Edit: Why am I being downvoted? These are legitimate questions. I'm not criticizing the minimum wage. I'm genuinely curious as to how it actually works.
This also still runs into the question of what happens if the driver is driving for multiple services? They may have relatively little idle time, but each independent service sees the driver as having a lot of idle time (any time they're on a competitor's job).
So it sounds like this isn't an actual hourly minimum wage, but instead a time/distance-based formula that's supposed to be equivalent. Whether that's based on 100% ridership or past averages isn't specified. Unfortunately the article doesn't link to the actual legislation, nor does any of the other articles I found from a cursory web search, so details seem to be lacking. (I really wish news articles would link to authoritative sources...)
After a few years when they get bad enough they can start to blame the poor quality on "private corporations" and people will eat it up. Then they'll outright ban them and they'll be back to taxis.
If people consume it privately, regulate it until it's so unusable that the government version is adopted.
"The equivalent wage for drivers, who are considered independent contractors and have to cover their own expenses, is $17.22."
It's up from 15$ baseline so I assume 2.22$/hr is what they benchmark fuel/maintenance to cost.
What they consider "expenses" there isn't specified, but that would put their estimate for driver costs at over $10/hour. Which actually seems more reasonable, given the cost of fuel.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125818/uber-lyft-ride-s...
They should really have let the free market play its hand here. To take the pressure off medallion owners, add some 0.5% tax per ride and use the collections to buy out some medallions.
Setting a min wage is the wrong way to go about it. The whole point of progress is to make things cheaper.
Banks need to suck it up. I don't care about them. They cal lay off some execs to make up that money if they want to.
this is all down to a union exercising its control over city politicians and having them to their bidding by distorting the facts and attacking those facts instead of the truth
