Uber alternatives are fine with being regulated, and do not use surge pricing.
In the wake of Uber and Lyft huffily leaving Austin, a swarm of lesser-known "ride-hailing" or "soft cab" services are rushing in to fill the void. Unlike the giants Uber and Lyft, these companies seem to be fine with following local regulations. And the big news is: not a single one of these Uber alternatives uses "surge pricing", the dynamic pricing system which Uber and Lyft use to manipulate the market.
Dallas-based GetMe shows an absolutely insane number of cars available on their app. Uber always tried to make their over-saturation less noticeable by limiting the number of visible cars to 8 or so. GetMe shows so many cars available it actually interferes with the screen refreshing rate. It might also be daunting to would-be GetMe drivers -- how easy can it be to make money with this much competition?
Playing the Lyft to GetMe's Uber is Fare, founded in Phoenix. Part of Fare's selling point is that they claim to be friendlier to drivers. They appear to be far, far behind GetMe in terms of drivers available, but that might be a good thing as far as sustainability of the network is concerned.
Back in 2012, when Uber was just a limousine dispatching service, Tickengo was one of the first companies to go the "ridesharing" route. Since rebranding as Wingz, they have focused exclusively on airport rides--until now. Their new "WingzAround" service, available only in Austin, gets back to their roots. It's interesting that, while both Fare and GetMe's apps follow the map-based style which has become the e-hailing standard, Wingz is sticking with a text-based alternative format, as you can see from this screenshot.
Finally, there is Austin's licensed taxi app, Hail A Cab. Unfortunately this app uses a very old-fashioned (circa 2010) style of map-based format in which you can't see the available cabs until after you have ordered one. Nobody likes that, guys. The licensed cab industry in Austin might want to try attracting a more up-to-date taxi app such as Flywheel.
Certainly the time to roll out a competitive alternative is now, while the elephants are out of the room. If any of these smaller, more driver and passenger friendly alternatives can take hold before Uber and Lyft come crawling back, Austin could invent the future of e-hailing: locally regulated, and free of surge-pricing.
Golden Gate Avenue in 1911. Detail of SFMTA photo U02934 . SFMTA Photo | sfmta.com/photo
The past and future of transportation history mingle in this great photo of Golden Gate avenue in 1911, from the SFMTA photo archive. I don't just mean the mix of horse-drawn and motorized vehicles in the street: what's most interesting about this photo is the presence of a livery stable, a full-service garage, and a taxicab company, all in the same shot.
At the center, the Santa Clara Stables, one of the great old livery stables of the city. In the 1800s, if you needed to rent a horse or a carriage, or a place to keep a horse and carriage, this was where you came. Like many livery stables, the Santa Clara also ran a small fleet of hacks. Rebuilt after the fire, in 1911 the Santa Clara only had one more year of existence left before it would be shut down and its inventory sold at auction.
In the foreground can be seen the Mission-style facade of the Golden Gate Garage. This beautiful old garage has been described as "surprisingly lyrical" by Mark Kessler, author of an amazing book on The Early Public Garages of San Francisco. Kessler notes that, by adopting an architectural style associated with Southern Pacific railroad stations, the Golden Gate “relies upon a continuity of imagery
to assert that the garage is the successor to the train station, and
the car is successor to the train.” More obviously, it was the successor to the livery stable up the street. Boasting a lounge for chauffeurs (waiting around the garage while their employers shopped, dined, etc.), the Golden Gate was also involved in the auto livery business, and at one point housed a taxi service. Now a mere parking garage, the building still stands at 64 Golden Gate, somewhat neglected and under-appreciated, like most old garages.
Alco Taxicab Company, 360 Golden Gate. Detail of SFMTA photo U02934.SFMTA Photo | sfmta.com/photo
And in the distance, the sign for the Alco Taxicab Company peeks over a building. This is the kind of cab company that would last out the Twentieth Century, long after livery stables and full-service garages had been forgotten. In this year of 1911, one of Alco's drivers was a young Malcolm Loughead, who would later found the Lockheed corporation with his brother Allen.
(See here for more on livery stables and cab history in San Francisco.)
Continuing the jitney-related theme of last month’sposts, let’s explore the history of jitneys in song.
"He packed them on the fenders/ And he packed 'em on the hood;" Sheet music for Mister Whitney's Little Jitney Bus.
“Jitneys,” named after the slang term for a nickel, got their start in late 1914 in Los Angeles, where down-on-their-luck auto owners first got the idea of driving along street car routes, giving rides for the same 5-cent price as the streetcar. The idea caught on quickly due to a rise in unemployment that came with the beginning of World War One. The “jitney craze” was matched by a slew of songs giving voice to the excitement, romance, and frustration of the early jitneys.
