Category: Transportation

Al-Gebra Terrorist Operative Uncovered on American Airlines Flight

No Comments

My bad, not Al-Gebra, Algebra.

It turns that an award winning economist of Italian descent was ethnically profiled for doing mathematics for a talk that he was going to give:

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.

………

Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some other flimsy excuse; the curly-haired passenger could not later recall exactly what it was.

The wait continued.

Finally the pilot came by, and approached the real culprit behind the delay: that darkly-complected foreign man. He was now escorted off the plane, too, and taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn’t entirely sure of the agent’s affiliation, he would later say.

And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

We are a nation of panicked cowards, soiling ourselves at the smallest provocation.

They Finally Lost One

No Comments

The City Council of Austin passed regulations on ride sharing services, and Uber and Lyft spent millions in an attempt to override the vote through a plebiscite, and lost:

Uber and Lyft spent nearly $9 million on a May 7 special election in Austin, Texas. They offered free rides to the polls, and texted users asking for their support. They pulled out all the stops in a political playbook that has worked in almost every other city in the US.

For once, it wasn’t enough.

Voters in the Texan capital came out against Proposition 1, upholding ride-hailing regulations that the city council passed in December. The rules are stricter than ones that Uber and Lyft face in other jurisdictions: They require drivers for the services to pass fingerprint-based background checks, to identify their cars with company emblems, and to avoid picking up and dropping off passengers in certain lanes.

That is to say, exactly the same requirements as exist for the taxis.

………

Uber, I think decided, they were going to make Austin an example to the nation,” said David Butts, a local political consultant who helped coordinate the campaign against Proposition 1, according to a report in the Austin American-Statesman. “And Austin made Uber an example to the nation.”

Ahead of the vote, both Uber and Lyft had threatened to leave Austin should the proposition fail. Austin mayor Steve Adler invited them to stay despite the election results.

………

The nay vote on Proposition 1 is all the more crushing for Uber and Lyft considering the lopsided amount of money they spent in favor of it. The companies invested a combined $8.7 million to support the proposition via their lobbying committee, Ridesharing Works for Austin, an unprecedented sum in Austin local politics. That dwarfed the $132,000 that Proposition 1’s opponents strung together from about 500 individual contributions, according to campaign finance filings.

………

Uber and Lyft have cultivated the impression that their services are indispensable to cities. But Uber in particular has also spun itself as politically unbeatable. It has the money; it has the policy talent; it has the app that makes reaching potential voters as simple as sending a text or push notification to their phones.

………

That’s a potent narrative. With the loss in Austin, it’s starting to come undone.

The myth of inevitability and invincibility is central to Uber’s and Lyft’ssuccess.

It is what allows them to move into new markets, break the law, cheat their employees, place their customers at risk, and create a multi-billion dollar stock valuation.

It may not be the beginning of the end for the lawless players in the “sharing economy”, but it might be the end of the beginning.

I Like this Catch 22

No Comments

Uber and Lyft claim that their drivers are independent contractors, not employers.

Now San Francisco, accepting the Not-a-Taxi-is Really-a Taxi services argument, has has issued a notice that the drivers therefore require business licenses:

Uber and Lyft drivers have cruised the streets of San Francisco for years. But the city has now decided that drivers who work for more than seven days in a year need a business license.

Nearly 37,000 people have been identified by the city as drivers for either Uber or Lyft, according to a press release issued on Friday by city treasurer José Cisneros.

Cisneros did not say how the city came across a list of names, but the notice being sent to drivers comes from “two years of enforcement work, including multiple requests for information and subpoenas to get sufficient data about business operations” from companies like Lyft and Uber.

Knowing that both Lyft and Uber have both actively fought having information released, it’s likely the data wasn’t passed over voluntarily. San Francisco was not listed as a city that had requested data in Uber’s transparency report, although its airport has information about 44,000 drivers.

“Uber partners with entrepreneurial drivers and as independent contractors, they are responsible for following appropriate local requirements,” an Uber spokesperson said.

Lyft, on the other hand, was worried that forcing registration would compromise driver privacy.

