What do you guys think of Uber's threat to leave Houston

Why can't a new startup be a serious business? What's wrong with new competition?

 

It was a service Houston didn't have a year ago. If its a service we won't have in a year then how much will our lives change?

 

Them leaving is huge for my business, so I'm ecstatic .

 

Uber takes hundreds and probably more accurately, thousands of otherwise drunk people off the road on the weekends in Houston. I can't see how them, and all such services leaving, can be a good thing.

 

Yeah but they sent fliers around and other annoying things. They're bullies. If their presence prevents auto accidents / injuries / deaths it doesn't matter cuz something something.

 

uber/lyft wasn't making you/stopping you from doing anything

The same can't be said for the voters of Austin.

Force is force, whether it has the imprimatur of democracy or not.

We should be reflexively skeptical of all mandates/prohibitions (and their close cousins, subsidies/fines). They should be uses sparingly, only when third parties are impacted or rights are being violated (don't hurt/steal, etc.)

 

A lot of spam and misinformation spread by Uber/Lyft turned voters against them. Uber/Lyft's decision to have it their way or no way is a PR disaster, as well. Uber/Lyft's stance that they shouldn't follow safety regulations of similar companies is very unfair.

Uber/Lyft basically sabotaged themselves to the public. They're gone, and another rideshare company who will play by the rules will take their place. It'll be a little rough at first, but there's no reason those companies couldn't operate as smoothly as Uber/Lyft at getting drunk drivers off the road.

Uber/Lyft played the field the worst possible way they could. If they didn't lie in their campaign and agreed to compromise and play by the same rules, then everyone would win.

 

never said they were.

i am "the voters of austin", you dork!

prop 1 lost by a huuuuge margin. it was an ass-kicking. not even close. im proud of my city for standing up to "little fascists" (your term, not mine) who want to move into our town, create their own laws, refuse to sit down with the city and work out a compromise and spend millions on a deceptive ad campaign and buying off former mayors. why dont you respect the will of the people and the right to local control?

 

right now there are multiple ridesharing options in austin. they were more than happy to comply with the city. you dont know what you are talking about.

 

they were kind of stuck after making their dumb threat to leave. if they did not they would look even weaker than they do now. they will be back, but in the meantime they left the door wide open for their competition to come in and get a foothold. pretty stupid business move.

the city tried to sit down with them and work out a compromise and they refused. i think austin was their test case...they wanted to win badly here so they could go to other cities and say "give us everything we want or this will happen to you".

 

No true Scotsman.

Come back when they publish profits then. I'm still not seeing why they can't operate under our regulations when taxis can, and when they've been doing it in Houston for a year now. And they still have a lot of headroom under the price of a taxi if that means prices for consumers goes up because of their voting behavior (and, they already have functionality for that in their software). But, even if they can't survive, it's not my problem their business model sucks. Thing is, it doesn't suck, they are going to be in the pantheon of tech companies that rule the world for the rest of my lifetime. This ain't some mom-and-pop shop. If a fingerprint requirement takes them from heir apparent to a nonviable business model, they probably don't deserve to exist anyway.

I have a family member who signed up with Uber in Houston a couple months ago. He said it was tedious and complained about the red tape. But, it took him 1-2 months, not 4. And, he drove for Uber outside of city limits in the interim. I'm certain that added regulation deters some would-be drivers on the margin, but so much that the business model is not viable? No way.

 

Don't worry Brando. All Uber has to do is collect signatures for a popular referendum. Didn't work in Austin, but it'll work here.

 

(Thanks!)

I freely admit to knowing next to nothing about the Houston situation, at least compared to what I know about the Austin one. If the idea was to have the city itself do both background checks with fingerprinting and vehicle inspections as well as a requirement, then I agree that that would be unreasonable. The cars drivers use are inspected in order to get license tags (the driver has to show proof of insurance when doing that obviously). Having to go through another inspection by the city is unnecessary. It all sounds very convoluted. Austin was going to have a third party take care of the fingerprint/background check, which shouldn't take more than a week. The only involvement by Taxi companies in Austin that I'm aware of, and you might find this interesting, is a $5,000 donation from Houston's taxi companies to help defeat the Uber/Lyft plan. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what Uber/Lyft spent, but shows Houston taxi drivers interest in beating back Uber/Lyft's competition.

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaredme...-a-tech-capital/?linkId=24409218#20c7df1149ab

 

The question of whether or not the ridesharing business can be run with the fingerprint background check should be an easy one to decide. If it really is financially feasible to do this business that way, someone will step in and fill the void Uber/Lyft left. If that doesn't happen, seems a pretty safe bet it really was as big a deal as Uber made it out to be. If there's profit to be had, someone will take advantage of it.

 

Interesting whenever I read about Uber and the amount of jobs in a city they claim to have created the number is 10,000 whether its Austin, Kansas, or Houston even though the population size is different.

 

I love Texas so much more sometimes.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/1...eat-uber.html?referer=https://www.google.com/

 

Heck, that's an absurd amount of time to get approved as a driver for this service. With today's technology, a potential driver should be able to go through this process in a week, possibly 2 weeks at the most, in my humble opinion. That includes the fingerprint check. Sounds like someone "got" to the Houston city council.