I see your point. In Sweden, I see they don't have a minimum wage, and that they use collective bargaining to make agreements. Since Uber Eats is new, I imagine they haven't established a union yet.
Firing someone for joining a union is against the law. In fact firing an employee after a grace period is difficult in Scandinavia unless they are clearly incompetent or criminal.
For that reason it might even be that Uber doesn't worry too much about high turnover because it means that most of their workers are sackable without having to give reasons or compensation.
They work around that by calling these employees 'freelancers'. Which is of course bullshit since there's a top-down relationship, but these employees don't have the means (resources/info/money) to combat this in a court of law.
The trick abused before was hiring people as interim, and then sacking them right before they had to be hired permanently by law. I know first hand even the government in The Netherlands did this in '00. However this still means these people need to get minimum wage (actually, more, since the employment agency also demands a cut). As you can see, the freelance trick is more lucrative.
Sounds like the Foodora people have their act together so if a scooter was a winning strategy they would be doing that. Maybe city driving regulations are a problem? A bike with an electric boost could be good though.
Yeah, but e-bikes have very limited range which would quickly become an issue on longer runs. The systems are awfully heavy to pedal unassisted; well at least my Bionx conversion was (have removed it since).
The Bosch system is crank driven, right? In hind sight I regret not going for something like that. The Bionx hub is ludicrously heavy, with short spokes prone to breakage, and required (at the time) its own crappy cassette.
I had to crack the 25 km/h speed limit restriction as going above it required an almost Herculean effort. It should have reverted to an assistance level that offset the weight / drag, but alas.. it just turned off.
What I like the most about this is the sensor system. I am pretty sure there is an actual torque sensor in there. This makes for a very smooth acceleration phase.
Along with a back wheel magnet sensor to keep the speed limit. Last year I made a homemade hack for this.. I used a microcontroller, an electromagnet and a magnetic sensor from a cheapo bike computer to forget every second impulse towards the Bosch system. It worked. The speed limit changed to 50 km/h.
Ended up not bothering to weather-proof it though. 25 km/h is enough most of the time anyway.
In Sweden, as in most of the EU, electric bicycles are required by law to reduce the assistance as the speed increases and to cut out entirely above 25 km/h. So an electric bike wouldn't be much help to a courier, who would mostly be going faster than 25 km/h. (A faster vehicle would come under the moped regulations and the rider would need a license and insurance.)
