See https://chuangcn.org/2020/11/delivery-renwu-translation/ for another expose on the brutality of working conditions imposed on delivery workers in China, by a Marxist collective
See https://chuangcn.org/2020/11/delivery-renwu-translation/ for another expose on the brutality of working conditions imposed on delivery workers in China, by a Marxist collective
Seems like a pretty major oversimplification of why uber is preferred to taxis, but ok
What did I miss
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:porky-happy:
"My ideal socialist utopia is not one where everyone rides taxis everywhere and orders Panda Express to their door every night"
I'm a pretty small and visibly queer woman, I wouldn't do any kind of taxi service alone (especially not drunk or stoned) without having some info on who's picking me up and where I am the whole ride, as a safety concern.
Train stops running at midnight where I live and at that hour it can take an hour and a half to get home with a couple station changes thrown in there. I can want the trains to be better and also acknowledge the material reality that taxi services fill a need until the trains are fixed and more efficient routes are added.
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I see both of those things as downsides, although I'll admit the GPS thing is just me being silly. Picking and choosing drivers seems very anti-worker to me and promotes discrimination.
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CW: sexual assult
There are unfortunate implications to the suggestion that any taxi driver might be a rapist.
Taxis have dispatchers constantly tracking their whereabouts (with yes, GPS), they have visible liscences, numbered cars, etc. Although the rules have since been changing, for a while Uber basically let anyone join without background checks, during which time you were far more likely to be driven by someone with a rape conviction than had you taken a taxi. The risk in both cases is negligible however, since rapists typically do not rape customers while they are at work.
Fact is the safety thing was a deliberate part of their sales pitch that didn't end up matching with reality. The likelyhood of being raped in a taxi vs an Uber is a hard thing to judge, but neither are as dangerous as hanging around corporate employees of Uber when they start drinking
The dispatcher is only helpful if you call a taxi, if you hail a random one you’d have to take note of the drivers credentials if you wanted to report them for assaulting you. If you forget that all you got is “a cab driver in one of 60,000 yellow cabs”.
With a ride share service you have a digital record of who picked you up from when and where in what car which makes it pretty easy to report an assault by a driver.
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The psychological benefit of feeling safe is invaluable, and the train at night is definitely the scarier between that and a car, but the fact is between a car that you call for and a car that you press a button for there is no difference in safety besides one that exists in your mind. The implication that you are safer because an AI pages the car rather than a dispatcher, or that a gig worker who you see a picture of on your phone is less liable to sexually assult you than a full-timer who you see a picture of on their cab liscence, or that a massive multinational is a safer steward than a citywide business - these are just not true, no matter how many people Uber managed to convince through marketing.
Now, in terms of harassment, I could see that taxi drivers being typically older and more male than rideshare drivers would account for a difference (although no data I have seen suggests that), although I've heard stories of Uber drivers too so idk. Uber drivers are less professional which might lead to more harassment.
That sounds pretty tight actually
The former is a marketing gimmick that hasn't turned out to be backed up by data. Not to downplay the benefit of feeling safer, but the actual incidence rate is not meaningfully different (especially if you consider traffic accidents a threat to safety: in this regard app taxis are worse). The latter is true if you have location services on (although in places with taxi ranks or hailable cabs that's much faster still), but anyway as I said, getting a taxi 5-10 minutes faster is something I don't care about or think is worth caring about, and in the case of it being easier, the time saving isn't even in that range, its closer to seconds. Silicon valley is good at making you think a thing that isn't really much better is '100x better' because that is the main thing they do: sell mundane marginal improvements as revolutions and hide the downsides.
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There are advantages to both. For example its more convenient still to simply walk up to a car, or hail one, and get in. You don't need a functional phone or a bank account. You don't need to make any account at all. You don't have a predatory system tracking and keeping forever a record of every ride you take. You don't have a homogenous experience everywhere on earth you go.
But in any case, my point is it may be a little easier, but I don't care. Its only marginally easier (although people insist it is revolutionary) and I am not obsessive about using slick interfaces to shave literal seconds off minor tasks, nor do I think it is a good thing to be.
Better accessibility for disabled passengers. You can request a car to fit your needs. You might not always get it, but at least it's a thing.
I believe this is equally true of taxis most places but tbf I don't really know. Do you mean how Uber has different sizes of car, or do they specifically have wheelchair taxis? Medical taxis used to be a thing, and I have seen wheelchair taxi services before, but I have no guess as to how common those are or were. If its only a matter of size however, places I've lived you could get any size taxi from the same taxi company
Yes, primarily vehicle size requests (some disabled people need a larger or higher vehicle). Many local taxis companies (if they exist where you are) are not so flexible. Somewhere like New York, disabled friendly services are hard to come by. There are things like the city's access-a-ride, but disabled people shouldn't have to go through such bureaucracy just to pop down to the shops when they feel like it. I've lived in more civilized countries where taxi apps allow you to order specifically wheelchair friendly taxis etc. that will arrive in moments. Of course, none of these are the actual solution to the problem of accessible transport, but there are some advantages to the apps over the existing taxi system in this regard.