Morning Ed: Transportation {2017.03.01.W}

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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35 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordan says:

    I can appreciate the method of protest, but if the purpose is obscured, it strikes me as outrage for its own sake, which isn’t very useful.Report

  2. Oscar Gordan says:

    Uber screwed up by poaching the Google engineer & going straight to a parallel project. They might prevail in the lawsuit, but the legal costs & PR hit is going to hurt.Report

    • Kim in reply to Oscar Gordan says:

      Oscar,
      Uber is a bit like Trump — good at playing the villain. Their sexual harassment issues are self-inflicted, and hurt PR way more than poaching google employees.Report

    • Doctor Jay in reply to Oscar Gordan says:

      The hiring itself was probably legal. The copying of the entire petabyte of source code and data from Google was not. It might be that the hires also disclosed trade secrets.

      The thing about Kalanick is that before Uber, he ran two different file sharing companies. The first one went bankrupt when sued by the RIAA. He currently runs a company that could be described as an illegal taxi service. He’s kind of a Darth Vader wannabe, so I will call him a Kylo Ren.

      Google was an investor in Uber, and until last Friday owned a big chunk of them. They are pulling all that investment, and the prospective value of that investment is included in damages, as well as the prospective value of, you know, robot cars. Should Google prevail, Uber is dead.

      I’m a bit sad, though, because there’s a thing there in the Uber-Lyft space that seems worthwhile. I’ve kinda been screwed over by taxi companies, as I’ve mentioned before in this space.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Doctor Jay says:

        I agree that poaching the engineer wasn’t illegal, but the data dump certainly violates an employment contract at the very least, and exposes Uber to trade secret violations. My point about the lidar system is that, if nothing else, it was a big flare to Google that their former employee was sharing data.

        As for Kalanick, he’s not having a good year.Report

        • Mo in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          Also, the price paid for a company with no product or working prototype that is less than a year old, that you had contact with while still employed at Google indicates to me that Uber was, at best, only technically ignorant about the source of the information because they did zero due diligence on the source (because they already knew but wanted plausible deniability in the most technical sense).Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to Oscar Gordan says:

      A lot of dumping on Uber in that article, but the main thing that stood out to me was: “rider fares only cover roughly 40 percent of a ride, with the remainder subsidized by venture capitalists.” It looks like Uber is trying to overcome this with volume.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to PD Shaw says:

        The article had a really difficult time distinguishing between:

        1) Reasons I think Uber is bad, and
        2) Reasons that the Uber business model is not financially viable.Report

        • PD Shaw in reply to Will Truman says:

          Yeah, and I guess the other point is that even if Uber’s business model is not financially viable, I could still see the business purchased out of bankruptcy with the bad debt wiped-out and a new business model. Deadspin is still with us.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to PD Shaw says:

        I don’t know what “rider fares only cover roughly 40 percent of a ride, with the remainder subsidized by venture capitalists,” Uber takes a percentage of each fare; if there’s a loss, it’s borne by the driver, not Uber.Report

      • Kim in reply to PD Shaw says:

        PD,
        Writing from Pittsburgh, Uber is trying to overcome this with automation.
        Marketshare, then money — leave the drivers behind.Report

      • Doctor Jay in reply to PD Shaw says:

        My understanding of Uber’s strategic business plan is

        1. Drive traditional taxi businesses out of the market.
        2. Raise prices.

        There’s this other thing they do, which I think might have a place in the economy. Which is to utilize slack resources (vehicles and drivers) during peak demand times, which will result in more rides for riders and extra cash for people who already have cars which they use for other reasons.

        I kind of don’t have a problem with that, actually.Report

  3. Kolohe says:

    No gondola paid for by the Arlington County government. If the Georgetown BID wants to foot the entire bill, (and/or go in with the private real estate honcos that own & lease the Rosslyn office towers) the government of Arlington won’t object, as far as I can tell.

