciation, and then put a lot more miles on it over a couple more years -- which is what most of the people driving for Uber would actually be doing -- the cost is dramatically lower.

Presuming that the people choosing to do this as a profession can't figure this out is kind of patronizing, but, in the common case, not even that much of a difference.

[chongli]

Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 10 years old and in good condition as well as pass an inspection from a licensed mechanic. You can’t just go ahead and grab a 12 year old clunker and run it into the ground unless you’re only planning to do food deliveries (which have no restrictions on vehicle quality).

[AnthonyMouse]

> Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 10 years old and in good condition as well as pass an inspection from a licensed mechanic.

Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 16 years old:

https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/requirements/vehicle-requir...

Plenty of 10-16 year old vehicles are in good condition and will pass an inspection.

You can keep a vehicle in good condition indefinitely because vehicles are made of modular parts and parts can be replaced as they wear out. Whether this is worth doing depends on the expected frequency of future repairs, which in turn depends on the specific make and model (there's a reason the most common ride sharing car is a Prius), how well the car is maintained and how stupid you drive it, but most cars continue to be worth maintaining rather than scrapping until they're 20-25 years old. Which is why the average age of vehicles on the road is just over 12 years, implying that they last approximately twice that long.

[chongli]

I’m in Canada. Uber has different rules for vehicles here. Though now that I check the 10 year requirement has changed since I wrote that comment.

Perhaps someone from Uber saw my comment and updated the requirements. If so, they must’ve been working on the weekend!

[AnthonyMouse]

It does appear to be 10 years in Canada:

https://www.uber.com/ca/en/drive/requirements/vehicle-requir...

This is presumably some kind of regulatory requirement since it's jurisdiction specific. But even selling the car at 10 years old under similar conditions still causes the depreciation to be less than $0.02/mile.

On the other hand, that's around an extra $1000 over the life of the car, and who is to blame for that increase in costs on the driver? It's not as if 10 year old cars are meaningfully safer than 12 year old cars, nor would non-trivial numbers of people be using significantly older cars than that to begin with. Is this really just the Canadian government screwing the drivers for want of something to do?

[palata]

> If you try it and it sucks more than working somewhere else then stop doing it.

People like you deserve to end up in a situation where they don't have a choice but to accept an abusive job. Just to learn empathy.

[AnthonyMouse]

Using "empathy" as the reason to diminish the options of someone who has few to begin with is the oblivious cruelty of the political functionary.

If A and B are both bad but B is worse, and then you prohibit A because A is bad, what result do you expect? B is still worse than A and B is now their only option.

This is the age distribution of Uber drivers:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/828981/ride-hailing-serv...

More than 70% are over the age of 50. Only 1.5% are 30 or under. Approximately 90% of Uber drivers are doing it part-time. These are not naive kids being taken advantage of, they're older people who want a little extra income and to get out of the house.

The people claiming that this is abuse are the people who want to sustain a taxi medallion cartel. Competition from bored retirees interferes with that, so they demonize it. This is how we get bad laws, regulatory capture and cost disease.

You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.

[palata]

> You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.

By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?

With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.

[AnthonyMouse]

> By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?

Who is making them work there? Is there any place in the world where Uber is the only source of employment?

> With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.

The incumbents define opportunities for competing drivers as abuse and then want to prohibit the competition from doing that. This is straightforwardly taking away those opportunities from others to benefit the incumbents.

If it was actually abuse, the people nevertheless choosing it as the best of their available alternatives would have to be in a position where all of their other alternatives are also abusive. This typically happens when there is some kind of serious monopolization or regulatory capture in the local economy. In that case you can forget about the original company for a minute and redirect all your efforts to addressing that, because then you're on a sinking ship and if you don't stop taking on water it's not going to matter how you position the deck chairs.

Whereas if there are non-abusive alternatives and people are willfully choosing the "abusive" one, something doesn't add up and you shouldn't assume that it's them rather than you who doesn't understand their situation.

[palata]

Regulate how much Uber/Lyft can take from the drivers for merely providing a matching app.

[AnthonyMouse]

That isn't what most of the proposals or actual laws to "regulate Uber" do.

But let's consider your proposal. The first question to ask about any proposed rule is, what are people going to do in response to it? If you limit how much they can take for providing a matching app, they'll add some other feature to their service and charge for that. Or just break out the existing charge on the customer's statement to list something else they're already providing. Your purpose wasn't to prohibit anyone from offering services other than matching to livery drivers and customers, right?

The next question to ask is, what problem are you trying to solve? Are their margins too high? Uber's net margin for 2024 was ~10%, and that was the first year it was even a positive number.