Can Ride-Sharing Startup Lyft Survive the SoCal Heat? 133
First time accepted submitter Kyle Jacoby writes "The app-powered on-demand ride-sharing startup, Lyft, has brought its trademark pink mustaches to San Diego. After a successful venture in San Francisco about a year ago, Lyft has since expanded to offer their services to other congested cities, like Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. Despite the utility of the service, Lyft (and related services Sidecar and Uber) has recently come under fire from the city of Los Angeles, whose department of transportation issued cease-and-desist letters to the startup. It seems that the service has the taxi community in an uproar, who believe that Lyft ride-share drivers should be required to obtain the permits similar to those required of taxi drivers." Nothing like some regulatory capture for Independence Day. Amid the ongoing strike of BART workers in the Bay Area, I bet some people are using on-line organization tools for ride-sharing with a similar upshot.
Lyft's rating system is bonkers (Score:5, Insightful)
"Passengers and drivers rate each other after every ride. If you rate a driver below 4 stars, youâ(TM)ll never be matched with that driver again. If a driver's average falls below 4½ out of 5 stars, they are removed from the Lyft community. It's our way of maintaining high-quality standards."
Can anyone tell me what the point is of a 5 star rating system if anything below 4.5 stars gets you kicked out? All this is going to end up doing is artificially inflating ratings. Basically everyone will be a five star driver or a zero star. It makes no sense whatsoever. I would think any logical system would have at least 3 stratas of "Excellent/Well above average", "OK", and "Average, but would ride with again".
Re:Sharing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, the prices are definitely more taxi-like than rideshare-like as well.
If you look at ride-sharing via places like Craigslist, payment is usually roughly on the order of the cost of gas, maybe rounded up. E.g. if you get a ride from SF to LA, a typical asking price is for you to pitch in $50.
But the prices on Lyft seem to be on the order of $15-20 for a short ride within SF, which is more like taxi prices. At that cost you're hiring a paid driver, not pitching in for gas in a rideshare.
Re:Lyft's rating system is bonkers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Sharing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its stil bonkers. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have 100 four stars you will be kicked out. The system is basically saying you need to give any driver you want to keep five stars, all the time. This makes a 5 point rating system pointless and it might as well be a boolean "Keep? Yes / No" flag that is averaged.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd agree with you IF Lyft was a car pooling service. It is not. It is a service for freelance taxi drivers. This is NOT the same thing as car pooling.
Lyft is much more like a taxi company than a carpooling connection network. They're just trying to pretend that they're not.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
That was my thought as well, but it turns out it isn't carpooling -- it's a paid service, and a fairly steep one at that.
http://www.lyft.me/drivers [www.lyft.me]
From the "become a driver" page: "Drivers are making up to $35/hr + choosing their own hours."
It sounds like a taxi service, except Lyft doesn't have employees, doesn't have to pay unemployment or workers comp insurance, and then if there is an accident, will the driver's private insurance which most likely assumes you are not being a public carrier, pay out?
Where is the service? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the distinctive thing is that you're paying for a ride. That's a service.
Not saying that the city/state whatever needs to be involved, but I *am* saying that to pretend this isn't a paid service to the rider is disingenuous.
Suppose a taxi driver was thinking of going downtown to Bruno's for a good pizza slice. Turns around, heads down Broadway, there you are, waving your hand. You get in and tell him, Bruno's, please! Did that suddenly turn the taxi ride into not-a-taxi-ride? No, of course not.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Its quite a bit different than Slugging [npr.org] that is/was popular in some cities.
These newer programs have apps for ride matching, rating systems, and at least informally set fees. Its a regulation dodge more than anything else.
Still, I would love to see a similar rating system for individual taxi drivers, because half of them don't bathe, 60% of them are surly, 5 to10% of them on any given day don't look remotely like the credentials hanging in the cab, and the vehicles themselves are filthy and often barely road worthy.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Its stil bonkers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lyft's rating system is bonkers (Score:5, Insightful)
Requiring 4.5 stars out of 5 is not a 90% approval rating. A 90% approval rating would have a "Do you approve of this driver? Yes/No" poll and require 90% to be yes.
A 90% approval rating on a 5 star program would mean 90% of people must rate at 3 stars or higher. Not that the average rating be 4.5 stars or above. It is TOTALLY different.
Your comments point out the problem perfectly. " I imagine that a driver that does their job on time, is safe, and doesn't smell too bad gets an automatic 5 stars.". So what does one do to get 3 stars? Stink of onions, run red lights, and be late? That's a 3 star driver?
Then what is a 1 star driver, someone who runs over your wife and then spits on the corpse?
By designing the rating system this way they are FORCING a skew to the right. It's idiotic. The only reason I can see them doing this is for some marketing tactic where they can claim they have all 5 star drivers without explaining the meaning.
Re:Its stil bonkers. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have 100 four stars you will be kicked out. The system is basically saying you need to give any driver you want to keep five stars, all the time. This makes a 5 point rating system pointless and it might as well be a boolean "Keep? Yes / No" flag that is averaged.
People other than engineers do not do the mathematical reductions like this in their head, and then act accordingly.
Personally, I never thought eBay would go anywhere, since it's not actually an auction; the mathematical reduction is "second lowest bid ceiling plus bid increment", given that you can give a bid ceiling, and it will automatically "bid" for you. But seriously, on the back end you could just insertion sort the bid ceilings, look at the first two in the table, and make the decision on that basis. I thought the OnSale model, in which actual bids were being placed, in a non-automated fashion, was more of a real auction, and that they'd own things.
But I had not taken into account that ordinary people don't do the mathematical reduction, and find the convenience of not having to watch their "bids" of more value than the actual "auctionness" of the auctions.
I imagine they have "proprietary" back end safeguards against things like "perpetually lower-than-5-rating passengers, or some other means of throwing out the outliers so that they can keep their driver pool up, in case that ever became a real issue for their business expansion. I suspect at this point, they'd rather have twice as many drivers that are unhappy about being thrown out of that role than they currently have, as a PAC to be able to have an effective block to counter the taxi interests. So if they don't have the rules behind the curtain, expect the rules in front of the curtain to change soon.
Otherwise, it occurs to me that the taxi lobby could have a few people sign up as 5 day a week riders and perpetually rate the drivers "1" in order to reduce the number of drivers below the level of viability by gaming the published rating system.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I work for a limousine service, here's just a couple of things I can think of off the top of my head. Insurance, which was mentioned earlier. If you get in an accident, is this guy's private not-for-hire insurance going to cover you? We drug test, I can't imagine an individual drug testing himself. We monitor employee's hours making sure that they get enough sleep and we see them in person when they pick up cars. We're able to judge their appearance to make sure they look fit and healthy enough to drive and are also dressed professionally. We wash our cars every day. We have an office that keeps track of things and can send another car to pick up a passenger should something unexpected happen. If you use Lyft and schedule a pickup and then your single and only driver needs to make stops or gets stuck in traffic, what do you do next? We check their DMV record and straight up fire people if they get into 2 accidents in too short of a time span. We do regular maintenance on the vehicles constantly to make sure they're in top operating condition. In this industry, you get what you pay for. We're a business and we're good at what we do and have streamlined processes for making our business run efficiently. If you go with some Joe off the street, he's going to be learning all of this from day 1.