Many of the early jitney songs share a common narrative. In the first verse, everyone is complaining about the poor economy:
O'Grady phoned to me
In great perplexity
That the times are getting harder ev’ry day
And said with moans and sighs
That he must economize,
Cut out the booze and throw his pipe away;
The song’s protagonist starts driving a jitney, and economic success, mixed with occasional hilarity (and lots of nickel/pickle rhymes), quickly follows:
He used to save the coupons that cigar stores give away,
And that was all that he had left upon the fatal day.
He gathered all the coupons and he tied them with a cord,
He took them down, and turned them in and got himself a “Ford.”
(Mister Whitney’s Little Jitney Bus, 1915)
Father is driving a Jitney bus from the station to the park,
And soon I know he'll be a millionaire,
The stove in the kitchen has been ignored,
Dear mother is renting a "Can't Af-Ford"
For a half a dime she'll take you anywhere;
(Father Is Driving A Jitney Bus, 1915)
The fuel he used was very queer,
He ran the car on “Ehret’s” beer;
His engine was in perfect tune,
The car would stop at each saloon.
(Mister Whitney’s Little Jitney Bus, 1915)
Plenty of songs told of the joys of riding in a jitney bus. For many people this was their first experience riding in an automobile, which had previously been a privilege known only by the rich:
Take me out in a jitney bus and pose as a millionaire,
I know a man with a Ford machine who will take us anywhere;
We can see the sights of the city, and have loving here and there,
One of the best known early jitney songs, “Gasoline Gus And His Jitney Bus,” paints a more questionable view of the jitney. Gasoline Gus (named after a taxi-driving comic strip character of the day) buys an extremely cheap jitney bus for a dollar and 20 cents (most jitney drivers did buy used cars, but these started at around $300 at the time). Not only does he fuel his car with gasoline and gin (and hilarity ensues), he packs as many customers into the vehicle as possible:
Prudes of the day worried that jitneys promoted immoral behavior, so it is perhaps fitting that, in the song, Gasoline Gus ends up in Hell, where he elopes with the Devil’s wife.
The devil frowned; said, "Take him out
And let him ride my imps about."
In fifteen minutes, big as life,
He was making love to the devil's wife.
Oh, Gus, Gus, Gasoline Gus,
Gasoline Gus and his jitney bus.
(Gasoline Gus And His Jitney Bus, 1915)
With the low fare of only a nickel, and intense competition from unlimited numbers of other jitneys, many jitney drivers ran their vehicles into the ground pretty quickly. Some songs joked about the likelihood of breakdowns while riding:
Come along with us, we’ll hop a jitney bus
And then we’ll ride all over town
Just get aboard, any old Ford,
Find one that never breaks down! (It can’t be done!)
Hear the driver calling us, he’ll soon be hauling us
The idea that you could hop into “any old Ford” for a 5-cent ride didn’t necessarily sit well with everybody. A parody of the famous anti-war song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier” tells the story of a man driving his private car who is repeatedly accosted by would-be passengers; he responds:
You’d better take the streetcar right away, sir,
You’re the meanest man I’ve ever seen;
You’re in an awful pickle, Take back your goll darned nickel,
There were perhaps dozens of songs written about jitneys in 1915—after 1915, not so many. Like the jitney craze itself, the jitney song craze came and went in the blink of an eye. Jitneys, of course, did not die out everywhere, and continued to make occasional appearances in song, such as in Cole Porter’s 1934 “Anything Goes,” lamenting the Depression:
When folks who still can ride in jitneys
Find out Vanderbilts and Whitneys
Lack baby clo'es,
Anything goes.
A hardworking jitney driver is the protagonist in “The Jitney Man,” recorded by Earl Hines and his orchestra in 1941:
You don't even have to call,
Look like you're going somewhere,
And I'll be there with the door wide open,
Waiting to take your fare.
I'm the jitney man,
Take you and bring you, my friend;
I'm always up and down the street;
A jitney driver's got to eat;
Boo-deedle-a-dee-ah.
I'm the jitney man!
(The Jitney Man, 1941)
But outside the dwindling number of cities in which jitneys still plied for hire, the jitney bus was being forgotten. By the time the teenage newlyweds in Chuck Berry’s 1964 “You Never Can Tell,” buy “a souped-up jitney, a cherry red '53,” the word “jitney” just means an old car.
But the jitney hasn’t disappeared from song entirely. Let’s end with a 2011 song by Nina Katchadourian, about a California girl who moves to New York City. She has heard all about this exotic "jitney" they have there, and is excited to ride it... only to discover that, to her disappointment:
We control the horizontal; we control the vertical.
Kalamazoo
Uber driver and shooting suspect Jason Dalton’s story of being possessed by the Uber app is only the latest in a long history of
such stories, in which people have attributed paranormal or spiritual
powers to new technologies. Tales of otherworldly beings
communicating through the telegraph, radio, television, or computer
screen are motivated by the anxieties that arise with social and
political changes driven by new forms of communication and
action-at-a-distance. Today, while Uber’s PR department scrambles to keep the phrase “going Uber” from becoming an updated version of “going postal,” it is worth looking more
closely at Dalton’s delusions for some insight into the particular
fears and dreams of our up-and-coming app-governed existence.
