Put your money where your mouth is, Uber
Uber and Staking Mechanisms - marketplaces should be built with escrow & staking
An arrival time you can’t trust is a silent tax on your day, so let’s make the clocks pay when they’re wrong.
⚠️ Disclaimers: 834 Uber trips over 11 years as a user, and years of bus-stop loitering feed this rant.
Real Story
Paris. Bus to Beauvais airport (2h from Paris) at 13:00. It’s 12:15
Google Maps says:
18 minutes by car (I don’t have a car)
18 minutes by Uber
26 minutes by metro
I click on the Uber app, wait time 4 minutes. That was the first lie. Fine, 22 minutes is still better than metro and I don’t want to risk making a mistake navigating the tickets and metro stops.
+7 minutes, car arrives. 2nd lie. +3min (7 minutes total)
Estimated arrival in 18 minutes on Uber, Google Maps says 20 minutes.
10 minutes later, Uber says 14 minutes arrival. 3rd lie. +6 minutes, 13 mins total
10 minutes later, Uber says 5 minute arrival time. 4th lie. +5 min, 8 mins total
I finally arrive, 12:55. I have to run and can’t buy any water on the way, arrive sweaty. We went from 12:33 to 12:55, a 110% delay.
Having gone by metro, I would have had the time to drink a coffee, smoke a pipe and play some boules.
It’s a known story.
Reliability Is the Product
What you really “buy” from a ride-hail app is certainty: tap the button, get a timestamp, plan your next move. A screen that says “driver in 5” and shows a car icon inching closer feels solid, yet the count often freezes, jumps, or resets when the first driver cancels. Meanwhile, the dusty LED at a bus stop flashes BUS 23 — 5 min and, more often than not, the vehicle appears within that window.
The difference isn’t magic; it’s incentive design. Public operators publish their prediction feeds every 30 seconds and answer to regulators if the numbers drift. Ride-hail platforms, by contrast, optimise for conversion. Uber’s DeepETA system is literally tuned for “low-latency, conversion-ready predictions,” a polite way of saying the model can shade optimistic (really, they say themselves here!) This is the classic enshittification curve: early accuracy wins users, later distortions wring out more revenue.
Fix #1 Regulatory Penalties, Airline-Style
Borrow a page from aviation: turn lateness into an automatic cash liability. Under EU 261, landing three hours late triggers €250–€600 compensation, no excuses. Apply a similar rule on the curb: if the car arrives more than two minutes past the stated ETA, the rider receives a fixed payout credited instantly. EU 261 has forced airlines to tighten schedules or budget for payouts; the legal precedent exists. Consumer-protection law already forbids “false or deceptive messages,” so extending it to digital ETAs is not a far fetch. Penalties would curb blatant sandbagging.
However, these kind of regs rarely price things right. Anecdote: I’ve been on 4 flights that were approx. 2:55h late, just outside of the 3h duty to compensate. Such regulations create “padding creep”: to dodge fines, every platform may add safety margins, nudging nominal wait times upward and dulling price competition. This is highly inefficient too. Furthermore, it might be the case that I simply do not care about arrival, so I price it differently.
Overall, I am not a fan of this being fixed by targeted regulation. General consumer protection laws should just be more robust and consumer should understand how shitty Uber is.
Fix #2 Prediction Staking, Crypto-Style
Make every ETA a micro-insurance contract backed by cash on the line. The platform stakes, say, $10 when it promises “driver in 5.” Show up on time and the stake returns minus a small premium the rider paid. Miss the window and the stake transfers automatically to the rider’s wallet. On-chain escrows already move billions in real time; extending them to pickup guarantees is technically trivial.
Unlike, top-down regulation, the pricing is super efficient:
Premiums float with risk: Friday-night surge? Higher premium, bigger stake; sleepy suburb? Cheap guarantee.
Transparent ledgers expose historical accuracy, so reliable fleets earn lower premiums and win more rides, while chronic laggards bleed cash until they improve or exit.
Unlike blanket fines, staking prices reliability minute by minute and keeps market incentives intact.
Which Path Gets You Home Faster?
Until either fix lands, treat ride-hail ETAs like that friend who’s always “five minutes away.” They might show. They might not. Plan around the mode that tells the truth even when it’s late: yes, that’s usually the bus.
DM me / hit me up if you think staking should be part of any consumer marketplace or you’re otherwise involved in building on-chain guarantee rails, or lobbying regulators to measure what matters. Happy to jam!
UNLICENSE. Copy, fork, improve. I don’t care. Fuck copyright.