………

Cisneros will start by sending out three batches of letters to the identified drivers over the coming days, according to the SF Chronicle. Each driver will need to register him or herself as a business within the next 30 days and pay a $91 annual registration fee and display the registration in the vehicle, or face additional fines. If each driver registers, that generates approximately an extra $3.37 million for the city’s coffers.

………

Now San Francisco is flipping the argument around on the ride-hailing companies arguing that if their drivers are truly independent contractors, then they need these business licenses to be able to operate in the city.

Sweet, sweet schadenfreude.

First Civil Application will be on Car Bras

No Comments

A car bra

Researchers at Iowa State University claim to have developed a flexible skin that absorbs radar:

Iowa State University engineers have developed a new flexible, stretchable and tunable “meta-skin” that uses rows of small, liquid-metal devices to cloak an object from the sharp eyes of radar.

The meta-skin takes its name from metamaterials, which are composites that have properties not found in nature and that can manipulate electromagnetic waves. By stretching and flexing the polymer meta-skin, it can be tuned to reduce the reflection of a wide range of radar frequencies.

The journal Scientific Reports recently reported the discovery online. Lead authors from Iowa State’s department of electrical and computer engineering are Liang Dong, associate professor; and Jiming Song, professor. Co-authors are Iowa State graduate students Siming Yang, Peng Liu and Qiugu Wang; and former Iowa State undergraduate Mingda Yang. The National Science Foundation and the China Scholarship Council have partially supported the project.

“It is believed that the present meta-skin technology will find many applications in electromagnetic frequency tuning, shielding and scattering suppression,” the engineers wrote in their paper.

Dong has a background in fabricating micro and nanoscale devices and working with liquids and polymers; Song has expertise in looking for new applications of electromagnetic waves.

Working together, they were hoping to prove an idea: that electromagnetic waves – perhaps even the shorter wavelengths of visible light – can be suppressed with flexible, tunable liquid-metal technologies.

What they came up with are rows of split ring resonators embedded inside layers of silicone sheets. The electric resonators are filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that’s liquid at room temperature and less toxic than other liquid metals such as mercury.

Those resonators are small rings with an outer radius of 2.5 millimeters and a thickness of half a millimeter. They have a 1 millimeter gap, essentially creating a small, curved segment of liquid wire.

The rings create electric inductors and the gaps create electric capacitors. Together they create a resonator that can trap and suppress radar waves at a certain frequency. Stretching the meta-skin changes the size of the liquid metal rings inside and changes the frequency the devices suppress.

Galinstan is the metal in modern “Mercury” thermometers.

If this works, I expect to see covers on cars to absorb the radar frequencies used by speed radars.

Because these radars operate over a fairly narrow bands, it’s not a particularly demanding application, and radar absorbent car bras has been a kind of holy grail in the industry.

How Convenient

No Comments
Normally, when one says that a Congressman is in bed with lobbyist, it is meant as a metaphor.

Not this time:

Congressman Bill Shuster from Pennsylvania, the Chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the lawmaker behind pro-airline legislation like this 2014 bill to remove any transparency from advertised airfares — and whose top campaign contributors are United and American Airlines — has admitted today to being in a romantic relationship with a top lobbyist for the airline industry.

A lengthy report from Politico shines a light on the too-close-for-comfort relationship of Shuster and Shelley Rubino, VP for global government affairs for Airlines for America (A4A), an industry trade group whose members include the aforementioned United and American, along with other top Shuster donors like FedEx, UPS, and Atlas Air Worldwide.

And when you look at which politicians have most benefited from A4A’s contributions, Shuster is right at the top of the list, at $16,700 for the 2014 election cycle. That’s more than A4A gave to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Not bad for a Congressman who represents a largely rural section of Pennsylvania.

“Ms. Rubino and I have a private and personal relationship, and out of respect for her and my family, that is all I will say about that,” said Rep. Shuster, who was recently divorced, in a statement to Politico.

The Congressman says his office has “a policy that deals with personal relationships that cover my staff and myself. This was created in consultation with legal counsel and goes further than is required by the law. Under that policy, Ms. Rubino doesn’t lobby my office, including myself and my staff.”

