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The piece is exactly right. Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. From a macroeconomic pe

The piece is exactly right. Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. From a macroeconomic perspective this is terrible because turning taxi firms into countless of one man businesses provides no efficiency gains, it's basically reverse economic development. There is a version of Uber that actually makes sense. As a lean SaaS company that sells its software to ordinary taxi companies, takes a cut and makes a profit. Which is basically how they operate in Spain because Spanish law has not tolerated Ubers attempts to capture markets.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> a lean SaaS company that sells Uber's software as a service to ordinary taxi companies, takes a cut and makes a profit This destroys a lot of value. Most taxi companies suck for reasons independent of their tech stack. (The fact that they’re better post-Uber shouldn’t obscure the effect of that competitive pressure.) Moreover, having a transport app that works in most countries is a value add for such a service’s most-profitable customers. Finally, the claim that taxi companies treat their drivers better than Uber applies in some markets, but it doesn’t in most, e.g. New York and New Delhi. Uber isn’t profitable as a company, but they’re profitable in some (and a growing number of) markets. There is a recurring set of Uber hot takes that get recycled every few months that ignores this.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  > This destroys most of the value. Most taxi companies suck for reasons independent of their tech stack. None of which Uber fixes? Uber is a tech company. Arguing that it's better than taxis for non-technical reasons is a bit absurd.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > None of which Uber fixes? Did you hail or call taxis before Uber? The simple ability to see where your car is while en route was game changing. Add to that ratings, embedded payment (“credit card reader broken”) and dynamic pricing and you have a dramatically better experience.
    - BobbyJo 5y ago
      ...those are all technical problems, no?
    - sbarre 5y ago
      Balance that against the fact that most taxi drivers know the city by heart, including where there is construction, habitual traffic jam, and transit congestion.. I'll take a better drive-to-destination experience over being able to stare at my phone watching a car inch closer to me, or saving a few dollars when I need to get somewhere. A lot of part-time Uber drivers, especially in big cities, come in from the suburbs to get fares in the city - where they are not familiar with their surroundings - and just blindly follow the directions on their GPS. In my anecdotal experience over the last 10 years, I've had plenty of experiences with Uber drivers either not knowing the proper way to get somewhere, or naively driving into avoidable traffic jams, or just getting stuck behind a bus or streetcar and not understanding when/how to get past it. This very rarely happens with taxi drivers - to the point where sometimes they can be a bit scary in traffic, so there is a counterpoint here too.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - colinmorelli 5y ago
        Interesting angle. My experience (in NYC) has been that while taxis most certainly have better knowledge of the city, Uber is by far more reliable in just getting me there. This is because of the key difference of Uber knowing exactly where I'm going in advance, and relaying turn-by-turn directions to the driver. Most of the time, the taxi driver knows the address or cross streets I'm going to. But when they don't, it's painful. I've never even been asked in a Lyft/Uber, though.
        sbarre 5y ago
        Yeah where I live (Toronto) the turn-by-turn is the problem often. There's no adjustment for traffic or temporary closures, and combined with part-time drivers not knowing what roads should be avoided at certain times of day, and you can end up taking way too long getting somewhere. In fact I used to see a lot of Uber drivers switch out to Waze for directions once you're in the car, since that was probably better.
  - colinmorelli 5y ago
    Uber shifts the relationship from rider <-> taxi company, to rider <-> Uber. This places a significant responsibility on Uber to create a high quality rider experience. If you book a car and the driver doesn't show up repeatedly, Uber will remove that driver. Uber also fields customer service, meaning you're not trying to call into a one man shop to argue for a refund with whoever happened to pick up your ride that day. You're talking with Uber. Some cities, such as NYC, have created their own structure around taxis, but in many cities it's a complete guess as to the quality of service you'll get when you call a local cab company. This is the exact same playbook as Doordash, Seamless, Taskrabbit, Airbnb, or any of the other gig economy platforms. They're vastly more than just software. They're certainly different from software provided to independent operators, though individual people can come to their own determination of whether or not that is "better."
