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I was a longtime SF resident and remember very well how truly awful the taxi service was in SF before the rideshare apps. You'd call a cranky operator to reques

• telesilla 5y ago
  The combo now of some cities such as Barcelona making an Uber-style taxi app is working great, where the city declined to allow Uber but built their own. Some of them combine bike and motorcycle sharing in the apps. For me, this has been a huge gain for which I'm thankful for the tech revolution started by Uber. Also, in some dangerous cities it's now safer given the ride is fully tracked.
  • seg_lol 5y ago
    This is awesome! The ride sharing platforms should plug into the universal transportation app that serves public transit, cabs, car share, etc. I gotta see Barcelona.
    • all2 5y ago
      This sounds like an excellent idea and also a terrible idea. In the US that would mean allowing the same bureaucratic organization that manages Medicare/Medicaid to manage a transportation app. And then you'd deal with the Intuits of transportation that would legally hobble any meaningful development in favor of their bespoke (and expensive) ride-hailing service... And so on. Maybe I'm just a cynic about these things. We could instead regulate a distributed ride-sharing communications system that companies could build apps for and drivers could hook in to. Well regulated industries tend to thrive (look at internet/cellphone providers in Japan).
      • mordae 5y ago
        > In the US that would mean allowing the same bureaucratic organization that manages Medicare/Medicaid to manage a transportation app. Why are you keeping your public companies in such a bad shape?
        • gtyras2mrs 5y ago
          My understanding (outsider perspective, based on what people have told me) is a combination of silly complicated laws pushed by politicians to keep people from abusing the service, lobbying by private healthcare providers (insurance etc) to keep government assistance limited and purposefully annoying and politicians against "big government" underfunding institutions to see them fail.
      • tpxl 5y ago
        Where I live there's an API for buses in the capital city and anyone can build an app on top of that. Not quite sure you need to apply for an API key or if it's completely public. That sounds like a nice solution to me.
      • wolverine876 5y ago
        > the same bureaucratic organization Every large organization is bureaucratic. The US federal government does pretty well, IME: Parks, highways, air travel, food safety, drug safety, medical and scientific research, public universities, NASA, military, etc etc. It's not perfect, but nothing is.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • glaucon 5y ago
        > Intuits I'm hesistant to say this because I don't live in the USA and so it's not really my business but .... You know you really don't have to live in this society where large organisations are allowed to maintain de-facto monopolies. Every other part of the developed world has laws which limit monopoly suppliers. The laws aren't perfect but they have an effect. Oddly enough the only real exception to this is the digital advertising duopoly owned by two large US companies and which operates on a, pretty much, global scale. So far, the rest of the developed world hasn't worked out how to address that.
    • jpalomaki 5y ago
      In Finland we got a law couple of years ago that forces public transportation companies to open up ticketing APIs for ”transportation as a service” providers. I think this is a step to right direction.
• forrestthewoods 5y ago
  > Now I'm in NY and I use taxis almost as often as rideshares. That’s because New York is corrupt and artificially limits both ride shares and taxis. But they’re heavily biased towards taxis and their outrageous medallion system. Taxi’s have definitely been forced to improve thanks to competition from Uber/Lyft. But don’t be fooled into thinking scarcity and high price of ride share in NYC is a naturally occurring phenomena.
  • ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
    > That’s because New York is corrupt and artificially limits both ride shares and taxis. It is both desirable and definitely within the purview of government to control the number of vehicles on the road. Congestion/traffic is a perfect example of an externality. Go to a megacity in a developing country like Delhi and experience traffic that causes what would be a 20 minute trip with 0 traffic to become a 4 hour trip in traffic. Given the traffic/congestion externality, taxing/charging vehicles to enter downtowns, creating a cap on the number of taxis via medallions, etc are all the economically optimal solutions according to economics. We want to substitute individual vehicle transport to mass transit wherein there is a dramatically reduced externality (e.g. adding a person to a subway train or a bus only has an effect if that train hits capacity -- in contrast to adding an additional vehicle to the road). Ideally, the pricing model for ridesharing and taxis should be dynamic but account for the congestion impacts (i.e. internalize the traffic externality). The fixed pricing of taxis doesn't do this (though medallions partly do from a more traditional cap and trade scheme) and the surge pricing of Uber and Lyft is only to clear their internal market and not to resolve the traffic impacts of all those additional vehicles on the road. As such, there have been numerous peer reviewed papers that have demonstrated that traffic is actually increased by ridesharing due to a substitution away from mass transit.