Even if the agreement prevents Rubino from lobbying Shuster directly, she is not prohibited from lobbying the dozens of other members of his powerful committee or their aides.

Legal experts say there is no apparent violation of House ethics rules going on here.

It does appear that the news of Congressman Shuster’s application of applied kinematics to Ms. Rubino has, temporarily at least, put the kibosh on privatizing air traffic control:

The House Republican leadership is shelving plans to pass an overhaul of the Federal Aviation Administration, a major blow to House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, according to multiple senior aides

Instead, the House will revert to a short-term extension of the FAA’s authority while “the Transportation Committee will continue their work on this transformative legislation,” a leadership aide said Thursday. The FAA must be renewed by the end of March.

………

The bill was also a priority for Airlines for America, the lobby that represents every mainline U.S. air carrier except Delta. Shuster is very close with A4A, as it is known, and dates one of its top lobbyists. POLITICO reported that earlier this week, Shuster spent time lounging in Miami with Nick Calio, A4A’s leader, and Shelley Rubino, the group’s vice president and his girlfriend. The trip came days after Calio testified before Shuster’s committee.

I gotta figure that the house leaders realized that this story was blowing up, and decided to put it on hold.

This is a good thing.

Air Traffic Control should not be placed in private hands, particularly when those hands are largely those of the 4 remaining large airlines, who are, after all, Shelly Rubino’s clients.

The classic Scorsese movie is Taxi Driver, not Uber Driver.

1 Comment

I dunno, maybe it’s a 20-teens thing that a wannabee Travis Bickle is now driving Uber:

The man accused of killing six people and injuring two more in a Saturday evening shooting rampage in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was an Uber driver who picked up and dropped off passengers between shootings, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN.

 The source, who is not authorized to speak to media, said investigators believe Jason Brian Dalton was even looking for fares after the final shooting of a nearly seven-hour killing rampage.

It could be that this guy is just nuts.

It could be that Uber’s abuse of its drivers drove him mad.

It could be that a he has a history of issues that would not have allowed him to get a hack license.

I’m not sure, but I saw the Scorsese reference.

What a Surprise: Privatizing London’s Rail System Failed

No Comments

After decades of poor and inconsistent service, incomprehensible fares, higher costs, and a lack of investment in essential infrastructure, London is moving to re-privatize its commuter rail lines:

So, last week, the Centre for London think tank published a report called “Turning South London Orange”, which argued that Transport for London (TfL) should take over all suburban rail services in the south of the capital.

 This morning, the mayor of London Boris Johnson and the British government’s transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, released a joint statement, saying, basically: Okay.

 Wow, that happened fast.

 Actually the statement goes rather further than that, mentioning services into six different rail terminals. They’re only proposals at this stage – “views are being sought”. Even if it does happen, TfL will only take control of different routes once the various franchise come up for renewal, so the change will take five years or more to take effect.

 But this is nonetheless a remarkable statement of intent that the capital’s rail network should be run by the capital’s transport authorities. It’s a big deal.

………

When a private rail franchise controls a route, its ultimate goal is to make money for its shareholders: running trains is the means, not the end.

By contrast, when TfL controls a route, its ultimate mission is to run lots of trains to help the city run smoothly. That’s true even when TfL’s role is contract management, and the actual trains are run by a private firm, as happens with the London Overground.

Some London train franchises have a history of cancelling train services at the drop of a hat, just because it’s easier and cheaper than letting them run late. Maybe we’re being utopian, but it’s hard to imagine a TfL-run network doing the same. Even without investment, this would be a big change.

The author notes that this is odd, given that Boris Johnson only has a few more months in office, and explains why they are moving now:

The message here is the Conservatives can be trusted to back Londoners against any big businesses that might be making their lives hell. It’s almost as if there’s an election coming up.

It’s true. Privatized rail is so sidely loathed that the even the bloody Adam Smith Institute, which describes itself as working to, “Promote libertarian and free market ideas through research, publishing, media commentary, and educational programmes,” is cheering the return of publicly owned and operated rail:

You know the trains are utterly terrible when the entire @ASI office cheers at hearing that TfL is taking over the London commuter railways.

