The chaotic cabdriver protest that clogged traffic and stranded travelers at San Francisco International Airport on Monday night will likely not be the last battle in the war between traditional taxis and on-demand ride services like Uber and Lyft.
A recently organized coalition of San Francisco taxi drivers, pleased with the impact of the protest, vowed Tuesday to bring more disruption to SFO unless the airport director agrees to discuss their concerns that the ride services are being given an unfair advantage in serving the airport.
“That’s just a sample that we showed them,” said Harbir Singh, a taxi driver and board member of the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance, which organized the protest. “We will do it again and again, every now and then. They have to listen to us.”
The protest was the latest skirmish in the ongoing fight between San Francisco’s much-maligned taxi industry and the technology-driven ride-service startups that use untrained drivers in personal cars and are summoned by smartphone apps. Taxi operators complain that the newcomers are barely regulated while the ride services argue that the cab industry was a monopoly in need of a shakeup.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-taxi-drivers-promise-a-repeat-of-airport-5902765.php#photo-7160431
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Is Uber the worst company in Silicon Valley? The taxi app company has proved to be one of the most aggressive of the new generation of tech startups – showing a willingness to take “disruption” to new heights. Governments, states, taxi drivers, tax authorities, rivals, even blind people – all have come up against Uber and lost.
On Monday, the company stepped it up a gear when it was revealed that at least one senior executive at Uber had considered a smear campaign against one journalist who has had the temerity to question the company’s ethics.
At a private dinner last week at Manhattan’s Waverly Inn, Uber’s senior vice-president of business, Emil Michael, suggested the company could spend “a million dollars” to hire “four top opposition researchers and four journalists” to “help Uber fight back against the press” by looking into personal lives of reporters who write unflattering stories about the company, BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith reported.
The meeting was part of a series of events apparently meant to be a “charm offensive” to woo the media. Among the attendees for at least one of the events were Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick, BuzzFeed’s Smith and Johana Bhuiyan, the actor Ed Norton, Arianna Huffington, and, reportedly, representatives of the New York Times, Business Insider, Capital New York and Newsweek. Smith was there as a guest of columnist Michael Wolff.
When somebody at the table at the dinner suggested the plan could be problematic for Uber, he allegedly replied: “Nobody would know it was us.” Well, they do now.
On Tuesday, Kalanick tweeted an apology to Lacy and said Michael’s comments “showed a lack of leadership, a lack of humanity, and a departure from our values and ideals.” He said, however, that “folks who makes mistakes can learn from them … and that also goes for Emil,” suggesting that Michael would be remaining with the company.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/18/uber-worst-company-silicon-valley
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