Manor House, Cheapside, plate one from Original Views of London as It Is, 1842. Artist Thomas … [+]
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Two needs of fundamental interest to all major metropolitan areas, if not all cities, seem to be underestimated these days: First, the need for readily available painting and delivery services, which have become a sort of fundamental infrastructure since the beginnings of our republic. And secondly, the need for an adequate quality of life for local residents providing such services, which, among other things, is a prerequisite for the sustainability of any means of satisfying the first need.
A city like New York, for example, benefits immensely from readily available and affordable livery for people and things (letters, documents, medicines, groceries, meals, etc.), hence arrangements too, and could hardly do without the local providers of such services sustainably wear and hold. Taxis, buses, small trucks and other delivery vehicles can therefore be seen everywhere and always have been.
It is therefore quite disturbing to learn, after several taxi driver suicides in recent years, that drivers of Uber, UBER and Lyft LYFT are also finding it difficult to live and therefore operate in and around New York City. New York needs its drivers and cannot afford to see them go. In light of this fact, last November the city’s Taxi Commission announced plans to demand higher wages for Uber and Lyft drivers. But almost like a miracle of expedition on behalf of the wrong side, a court halted New York’s move a month later at the behest of Uber. (Lyft didn’t participate in the lawsuit, but its owners like Uber’s gain from the decision.)
The court’s ill-fated decision raises an obvious question: If New York can’t “beat” Uber and Lyft, why not “join” them – that is, join them as a competitor? In other words, why not offer a “public option” when it comes to delivery and delivery services in and around New York?
To see why it’s worth asking this question, consider that the typical Uber driver only gets between 40% and 60% of each fare charged to passengers, averaging around 52%. The lion’s share of the rest — between 25% and 43%, depending on trip length — goes to Uber itself, while the remaining 15% goes to the city. The figures from Lyft, which uses the same platform model as Uber, are comparable.
But what do Uber, Lyft and the City contribute to the journey? Uber and Lyft offer little more than tech-simple, easily replicated “two-way marketplace” platforms, while the city oversees operations to ensure safety.
Given the low level of maintenance required for the platforms themselves, which use an ancient and very simple model, New York and other cities should be able to easily set up and maintain their own safe platforms with the 15 percent reduction in fares York and other cities are already participating, allowing all licensed drivers to pocket the remaining 85% of the fare. Meanwhile, it could allow drivers to compete on vehicle comfort and even price within a reasonable range, lowering costs for drivers, while allowing the city to levy congestion surcharges at certain times of the day (like Uber and Lyft themselves do). do), could help control the volume.
Of course, companies like Uber and Lyft and the politicians they “contribute” to will argue that this sounds like “socialism”, that “capitalism” is more efficient and cheaper, and so on. But there is no reason to believe such clichés in the current infrastructural context. All that Uber and Lyft are “efficient” right now that a city wouldn’t be is gratuitously pulling heavy fees from riders and profits from drivers. They offer no value in return for these forms of extraction, which cities might not just as well offer on a not-for-profit basis, again given how old, familiar, and inexpensive the matching technology used by their algorithms is.
In other words, Uber and its ilk are pure rent collectors at this point. And when it comes to public goods and essential infrastructure like painting and shipping, we as a nation have long viewed rent collection as just a form of extortion or piracy. Those who invented the relevant technologies were paid well for the intellectual property long ago, and all companies like Uber and Lyft are now negotiating is widespread public ignorance of how readily available and usable the technology is now.
So what New York and other cities should be doing is giving their own liveries and delivery drivers their own platforms. Cut out the now-literally parasitic middlemen, and you’ve got cheaper rides and deliveries, as well as better-paid drivers and deliverers. This, in turn, will improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers, not just a few retirees way over in Silicon Valley. And with the ride-sharing industry still growing rapidly in response to still-growing demand, acting now will continue to prevent even greater withdrawals than now in the future.
One would think that New York and other cities are already doing this via the Curb Taxi hailing app, which is now downloadable on smartphones, as are the Uber and Lyft apps. That would be a mistake. Curb just works as an easier way to flag down a cab than the old wave-in-the-street method. It doesn’t add additional cars and drivers to the taxi fleet like Uber and Lyft do, but makes it easier to hail existing taxis. As such, most of the downsides of cab rides — long waits, sometimes unpredictable fares, etc. — that spurred demand for Uber and Lyft in the first place remain, while app user fees are added.
Another, more general point: the so-called “platform” and “gig” economies, as we now know, encompass far more than delivery and delivery services. This includes sales of all kinds, temporary and handyman work, hotel and apartment rentals and all sorts of other markets that only require simple means of matching buyers and sellers – i.e. two-way matching platforms. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that over 55 million Americans, or 36% of the workforce, work in the gig economy, while 33% of American businesses employ gig workers extensively.
Platforms like Facebook Marketplace make it clear that such services can be made available to sellers or buyers at virtually no additional cost. So why don’t all cities make such platforms available free of charge in all areas where they are not yet available? Why isn’t the US Department of Labor doing this for the entire American economy? If a large part of America’s economy is “the gig economy,” why don’t we cheaply and publicly provide that economy’s infrastructure as we do for the non-gig economy?
So let’s literally cut out redundant private intermediaries and mediate all of our “gig” relationships through that primal form of mediation that we discovered thousands of years ago on a civic, not-for-profit basis: the polis, the civitas, the “public.” Sector” – what we set up to work for all of us, not deprive most of us. This translates into gains not only in the fairness and efficiency dimensions, but also in the productivity dimension, which will force those collecting pensions now to start creating value instead.
Start with our cities and then rise higher and higher to our state and federal governments to truly make them servants of all, rather than accepting the Silicon Valley companies as masters of us all.
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