Where I live there are few wheelchair taxis and they need to be booked in advance, sometimes months in advance if it’s a holiday. If a driver is sick most likely all their customers are staying at home. Costs are significantly subsidised and yet still there are not enough drivers.
It is hard to scale because it requires drivers with well above average patience, empathy and a caring personality. It’s not a job for profit focused individuals.
To scale it would require drivers paid a salary not paid per trip/mile. It would also require generous allowances for time (wheelchair taxi drivers are often delayed through no fault of their own).
It’s even worse. Wheelchair accessible vehicles are extremely expensive. As in, a basic wheelchair retrofit to a standard minivan adds over $30k of cost. And then the modifications to the vehicle prevent the cabin space from being used to the same level as before (you lose seats and cargo space). So it’s monetarily a bad proposition on many levels for taxi operators.
The best way around it is to push vehicles like the Cruise Origin that come with wheelchair-ready space by default but then you’re into purpose built vehicles that have their own downsides.
> It is hard to scale because it requires drivers with well above average patience, empathy and a caring personality. It’s not a job for profit focused individuals.
To be glib: that's ridiculous. Offer $1000/ride and I guarantee you'll find a long line of patient, empathic and caring drivers signing up for your service.
It just costs money. Maintaining a wheelchair-capable vehicle and operating rides for wheelchair-bound people is simply more expensive than driving millenials around to their dinner dates. Someone needs to pay for that. Law suits and regulation like those detailed in the linked article are part of the mechanism by which we as a society decide how to do that.
> To be glib: that's ridiculous. Offer $1000/ride and I guarantee you'll find a long line of patient, empathic and caring drivers signing up for your service.
Do you honestly believe paying a huge salary will attract kind empathetic people? I can say it will for sure attract a lot of people who will claim to be.
But I do think the genuine angels that do so much to help people do deserve to be paid well.
> Do you honestly believe paying a huge salary will attract kind empathetic people?
You missed the point (and the joke).
No, but for $1000 even an asshole will act empathetic. I mean, go to a high end hotel or restaurant. You genuinely think that all those emphatically polite and helpful wait staff are doing it because they're nice people? No, they're doing it because (1) good service is required by their job and (2) their job pays better than similar jobs at proletarian places. So they do it. Same principle here.
> B.C.’s attorney general was named as a respondent in the complaint and in its submission said that in early 2020 it implemented a 30-cent per-trip fee under the passenger transportation act or regulation as an incentive for ride-hailing apps to provide a wheelchair accessible ride option, not to exempt them from offering one.
I think this is the interesting part. Uber was paying a fee per ride (previously $0.30, recently $0.90) which was supposed to go towards providing accessible transit options. This doesn't seem like an unreasonable way to ensure that there are accessible options while not requiring every provider to make those accommodations (which can be very expensive for smaller providers as in order to reliably offer accessible transit you need capable vesicles and always have them spread out over your operating range). It seems that raising/adjusing this fee and using the proceeds to subsidize accessible transit could be a quite efficient way to ensure that this service is available and self-balancing based on the market.
As a matter of law though it's a terrible argument.
the BC Human Rights code has a provision "If there is a conflict between this Code and any other enactment, this Code prevails." So unless the taxi fee explicitly says it supersedes the human rights code it explicitly does not.
Most parliamentary systems don't allow past law from preventing future laws overriding it. So if a later law clearly says it overrides an earlier law, then it does*. If it's ambiguous, then courts would generally decide (or parliament can write a new law clarifying).
* Unless that country has "tiers" of laws. Often there are classes of laws that are always superior to each other. For example constitutions cannot be overriden by regular laws, regardless of time or clarity. But note that parliaments can generally amend constitutions too, so the equivilant is too conflicting constitutional laws. Some countries also have human rights laws that trump regular laws, and that is in effect what BC has set up with that provision.
"...Uber told the 2022 hearing into Bauer’s complaint that it didn’t violate the human rights code because it’s an app and doesn’t provide a service as defined under the code."
You could substitute any ideology and any laws they don't think should exist into that sentence. Laws prohibiting unions or punishing blasphemy are laws. The people who don't like those laws don't think you should have to follow them. Sometimes they're right.
There is an ideology where that is the defining characteristic, but it's not libertarianism, it's unadulterated anarchism.
There are many ideologies that believe in limitations on government regulation, and they're not all the same. A libertarian is not going to be on board with an anarcho-communist's desire to abolish private property, or a strict constitutionalist's willingness to have state and local governments set price controls. Whether a private monopolist/cartel is regarded as a form of government is a rather important practical distinction.
And hardly anyone is a pure anarchist -- how many people intend murder to be legal? So one way or another it's all about the details. And I'm assuming you're not a proponent of the opposite. Totalitarianism is the worst form of government including all of the others.
I can't even begin to take you seriously when you're arguing on behalf of the group who heckles their own political candidates because they believe in driver's licensing requirements.
You are claiming that absurd conflicts within a political party mean it cannot be taken seriously, but the Democrats have the "blue dog" faction and a prominent representative who recently proposed a fifty dollar an hour minimum wage law and the Republicans stretch from Romney to the colorful current party leadership.
If you were really thinking about whether or not to take Libertarians seriously then you might take some lessons from the book The Righteous Mind that points out moral axes and notes that liberals tend to focus on care and harm, conservatives focus most on fairness and cheating, and libertarians with their focus on liberty are just behind both of those. It might also be interesting to consider the content of Libertarian meetings which are often dominated by discussion of cannabis legalization, right to repair, and arguments for a universal basic income.
