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Strangers in cars with candy

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This situation between the Land Transportation Franchising & Regulatory Board vs. Uber is bringing back memories.

Back when apps like Uber and Air BnB were new, it didn’t seem like something that would take, or if it took, not something that would last. I just couldn’t see it as something I would ever try.

It’s easy to be iffy about newfangled approaches to the sharing economy. Maybe it’s an ingrained distrust of anything that promises to shake up the status quo. Maybe it’s the universal mentality that a registered business is legit, and legitimacy equals trustworthiness. Or maybe it’s just the older we get, the less change we embrace.

The comfort of the familiar is a rut we all get stuck in, the root of the reason Throwback Thursday exists. It’s flawed reasoning, I admit. But it’s worked for so many years, and you know what they say about fixing what ain’t broke.

If I’m at all honest, the real reason I was iffy about Uber is I have deeply- ingrained trust issues. Issues that began with otap. To this day, the sight of it triggers memories of lost innocence, and I always suppress the urge to hiss at a display of Shamrock’s best.

The year was 1999. To a teenager on her own in a a big city, on holiday for the first time, Cebu was a magical place. It was all fun and games up until I needed a ticket home. Times being what they were, and Google maps being non-existent, I inevitably got lost searching for the ticketing office of George & Peter Lines. Directions were needed, nothing that a smile and a few words of thanks wouldn’t fix.

Or so I thought. Long story short, I asked an otap vendor. He was so eager to help, he roped in a friend, who had one of those trikes you see at piers for ferrying people with heavy luggage around.

The good news? I found the ticketing office. The bad? I came home with P500 worth of otap and a lifelong distrust of strangers.

Clearly, the lesson here is that otap is evil. Oh, and get directions from someone who isn’t incentivized to benefit from your ignorance (like a policeman), and learn to say no.

Strangers do not always wish you well. This is why it took me forever to come around to using Uber.

The idea of getting into a car owned by a random person unaffiliated with any known cab company sounded like a recipe for disaster. Who would this driver answer to? A faceless app? It sounded like chaos. It sounded like anarchy. It sounded like I might disappear forever, my face on milk cartons across the land, my remains exhumed 20 years later when what used to be swamp land is excavated to make way for a new gas station.

And then I woke up late for the umpteenth time, took a cab to work because being employed is good, and I’d like to remain that way, and realized the cost of the cab ride was almost half of what I earn in a day.

The next time it happened, I took the Uber plunge, and the price difference was astounding. Toronto’s cab issue is more about price, than it is about meters being jerry-rigged, or drivers intentionally taking the long way round to run up the tab, the way it can get in cities like Manila or Cebu.

Uber lets riders rate drivers, and vice versa. Anyone who uses the app has a star rating, and potential passengers can view the driver’s star rating, and decide whether or not to proceed with a trip. Too low, and Uber itself prevents the car owner from being an Uber driver. In turn, Uber drivers can also decline passengers with low star rating. It’s a fairly democratic way to ensure that everyone involved in the transaction behaves themselves.

What sealed the deal for me wasn’t just the cashless transaction — the cost of the ride is automatically taken out of your credit card at the end of the trip so no money actually changes hands, unless you want to tip the driver — it was the ability to send the status of a trip to someone who can track the route you take as you’re taking it.

Uber utilizes the GPS in one’s phone, enabling the person to whom you’ve sent a link to track your whereabouts during the trip. It helps give peace of mind, banishing all thought of a future that looks a Soul Asylum music video. It’s not a hundred percent secure — the risk of sexual assault is still there, whether by cab or Uber/GrabCar/Lyft — but it’s still a good security measure.

Uber, Lyft, and Grab exist because someone got sick of paying through the nose for a cab, and decided to do something about it. The cost is significantly lower.

This newfangled approach to the sharing economy works. While not all taxis and taxi drivers in the Philippines are bad, there are enough bad apples to give the whole system a bad name.

If the LTFRB wants to win this, they’ll need to come up with a similar system that combines savings, security, and customer feedback as effectively as Uber does.

________________________

Author’s Twitter: @nikkajow

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