Friday, February 02, 2018

Gizmodo has this article wrong.

It should read - Uber and Lyft AND ZIPCAR Have a Hot New Idea for Screwing Over City-Dwellers.

"The arrival of autonomous vehicles is an inevitability, so it makes sense that before mass adoption hits, companies like Lyft and Uber would want to band together to determine what our self-driving future will look like. Sounds pretty harmless, right?

Well, not so fast, because a new pledge by 15 big-name transportation companies seems designed to screw over city-dwellers who want to ride in their own self-driving cars. Item #10 of the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities, co-signed yesterday by Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, and Didi Chuxing (China’s largest ride-sharing service), reads as follows:"

I have never been to a conference where Uber attended, but a HAVE been to a conference where Zipcar and Lyft were. It seems like these two have gotten pretty cozey. And frankly I walked away pretty frightened by Zipcars philosophy.

That company or their previous co-founder is super socialist and she speaks to governments ALL THE TIME. She 's on an advisory panel setting agenda. Not only do they want to ban everyone else from driving autonomous cars, but they want to ban you from driving all cars by charging you by the mile fee. Basically forcing you into only the option THEY give you. Which is basically having less cars by punishing you financially. Don't believe me? Here is a handy video of one of the co-founders basically giving the same speech I saw. Skip to about 1 minute 40.



If you want to be super bored you can watch her TED talk where she predicted in 10 years we would have a 3 degree rise in temps resulting in 50% species elimination. She gave this talk in 2008 BTW.
If you skip ahead to 6 minutes 17 she starts talking about road pricing.

3 comments:

  1. I had a membership with Zipcar because I had a membership with Flexcar (and also i-Go in Chicago) ...

    It was for all of the right economic reasons, of course: I didn't have to waste time going to get a rental in an emergency or if I'd left my vehicle off for service because the car I could rent was usually the one parked in front of my building.

    Then Flexcar became Zipcar, and the fees started to go up and up. They made the default insurance coverage worse so they could sell you a "full coverage waiver", which on an annual plan for me meant $145 per year including the membership fee.

    I'd kept it because it seemed like a good backup plan despite several moves.

    Now I'm moving to an area that's actually somewhat close to an AVIS rental location, and I actually have an AVIS black card because of all of my business rentals through them. They routinely give me 35% to 50% off rentals because of this, and the local rental agency doesn't mind picking me up or dropping me off.

    What does a Zipcar membership do for you at AVIS, which owns Zipcar now?

    Absolutely nothing, so I finally booted Zipcar in November after they sent me a $145 invoice for 2018. That's not for a single day's rental or even a single hour of vehicle time, that's just so they can keep your information as active in their database for another year. Of course, AVIS charges me zero for their black card service because they want the business.

    Zipcar actually booted this crazy vehicle socialist you mentioned a few years before I'd joined up, and when I joined Flexcar, it was actually controlled by Steve Case.

    I see a bigger problem with most US cities, and it's one I call "the donut hole problem": urban liberals and their allies have made living in city centers awful enough on an everyday basis (especially in terms of economics) that they're convincing conservatives to move elsewhere, and so US cities are moving more toward being liberal "donut holes" surrounded by conservatives who have become hardened to pleas for cash toward "roads to good intentions".

    *waves my hand and says hiyoooooooo!*

    This stuff with Zipcar and Lyft isn't helping that impression at all.

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  2. I'm glad you didn't actually mention her name because I don't really want this post searchable easily. She also thinks you should pay by the length of your vehicle. I'm not sure how they would charge for boats or uhauls. She may no longer be at zipcar, but she does speak for them. And she speaks with governments to set policy. Now I'm sure that Uber is predatory in their own way - but this woman is hell bent on taking your choices away. She also wants to make it so you have to give your car data away because you are on "their network".

    I guess I'm the one conservative living inside the donut hole. Someone has to - so the world can know what kind of crazies these people are. I was pretty pissed when I left that meeting. I felt like there were a lot of things they could do now to help traffic like let us know which lane crashes are in so we can start trying to get around it, but all they wanted to talk about was punishing people for driving and stealing their data.

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  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeSunday, February 04, 2018 7:17:00 PM

    I try not to give free advertising to moonbats, BTW. :-)

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