You misunderstood. I'm just trying to express the realities of Libertarian leaning politics. In this particular case I don't have a strong opinion and it isn't clear what options would most enhance the liberty of the general public. Uber has made an impact, but so far the business continues to lose vast amounts of money while disrupting similar options. How we might best structure this transportation sector seems to be an open question whether one is trying to optimize for liberty or efficiency or whatever else.
The US has "driver's licensing requirements" that are basically pro-forma. Any idiot can pass the test, more than 90% of adults have a driver's license and renewals don't even require a retest, implying that they're just an excuse to stick you for a fee.
It's the sort of thing that seems like it would serve some important function and then you try to imagine what would change if they didn't exist and it's hard to come up with anything serious.
Meanwhile it's a cause to charge you with a crime even if you harmed no one in any way, which is exactly the sort of thing that libertarians oppose, so it's entirely consistent that the audience would oppose it.
Externalities are damages. But that's not what these kinds of laws are trying to address.
The market is willing to provide car service to people in wheelchairs, for a particular price. A lot of people in wheelchairs can't afford that price. The law is trying to create a subsidy.
In principle the people who want the subsidy should be the ones paying for it. If you think subsidizing this is a good idea then you give your money to a charity, they use the money to subsidize the service, and then the market provides the service because somebody is paying for it.
You can also decide you don't want to be a libertarian and instead you want the government to subsidize the service out of tax revenue. Libertarians don't like this, because now you're taking money from the people who didn't agree to subsidize it without their consent. But also, politicians don't like this, because it's spending tax money and they'd prefer to spend that on their cronies in some government-adjacent industry.
So what politicians do instead is pass it as an unfunded mandate on whatever industry. This is still a tax, but now it's not a tax on e.g. rich people, it's a tax on other ride sharing customers and drivers. Who tend not to be rich people, because rich people have their own cars or private limousines or planes. Then we get a covert tax on the poor so that the overt tax money can go to defense contractors and other politically-connected corporations. It's at this point that you start to wonder if the libertarians might have been onto something.
this was proven true by the Libertarian backed Anti-Mask Rallies in Vegas, they did not care if they got people sick because they couldn't be held liable.
Wow, each ride is taxed $0.90 to hopefully provide taxi companies with wheel chair accessible vehicles so they can perform rides at a loss? The city would be better off forming a non-profit and managing the rides like public transit.
Uber gonna Uber, but I'm surprised someone in management doesn't realize this is a bad look, read the tea leaves, and buy a few wheelchair taxis and have Uber-employed drivers to handle this in cities with over 100,000 people.
I'd think that Uber would just hire the wheelchair accessible taxis directly from the taxi company. Maybe the taxi company charged 3x or more for the ride, but it's still cheaper for Uber.
> But Uber told the 2022 hearing into Bauer’s complaint that it didn’t violate the human rights code because it’s an app and doesn’t provide a service as defined under the code.
What a slimy, disgusting, in-human argument to make.
Doesn't sound anything like that. It would be like if "Ask HN: Who's Hiring?" was asked why they didn't ensure that the hiring was evenly distributed among (say) races. They're just a forum, a place where people can post stuff. They can't guarantee that the people posting are of that distribution unless they themselves post it.
In this case, Uber is just a forum where people post ride availability and people look for ride availability.
It's not an outrageous argument to make, but it clearly didn't take. Presumably Uber will have to ensure there are sufficient UberWAV available in any region they offer normal services.
Uber enforces standards on drivers and cars to use their platform -- and take around 30% or more per ride. This is obviously completely different from HN's "Who's Hiring?" threads.
Well, the standards can't be that important. If you post the r-word in your job listing you're not going to get listed. But the payment may do the trick.
But then you have the opposite problem, don't you? Ford or Exxon is making a significant profit from the activity too. The former may even be imposing standards -- some modern cars have a limp-mode if they detect a fault -- and they had a lot to do with whether the vehicle is wheelchair-accessible.
So much for those attention-grabbing 7-8 figure settlements that sometimes make the news. The reality is much less money. $35k so tiny can be treated as a cost of doing business.
That was the amount awarded to a single claimant. Living in this area I can promise you that there is more than one disabled person in the BC's largest city.
Also they are required to begin providing acceptable service.
So the business impact is much more severe than writing a check and forgetting about it. Canadian regulators are more than happy to shut down your whole business if you fail to comply with tribunal orders.
In a strictly business sense, Uber made the right call. Paying $35,000 plus lawyers to learn this is a service they need to provide is cheaper than building it preemptively. In a human sense, it's pretty fucked.
Paying out 35k a ride on every 20 dollar canadian ride for a handicapped person is good business?
You're losing money on every transaction.
And no, you don't make it up in volume. You need to do 1750 other 20 dollar canadian rides just to make up for each handicapped ride. That's assuming you only want to break even, and you don't pay anything to your drivers.
I wonder if there will now be a large number of similar suits from others that have been discriminated against in the same way. Maybe the eventual total liability could be meaningful?
Auto-brail screen readers exist. If someone has the means or has a gov subsidy can read text on the internet Taxis to support wheelchair users don't, or at least done exist enough to subsist off the profit motives necessary to keep the service alive.
If someone had a government subsidy then they could use the money to pay the market price necessary to make such a service viable. If the government wants that subsidy, why should they impose that cost on a particular industry instead of paying for it out of the general fund?
It is hard to scale because it requires drivers with well above average patience, empathy and a caring personality. It’s not a job for profit focused individuals.
To scale it would require drivers paid a salary not paid per trip/mile. It would also require generous allowances for time (wheelchair taxi drivers are often delayed through no fault of their own).