— Sam Bowman (@s8mb) January 21, 2016

Unleashing the private sector frequently does not deliver the promised results.

H/t Atrios.

Seriously Neat Tech

2 Comments

Do you know how GPS works?

Basically, the satellites broadcast the time using very accurate clocks, and the differences in times received from various satellites in different positions allow a receiver to determine its positions.

Well, it looks like someone is on the cusp of using a natural clock to do the same thing, using pulsars: (paid subscription required)

Celestial navigation was a mainstay in the early days of aviation, and astronavigation is still used in nuclear bombers to overcome jamming. Now a European research project has shown the feasibility of employing pulsars for aircraft navigation that is independent of ground- or space-based equipment.

The PulsarPlane project is investigating the use of pulsar signals for real-time navigation and timing, to overcome the vulnerabilities of global navigation satellite systems and reduce operating costs for aviation in the second half of this century.

Begun in 2013 and funded by the European Union’s Framework 7 research program, the project is coordinated by the Dutch aerospace laboratory NLR and involves universities in the Netherlands, Finland, Portugal and Bulgaria.

Pulsars are fast-rotating neutron stars that emit stable, fast electromagnetic pulses with unique periods between 1.4 millisec and 5 sec. and unique shapes. Pulsars are visible from everywhere on Earth and across a wide band of frequencies.

This is insanely cook cool.

Read This………

No Comments

A transportation expert takes Pando to task regarding their analysis of Uber, and Pando sees fit to publish his letter.

Basically, Pando has gone after Uber as being a bunch of Silicon Valley snake oil, and Hubert Horan believes that this is not true.

Specifically, notwithstanding their somewhat horrifying business practices, Amazon and eBay actually innovate, reducing the costs and increase the selection relative to brick and mortar alternatives, while Uber provides the exact same service as any taxi or limo service, while adding the “benefits” of price gouging and drivers who have not passed a background check:

The letter is fascinating, insightful, and critical. I don’t agree with his characterizations of some of my arguments; but I do agree with his own arguments and explanations in this letter, and more than that, I appreciate the time and serious effort Horan put into this letter to educate all of us. Few people in America have his decades-long industry perspective and his unique political insights on the politics of transportation, antitrust, markets, and tech. Here’s the letter in full.

-Mark Ames

………

I agree that Convoy, which appears to be closely mimicking the Uber playbook, raises major issues that fully warrant the attention you’ve given it, and I am grateful for the effort and critical thinking that you and Pando have brought to these unicorn issues over the last several years. Apologies in advance if the tone of what follows seems excessively critical, but I have four major concerns based on my background in transport and regulatory economics: (A) I think the Convoy piece (as well as most previous Pando reporting on Uber) misses the critical point that neither company has an underlying business model linked to any rational evidence of sustainable competitive advantage, and you’ve misled readers by equating the Uber/Convoy models with companies like Amazon, and EBay, which did have plans based on solid economics; (B) You correctly noted that the investors behind Convoy (and Uber) are seeking quasi-monopolistic dominance (trying to build a rent-extractive “narrow in the stream”) but you failed to lay out for your readers the critical difference between driving thousands of less-efficient existing suppliers out of business because you’ve built an overwhelmingly better mousetrap, versus driving more efficient suppliers out of business using artificial market power; (C) You correctly note the already lean conditions in trucking, and it is quite reasonable to discuss Uber-type companies in a broader historical/political context. But I think you’ve improperly equated the politics and economic thinking behind Ford/Carter transportation deregulation with much more radical finance-driven changes 20-30 years later, and I think the 1970s points you raise aren’t critical to your readers’ understanding of Uber/Convoy; (D) I imagine that Pando doesn’t get many letters attacking its failure to fully appreciate the problem of Uber and Uber-type companies, but if one fails to focus on the complete lack of competitive economics, and the huge dependence on (eventually) exploiting artificial market power, then I think you end up seriously understating the damage these companies could impose on the rest of society.

