The city has just 39 licensed cab drivers.
Minneapolis should make public transit free for a few* months, to encourage folks to use that instead. Golden opportunity.
public transit?
For the areas it covers, Minneapolis has a pretty good public transit.
its pretty cool you can go from home to work to the store and back home without ever going outside. lifesaver in some of the harsh cold winters
“we don’t want to pay min wage” -billionaire run companies who cannot pay people competitively with taxi services 10 years ago.
I guess there is going to be a split on this in terms of what people think. Obviously ride share drivers would love this, and since the only time I’m in Minneapolis is when I’m on business, it’s my company footing the bill, not me.
However - if it was me footing the bill, I’m sure I’d be much less inclined to take a Lyft/Uber. However, ending ops over this is stupid, because there will be people that will pay for it, business or personal. Let the market decide what’s palatable.
Everyone’s wallet is shrinking due to the rampant inflation over the past several years, and if you’re a full time ride share driver, it’s hard to cut even with the rising costs all around. Even before the inflation was hard. Vehicles don’t run on hopes and dreams and need maintenance.
But it’s a tactic, right? They could still make money, if a bit less, by operating in Minneapolis. But they can put pressure on residents to try and get it repealed by stopping, and try to send a message to other cities.
No, they barely make money as it is
Lyft is losing money, Uber is barely profitable
Uber is making way more money than they let on. They got caught stashing millions over seas. They and lyft both take over half of the transaction on average and have reduced their support teams to mostly bots and people who can barely read.
Millions? That’s almost as much as they make in a day
Tell us you don’t understand gross revenue versus net profits without telling us.
Uber increased the cash on hand by 139M in the 4th quarter, so they definitely make more than a million a day net profit
And at least Lyft is sending emails to customers making it sound like paying a decent wage makes their business model unsustainable.
Which is weird because what’s their overhead? They run an app. 99% should be going to drivers.
Card fees, keeping it updated, onboarding drivers and doing checks, accounting for fraud, employees, advertising. 99% is a silly figure to request.
The shitty gig companies decimated the taxi industry, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see things like drunk driving tick up, especially come winter.
I hope the city can incentivize something new to fill the void. And hopefully they can also put guardrails around it so drivers and passengers don’t get screwed.
The industry got decimated due to being worse than the apps. The apps 100% exploit drivers, but let’s not act like calling a cab was such a good experience 20 years ago.
We support a minimum earning standard for drivers
Is that why they spent millions to defeat a law in CA that would have clarified that their employees are in fact employees and should be covered by minimum wage laws?
I have to wonder how hard it would be to build some kind of open source platform to compete with these companies. Then the drivers will be free to set their own rates and this rent-seeking behavior can be undermined.