In
his book Haunted Media,
Jeffrey Sconce describes the long history of stories of possession
and paranormal activity surrounding new and unfamiliar technologies.
The telegraph and radio gave rise to stories of spirit possession and
the entire phenomenon of the spirit “medium:” a human who, not
unlike a radio, was “tuned” to frequencies through which they
could talk to the dead. Television and the internet inspired stories
of mind control, alien invasion, and being trapped in worlds of
illusion. In each case, the paranormal stories that have swirled
around new technologies boil down to the hopes and fears these
technologies inspire, and such questions as:
how
can you talk with someone who isn’t present?
how
can these images seem so real when we know they are not?
how
can we make sense of this invisible power that flows all around us,
and through us?
We
may laugh today at people being afraid of telephones and radios, but
Dalton’s story owes more than a little to contemporary cultural
anxieties over the increasing saturation of our lives with apps
designed to influence, and to some extent to control, human behavior.
Though exaggerated by his paranoia, each of Dalton’s crazy claims
reflect the actual controls and suggestions made by the real Uber
app.
In
his interview with police, Dalton made these claims:
1. Dalton saw an
“Eastern Star” or “devil head” in the app.
2. The app triggered Dalton's actions with colors and sounds.
3. Dalton
described possession by the app as more of a “feeling” than a
“telling.”
4. Dalton felt
that the app was telling him where to drive.
5. Dalton felt
that the app gave him special abilities or protections.
6. Through the
Uber app, Dalton felt connected to some greater, inexplicable power.
Each of the quotes below (in italics) are from the interview notes
made by officers Moorian and Ghiringhelli, and made available by WZZM in Kalamazoo.
1. Dalton saw an
“Eastern Star” or “devil head” in the app.
Dalton said
that if we only knew, it would blow our mind. Dalton then explains
how when he opens up the Uber taxi App a symbol appeared and he
recognized that symbol as the Eastern Star symbol. Dalton
acknowledged that he recognized the Uber symbol as being that of the
Eastern star and a devil head popped up on his screen and when he
pressed the button on the app, that is when all the problems started.
Uber did just change its logo, but neither the old nor the new logo
matches the “devil’s head” described by Dalton. Nevertheless,
as Uber drivers have already started pointing out over at
uberpeople.net, there are in fact upside-down five-pointed stars (as
well as rightside-up ones) all over the background of the
newly-designed app. Dalton seems to have fixated on this.
TruYouber: Sure,
the new Uber app is covered with up and down-facing pentagrams. But
isn’t it more disturbing that it is clearly modeled after the logo of the world-conquering corporation in the dystopian Dave Eggers novel, The
Circle?
It was not enough for the devil’s head logo to simply be there:
Dalton himself had to speak its name for it to take power over him.
When he recognized the symbol and “spoke what the symbol was,” it
responded (he claimed) by turning from red to black.
Dalton said
that when the Uber symbol is red, it is just picking up and dropping
off people, but when he recognized the symbol and spoke what the
symbol was, the color changed from red to black.
Dalton said he
wishes he would never have spoken what that symbol was when he saw it
on his phone. Dalton described the devil figure as a horned cow head
or something like that and then it would give you an assignment and
it would literally take over your whole body.
Dalton said
that if he wouldve never ever mentioned the Uber symbol resembling
the Eastern Star, he never wouldve had any problems.
2. The app triggered Dalton's actions with colors and sounds.
Dalton was
asked what was different tonight from the other nights and he said as
a driver partner with Uber, the icon is red and it had changed to
black tonight.
The red-to-black shift which Dalton reported seeing is a bit harder
to explain. On a normal, non-possessed Uber driver app, the screen
does go black—right before a ride request, after which the screen
zooms in on a blue circle centered on the hailer’s location, while
a ringing/beeping sound alerts the driver to touch the screen to
accept the ride. Dalton reported such beeping when the app was taking
control of him.
I asked Dalton
why the system allowed him to stop for the officers and Dalton said
that he didn’t know. Dalton then told us that he did know one
thing, that when the system switched from black to red and when the
officer was about to say something to him it went beep beep beep for
Dalton to log back into the system. ... Dalton said that when the
system switched back is when Dalton got his presence back.
The Uber app is, of course, designed to influence driver behavior
through the control of information, and through certain visual and
audio cues; and Uber does have a history of experimenting on driver
behavior by tinkering with the app. Nevertheless, it is probably safe
to assume (barring further revelations) that Dalton hallucinated this
whole red-to-black shift.
Dalton said
that as soon as the police officer stopped him tonight, the symbol
went from black to red and he felt like he was no longer being
guided. Dalton said that was the reason he didnt shoot the officer
because the app went from black back to red. Dalton explained that
when the symbol turns to black, it literally has control over you. I
asked Dalton why didnt he just uninstall the app and he said it sort
of had you at a certain point.
