Uber’s PR schtick was prominently on display during a recent council committee meeting in York to decide on a licence application, as reported by York Mix. For example:
Matthew Freckelton, head of cities for Uber[…]“Uber only uses drivers and vehicles that have been licensed,” he said.
“We do not use unlicensed drivers or vehicles. So a driver will get himself and a vehicle licensed by a licensing authority like yourselves, and then come to us to onboard with Uber.”
Yes, that’s how it works, and indeed how it’s worked before Mr Freckelton was even born, I’d guess. Talk about stating the obvious – it’s like applying for a pub licence, and telling councillors that they’re applying for a licence for a pub. Apart from one of the neologisms associated with Uber, but not with the traditional trade – ‘onboarding’ – it makes it sound like Uber is doing the whole world a favour by doing what similar providers have been doing for decades.
Then there’s the likes of: “He added that “our drivers can’t refuse trips to people with guide dogs or wheelchair users.”
Er, that’s the law of the land. The Equality Act. And applicable to all similar providers already in York. (And strictly speaking, it’s the broader concept of ‘assistance dogs’, as I recall it, rather than guide dogs per se.)
So all a bit of making a virtue of regulatory and licensing necessity.
Then there’s the usual PR-esque stuff about the Uber app:
Paul Kane, Uber’s UK head of safety, ran through the company’s security procedures, including the fact that all trips were tracked by GPS “so we have a record of all of the trip from from beginning to end. This helps Uber, licensing authorities and the police and with any investigations that they may want to take after after the trip, about anything that may have occurred.”
Riders could share their trip with trusted contacts and there was an emergency button on the app that called 999.
But which, of course, is common to stuff on many other apps. And it’s not as if safety features not dissimilar to some of the stuff punted by Uber wasn’t available even before apps became technically feasible. Also:
Questioned by Cllr Warters about Uber drivers regularly picking up customers from York taxi ranks, which can only be used legally by licensed Hackney drivers, Neil McGonigle, Uber’s head of driver operations, said they educated drivers about their legal duties and would take action against drivers found to be in breach.
Mr Freckelton said Uber had “a number of geofences set up to try and ensure that pickup and drop offs don’t take place on Hackney ranks”.
Assuming illegal plying for hire is a problem, then it’s difficult to see how this would prevent it. Geofencing around ranks would presumably stop Uber feeding bookings to vehicles within the relevant area. But that would appear to be all it would do. It wouldn’t stop Uber’s vehicles plying for hire on taxi ranks, nor of course anywhere else in York, the vast majority of which wouldn’t be geofenced anyway. Thus maybe a sniff of licensing councillors and officials being blinded by science – they perhaps think it’s capable of achieving something that it can’t.
(Anyway, there’s not really anything illegal per se about Uber cars picking up passengers at or near a taxi rank, as long as it’s been pre-booked.)
Asked by Cllr Kate Ravilious about wheelchair accessible vehicles, Mr Freckelton said Uber was not a fleet provider, the drivers own the vehicles. “If York licensed drivers with wheelchair accessible vehicles that on-board with our platform, then a wheelchair accessible vehicle will be bookable through the Uber app.”
What has being a ‘fleet provider’ got to do with anything? Most wheelchair accessible vehicles (WAVs) in the industry are hackney carriages, which is often a requirement of being granted a licence. Indeed, in the bigger cities in particular, all hackney carriages are WAVs. And are no more part of a ‘fleet provider’ (which in this context seems to mean owned by a business entity other than individual drivers) than Uber’s cars. The point is that Uber is almost wholly a private hire rather than hackney carriage provider (although in many locations ‘providers’ are often composed of mixed private hire and hackney carriages). This is little more than a deflection from the fact that Uber doesn’t normally offer WAVs, and has nothing really to do with providing ‘fleets’.
To be fair, however, there’s more than a hint of sarcasm in what I’ve written above. That’s because Uber are having to combat this kind of nonsense from the established York trade as reported in an earlier article, thus almost a carbon copy of the recent stuff in Aberdeen:
But Neil Rowley, chair of York Private Hire Association, told YorkMix: “Uber is still a dangerous company as they do not and never have known who is driving their cars.
“They are a faceless machine that has no human base in the cities that they work.
“All York Licensed vehicles and drivers are monitored not only by their local companies, but also by each other. Anyone could be driving an Uber as nobody checks them. Public safety is at huge risk with Uber.”
More than a decade since this kind of drivel became common currency in the trade, and industry ‘leaders’ are still coming out with it. And clearly councillors are credulous enough for Uber’s representatives to have to state the obvious to counter this disinformation. (And don’t get me started on the rose-tinted portrayal of the more locally-based legacy trade.)
On the other hand, with the assistance dog, wheelchair access and geofencing stuff, there’s more than a hint of Uber exploiting councillor credulity.
Of course, with its huge brand, gargantuan Wall Street-financed budget and army of MBAs, tech types, PR gurus, lobbyists and lawyers, Uber is a huge competitive threat to the likes of the York hackney carriage and private hire trades. But that’s really a different issue to what should have been a fairly routine licensing application, rather than something that reportedly encompassed four hours of the licensing committee meeting.