………

  1. You’ve improperly equated the Uber/Convoy and Amazon/EBay business models—one is based on legitimate /competitive economics; the other isn’t. Your post said that even if it’s not Convoy, “it’s safe to assume that sometime soon, tech will transform and restructure the $749 billion trucking sector” in a similar way to Uber and taxis, Amazon and booksellers, and EBay and newspaper classifieds. This totally misses a critical distinction– Amazon/EBay type business models were based on powerful competitive advantages over the businesses they were seeking to supplant while the Uber (and apparently Convoy) models seek to “disrupt” an industry with economics that are actually worse than existing competitors. Despite other issues, Amazon could offer consumers much wider choices than they ever had before, eliminated all of the costs of retailing, achieved huge warehousing and distribution efficiencies and clearly had scale economies that no traditional competitor could match. On the other hand, the Uber business model (software/brand company plus its “independent” contractors) fails each of these efficiency/competitive/technological tests. Uber isn’t transforming the consumer product—it offers the exact same service as traditional taxi/limo operators. Uber—even a future, more mature Uber– will have much higher driver, insurance, training, ownership and maintenance costs. The massive subsidies that create the appearance that Uber offers better/cheaper service are not sustainable. Since the mature Uber won’t be able to produce urban car service at significantly lower cost, there are no welfare gains from increased service or lower prices. There is no evidence that a reasonably well run taxi/limo company has bloated costs that cry out for new market entrants, and there’s ample evidence (dirty cars, horribly paid drivers) that industry costs are already extremely lean. Even Uber’s vaunted app is irrelevant to competitive economics. The ordering/pricing aspects of the app are a tiny piece of total costs, they don’t drive any big network economies, and apps can easily be copied. The app actually illustrates a serious Uber structural disadvantage. The economic key to any transportation company is the ability to balance supply (i.e. assets) against volatile demand in the medium/longer term. Thus profits depend on managers with long experience dealing with complex markets, and with sophisticated tools for capital planning and shorter-term price/supply adjustments. Airlines, railroads and shipping companies use some of the most advanced management systems anywhere in the private sector. Yellow Cab isn’t in the same league, but has managers with serious fleet management capabilities, and dispatchers who understand all the idiosyncrasies of local demand patterns (factory night shifts, conventions, bar/restaurant patterns). Uber has an app that ignores the both vehicle management, and market demand forecasting, has no local market knowledge and simply reacts to short-term car requests. Any urban transport operator faces much tougher economics than freight or intercity passenger operators, because there’s no way to reduce costs by smoothing demand peaks. Airline revenue management can massively reduce capital costs by getting price sensitive people to not fly on Friday afternoon. The Long Island Railroad has had peak/off-peak pricing for a hundred years, but rush hour is still rush hour, and the LIRR suffers with the cost of hundreds of cars that only get used ten hours a week. Surge pricing will not get anyone to shift their Saturday night out to fill empty cabs midday Tuesday, and there’s nothing else in the Uber model that addresses any of these fundamental problems with the economics of urban transport. Given the vastly greater complexity of trucking, the idea that a company with a software app could produce new efficiencies great enough to drive most existing trucking companies out of business seems too ludicrous to take seriously. As you clearly point out, there is lots of historical evidence that the last few decades of competition have already made existing operators pretty efficient. Unlike urban car services, trucking includes lots of companies (UPS, JB Hunt) with incredibly advanced industrial engineering capabilities. Anyone who thinks that there are tens of billions worth of trucking efficiencies out there—efficiencies that absolutely no one anywhere in the trucking industry could see—and that these billions can be generated by a scheduling app, but will be so huge that they’ll totally disrupt a$749 billion industry—is either delusional or willfully dishonest.

Uber-type companies need to be understood as a radical departure from Amazon/EBay type models. Instead of displacing competitors through actual efficiencies, or by creating entirely new markets, its model is entirely based on getting the world to believe that it will inevitably dominate the entire industry. This requires aggressively suppressing any discussion of empirical economic evidence (which would undermine its case) and emphasizing the factors driving inevitability–the brilliance of its early stage investors, the ruthlessness of management, and the raw political power of the company’s wealthy supporters. PR is a component of every start-up; at Amazon/EBay it played a supporting role and relied heavily on economic evidence of competitive strengths, but at Uber PR is the heart of the plan, and replaces the need to figure out how to provide much better service at much lower cost. As with 97% of Uber’s media coverage, the Fortune and Bloomberg pieces you cited totally avoided any discussion of competitive economics and tried to pass off its faithful repetition of Convoy’s “industry disruption is inevitable” PR theme as “news reporting”. But by equating the Amazon and Uber approaches you’ve fallen into the same trap. You’ve failed to tell your readers that there are no competitive economics behind the “inevitability” claim, and you’ve helped spread their “our valuation is legitimate because we’ll produce huge economic value just like Amazon and EBay” PR claim.

