Black Market Ride-Sharing Explodes In Austin After Voters Drive Out Uber And Lyft

[Chris]

With a little peer-to-peer technology, people go right around the government!

Black Market Ride-Sharing Explodes In Austin After Voters Drive Out Uber And Lyft

Almost as soon as Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin two weeks ago, a black market for unregulated ride-sharing emerged to meet the huge demand for transportation here.

Tens of thousands of riders and drivers are now connecting through Facebook and Craigslist, sidestepping onerous city regulations passed late last year aimed at traditional ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft that required drivers to be fingerprinted, among other things…

For its part, the City of Austin hilariously told one local news outlet that Arcade City “is legal as long as drivers do not charge beyond the federal reimbursement rate of $0.54 per mile.”

Of course, there’s no way the city can enforce what riders and drivers privately agree to for payment…

Adler gets it exactly backwards: city regulators and their government-backed taxi cab cartel are the ones who should have expected disruption—and a thriving black market—when they tried to shut down ridesharing in Austin.

[Ethereal]

And there is no way for regulators and control freaks to go after Arcade City because it's fully decentralized.

There is no company or centrally managed entity for them to regulate.

It's entirely peer-to-peer networking.

So all Austin regulators did was speed up the proliferation of platforms that cannot be regulated by the government.

Kudos to them.

[Chris]

I recall once, Polly proclaiming new sharing technology would usher in at last the Marxist Revolution. Alas, this is just the opposite, free market anarchy.

[Common]

This would have happened anyway, wheres theres money theres scammers. Im betting major cities with uber have their blackmarket also

[Chris]

This would have happened anyway, wheres theres money theres scammers. Im betting major cities with uber have their blackmarket also

Scamming and blackmarket are two very different things. Scamming is essentially theft, and your reputation would take a dive in the black market, especially here where reputation is key.

[waltky]

Uber Suspends Self-driving Car Program...


Uber Suspends Self-driving Car Program After Arizona Crash
March 25, 2017 — Uber Technologies Inc suspended its pilot program for driverless cars on Saturday (March 25th) after a vehicle equipped with the nascent technology crashed on an Arizona roadway, the ride-hailing company and local police said.

The accident, the latest involving a self-driving vehicle operated by one of several companies experimenting with autonomous vehicles, caused no serious injuries, Uber said. Even so, the company said it was grounding driverless cars involved in a pilot program in Arizona, Pittsburgh and San Francisco pending the outcome of investigation into the crash on Friday evening in Tempe. The accident occurred when the driver of a second vehicle "failed to yield" to the Uber vehicle while making a turn, said Josie Monte$#@!, a spokeswoman for the Tempe Police Department. Two 'safety' drivers were in the front seats of the Uber car, which was in self-driving mode at the time of the crash, Uber said in an email, a standard requirement for its self-driving vehicles. The back seat was empty.

A self-driven Volvo SUV owned and operated by Uber Technologies Inc. is flipped on its side after a collision in Tempe, Ariz.

Photos and a video posted on Twitter by Fresco News, a service that sells content to news outlets, showed a Volvo SUV flipped on its side after an apparent collision involving two other, slightly damaged cars. Uber said the images appeared to be from the Tempe crash scene. When Uber launched the pilot program in Pittsburgh last year, it said that driverless cars "require human intervention in many conditions, including bad weather." It also said the new technology had the potential to reduce the number of traffic accidents in the country. The accident is not the first time a self-driving car has been involved in a collision. A driver of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S car operating in autopilot mode was killed in a collision with a truck in Williston, Florida in 2016.


A self-driving vehicle operated by Alphabet Inc's Google was involved in a crash last year in Mountain View, California, striking a bus while attempting to navigate around an obstacle. The collision comes days after Uber's former president Jeff Jones quit less than seven months after joining the San Francisco-based company, the latest in a string of high-level executives who have departed in recent months. In February, Alphabet's Waymo self-driving car unit sued Uber and its Otto autonomous trucking subsidiary, alleging theft of proprietary sensor technology.


http://www.voanews.com/a/uber-suspen...h/3781866.html

[Ethereal]

It's almost as if people don't want to be "protected" by a bunch of presumptuous little control freaks. Imagine that.

[Don]

With a little peer-to-peer technology, people go right around the government!

Black Market Ride-Sharing Explodes In Austin After Voters Drive Out Uber And Lyft

"My name is Ann Kitchen and I disagree with this article!"

I read about the failure of the startups to get rides for the South by Southwest conference attendees. Phone apps crashing, drivers not showing up. The taxi cartel owns Kitchen. Uber and Lyft wanted to capitalize on the inefficiencies of the cab companies and Kitchen wanted a "level playing field" that would make them as inefficient as the cab companies. The black market is a good way to equalize things again.

[Peter1469]

3D printing will lay governments low.

[resister]

3D printing will lay governments low.

Interesting thought, still in its infancy; who knows where it will lead!