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Absolutely disagree - taxis in the UK used to be awful, none of them had apps before Uber. Black cabs in London were generally good due to the high entry requir

Absolutely disagree - taxis in the UK used to be awful, none of them had apps before Uber. Black cabs in London were generally good due to the high entry requirements but you could only get them by flagging them down somewhere fairly central. Uber introduced competition which has massively improved all other taxi services. These days there's nothing special about Uber except its ubiquity so I don't care if it fails now. Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices.

simonbarker87 5y ago
Maybe you were unlucky but I never had an issue at all in Essex growing up or Newcastle where I spent 15 years. Also Blueline taxis had an app before Uber gained market relevance in the UK and it was great.
- pokepim 5y ago
  If 87 in your nickname suggest your age then I guess you are not the target for Uber. I’m 10 years younger and almost all of my peers never used Taxi and take Uber/Lyft quite often.
  - simonbarker87 5y ago
    Yeah maybe, I’m getting old now I guess :-)
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    That’s a bit of an absurd take. Uber entered the UK market in 2012 when he was 25 and you 15, surely he’d have been in the target demographic before you? I’m in a similar age bracket and everyone I know uses Uber rather than black cabs.
- bartread 5y ago
  Ditto: Panther in Cambridge have always been reliable for the 20 years I've lived in the area. Same with the Ely firms. Last time I tried to get an Uber in central London in the early hours of the morning two or three drivers cancelled before one eventually showed up after I'd phoned Uber support to complain. I'm not sure the phone call is what did the trick - in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't - but what triggered that call is I'd been trying to get a ride for 20 - 30 minutes by that point. It sounds like this kind of poor QoS might be a new problem though: I certainly wasn't aware of it before the pandemic.
  - rosndo 5y ago
    This sounds really unusual, in my experience even Uber Lux usually shows up within a couple of minutes at 3-4 AM on weekdays. I live in SW1 and end up in these situations on a weekly basis, I’ve never waited 30 minutes for a Uber.
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    Uber actively modifies the earnings of their drivers in real time, which causes the drivers to modify their willingness to accept rides in real time. The reason those drivers are canceling is because between the time they accepted the ride and arriving to pick you up, Uber modified their earnings such that it was no longer profitable, or simply worth the effort to pick you up. Uber is a terrible "employer".
waynecochran 5y ago
But Uber is horribly in the red financially. They disrupted a poorly ran industry, but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  They produced a ton of taxi rides, surely that's worth something?
- whitepaint 5y ago
  > but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point. Utterly false. They produced people taking way more rides. More rides = more people going out to different places.
  - Beltalowda 5y ago
    It's not like people would be stuck in the house otherwise. It's just that people would have taken public transport, their own car, or went by foot or bicycle before. I'm very skeptical of this claim that Uber increased mobility.
    - spacebanana7 5y ago
      It’s hard to get empirical evidence for the general claim that Uber increased mobility after adjusting for substitution effects from walking etc. However, I think one can make the case from economic intuition that price reductions generally increase consumption in a category of normal goods. E.g - a reduction in the price of wheat will increase food consumption even after accounting for people switching from other crops. Conversely, an increase in the price of Lego will reduce the amount of toys the average child gets, even after adjusting for the substitution to action figure etc.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  That's Uber's problem though. Essentially their billionaire investors subsidized car rides for lots of people. Maybe it'll work out for Uber in the long run. Maybe not.
Crazyontap 5y ago
You're absolutely right. I don't know what OP is going on about but no there were 0 taxis with apps at least in Birmingham. I just checked with my friends too and not one person remembers using an app to call a cab before uber. It is possible that some company possibly offered it but it certainly wasn't a popular option before Uber and it was just awful using the taxis here.
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  Blueline taxis had one in Newcastle - you could also send a text message and they’d come pick you up
- ectopod 5y ago
  Star Cars in Birmingham had an app before Uber.
Beltalowda 5y ago
You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, but back in the day you didn't have mobile phones either so not much option really. I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, and it's kind of an obvious thing to add once smartphones become popular. I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovation" with Uber is with its business model ("employees but not employees") and willingness to just ignore local laws. This I think is the real point of the article; for all the pompous bloviating about being "disruption" and "changing the world", the actual real change is actually not all that large, with many of the changes being of doubtful or even negative worth.
- jasode 5y ago
  >You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number. The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are not at typical taxi "hubs" like airports, convention centers, downtown hotels, etc. Before Uber, getting from one suburb to another suburb using a taxi was unreliable. A traditional taxi dispatcher can broadcast a ride request from a potential passenger in the suburbs but drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for. A traditional taxi company -- even with an app -- doesn't build that geographically distributed mesh to the same degree. The economic constraint was the taxi meter. When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.
  - mcny 5y ago
    > When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call. I find this interesting because on the food delivery side, this is kind of mental gymnastics the worker needs to do. If it is a busy evening hour, do you want to take a (small) McDonalds order? Most likely not, unless there is a nice tip. You could do at least two deliveries in the time you wait for the McD order. I imagine rider side is the same way as delivery. Every worker has to do this sanity check if whether something is worth doing. If workers are taking low reward rides or deliveries, it is probably because they think they aren't missing out on something better.
Mirioron 5y ago
>Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices. In some ways it does though. Some industries corner the market through regulation. Ie it's impossible for a new competitor to start up that follows all the rules and it's that way by design. The only way to break into that market is to break the rules or buy out an existing business.