    (eta – I’ll admit, this is a thing that I would like, but I don’t want to pay for it at all)Report

  4. Kolohe says:

    McEachern says it is illegal to tow a couch through a drive-thru,

    The province of New Brunswick has some oddly specific criminal codes.Report

    • Marchmaine in reply to Kolohe says:

      but the two men were wearing helmets.

      I mean, c’mon… they are complying with the spirit of the law. This is how you get Trudeau.Report

    • Morat20 in reply to Kolohe says:

      Given how these things generally work in reality, I’d guess that the law just says you’re not allowed to tow anything through a drive-through. Designed for people pulling trailers, for the most part.Report

    • dragonfrog in reply to Kolohe says:

      IIRC at the time the cops were saying, essentially “we’re for sure going to charge them with something – we just have to figure out what. I mean, this has to be illegal somehow. It’s not like it’s come up before.”Report

    • Brent F in reply to Kolohe says:

      Putting on my pendant hat: As a point of law, New Brunswick is absolutely forbidden to have any kind of criminal codes, let alone specific ones.

      An American who can tell me why gets one imaginary internet Nanimao bar.Report

      • Francis in reply to Brent F says:

        A. Just what is your hat hanging from? /pedant.

        B. As a guess, because it is a sub-part of a larger jurisdiction that has the sole authority to promulgate criminal codes.Report

  5. Michael Cain says:

    From the story about the men on the couch in the McDonald’s drive-through, the sentence “Two local men, aged 28 and 39, will face yet-to-be-determined charges” carries a pronounced flavor of “We know it ought to be illegal, but we’re not sure exactly which laws were violated.”Report

    • aaron david in reply to Michael Cain says:

      Driving with a load not properly tied down…Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

      Failure to be properly restrained in a moving vehicle.Report

      • dragonfrog in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        Thing is, it sounded to me like they weren’t driving on public roads – you can do all kinds of stupid stuff on a quad, as long as you don’t take it on a road.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to Michael Cain says:

      This reminds me of a story that took place about an hour from me where three men tied up a dead horse to a truck and dragged it down the road, around the courthouse plaza, purportedly on their way to a landfill at 3 in the morning. They were supposedly helping a lady with a dead horse that was starting to decompose and they were dragging it to a landfill late at night to avoid a scene. They were caught, but no alcohol test was performed. The state’s attorney said the only charge he could find was improper disposal of a dead animal, as in pieces of the dead animal were deposited all along the street.Report

  6. DensityDuck says:

    Oh if only you’d waited one day to post these links…

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html

    Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been outright banned.

    The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities such as Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China, Italy and South Korea.

    Greyball was part of a broader program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The VTOS program, including the Greyball tool, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.

    Greyball and the broader VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees, who also provided documents. The four spoke on the condition of anonymity because the tools and their use are confidential and because of fear of retaliation by the company…

    So I guess this is confirmation, as though it were really needed, that the sharing economy is mostly based on ignoring the laws that stop other people already doing the thing you want to do.Report

    • Kim in reply to DensityDuck says:

      DD,
      Tech Libertarian Iconoclasts.
      Pretty much uber in a nutshell.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to DensityDuck says:

      If your regulation(s) result in a thriving black market, or widespread skirting/disobedience, you might be doing regulation wrong.

      Or not, depending on what your true desired result is (see also: The Drug War).Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        “If your regulation(s) result in a thriving black market, or widespread skirting/disobedience, you might be doing regulation wrong.”

        Thing is, we don’t look at black-market operators and say “wow, they have come up with an amazing new economic model which will totally result in a better world for everyone and we shouldn’t restrict what they’re doing”. We look at black-market operators and say “they’re breaking the law”.

        The existence of a black market suggests that we should relax regulations, but I wouldn’t think that even the hardest of hardcore market-orthodoxists would suggest that a black market means we should allow people to flout the laws that exist.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to DensityDuck says:

          but I wouldn’t think that even the hardest of hardcore market-orthodoxists would suggest that a black market means we should allow people to flout the laws that exist.

          Yeah, that isn’t what I am saying.Report