Read the rest.

While my (and Mark Ames’) point have made the point that Uber is designed to succeed by fobbing off many of its costs onto its employees and society, in doing so, we had ceded that Uber had in some way a built a better mousetrap.

He argues that it’s all an exercise in PR where the real business is to create a monopoly, or oligopoly, model where they sit astride the market extracting rents.

No wonder Wall Street loves Uber.

And While We are on the Subject of Uber………

No Comments

It appears that they retaliated against one of their drivers for talking to the press:

An Uber driver who critiqued the company’s top-brass at a highly publicized event now tells the San Francisco Examiner he’s facing backlash from the tech company.

Last Friday Eric Barajas, a Bay Area-based Uber driver who works in San Francisco, leveled criticism to Uber which garnered exposure in national news. The next day, he said, he was unable to get fares via the Uber app.

Barajas showed the Examiner video of two phones with two Uber driver accounts side by side, one showing “pings” for ride requests, while Barajas’ phone had no pings. Now he says he isn’t sure what to do – his three children and wife depend on his earnings to live, and without his income from Uber he may face dire financial straits.

The Examiner contacted Uber, and only an hour after a phone conversation with an Uber spokeswoman, Barjas saw his account suddenly reactivated.

He also reported “strange” modifications to his profile and Uber login screen, what he said are clear signs Uber was trying to shore up the story they told this reporter.

“You call them, and then its active,” Barajas told the Examiner. “That says to me they’re trying to cover their tracks.”

He still worries that his account may be deactivated or otherwise modified in the future, once media exposure dies down. That exposure began last Friday, when former Obama campaign manager turned-Uber advisor David Plouffe was onstage at the Next Economy Conference in San Francisco.

As cameras rolled, Plouffe invited drivers to speak at a microphone. Barajas made his voice heard.

“I just wanted to know how you guys are helping the economy when there are full time drivers like me… who are struggling to make ends meet, barely making minimum wage,” he said. On Craigslist, Uber in the past has said drivers could make $35 an hour, Barajas said, but that isn’t near what he earns.

“After all the expenses I’m really struggling, I don’t know if I can pay my PG&E bill and my water bill,” he said.

Uber is founded and run by bad people whose goal is to privatize their profits and to socialize their losses.

It is a fundamentally evil and hypocritical business model.

When Your Business Model Is to Use Law Breaking to Enter Markets, This Is Inevitable

No Comments

In Pennsylvania, a $50 million dollar fine against Uber in response to their deliberately and knowingly breaking the law:

Judges for the Pennsylvania agency that regulates buses and taxis recommended on Tuesday a record $50 million fine against ride-sharing company Uber for operating in the state without approval.

Two administrative law judges issued the decision, subject to approval by the Public Utility Commission, to punish Uber Technologies Inc. for rides by its subsidiaries from February 2014 until it received experimental authority six months later.

The judges rejected Uber’s argument that it did not run afoul of commission rules because it’s a software company whose services aren’t necessarily available to the public at large.

“Uber took a more active role in providing transportation service than simply providing the Uber app for people with cars to use to provide rides for people who need transportation — it was not a disinterested invisible entity in the background,” wrote judges Mary Long and Jeffrey Watson.

Uber spokesman Taylor Bennett said the San Francisco-based company was disappointed and hoped to come to a “reasonable resolution” after being unable to settle with the commission.

After a 30-day period to allow both sides to respond, the Public Utility Commission will consider the recommendation. If approved, it would be the largest fine ever imposed by the agency.

