> It seems likely that this will cause ride-sharing not to be economically feasible in rural areas where per-driver utilization is low.
Or they will have to make allowances for areas that have very low supply and/or supply that is very dispersed. For example, charging for some/all of the the time/distance from the driver's origination point to the pickup point. That will necessarily make ride sharing more expensive in those places, but that's because providing rides in those places is more expensive.
Another option that might work in tandem is to allow drivers to log in as a sort of "if the offer is good enough I'll take it" sort of tier, and then you might get a lot more people in rural areas signed in in that state, and while any one potential driver might reject, a lot more eyes might see it that wouldn't bother to have been looking before, and that might make cheaper rides more likely as closer people are logged in as potential drivers. It's worth noting something like this might also have kept Uber/Lyft from having to classify the drivers as employees in the first place, since as I understand it choice of work is a big part of why they didn't qualify as contractors.
> It's also possible they'll decide they won't want to dilute their brands by offering a service which makes you wait 7 minutes for a ride.
7 minutes is actually on the lowest end I've seen where I live, and that's in a metro area of ~250k people. Usually it seems to be around 15-20 minutes. Maybe it's just particularly slow around here, but my guess is that you don't get under 10 minute pickup times on average anywhere except for major cities.
> Or they will have to make allowances for areas that have very low supply and/or supply that is very dispersed. For example, charging for some/all of the the time/distance from the driver's origination point to the pickup point. That will necessarily make ride sharing more expensive in those places, but that's because providing rides in those places is more expensive.
Yeah, definitely. I agree that to make it work they'll have to raise prices. My guess is that they'll have to raise prices by so much that riders decide to just drive themselves. If drivers must be paid minimum wage that might raise the cost of a ride by enough that in some locations there is no clearing price.
> Another option that might work in tandem is to allow drivers to log in as a sort of "if the offer is good enough I'll take it" sort of tier
AB5 is strict enough that this will not save Uber. You are an employee unless "The person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business." Though, they did experiment with this model [1] and I wonder why they decided not to pursue it. If they had allowed drivers to set their own prices that might have been enough to prevent AB5 from being passed.
> 7 minutes is actually on the lowest end I've seen where I live, and that's in a metro area of ~250k people. Usually it seems to be around 15-20 minutes.
Yeah, absolutely :) Sorry, I should have been more specific! In major cities it's usually something like 2-3 minutes, I would not be surprised if it becomes 7 minutes once prop 22 fails. Wait times in places which are not major cities will increase by even more.
And of course Californians will vote for the exact same legislators in the next election, as they always do, and then they will complain about rising housing costs, homelessness, deteriorating schools, crumbling infrastructure, wildfires, electric blackouts etc, as they also always do, but somehow they never manage to connect the two.
Or they will have to make allowances for areas that have very low supply and/or supply that is very dispersed. For example, charging for some/all of the the time/distance from the driver's origination point to the pickup point. That will necessarily make ride sharing more expensive in those places, but that's because providing rides in those places is more expensive.
Another option that might work in tandem is to allow drivers to log in as a sort of "if the offer is good enough I'll take it" sort of tier, and then you might get a lot more people in rural areas signed in in that state, and while any one potential driver might reject, a lot more eyes might see it that wouldn't bother to have been looking before, and that might make cheaper rides more likely as closer people are logged in as potential drivers. It's worth noting something like this might also have kept Uber/Lyft from having to classify the drivers as employees in the first place, since as I understand it choice of work is a big part of why they didn't qualify as contractors.
> It's also possible they'll decide they won't want to dilute their brands by offering a service which makes you wait 7 minutes for a ride.
7 minutes is actually on the lowest end I've seen where I live, and that's in a metro area of ~250k people. Usually it seems to be around 15-20 minutes. Maybe it's just particularly slow around here, but my guess is that you don't get under 10 minute pickup times on average anywhere except for major cities.