3. Dalton
described possession by the app as more of a “feeling” than a
“telling.”
Dalton said it
also told him to be available all the time. ...he said it wasnt like
a telling, it was more of like a control. ...Dalton said that Uber
requires a driver to have a car newer than 2007 and when you plug
into it, you can actually feel the presence on you.
Significantly, Dalton said that the app didn’t tell him what
to do; it rather took control of him through a sort of feeling
of presence. This makes sense, because this is just how algorithms
influence human behavior, by feeling or intuition, rather then
“telling” per se. Paranoias about receiving instructions are so
last century—befitting antiquated technologies like radio or
television. Today, instead of being given instructions, we rely on
algorithms working in the background to guide our behavior; apps like
Uber work like video games, by giving users a circumscribed freedom
of action within which we intuit or “feel out” the algorithms
which assign value to our actions. McKenzie Wark calls this an
“intuitive relation to the algorithm;” the most successful game
players, or Uber drivers, are those who have “most fully
internalized” the algorithm.
Dalton certainly internalized the algorithm; unfortunately, he seems
to have confused Uber’s taxi game with a FPS.
Dalton said
that he could only tell us that it has the ability to take you over.
We confirmed with Dalton that he was referring to the Uber app and
Dalton said yes. Dalton then told us that it feels like it is coming
from the phone itself and he didnt know how to describe that. ...
Dalton said that as he was sitting there with us, it was almost like
artificial intelligence that can tap into your body.
Dalton then
said that is why he is trying to tell us it is like an artificial
presence.
Dalton said
that it would take you over to the point that you are like a puppet.
4. Dalton felt
that the app was telling him where to drive.
This one is hardly surprising. Uber driver apps are automatically
integrated with Google Maps or with Waze, and while Uber drivers are
not technically required to use and follow GPS, they are
strongly encouraged to do so. Dalton seems to have interpreted
this suggestion as mandatory.
I asked Dalton
where he was headed when he was stopped and Dalton said that the
system was telling him to drive. I asked Dalton if he knew where it
was telling him to drive and Dalton said that the system was
literally telling him to just take turns (as he made a motion with
both hands on a steering wheel making turns).
Dalton said
that it starts out that you have to follow the navigation, but it
gets to the point where you dont have to drive at all, the car just
goes. Dalton said that as long as you have a 2007 or newer car, your
phone can link through your car.
Great news for driverless car fans: there is no need to wait five or ten years for scientists to develop
self-driving cars when Uber can achieve the same effect right now
through the magic of spirit possession!
5. Dalton felt
that the app gave him special abilities or protections.
This
is one of the most interesting aspects of Dalton’s story. Just like
in any deal with the devil, you lose control of yourself, but you
gain certain perks in return.
Dalton then
told us that when the app would turn from red to black and it was a 5
star driver that is when it was telling you you could drive just as
fast as you wanted to.
This
tallies with the stories told by several of Dalton’s passengers,
that he drove insanely fast, and blew through stop signs and
stoplights. The app, apparently, was giving him superhuman driving
powers and privileges.
Dalton said
that the Iphone can take you over. Dalton explained how you can drive
over 100mph and go through stop signs and you can just get places.
The five-star rating system is one of the means whereby Uber (and its
similar competitors) encourage drivers and passengers to feel like
they have some power within the system. Dalton seems to have taken
this very seriously:
Dalton
explained how there is a customer service score on Uber and when he
tapped the button, he could say anything he wanted to about the
person and it would be anonymous. Dalton then said that he could hear
other peoples phones ding and their score or rating would go down.
6. Through the
Uber app, Dalton felt connected to some greater, inexplicable power.
Dalton attributed
great knowledge and power to the Uber app, or some greater power that
it was “attached to.”
Dalton said he was seeing himself
from outside of his body. Dalton said that this thing knows where
everything is through your phone. Dalton said that it knows
everything and when I asked what it was he said whatever Uber is
attached to.
Dalton
said that there is something bigger than Uber just picking up people
and dropping them off.
Isn’t this exactly what Uber’s CEO has been claiming all along?
The New Spooks
Dalton then told us that he is not a killer and he knows that he
has killed.
Let’s go out on a limb here and assume that the Uber app did not
make Dalton shoot all those people. He did it himself. He was
bonkers, and confronted with the horror of what he himself had done,
he rejected his own actions and blamed them on the conveniently
available construct, the “app.” Which we all know to be an
uncanny, and untrustworthy, interloper in our social relations. Jason Dalton thought he was being controlled by the app, but, in truth, he had split himself in two—one half a helpless puppet, haplessly looking on while the other half, the ghost in the machine, wrought mayhem.
Or maybe it wasn't Dalton who split himself in two. The very working of the app involves the tracking and profiling of a "data double," a spectral data-Dalton corresponding to the human Dalton, and through which the human Dalton can be tracked, profiled, and manipulated. And Dalton isn’t the only person having trouble telling where his own actions end, and algorithmic controls begin.