Uber’s arguments in this hearing describe their business model in a nutshell:

  • Break the law.
  • Profit
  • When the hammer falls, blame their employees while claiming that their employees aren’t their employees.

While there are a tech business models that make no sense, Uber’s business model makes a lot of sense.

It’s been used by con men and organized crime for years.

Why I Love Taking Mass Transit to Work

No Comments

Today, commuting was a little bit f&$@ed up.

The Metro train was constantly stopping between stations, and finally discharged everyone to go to another train.

Why is this so wonderful?

If I were driving, this sort of sh&@would happen at least as often, but the feline option, saying, “F&$@ this, I’m taking a f&$@ing nap,” would not be available to me because I would be driving a car.

I took a nap on my commute, and it was good.

Posted via mobile.

We Live in Remarkable Times

No Comments

I was getting off the Metro on the way to work, and, not for the first time, noticed the green light underneath the escalator.

So I fired up search on my phone, “Why is there a green light under an escalator?” and immediately found the answer: the lights are there to limn the edges of the steps, so as to reduce the possibility off placing one’s feet between stairs, which might cause a fall.

This is a technical development that was unimaginable to the most technologically forward looking science fiction author just 30 years ago.

Of course those same authors had me commuting to work with a jet-pack, which has not yet happened.

I still want that jet-pack, damn it.

Posted via mobile.

Out F%$#ing Standing!

No Comments

I have been out of work for the past few months, and tomorrow I start a new job at Nozilizer, a company that makes No2 based sterilizers.

As is my wont, I am not going to be blogging about this new job, because this is a way for me to end up on unemployment list.

Even better, it is less than a 10 minute walk from the Lexington Market Metro stop, so I won’t be using my car to commute.

Time for a hearty “Boo Yah!“

Regulatory Sanity on the “Sharing Economy”

No Comments

Uber has been operating illegally in France for some time, and following protests from cab drivers, French authorities took Uber executives into custody:

On Monday, French authorities took two Uber executives into custody for questioning as part of an investigation into UberPop, the startup’s lower cost alternative.

Local media have named the men as Thibaut Simphal, the CEO for France, and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, the CEO for Western Europe. Under French law, both men can be held for up to 48 hours without being charged.

“Our general managers for France and Western Europe today attended a hearing with the French police,” Gareth Mead, an Uber spokesman, told Ars in a statement. “We are always happy to answer questions the authorities have about our service—and look forward to resolving these issues. Those discussions are ongoing. In the meantime, we’re continuing to ensure the safety of our riders and drivers in France given last week’s disturbances.”

………

The primary regulatory issue in France is that UberPop’s drivers operate under a VTC license (véhicules de tourisme avec chauffeur, or tourism vehicles with a driver). Created in 2009, this license was designed for pre-booked travel, not on-the-street hails. UberPop’s drivers are like their UberX counterparts in the United States: normal people with regular cars who do not have an expensive French taxi license. As such, traditional taxi drivers in France have been upset that Uber seems to be flouting the law. Uber maintains that it is a technology company and not a traditional taxi company, and therefore the company believes it’s not bound by taxi law.

It’s nice to find authorities who doesn’t ignore the law, “Because ……… Internet.”

Uber has been operating an illegal taxi service, and been abusing its drivers, and the public, with its business model, and it’s good that someone is acting on this, albeit with some prodding by protesters.

Your Uber Update

No Comments

Wow, it’s the sharing economy, everything is new and different. Hey, they don’t have to pay the fees that those stupid old taxi companies do, because you order them on the Internet.

Sorry to be a bit negative early on a Monday morning, but I was just reading in the Washington Post that Uber is arguing that it should not have to pay the same fees as traditional taxi companies to pick people up at airports. Uber says the fees are too high.

I have no strong opinion about the size of these fees, which are effectively a tax on taxi travel that is used to support the operation of the airport. However, there is no basis for Uber paying lower fees than their competitors in traditional taxi companies, even if it is cooler.

So not surprised.  Of course they want a government handout, because ……… Free Market.

On the other hand, the apparent behavior of Uber in China, which has taken to disciplining drivers who drive too close to political protests:

The next day, Uber told its drivers to keep away from such protests. The Financial Times reports that Uber drivers in Hangzhou received a message imploring them: “Please don’t wreck the good urban environment you have all worked so hard to help build… If you are at the scene, leave immediately.”