    • somethoughts 5y ago
      Probably the key is to move to a Fastpass system now that the technology is more feasible where congestion impacts are actually what gets priced into the convenience of personal transit in a big city.
• chrisseaton 5y ago
  How did anyone get around if you had to wait two hours for a car?
  • jamiequint 5y ago
    Often times you didn’t. I missed at least one flight waiting for taxis that never arrived. Had to wait 30m and take a bus then walk in the rain a few times, etc.
    • allforJesse 5y ago
      And if you lived in a busy area, and the cab actually showed, sometimes someone on the street would just take it and the drivers clearly didn't care.
  • ceph_ 5y ago
    You walked to a busy street and hailed one. I remember trying to phone in a cab from Nob Hill pre-lyft, they said one would be there in 45 min and we should be waiting outside because they will not call you. Also when uber first implemented the uber-taxi option before uber-x, I tried it and would regularly have multiple cabs cancel en-route to me because they just picked up a closer fare.
  • svachalek 5y ago
    I don't live in SF, but I live in the area. I used to always feel trapped in SF; parking is hard to find and very expensive, car break-ins are common, buses are full of homeless and never on time, subway stations are rare and in awkward places, taxis need to be summoned by phone unless you're in a few really popular spots (even most tourist hotspots don't see taxis passing by on a regular basis) and like they say, good luck actually seeing a taxi show up after you call. Yeah everybody remembers the worst situations and not the average, but Uber totally changed the game. Little electric scooters are also pretty amazing there, since it's so compact.
    • giantrobot 5y ago
      > I don't live in SF, but I live in the area. I used to always feel trapped in SF I have the exact same experience. It's to the point where I think SF literally hates anyone from outside the city. You have to live there to understand any of the public transit as it doesn't seem to work like that of anywhere else. Despite being only an hour away I hate going there as driving and parking is a pain at best and downright dangerous at worst. Taking CalTrain or BART into the city isn't much better thanks to the inscrutable public transit.
• hooloovoo_zoo 5y ago
  Interestingly all my worst Uber experiences are in SF. Drivers abandoning rides and peeling out in front of me, parking on the wrong side of the street for pickup etc. I generally try to make Uber drivers' lives as easy as possible too, requesting pickups in spots where they can park, being ready to go, etc., so it's not like I was being a difficult passenger.
  • neom 5y ago
    I've also had the worst experiences with uber in SF. I usually stay with a buddy in Oakland and I don't come to SF enough to feel totally comfortable with transit. More than 5 times I've had someone come, and then immediately kick me out because they don't want to "go across the bridge"(?) and one guy picked me up, and then dropped me off at a transit station and told me to take the train the rest of the way.... O.o
    • rightbyte 5y ago
      Are prices fixed or something? Why would a cab say no to a long ride otherwise.
      • tpxl 5y ago
        Going back alone earns no money. Not sure how the exact math checks out, but drivers don't seem to think it's a good deal.
        • swift532 5y ago
          IMO that's a problem with Uber's pricing model. If the destination doesn't have enough people requesting new rides, the price to that destination should be higher. If the price accurately represented the drivers' costs, they wouldn't refuse the rides.
      • neom 5y ago
        I actually finally asked a driver. They give a multiplier bonus for the number of rides you do in an day.
• ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
  > The Curb app makes it easy to find a taxi and the prices are almost always lower. I used to work at Curb years and years ago (and its predecessor TaxiMagic). It's always fun to still hear someone uses it and makes me wonder if any code I wrote could still be running somewhere for it.
  • cptskippy 5y ago
    More than likely yes. My first programming job was at an insurance broker where 15-20 years ago I wrote a maybe 20 line VB exe to transfer a file to our systems that was invoked by a comparative rater. It was still out there being distributed to client PCs for over a decade.
    • fibonachos 5y ago
      Those old VB apps really had staying power. I built one that was in use fro 2000 until the owner of the business passed away in 2017. If he were still alive I’m sure that app would be running today.
      • cptskippy 5y ago
        We have a VB Desktop App still being used at my current job. It works, we technically support it but have never had to do any support and would struggle to setup the tool chain. It's at least 15 years old and just keeps plugging alone. The author retired last year.
