7 ms·

Did you use taxis before Lyft/Uber? They clearly improve the customer experience.

• pydry 5y ago
  I did, yeah. They drove down the cost more than they improved the experience. It's neat not having to dig around for cash and being able to see your driver on your phone arriving but it's not game changing. The real innovation was using a tsunami of cheap financing to engage in a predatory pricing war to gain oligopoly status and opening up being a taxi driver to anyone with a car. This was basically exploitation of wealth inequality. When I visited Buenos Aires in 2011 I was shocked that you could easily send somebody on a scooter to get you a starbucks and people regularly did. That "innovation" seems significantly less shocking these days. The west caught up.
  • jimbob45 5y ago
    Yep, this is the right read. Uber exploited under-regulation in gig economy jobs and passed (part of) the savings onto users.
  • xiphias2 5y ago
    ,, opening up being a taxi driver to anyone with a car'' That's what customers want. Taxis were always too expensive for normal people to use. In the past they needed to know the routes to any place inside a city, but since we have GPS navigation, now that knowledge is much less useful. Nowdays I care more about the car being modern than the knowledge of the driver.
    • pydry 5y ago
      >Taxis were always too expensive for normal people to use. That's largely coz the American precariat-with-a-car demographic wasn't large enough. Had an Uber-like business kicked off in the 90s when fewer Americans were desperate for work and the world wasn't awash in capital seeking returns from, it would have gone spectacularly bust. The magic ingredient was wealth inequality - both for providing cheap financing (VC funded rides!) and tapping into that critical precariat-with-a-car demographic at just the right time. GPS is irrelevant. Taxis had it years before Uber was dreamed up. Giving them credit for that is like giving Mark Zuckerberg credit for the microchip.
      • thinkharderdev 5y ago
        They seemed to be doing alright in 2019 when we were at full employment (more or less), at least relative to their normal state of hemorrhaging money. But to give them their due, I do in fact think Uber made the product of paying someone to drive you from point A to B much better. Even in the early days of Uber (when they were still just Towncars), it was very rare to get in a taxi in Washington DC that accepted cards for payment. It was also much harder to get a ride if you weren't downtown. You would have to call a dispatcher and in about 30 minutes (if you were lucky and they didn't just ghost you entirely) a cab would show up. Also, if you were downtown and wanted a ride out to Arlington, they would sometimes just drive off because they knew they wouldn't be able to get a fare back into the city.
        • pydry 5y ago
          >Also, if you were downtown and wanted a ride out to Arlington, they would sometimes just drive off because they knew they wouldn't be able to get a fare back into the city. You understand how a precariat makes this type of thing possible, right? It's not like Uber drivers wouldn't pull this type of shit if they had more leverage. They absolutely would. They don't coz they really need the $$.
          • thinkharderdev 5y ago
            Partly, but partly it is an effect of having of thicker market. Arlington itself is still quite densely populated and Uber drivers have a lot of opportunities to pick up fares there. But you aren't going to find people hailing cabs on the street. But if you have a matching mechanism that works better in less densely populated areas then the drivers can actually pick up fares there so they are more willingly to take someone out there to begin with.
            • pydry 5y ago
              This is how radio cabs used to operate in the 90s.
  • standardUser 5y ago
    Ride share companies have absolutely been game changing. Even traditional taxis - as static and entrenched an industry as there ever was - eventually had to start playing the new game with their own apps. You are conflating the very real problems they solved with the dubious way they solved them.
  • thinkharderdev 5y ago
    > The real innovation was using a tsunami of cheap financing to engage in a predatory pricing war to gain oligopoly status and opening up being a taxi driver to anyone with a car. I agree with that 100% but I wouldn't say that they "didn't change the game." The sheer availability of taxi services outside of a handful of densely populated urban centers was almost non-existent before Uber. They existed but I certainly wouldn't call them "on demand." In my relatively small college town it was basically impossible to get a taxi to pick you up in less than an hour from when you called the dispatcher (and sometimes they would just not show up at all....). Now I can have an Uber pick me up within 10-15 minutes basically anywhere at almost any time. As you said this is mostly because they are subsidizing all of this with huge gushers of capital and it remains to be seen whether they can actually operate that sort of service profitably.
  • carlosdp 5y ago
    > It's neat not having to dig around for cash and being able to see your driver on your phone arriving but it's not game changing. It absolutely is game changing! Before, unless you were in a city like NYC, you would never use a taxi if you could avoid it because they might just never even show up. The accountability and tracking was the very first thing UberCab (Uber's original name) built, and it was the thing that got people initially invested. It's easy now to look back and say that was easy to figure out, but as with everything, it felt very different before Uber proved it out.
• ineptech 5y ago
  They also subsidize the cost with VC money to undercut more efficient public transit.