simonbarker87 5y ago

Maybe you were unlucky but I never had an issue at all in Essex growing up or Newcastle where I spent 15 years. Also Blueline taxis had an app before Uber gained market relevance in the UK and it was great.

pokepim 5y ago
If 87 in your nickname suggest your age then I guess you are not the target for Uber. I’m 10 years younger and almost all of my peers never used Taxi and take Uber/Lyft quite often.
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  Yeah maybe, I’m getting old now I guess :-)
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  That’s a bit of an absurd take. Uber entered the UK market in 2012 when he was 25 and you 15, surely he’d have been in the target demographic before you? I’m in a similar age bracket and everyone I know uses Uber rather than black cabs.
bartread 5y ago
Ditto: Panther in Cambridge have always been reliable for the 20 years I've lived in the area. Same with the Ely firms. Last time I tried to get an Uber in central London in the early hours of the morning two or three drivers cancelled before one eventually showed up after I'd phoned Uber support to complain. I'm not sure the phone call is what did the trick - in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't - but what triggered that call is I'd been trying to get a ride for 20 - 30 minutes by that point. It sounds like this kind of poor QoS might be a new problem though: I certainly wasn't aware of it before the pandemic.
- rosndo 5y ago
  This sounds really unusual, in my experience even Uber Lux usually shows up within a couple of minutes at 3-4 AM on weekdays. I live in SW1 and end up in these situations on a weekly basis, I’ve never waited 30 minutes for a Uber.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  Uber actively modifies the earnings of their drivers in real time, which causes the drivers to modify their willingness to accept rides in real time. The reason those drivers are canceling is because between the time they accepted the ride and arriving to pick you up, Uber modified their earnings such that it was no longer profitable, or simply worth the effort to pick you up. Uber is a terrible "employer".

waynecochran 5y ago

But Uber is horribly in the red financially. They disrupted a poorly ran industry, but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point.

HPsquared 5y ago
They produced a ton of taxi rides, surely that's worth something?
whitepaint 5y ago
> but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point. Utterly false. They produced people taking way more rides. More rides = more people going out to different places.
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  It's not like people would be stuck in the house otherwise. It's just that people would have taken public transport, their own car, or went by foot or bicycle before. I'm very skeptical of this claim that Uber increased mobility.
  - spacebanana7 5y ago
    It’s hard to get empirical evidence for the general claim that Uber increased mobility after adjusting for substitution effects from walking etc. However, I think one can make the case from economic intuition that price reductions generally increase consumption in a category of normal goods. E.g - a reduction in the price of wheat will increase food consumption even after accounting for people switching from other crops. Conversely, an increase in the price of Lego will reduce the amount of toys the average child gets, even after adjusting for the substitution to action figure etc.
ALittleLight 5y ago
That's Uber's problem though. Essentially their billionaire investors subsidized car rides for lots of people. Maybe it'll work out for Uber in the long run. Maybe not.

Crazyontap 5y ago

You're absolutely right. I don't know what OP is going on about but no there were 0 taxis with apps at least in Birmingham. I just checked with my friends too and not one person remembers using an app to call a cab before uber. It is possible that some company possibly offered it but it certainly wasn't a popular option before Uber and it was just awful using the taxis here.

simonbarker87 5y ago
Blueline taxis had one in Newcastle - you could also send a text message and they’d come pick you up
ectopod 5y ago
Star Cars in Birmingham had an app before Uber.

Beltalowda 5y ago

You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, but back in the day you didn't have mobile phones either so not much option really. I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, and it's kind of an obvious thing to add once smartphones become popular. I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovation" with Uber is with its business model ("employees but not employees") and willingness to just ignore local laws. This I think is the real point of the article; for all the pompous bloviating about being "disruption" and "changing the world", the actual real change is actually not all that large, with many of the changes being of doubtful or even negative worth.

jasode 5y ago
>You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number. The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are not at typical taxi "hubs" like airports, convention centers, downtown hotels, etc. Before Uber, getting from one suburb to another suburb using a taxi was unreliable. A traditional taxi dispatcher can broadcast a ride request from a potential passenger in the suburbs but drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for. A traditional taxi company -- even with an app -- doesn't build that geographically distributed mesh to the same degree. The economic constraint was the taxi meter. When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.
- mcny 5y ago
  > When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call. I find this interesting because on the food delivery side, this is kind of mental gymnastics the worker needs to do. If it is a busy evening hour, do you want to take a (small) McDonalds order? Most likely not, unless there is a nice tip. You could do at least two deliveries in the time you wait for the McD order. I imagine rider side is the same way as delivery. Every worker has to do this sanity check if whether something is worth doing. If workers are taking low reward rides or deliveries, it is probably because they think they aren't missing out on something better.

Mirioron 5y ago

>Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices. In some ways it does though. Some industries corner the market through regulation. Ie it's impossible for a new competitor to start up that follows all the rules and it's that way by design. The only way to break into that market is to break the rules or buy out an existing business.