• slownews45 5y ago
  I actually started using Uber when it was Uber Black only (might have had a different name) for that exact reason. if you worked or lived in a rough part of town, you COULD NOT get cab service - period. So I happily paid far MORE than cab service to get there or back. The uber I used was all TCP drivers only so was expensive. My female roommate once had to walk from the marina to edge of outer mission to get home late at night because on weekends you could not get cabs and/or they wouldn't take you places that they didn't like. It was that or stay at some ultra sketch guys house or hang in a park till buses started again. Just ridiculous - they wouldn't even do weekend only medallions to lighten load - so some commission was def. bought by the taxi cartel type folks. Was so glad when uber came along. you could get rid of your car, no if (or if not) you'd be picked up etc. And yes - the "broken" CC machine - the Taxi commission was busy making sure there were too few medallions and no gypsy cabs, but did diddly squat to enforce any other rules (ie, discrimination in pickups, CC machines working, lost property handling). The statistical chance that every other business seems to be able to operate CC machine, and these guys, in a regulated and licensed business could not, was just ridiculous. Corrupt through and through.
  • jaredsohn 5y ago
    >I actually started using Uber when it was Uber Black only Think it was UberCab.
    • arthurcolle 5y ago
      Yeah, you are right - check these out! https://thenextweb.com/news/ubers-first-ever-blog-posts-are-a-fascinating-read https://thenextweb.com/news/ubers-first-ever-blog-posts-are-...
    • slownews45 5y ago
      That was it. It was also all fully licensed chauffer type drivers (all the vehicles were pretty much town cars with TCP numbers etc) so service initially was so ridiculously better than cabs it wasn't even close. The drivers they had (initially) were used to talking rich execs around - so everything was leather and usually pretty dressed up. Then SF started in on "rider / consumer protection" and weirdly the drivers became just random / unlicensed folks! Literally, uberCab was amazing, then San Francisco started fighting Uber and before you know it the cars were random / drivers random etc.
• Grimm1 5y ago
  My experience in NYC over the last decade has been the opposite where drivers were doing things like pissing in a bottle while I was in the car with them, or similar to you having the meter broken, which starts miraculously working when I tell them I guess I have to call this number here and report it. I won't use anything but rideshare apps because they seem to have higher standards for the cars and the drivers.
  • staticassertion 5y ago
    I spent the first 20+ years of my life in NYC, taking cabs near-constantly, and I never experienced anything like that. Very, very rarely there'd be a "broken meter". It's possible things have gotten worse, I haven't lived there in 6 years, and that was basically pre-uber there. But yeah, can't reconcile my (likely thousands of) rides with that. edit: BTW, with the broken meter (the one time I recall this happening), I just told the guy I knew how much it cost every day - 7 bucks including tip - and that that's what I'd pay. He agreed, he took me where I was going, and I paid. Easy. I know some people will get out of the cab, I kinda remember that once when I was really young and my mother was like 'nah' and we got in another cab.
    • tqi 5y ago
      One thing to keep in mind is that these experiences are not randomly distributed. If the drivers assessed you as someone who they thought was likely to complain or know the rules, they probably wouldn't attempt to scam you.
      • staticassertion 5y ago
        Agreed, I was a kid for much of that time, and drivers were usually very nice to me, or at least would know that I was local and not some tourist to scam. But still, thousands of rides with virtually no incidents, I think that's gotta count for something.
      • Grimm1 5y ago
        Yeah in my particular case I was flying in from Dallas so I believe they thought I was just visiting, unfortunately for them I'm NY/NJ native.
• Black101 5y ago
  > I was a longtime SF resident and remember very well how truly awful the taxi service was in SF before the rideshare apps. this is because of the legal bribes paid to the government... aka lobbying. The free market would have solved that. What Uber did was illegal in many places, yet the Gov. let them do it (maybe they were scared of repercussions).
  • thatguy0900 5y ago
    Uber had a good strategy, subsidize prices super low to get enough customers and fans quickly enough before the government could act on it. Also blackballing government agents so they had more difficulty regulating it(how that never got them shut down in countries they did that I'll never know)
    • voakbasda 5y ago
      Show me a government that cannot be bought…
      • wolverine876 5y ago
        Many people in government cannot be bought.
        • voakbasda 5y ago
          It only takes one bad apple to spoil the lot. There’s always one.
