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One of the selling points of Uber in their marketing, at least in chicago, was that Uber drivers would drive like “regular” people and not like cabbies; because cabbies in Chicago drive like crazy people. In a very short period of time Uber drivers all drive exactly like cabbies, which is obnoxious since there’s more of them.



I live in Chi too and frequently lyft. They need to make it easier to report bad driving. That would solve the problem. I submit tickets when the driver drives like a madman but it’s not clear what to do about it inside the app.


> I live in Chi too and frequently lyft. They need to make it easier to report bad driving. That would solve the problem.

It needs to be possible for non-customers to report bad driving. Uber and Lyft passengers are not incentivized to report bad behavior by their drivers because that behavior often benefits them (stop wherever the passenger likes, shave a few minutes off by veering through traffic, block or drive in bus lanes because it's more convenient or faster).

That's my biggest complaint about these taxi (they're not "sharing" shit) services: there's no enforcement structure against them and no way for people who aren't customers to push back on terrible actors. Uber and Lyft have disclaimed all responsibility because "drivers are not our employees" and they use the myth of "sharing" to get around laws around many things, but especially around receiving complaints.


Given that Uber/Lyft track every inch of the car's journey, it seems entirely feasible for them to automatically catch some types of bad driving (exceeding speed limits, illegal U-turns, frequent hard braking, etc). But currently they're not incentivized to.


I would rather prices went up and they did this. The point was that the data should make the experience better.


Well then obviously for some reason "crazy" driving is selected for. The exhaustive options are:

1) profits are optimized by driving slightly faster and slightly more recklessly.

2) with hours and hours of experience you can drive better than an average person. Our simple non-professional minds simply don't comprehend their driving style and interpret their decisions as crazy.


The former seems plausible. Cab style driving seems incredibly risky.


They drive like cabbies, because most of them probably are cabbies, if it’s anything like SF.


They weren't originally. Now? I don't know.




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