- anyfoo 5y ago
  They really, really don't suck in Germany. Taxis there are mostly clean, comfortable Mercedes (E-Class usually, Mercedes has a long history and special contracts for that), and Taxi drivers are massively trained. Up until recently, part of the extensive examination was being quizzed about how to get to obscure streets (and remember that Germany does not have a grid system like in the US). That has been abolished, because with ubiquitous GPS it's not necessary anymore, but the other strict requirements stayed. Uber has nothing on that.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > Uber has nothing on that Travel extensively in Germany. I can hail Uber from an app that works in Frankfurt, Paris and New York. Uber is often cheaper. And it is far more ubiquitous, particularly outside the major metropolitan areas. I still take taxis e.g. from the airport, but pretending there is convenience parity in all situations is false. (Agree that Frankfurt and London cabbies are good.)
    - anyfoo 5y ago
      > I can hail Uber from an app that works in Frankfurt, Paris and New York. That matters to travelers (and skewed towards business travelers, too), i.e. people who visit only for a short time, but not much to anyone else. > And it is far more ubiquitous, particularly outside the major metropolitan areas. Not my experience. I can be far outside the city and call (through the App nowadays) a taxi and I know it's going to be there and reliable. Uber was hit and miss, tends to cancel suddenly etc... I don't think I've ever had a german taxi cancel on me, in decades. If something happened to impede my assigned Taxi, the driver would contact the central and they'd dispatch another one. Uber does not have a proper "central". They only have an app and dispatch servers, no humans to sort things out to guarantee service. > Uber is often cheaper. And you get what you pay for... A german taxi gives you trained people and dedicated, specially maintained cars.
      - thematrixturtle 5y ago
        Travelers hail a disproportionate amount of taxis. Living in a walkable European city with good public transport, approximately the only times I use taxis or Uber are when I'm going to/from the airport/train station and have luggage, or when it's a business trip and I can expense it (and even then I opt for trains when I can).
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. This is the entire gig economy/sharing economy in a nutshell. The platform puts most of the financial risk on the labor side (drivers owning the cars if you're driving Uber, owning the house if you're Airbnb'ing it, etc.) and simply taking a cut of each transaction. The platform owns nothing, the workers have very few rights, and the company has complete control of the market. This is VC utopia right here. The next financial crisis is gonna show us just how fragile this system is, whenever that is.
- rubicon33 5y ago
  Right when millennials are starting to feel some stability and save some money, right THEN is when the financial crisis will hit. Just wait and see.
- sbarre 5y ago
  > The next financial crisis is gonna show us just how fragile this system is, whenever that is. For now, a lot of the gig economy (but not all of it) is focused on non-essential services (food or other delivery, vacation rentals, private car rentals, etc), so in a time of crisis people can just stop using those services. It will suck for the workers but even in a non-gig model that same problem would occur, although there would be more safety nets like unions and insurance ... What worries me is if essential services start getting "gigged out" in a similar manner, that would be problematic.. Easy to say that would never happen, but "private citizens operating unregulated hotels/taxis" seemed impossible/illegal just a decade ago...
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > but "private citizens operating unregulated hotels/taxis" seemed impossible/illegal just a decade ago Every city has had gypsy cabs and Craigslist hotels since forever.
    - sbarre 5y ago
      Sure but that's not what I'm talking about and you know it. I mean large well-known and easily accessible versions of those.
rzz3 5y ago
Despite all of the negatives, many of which I agree with, the legacy taxi industry really sucked for riders. Riding in a taxi feels dirty to me, to be honest. Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained, having to actually call someone on a phone and tell them where to pick you up, often not accepting Apple Pay, Android Pay, credit cards. Rude drivers with no rating system to disincentivize it… It’s sad that Uber seemingly made such bad business decisions and ultimately has not been successful as a business. However, the “disruption” was widely successful. Hell, they even became a verb. Personally, even as a customer, I strongly prefer Lyft (but I’d never take a Taxi unless I was somehow forced to).
- dylkil 5y ago
  > Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained maybe in US or UK but in europe taxis are kept to a high standard, albeit way more expensive
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Given how large the US is, and how large Europe is, I doubt your statement. I can certainly find plenty of well maintained taxis in the US, I bet I can find plenty of beat up taxis in Europe.