          • wolverine876 5y ago
            > It only takes one bad apple to spoil the lot. I don't see how that applies to government. A corrupt person in DHS spoils all the other people there? And spoils people in the the Dept of the Interior, and in Congress?
    • wolverine876 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• joe_the_user 5y ago
  To be fair, before Uber, Taxis were crap everywhere in the US except NYC (edit: I should say, Manhattan), where they were somewhat expensive but a viable alternative to buses and subways (and driving was/is hellish).
  • koolba 5y ago
    Cabs in Manhattan sucked if you let them know of your intention to leave Manhattan before you entered the cab. An experienced transiter would know that when the cabbie asks, “where are you going?” the correct answer is to get in the cab and say “I’m doing great. How are you my friend?”. Only then would you inform them of your destination.
    • staticassertion 5y ago
      I mean, just don't take a taxi if you're leaving Manhattan. There's a great subway system for that.
      • koolba 5y ago
        Plane, train, or automobile, at the end of the night whichever would get me home first is the one I would pick. It was never the subway.
      • carlivar 5y ago
        Not sure great is the adjective I would use. Extensive, sure (unless you're going to LaGuardia).
        • staticassertion 5y ago
          I'd call it great, having lived in NYC, Boston, and SF. It's extensive and runs 24/7. That counts for a lot.
          • carlivar 5y ago
            Cleanliness and punctuality are also factors for me.
• analog31 5y ago
  Could somebody ELI5 me on the motive behind the broken meters? Is it just so they didn't have to report the income? Or a more complicated fiddle?
  • ALittleLight 5y ago
    I would guess there are lots of potential reasons. More creative charging, not reporting taxes, better income sharing for the driver, and not having to pay service fees.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• alasdair_ 5y ago
  >Hail a taxi downtown (if you can find one) and ask to go to the Richmond district only to have the driver tell you to get out of the car because they don't want to go that far. Now you get the joy of having an Uber show up then refuse to take you from SF to San Jose, and then they try to make YOU cancel so it actually costs you money, unlike a taxi.
  • tdeck 5y ago
    SF to San Jose is a pretty big jump from downtown to the Richmond. The latter is ~5 miles and maybe a 30 minute drive in traffic and the former is 50 miles and takes an hour even with clear roads.
• Johnny555 5y ago
  The other annoyance with SF taxis is that there are (well used to be) a half dozen competing taxi companies, all with their own dispatch system. So often you'd call a cab from one company and watch cars from the other companies drive by, and you had to decide whether to abandon the one you called to take the one that's driving down your street. And supposedly you'd get blacklisted if you had too many no-shows.
• imgabe 5y ago
  I lived in DC when I first heard about Uber in 2012. Up to that point the DC taxi cartel flat out refused to accept credit cards. It was simply impossible, they claimed, despite the fact that most other major cities had been able to do this for years. A couple months after Uber started, DC taxis started accepting credit cards. If taxis can now offer lower prices than Uber, great! That's how competition is supposed to work.
• ycombobreaker 5y ago
  > And of course the credit card machines were always "broken" so you had to pay with cash. I never understood this line, but maybe it is local taxi regulations differences. Where I live the taxis cannot refuse credit payment, so if their machine is really out, they do an old school carbon copy. If they refuse that then they've basically given a free ride, so they didn't tend to put up a fight.
  • tomduncalf 5y ago
    Used to happen with black cabs in a London a lot too. A cynic might suggest they wanted you to pay in cash so that there was no paper trail and no need to declare all the income…
    • switch007 5y ago
      They’re more barefaced where I used to live: if near the end of the month they’d beg for cash because they said they have bills to pay and don’t have time for the card payment to arrive in their account.
  • nly 5y ago
    In the UK most new cards don't have raised numbers on them anymore, and many banks won't process 'card not present' transactions, unless they're online and go through additional authentication (like SMS or app with, or additional security questions)
  • benhurmarcel 5y ago
    In France they must take cards by law, and yet they systematically claim their machine is broken and only accept cash. They know that most customers won’t fight it. They’ll even stop by an ATM if you don’t have the cash. I’ve even had a taxi prefer to take the 20€ I had on me rather than take the 25€ bill by card. They don’t declare any of that income. That’s why I always avoid taxis in France, as much as possible.
• Justsignedup 5y ago
  Because taxis are heavily regulated in NY. Even though there's demand, we don't want that many cabs around otherwise the streets are too congested. So it's a problem on both ends.