With no standard as to how the rating is measured, it's largely meaningless. Is 3 average? If it is, then why are people put off by 4.7?
Anybody want to open a poll on when the first big new story hits correlating user rating with race and gender?
Uber feels nice now because their drivers brought in new, comfortable cars. Once everyone's personal cars have been puked in as many times as the average taxi, it'll be no better. In the short term, those cars will get cycled out by bad driver ratings leaving the owner without income while they try to get their property back to the condition they started from, but eventually no-one with a car worth sitting in will sacrifice it to Uber and we'll have the same fleet of beaters we have on the city streets today.
Uber feels nice today because it's all paid through the app and there's no requirement to tip, but we're already seeing that if you don't tip you get marked-- the tip isn't a reward for good service, it's extorted at the risk of being stranded on a future Friday night. At least in a taxi, my decision to not tip a bad driver isn't used against me later.
@Abazigal made the (valid) point earlier that they like Uber because taxis refuse to pick up their friend's mother in a wheelchair. Abazigal may be more immune to this than most because they seem like an extraordinarily nice and even tempered person, but I wonder how long it will be before the added hassle of the wheelchair starts to show up in their user rating leading to the same outcome. Many places have (generally unenforceable) laws that require a taxi to pick up a passenger regardless of race or other attributes. Uber operates entirely outside of even those weak regulations, and when they're brought to bear I'm sure Uber will argue it's a contract driver problem, not a company problem.
Uber is just hostile toward everyone-- users, employees, governments, the press, women...
Anybody want to open a poll on when the first big new story hits correlating user rating with race and gender?
This is what I mean when I say that in a few years time the taxi industry will be dead and Uber will be worse than the taxis we used to have. This company gets rich on investors, but its operating budget is almost entirely borne by depreciation of their employees' assets.
Uber feels nice now because their drivers brought in new, comfortable cars. Once everyone's personal cars have been puked in as many times as the average taxi, it'll be no better. In the short term, those cars will get cycled out by bad driver ratings leaving the owner without income while they try to get their property back to the condition they started from, but eventually no-one with a car worth sitting in will sacrifice it to Uber and we'll have the same fleet of beaters we have on the city streets today.
Uber feels nice today because it's all paid through the app and there's no requirement to tip, but we're already seeing that if you don't tip you get marked-- the tip isn't a reward for good service, it's extorted at the risk of being stranded on a future Friday night. At least in a taxi, my decision to not tip a bad driver isn't used against me later.
@Abazigal made the (valid) point earlier that they like Uber because taxis refuse to pick up their friend's mother in a wheelchair. Abazigal may be more immune to this than most because they seem like an extraordinarily nice and even tempered person, but I wonder how long it will be before the added hassle of the wheelchair starts to show up in their user rating leading to the same outcome. Many places have (generally unenforceable) laws that require a taxi to pick up a passenger regardless of race or other attributes. Uber operates entirely outside of even those weak regulations, and when they're brought to bear I'm sure Uber will argue it's a contract driver problem, not a company problem.
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