Apps
like Uber (and Google, Instagram, etc.), through which algorithms
massage us, are popular because we embrace the controls they exert on
human interactions. They really do seem to know everything, or at
least a lot of things. They promise us great new powers, at a
(Faustian) bargain. In Uber’s case, the app provides a
preprogrammed set of social roles—driver, passenger—into which
actual humans can be plugged-in, interchangeably. The app promises freedom, while delivering stress, exploitation, and constant surveillance. Both YouTube and the news are full of videos of drivers having "Uber meltdowns" in which they quit the job, often spectacularly—though thankfully, not as bloodily as Dalton did.
Dalton's tale opens up all kinds of hauntological questions about the dawning algorithmic era. To what extent was it all his own paranoid delusion,
and to what extent the new experience of app-enabled
alienation? Haunted by our data shadows, all of our senses of individuality and identity, of
agency and responsibility, may be scrambled and shuffled by the
rollout of socially mediating algorithms. Will we recognize the
future that is created as our own doing, or attribute it to the
grotesque ideas of an algorithmic brain?
The story of San Francisco's early jitneys is a lot more complicated, and interesting, than the Free-Market fables that are being told about them.
On Fillmore at Sutter in 1920, a jitney driver waits for passengers to cross the street.
Detail of SFMTA photo U06961. SFMTA Photo
| sfmta.com/photo
As I wrote last week, San Francisco’s famous jitney tradition may have just come to
an end after a little over 100 years. The timing is ironic: jitneys
are being claimed as inspiration by a whole host of new “disruptive”
app-enabled transportation companies. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick even proclaimed his own company as the modern equivalent of the jitneys, which he believes were “regulated
completely out of existence” by over-regulation soon after they
started. The message: don’t regulate Uber!
The real history
of the jitneys is a good deal more complicated than this. It does not
fit conveniently into the fantasies of deregulation enthusiasts like
Kalanick, but instead illustrates how both regulatory systems and
markets (“free” or otherwise) are produced through power
struggles between competing interests. Here are a few inconvenient facts about jitney history:
Jitneys helped promote the automobilization of city streets.
The numbers of early jitneys were unsustainable.
Jitneys survived because their drivers unionized.
In an important sense, Uber is more like the old streetcar monopoly, than like the jitney.
We can get a glimpse of this
history in some beautiful photographs of early San Francisco jitneys
from the SFMTA Photo Archive.
One of the most
fascinating things about most of the photos in the MTA's archive is how
utterly boring their intended subject matter would be to anyone but
the wonkiest transport historian. In most images, the focus is on
streetcar tracks before, during, or after repair work.
Streetcar tracks at 18th and Castro. SFMTA Photo
| sfmta.com/photo
But the sides of
the frame are filled with the life of the city, captured
unintentionally. This photo of a summer afternoon at 18th
and Castro in 1915 includes pedestrians, window shoppers,
horse-drawn carts, an approaching streetcar, and newsboys hawking
papers. This accidental richness reveals the lively street life of
the economically diverse, and very pedestrian, city that streetcars,
cable cars, and early jitneys served. Most interesting for our
purposes is the line of jitneys busily loading passengers:
Jitneys at 18th and Castro, July 1915. Detail of photo U04909 at SFMTA archive.
SFMTA Photo
| sfmta.com/photo
“Jitneys,”
named after the slang term for a nickel, got their start in late 1914
in Los Angeles, where down-on-their-luck auto owners first got the
idea of driving along street car routes, giving rides for the same
5-cent price as the streetcar. The idea caught on quickly due to a
rise in unemployment that came with the beginning of World War One.
Automobile ownership had been expanding rapidly in the previous
years, and among the ranks of the first jitney drivers were many
recent auto buyers who, having lost their jobs, had to find a way to
put their “Can’t af-Fords” to work. Jitneys were on the streets
of San Francisco by December 1914, and the idea spread like wildfire
through the cities of the West.
The earliest
jitney drivers simply put signboards in their windshields indicating
a route (in the above photo, “Castro — Ferry”). They followed this
route picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. Unlike
the streetcar, stuck on its rails, jitney drivers could make detours,
go off route to take passengers to their doors, or turn around and
reverse direction at will to maximize business. Just like empty
taxicabs do today, they mostly followed established streetcar lines,
trying to entice waiting passengers. This antagonized the streetcar
companies, which complained that they were losing money because
jitneys were poaching their riders.
Valencia-Street jitney at Front and Market, 1915. Detail of photo U04980 at SFMTA archive.