- darth_avocado 5y ago
  Legacy taxis were and still are a more expensive and inefficient business. Outside of airports and maybe cities like New York, hailing a taxi was a terrible experience. The scale of Uber despite their shitty business model, allows them to have a lot more drivers constantly on the road than traditional companies. This allows for an quicker availability of a cab at a moment’s notice. Anyone remember leaving a party before Uber, calling a cab and then awkwardly sitting around at the host’s place for another half hour? This also means a generational behavior change where more people use Uber, which in turn allows more continuous business for the driver and a cheaper ride for the consumer. Uber can charge more (which they are doing now), fix their driver pay and still provide a cheaper and more convenient experience for the users.
1270018080 5y ago
Let me preface by saying I hate capitalism. But how did capital win in this arrangement? They lost billions. They're down 25% since IPO a few years ago.
barry-cotter 5y ago
This completely neglects the enormous gains to consumers of having cabs that (1) will actually show up if booked ahead of time (2) don’t discriminate by race/ethnicity (3) don’t take the long way round (4) always take cards instead of the machine being “broken” (5) will pick up and drop you off anywhere. Uber and their competitors are and were 100x better at getting drivers to follow the rules taxis were always meant to follow than their regulators ever were.
- tmnvix 5y ago
  I have had Uber drivers fail to show up multiple times. They appear to be heading to the pickup point but then park some distance away and just wait. It's very frustrating. I've never had that experience with a taxi service. It's nothing to do with my Uber rating. I've since learned that it has something to do with a scam involving short/undesirable trips and cancellation fees.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
Perhaps, another option would be for the government to help establish a drivers-cooperative app. An app where all the profits collected had to distributed back to the drivers or invested in the common infrastructure to maintain, promote, and improve the app. The drivers could also agree amongst themselves as to matters such as working conditions and minimum pay. Uber and others could still exist, but they'd be at a disadvantage because they'd be ploughing billions into nonsense like self-driving blimps or whatever.
- scarface74 5y ago
  “The government” is what caused the taxi system to be such a mess.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    It also built the city streets those Taxis and Ubers cruise around on. What's your point?
imtringued 5y ago
I am a bit confused here. This is a money losing company. Yes there has been some shift from labor to capital recently but overall investors are losing money here.
menzoic 5y ago
There's massive efficiency gains. The countless one man businesses have no overhead side from owning a car they already have. They don't need to do anything else besides install and run an app. No need for marketing, managing payment systems, customer acquisition...etc Millions of drivers globally have the business side of things taken care of by a single company. Fragmentation across tens of thousands of taxi companies is inefficient. In the US many neighborhoods and entire cities didn't have access to reliable taxis or any taxi at all. There's significantly more coverage with Uber and ride sharing in general. The same is probably true of other countries.
ISL 5y ago
Uber adds more value to the rider than a balkanized taxi environment. No matter where you are, it is likely to work and work in a familiar way.
scarface74 5y ago
Why do you take it as a fact that the legacy taxi companies were better?
cornel_io 5y ago
Almost every useful scalable service ends up shifting economic gains from labor to capital. And consumers benefit from it, because as a very rough economic rule of thumb, the more value that flows to labor the less efficient the service is and the higher price consumers pay. From a customer POV taxis were horrible, full-stop, and Uber/Lyft are fantastic. I can actually get a reliable, safe ride almost anywhere now, and that was impossible before (ever been held up by a gypsy cabbie because yellow cabs won't go to certain parts of NYC? Not fun...).
- amelius 5y ago
  > And consumers benefit from it As a consumer, I don't want to pay for unfair work practices. Taxis may have been horrible, taking rides with people who are systematically exploited is even more horrible.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    As if taxi drivers weren’t exploited when they had to rent medallions. But if you don’t want to support “exploited workers”, are you willing to give up all electronics?
