This Week In Rideshare: Empower, Driver Lockouts and Waymo.
A startup gets empowered, drivers fight lockouts and Waymo takes the lead. LegalRideshare breaks it down.
EMPOWER VS UBER
Uber has a new rival using its own playbook. NY Times reported:
Founded in 2019, the ride-hailing start-up Empower has become a serious rival to Uber and Lyft in Washington. It now does 100,000 rides in the city each week, good for 10 percent of the local market, a larger share than the city’s taxis.
But the company has refused to register with Mr. Rogers’s agency, meaning that it operates in the city illegally. While drivers and riders have taken to Empower because of its cheap prices, its rapid growth has been met with mounting legal troubles, and now, Mr. Rogers and Brianne Nadeau, a member of the District of Columbia Council who leads the Committee on Public Works and Operations, are making a push to shut it down.
The start-up has racked up over $100 million in unpaid fines. It is being investigated by the Council and has been sued by the D.C. attorney general’s office. Last month, a Superior Court judge ordered the company to cease operations.
To some regulators, Empower’s tactics are more than just familiar — they’re a page out of Uber’s playbook from when it arrived in Washington a decade ago and wrested control of the transit market from taxi companies.
DRIVERS FIGHT NYC LOOPHOLE
Drivers are fighting the NYC lockouts. NY Times reported:
Amadou Diallo, 38, is one of many drivers who say the lockouts have severely affected his take-home pay. Mr. Diallo, who has been driving full-time for Uber and Lyft for four years, said he used to make up to $350 on a given weekend day, before expenses, but is now making less than $200 during such shifts because of the lockouts.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission, the city agency that oversees the ride-share companies, plans to amend the driver pay law early next year to prevent the companies from engaging in lockouts. As the city mulls over how it will adjust the law, unions that represent drivers have made their demands clear, and so have Uber and Lyft.
The Independent Drivers Guild, which represents around 80,000 for-hire drivers in New York City, demanded this week that the city increase the amount of available work by limiting the pool of new Uber and Lyft drivers, which the union believes would end the lockouts.
WAYMO TAKES THE LEAD
It’s been a rough year for robotaxis… but not for Waymo. The Verge reported:
Chief among those is the number 4 million, which is how many driverless rides the company provided in the three cities in which it operates: Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Waymo says it has provided a total of 5 million driverless rides in its three key markets, which means nearly all of its growth took place this year alone.
The fact that Waymo has facilitated 4 million trips in three cities, while only serving one airport, is pretty amazing and could speak to the company’s future prospects as its technology continues to mature. Airports are a major source of revenue for human-powered ridehail companies like Uber and Lyft.
Safety is also a big hurdle. While Waymo has published a number of studies that indicate its vehicles are safer than human drivers, there are still a lot of lingering questions around passenger safety. Waymo vehicles have been targeted for harassment and vandalism. And they have occasionally come into conflict with emergency vehicles.
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