SFMTA Photo
| sfmta.com/photo
The conflict with
streetcars was not the only controversy that assailed the early
jitney. As viewers of the famous 1906 film shot from a Market Street cable car can attest, urban street traffic was very different before
the ascendancy of the automobile (and even in the 1906 film the
number of automobiles is exaggerated by the fact that the same
half-dozen or so keep circling the camera). Pedestrians—like this
Sam Spade-looking character stepping out across Market in
front of a jitney in 1915—shared the streets with vehicles on a
much more equal basis than today. To such urban walkers, jitneys
could be a menace. Though autos had been on the city streets for over
a decade, jitneys brought them out in force, travelling en masse
down crowded streets. Jitneys were blamed for a wave of collisions
with pedestrians and other vehicles, as a natural consequence of the
rising numbers of automobiles on the streets, with a lot of inexperienced, amateur drivers at the wheel.
Jitneys in traffic at 6th and Market, 1916. Detail of photo U05299 at SFMTA archive.
SFMTA Photo
| sfmta.com/photo
Jitneys were just
as popular with riders, however, as they were dangerous for
pedestrians. For the same price as a streetcar, you could get a much
faster and more comfortable ride. For many riders, this was their
first experience riding in an automobile, which had formerly been a
privilege of the rich. Jitneys were said to spread the automobile
bug—after all, anyone could join the ranks of auto owners by buying
a used car and driving it as a jitney!
Jitneys helped promote the
automobilization of city streets.
Like TNCs today, they competed directly with fixed-route transit, and
possibly even with walking, by making short, quick trips by auto
convenient and cheap. They spread the desire for automobiles, and helped normalize the image of city streets
filled with cars, heralding the day when urban pedestrians would
be relegated to sidewalks, or derided as “jaywalkers.”
"Not A Jitney" placards. From Popular Mechanics, June 1915.
San Francisco has become so thoroughly infested with “jitney
busses” that drivers of private cars are continually having to
explain to would-be passengers that their machines are not for hire.
Hundreds of these cars competing with the traction lines are plying
the streets of the city. Several motor-car owners, tiring of being
frequently mistaken for “jitney” drivers, have labeled their
machines with signs reading, “NOT a Jitney,” the “not” being
emphasized by an encircling ring. This placard is placed on the
windshield, or in some other position where it is plainly visible to
the jitney-hunting public. (Popular Mechanics Magazine, 23:6, June 1915, p. 839).
(And as if on cue, here is a new story about someone getting into the wrong car...)
The
numbers of early jitneys were unsustainable.
Wave after wave of drivers swarmed onto the streets with dreams of
making money with jitneys, only to be driven out of business by the
oversupply of drivers and the unexpected costs of driving a personal
vehicle as a bus. This is eerily similar to Uber’s labor situation today (though it is doubtful that early jitney drivers ever commuted from Stockton or slept in the Safeway parking lot). For a while, each
new wave of jitney drivers going out of business was replaced by new
drivers jumping into the game, but this couldn’t continue forever.
Economic pressures led drivers to defer maintenance, and to speed and compete in the quest for passengers. These in turn led to a decline in the reputation of the jitney. This might already be implied in Charlie Chaplin's 1915 film A Jitney Elopement, filmed in San Francisco. The little two-seater Chaplin drives in the film would have been no use as a jitney, but it does need to be kick-started a few times, and tears through the city in a high-speed chase.
New
regulations put restrictions on jitneys, in part to protect
the streetcar industry, but also to protect the safety of passengers
and pedestrians. Accused of overcrowding Market street, and
undermining the profitability of streetcar lines, the jitneys were
pushed off Market to Mission. The results were lauded by the San
Francisco Call,but the Jitney Weekly, a
trade publication of the Jitney Bus Operators’ Union, portrayed it
as class warfare:
Cartoon protesting the limitation of jitneys to Mission Street. Jitney Weekly, September 9, 1916.
Jitneys survived because their drivers unionized. To save their
industry, jitney drivers formed associations and unions. In San
Francisco, the Jitney Bus Operators’ Union affiliated with the
Teamsters and sought to improve the jitney industry’s reputation
and viability by promoting moderate regulations (insurance
requirements, and limits on numbers of drivers) that would stabilize
the industry and head off attempts to quash jitneys altogether.
San Francisco Values: The sign on a jitney at Sutter and Fillmore in 1920 announces that a "Union Driver" is at the wheel. Higher on the windshield, that is no "Lyft" or "Uber" sign, but the Teamsters logo. Detail of photo U06961 at SFMTA archive. SFMTA Photo
| sfmta.com/photo
San Francisco was
a stronghold of the labor movement, and unionizing was an obvious
step for San Francisco’s jitney drivers. Being unionized was seen
as a necessary sign of working-class respectability. Blue-collar
jitney riders would have largely been union members and supporters,
and many people made a point of not patronizing anti-union
establishments. One of the reasons San Franciscans preferred jitneys
to streetcars in the first place was because so many of them hated—absolutely hated—the
United Railroads, which was the dominant streetcar company before the
growth of Muni. The URR had a long history of bloody confrontations
with workers, and had faced down a series of very public, and
popularly supported, strikes. As the URR was also the jitney drivers’
strongest political opponent, unionizing was a good way for jitney
drivers to gain public support and good will.