  - cornel_io 5y ago
    I'm sorry...drivers are making a choice, they are not as naive as you seem to think they are and they have infinite other options for unskilled labor if it's really that "unfair", but most of those options pay less per hour - yes, they don't put as many miles on people's cars, but that's a tradeoff for getting cash now, which is often what people want. I delivered pizzas as a college kid, and made 1/3 of what Uber drivers make while driving the same amount, even accounting for inflation. "Systematically exploited" is a really paternalistic view.
yitr 5y ago
where did you learn this?
lhorie 5y ago
But it's not like people are necessarily worse off by choosing to drive for Uber. The thing is that for a lot of drivers, Uber is complementary income on top of a primary, inflexible income source. AFAIK, there's nothing else other than gig economy that lets someone supplement income piecemeal. If you think in terms of socio-economic mobility, isn't the ability to squeeze extra earning opportunities in between other responsibilities a good thing? Also, Uber has shown that it isn't 100% effective at "exploiting" its market. Last year, a lot of drivers were taking home 6 digit gross income due to driver shortages and the ability to opt into stupidly long work weeks. That's pretty significant for what is effectively a unskilled job.
- amelius 5y ago
  > Last year, a lot of drivers were taking home 6 digit gross income due to driver shortages. That's pretty significant for what is effectively a unskilled job. Source needed. Might just as well be a publicity stunt by Uber.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    One source is just an acquaintance of mine. A couple of others are people on youtube. Mind you, the caveat is these people worked 50+ hours per week. If you want something that looks less anecdotal, google "uber salary". Glassdoor lists a range from 18k-93k/yr.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Is that the take home after all cost, maintenance, depreciation and so on?
      - lhorie 5y ago
        It's gross income, so no. For my acquaintance it was still better net income than the job he had been laid off from (we're talking a difference of more than 2x), the trade-off is that the income boost comes from opting into putting long hours. He was able to use the extra income to pay off some debt, FWIW. If you're interested, some of the YouTube videos go into the earnings breakdown and take home amount after setting aside a maintenance fund.
pdonis 5y ago
> Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital But if the company is losing money, there are no economic gains; there are economic losses. Who is taking the losses?
injidup 5y ago
As a customer I don't care about economic theory. What I care about is that I take out my mobile, press a couple of buttons and I know the price and time of pick up. This is innovation. Before über nobody was doing this. This has been a huge efficiency gain. The service is safe and reliable and trackable. This really has nothing to do with employees vs contractors. If the government legislated that uber drivers had to be treated as employees, the innovation that uber brought to the market would not disappear. Might be a bit more expensive but we would not be going back to hailing random taxis on the street or calling numbers and negotiating with call centres.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> a lean SaaS company that sells Uber's software as a service to ordinary taxi companies, takes a cut and makes a profit This destroys a lot of value. Most taxi companies suck for reasons independent of their tech stack. (The fact that they’re better post-Uber shouldn’t obscure the effect of that competitive pressure.) Moreover, having a transport app that works in most countries is a value add for such a service’s most-profitable customers. Finally, the claim that taxi companies treat their drivers better than Uber applies in some markets, but it doesn’t in most, e.g. New York and New Delhi. Uber isn’t profitable as a company, but they’re profitable in some (and a growing number of) markets. There is a recurring set of Uber hot takes that get recycled every few months that ignores this.

BobbyJo 5y ago
> This destroys most of the value. Most taxi companies suck for reasons independent of their tech stack. None of which Uber fixes? Uber is a tech company. Arguing that it's better than taxis for non-technical reasons is a bit absurd.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > None of which Uber fixes? Did you hail or call taxis before Uber? The simple ability to see where your car is while en route was game changing. Add to that ratings, embedded payment (“credit card reader broken”) and dynamic pricing and you have a dramatically better experience.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    ...those are all technical problems, no?
  - sbarre 5y ago
    Balance that against the fact that most taxi drivers know the city by heart, including where there is construction, habitual traffic jam, and transit congestion.. I'll take a better drive-to-destination experience over being able to stare at my phone watching a car inch closer to me, or saving a few dollars when I need to get somewhere. A lot of part-time Uber drivers, especially in big cities, come in from the suburbs to get fares in the city - where they are not familiar with their surroundings - and just blindly follow the directions on their GPS. In my anecdotal experience over the last 10 years, I've had plenty of experiences with Uber drivers either not knowing the proper way to get somewhere, or naively driving into avoidable traffic jams, or just getting stuck behind a bus or streetcar and not understanding when/how to get past it. This very rarely happens with taxi drivers - to the point where sometimes they can be a bit scary in traffic, so there is a counterpoint here too.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - colinmorelli 5y ago
      Interesting angle. My experience (in NYC) has been that while taxis most certainly have better knowledge of the city, Uber is by far more reliable in just getting me there. This is because of the key difference of Uber knowing exactly where I'm going in advance, and relaying turn-by-turn directions to the driver. Most of the time, the taxi driver knows the address or cross streets I'm going to. But when they don't, it's painful. I've never even been asked in a Lyft/Uber, though.