More damningly, the message added that there would be consequences for those who didn’t follow instructions, and that Uber would track drivers’ GPS devices (i.e., personal phones) to make sure they comply. These measures, reports the WSJ, are intended to “maintain social order.” Not something you want to hear from an employer.

An Uber spokesperson in Beijing told Quartz that “we firmly oppose any form of gathering or protest, and we encourage a more rational form of communication for solving problems.”

It makes sense for Uber to tread lightly in China, where it is reportedly planning a rapid expansion, with a price tag of more than one billion dollars. Maybe Uber should spend some of that money figuring out how to deal with its (many) privacy issues, first.

Indeed.

It should be noted that there is some good Uber news though, even if the news is not good for Uber, The California Labor Commission has ruled that Uber drivers are employees of the firm:

In a ruling that fuels a long-simmering debate over some of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing technology companies and the work they are creating, the California Labor Commissioner’s Office said that a driver for the ride-hailing service Uber should be classified as an employee, not an independent contractor.

The ruling ordered Uber to reimburse Barbara Ann Berwick $4,152.20 in expenses and other costs for the roughly eight weeks she worked as an Uber driver last year. While Uber has long positioned itself as merely an app that connects drivers and passengers — with no control over the hours its drivers work — the labor office cited many instances in which it said Uber acted more like an employer. Uber is appealing the decision.

The ruling does not apply beyond Ms. Berwick and could be altered if Uber’s appeal succeeds. Uber has also prevailed in at least five other states in keeping its definition of drivers as independent contractors. Yet the California ruling stands out because officials formally laid out their arguments for why Uber drivers are employees. That could bolster class-action lawsuits against the company in the state. California law expressly requires employers to reimburse employees for business expenses and several suits proceeding against Uber are based on that state law.

………

“For anybody who has to pay the bills and has a family, having no labor protections and no job security is at best a mixed blessing,” said Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “At worst, it is a nightmare. Obviously some workers prefer to be independent contractors — but mostly they take these jobs because they cannot find better ones.”

The California ruling, which was made June 3 and came to light after Uber filed an appeal Tuesday evening, noted that the company provided drivers with phones and had a policy of deactivating its app if drivers were inactive for 180 days.

“Defendants hold themselves out as nothing more than a neutral technological platform, designed simply to enable drivers and passengers to transact the business of transportation,” the Labor Commissioner’s Office wrote about Uber. “The reality, however, is that defendants are involved in every aspect of the operation.”

In a statement, Uber said the decision was “nonbinding and applies to a single driver.” The company said individual cases about worker classification in at least five other states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Texas, have resulted in rulings that categorize drivers as contractors.

………

Other Uber drivers may also be inspired to follow Ms. Berwick’s example, given that filing a claim with the California labor office is a relatively simple process.

Here is hoping that this sticks.

Uber is not about innovation, it is about regulatory arbitrage.

If they are allowed to ignore labor law, taxi regulations, licensing requirements, they are effectively being subsidized by the rest of us.

Just When You Thought that Air Travel Couldn’t get any Crappier………

No Comments

The airline trade group, the The International Air Transport Association (IATA), has mooted a proposal to further shrink the size of carry-on luggage:

The International Air Transport Association has put out a recommendation that cabin bags be 21.5 x 13.5 x 7.5 inches to create more space for passengers to store luggage.

 Airlines set their own carry-on limits but the recommendation, if adopted, could lead them to trim bag sizes at most major carriers.

 No North American carriers have yet accepted the IATA guidance but Emirates, Lufthansa (DLAKF) and seven others have.

 Southwest Airlines (LUV) and American Airlines (AAL) said they don’t have any plans to change carry-on guidelines. Southwest passengers would be among the hardest hit if IATA’s recommendation becomes standard across the industry. They would lose about 40% in bag space.

Yes, the secret to the airlines is making the cargo customer experience crappier and crappier, until the consumer longs for the bliss of dealing with Comcast customer service.

I long for the invention of the Star Trek transporter system.