Which leads to a
significant point of contrast between TNCs and jitneys: in an
important sense, Uber is more like the old streetcar monopoly, than like the
jitney.
Whereas
jitney drivers were self-organized, Uber operates through a top-down
centralized network controlling information, pricing, and access. The
jitney expansion was unplanned; Uber hired teams of lawyers before a
single car ever hit the street. Jitneys were peer-to-peer; Uber only
pretends to be. Uber has also taken an openly anti-union stance, much
like the URR of yore, and has even gone so far as to invest money in
the development of driverless cars, in the hope of doing away with
drivers altogether.
Could Uber drivers
put together an actual peer-to-peer network that could challenge Uber
on its own turf—much like the jitney drivers challenged the URR?
Unfortunately, any such attempt would face massive difficulties
simply because of the size of the incumbent, Uber. While the URR’s
monopoly was based on the physical control of streetcar tracks,
Uber’s is based on the network effect: smaller networks just can’t
compete. And like the URR, Uber is willing and able to spend a lot of
money trying to drive competitors out of business, and to stop
unionization. Though the mechanisms by which the URR and Uber
achieved monopoly are different, the effect of de facto
spatial control is substantially the same.
The Jitney
Matures
Through the teens
there was a long struggle over just who would regulate the jitney
industry, and how. Though their numbers never returned to 1915-1916
levels, San Francisco jitneys survived, owing to a good extent to the
organizing efforts of the early jitney unions. They became a San
Francisco institution: Jack Kerouac described his experience riding
in a Mission Street jitney in On The Road:
She let me take a shower and shave, and then I said good-by and took
the bags downstairs and hailed a Frisco taxi-jitney, which was like
an ordinary taxi that ran a regular route and you could hail it from
any corner and ride to any corner you want for about fifteen cents,
cramped in with other passengers like on a bus, but talking and
telling jokes like in a private car. Mission Street that last day in
Frisco was a great riot of construction work, children playing,
whooping Negroes coming home from work, dust, excitement, the great
buzzing and vibrating hum of what is really America’s most excited
city—and overhead the pure blue sky and the joy of the foggy sea
that always rolls in at night to make everybody hungry for food and
further excitement. (On the Road, p. 218)
As documented by the late automotive historian (and San
Francisco taxi driver) Mike Sealey, San Francisco’s jitneys got
bigger over the years, following a pattern seen in other cities as
well (such as with Mexico City’s peseros). Long-wheelbase
limousines were used for many years, followed by vans. Jesus Losa,
the city’s last jitney driver, drove 23- and 25-passenger buses on
his route between 4th and Market and Caltrain. It is no
accident that jitneys tend, over time, to look more and more like
buses: though there was no love lost between the streetcar and the
jitney, modern motorized bus systems carry the dna of both.
San Francisco’s
jitney industry entered a terminal decline in the 1970s, and all but
expired in the 1980s. Several culprits can be blamed: competition from
BART; insurance expenses; and new laws forbidding the transferal of
permits. Another contributing factor seems to have been
disorganization and hostility among the city’s jitney drivers,
which prevented them from uniting to protect their industry.
Until January 20, 2016, Jitney 97, piloted by Jesus Losa, carried on the tradition alone. Uber, far from picking up the torch, may have helped drive the last real jitney out of business.
Thanks to Jesus Losa for sharing his story. Thanks also to Katherine Guyon and others at the SFMTA photo archive for enthusiastic help and great work. The archive is a great resource and everyone interested in San Francisco history should check it out at sfmta.photoshelter.com.
While pundits and CEOs spout
platitudes about jitneys, San Francisco’s last real jitney has been
driven out of business.
Real San Francisco: Jitney 97 in groovier times. Creative Commons photo by Mark Wahl (Flickr).
RIP: The San Francisco Jitney,
1914-2016
On January 20, 2016, San Francisco’s
last jitney ceased operation. Strangely, there was no media fanfare
or lament, even though jitneys are frequently in the news—not real
jitneys, mind you, but the jitneys of folklore. Jitneys are being
claimed as ancestors by all sorts of new “disruptive” modes of
transit—including Uber, Lyft, Leap, and (more plausibly) Chariot.
Yet while jitneys are being celebrated in legend, the last real
jitney quietly expires.
Jesus Losa, operator of Jitney 97,
blames operating expenses and a decline in passengers for his
troubles. He also tells a shocking tale of harassment by parking
officials around Caltrain, racking up $10,000 in tickets, even though
his is not a private vehicle, but a licensed San Francisco jitney.
It’s as if a Muni bus were ticketed each time it stopped in a bus
zone.
This harassment has also cost him
passengers. Losa’s loading zone at Caltrain was moved far from the
entrance, to the white-curb zone behind the taxi stand on
Townsend—where, he says, passengers have trouble finding him. On
top of this, parking officers, once again, ticket him if he stands in
this zone for more than five minutes, even though he drives a public
jitney, not a private vehicle, and often needs more time to fill his
23-seat bus with passengers walking over from the Caltrain entrance.
Jitneys (technically: semi-fixed route
shared vehicles for hire) first hit the streets of San Francisco just
over a hundred years ago, in late 1914. Their fortunes waxed and
waned until the 1970s, when a combination of competition from the
newly-built BART system, increased insurance costs, and changes in
licensing rules pushed them into a decline. Losa started driving his
jitney in 1972. Since 1985, his jitney, number 97, has been the only
remaining one in operation in San Francisco.
Urban Legend
Just under a month after Losa stopped
driving, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told a story about jitneys at the 2016 TED talks in Vancouver. (The presence of the CEOs of Uber and AirBnB
at the once-progressive TED talks led to some controversy, and the
speculation that “we have reached peak TED”). The version of the
jitney story that Kalanick told is one that has been tossed around by free-market apologists for the last few decades: the
jitney was a disruptive transit innovation that moved people in shared
vehicles instead of private ones; this innovation, despite being
popular, was quickly quashed by the streetcar lobby. Jitneys,
according to this story, were a long-ago innovation ahead of their
time. They are claimed as the inspiration for the new “ridesharing”
services like Uber, Lyft, etc, and serve as a lesson about the negative
consequences of over-regulation.
There are several problems with this
story—not the least being that jitneys did not disappear, but
survived (almost) up to the present, precisely in those places (such
as San Francisco) where they were
regulated. The real history is a lot more complicated than Kalanick’s
neoliberal fable (I’m planning to write about some of this history
in an upcoming post). As far as the demise of jitney 97 is concerned,
regulators do not look innocent—but neither does
Uber.
While
Losa was pushed to the back of the line on Townsend, Uber and Lyft
drivers (as documented by Kelly Dessaint) drive right up to the
front, using a zone officially reserved for Muni and bikesharing.
Mind you, they can get $288 tickets for stopping there! But this
doesn’t stop passengers from hailing there. In fact, Uber’s
passenger app encourages them to do so, indicating this as a
“Suggested Pickup Point.”
The Uber app encourages Caltrain passengers to hail from a "suggested pickup point" on Townsend, where drivers risk a $288 ticket.
It is no concern of Uber’s whether
neophytes among its rapidly turning-over horde of expendable drivers
get stung by these tickets. Any drivers who wise up and learn to
avoid picking up there are quickly replaced by clueless new recruits.
So as long as Uber drivers continue to spawn at a high enough rate
that they can throw themselves against the bus stop like wave after
wave of kamikazes, Uber can continue to service passengers right at
the Caltrain entrance. The rules are just different when you're as big as Uber.
Thrown Under The Bus
While
they try to claim its heritage, Lyft and Uber are no replacement for
the jitney. A Lyft Line or Uber Pool trip between Caltrain and Fourth
and Market (Losa’s route) costs about $5, over twice the jitney
fare, which is tied to the rate charged by Muni. Lyft Line and Uber
Pool carry between one and four passengers per trip; Jitney 97 had
seats for 23. Which means that, at their most efficient, it still
takes more than five TNC cars to carry the capacity of the last
jitney. And while Losa served the streets of San Francisco for 44 years, the typical Uber driver is lucky to last six months.
It is
powerfully ironic that the last public, licensed jitney has been
driven out of business, even while the city cuts deals with Silicon
Valley corporations to allow private tech shuttles to use the city’s
bus stops. But sadly, it isn’t really surprising that the powerful
get their way while the little guy gets squeezed out. As for Losa, he
says his plan now is to relax, and he doubts he will be able to get
back in business. When I ask him about getting some journalists
interested in telling his story, he laughs, and is skeptical that it
will do any good.
Nevertheless,
I’m writing this post in the hope that some journalist (a real one,
not the writer of some dorky blog about “taxicab subjects”) will
pick up Losa’s story. It deserves to be heard.
I know you thought you're a real
operator But I don't know why All you had was a bankroll,
babe And a glint in your eye
-- Motörhead
As of tomorrow, journalists accustomed to writing about "rideshare services such as Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar" will have one less word with which to pad their articles. The writing has been on the wall for Sidecar since at least September, when they were described here as the "Myspace of ridesharing." It is a bit ironic that Sidecar has turned out to be the first major TNC to fall, because it was always the most innovative of the three--for instance, Sidecar was the only e-hailing app with pins that looked like Kenny from South Park; what great fun!
Omigod! You killed Kenny!
One of Sidecar's most enduring "innovations" was the very idea of calling their unlicensed cab service "ridesharing" in order to avoid regulation. For this reason above all, the traditional cab industry is probably quite happy to be dancing on Sidecar's grave.
Take it away, Lemmy:
One time you was a real high-stepper On the high trapeze But you know you ran out of money Wound up on your knees