      - sbarre 5y ago
        Yeah where I live (Toronto) the turn-by-turn is the problem often. There's no adjustment for traffic or temporary closures, and combined with part-time drivers not knowing what roads should be avoided at certain times of day, and you can end up taking way too long getting somewhere. In fact I used to see a lot of Uber drivers switch out to Waze for directions once you're in the car, since that was probably better.
- colinmorelli 5y ago
  Uber shifts the relationship from rider <-> taxi company, to rider <-> Uber. This places a significant responsibility on Uber to create a high quality rider experience. If you book a car and the driver doesn't show up repeatedly, Uber will remove that driver. Uber also fields customer service, meaning you're not trying to call into a one man shop to argue for a refund with whoever happened to pick up your ride that day. You're talking with Uber. Some cities, such as NYC, have created their own structure around taxis, but in many cities it's a complete guess as to the quality of service you'll get when you call a local cab company. This is the exact same playbook as Doordash, Seamless, Taskrabbit, Airbnb, or any of the other gig economy platforms. They're vastly more than just software. They're certainly different from software provided to independent operators, though individual people can come to their own determination of whether or not that is "better."
anyfoo 5y ago
They really, really don't suck in Germany. Taxis there are mostly clean, comfortable Mercedes (E-Class usually, Mercedes has a long history and special contracts for that), and Taxi drivers are massively trained. Up until recently, part of the extensive examination was being quizzed about how to get to obscure streets (and remember that Germany does not have a grid system like in the US). That has been abolished, because with ubiquitous GPS it's not necessary anymore, but the other strict requirements stayed. Uber has nothing on that.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Uber has nothing on that Travel extensively in Germany. I can hail Uber from an app that works in Frankfurt, Paris and New York. Uber is often cheaper. And it is far more ubiquitous, particularly outside the major metropolitan areas. I still take taxis e.g. from the airport, but pretending there is convenience parity in all situations is false. (Agree that Frankfurt and London cabbies are good.)
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    > I can hail Uber from an app that works in Frankfurt, Paris and New York. That matters to travelers (and skewed towards business travelers, too), i.e. people who visit only for a short time, but not much to anyone else. > And it is far more ubiquitous, particularly outside the major metropolitan areas. Not my experience. I can be far outside the city and call (through the App nowadays) a taxi and I know it's going to be there and reliable. Uber was hit and miss, tends to cancel suddenly etc... I don't think I've ever had a german taxi cancel on me, in decades. If something happened to impede my assigned Taxi, the driver would contact the central and they'd dispatch another one. Uber does not have a proper "central". They only have an app and dispatch servers, no humans to sort things out to guarantee service. > Uber is often cheaper. And you get what you pay for... A german taxi gives you trained people and dedicated, specially maintained cars.
    - thematrixturtle 5y ago
      Travelers hail a disproportionate amount of taxis. Living in a walkable European city with good public transport, approximately the only times I use taxis or Uber are when I'm going to/from the airport/train station and have luggage, or when it's a business trip and I can expense it (and even then I opt for trains when I can).

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

> Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. This is the entire gig economy/sharing economy in a nutshell. The platform puts most of the financial risk on the labor side (drivers owning the cars if you're driving Uber, owning the house if you're Airbnb'ing it, etc.) and simply taking a cut of each transaction. The platform owns nothing, the workers have very few rights, and the company has complete control of the market. This is VC utopia right here. The next financial crisis is gonna show us just how fragile this system is, whenever that is.

rubicon33 5y ago
Right when millennials are starting to feel some stability and save some money, right THEN is when the financial crisis will hit. Just wait and see.
sbarre 5y ago
> The next financial crisis is gonna show us just how fragile this system is, whenever that is. For now, a lot of the gig economy (but not all of it) is focused on non-essential services (food or other delivery, vacation rentals, private car rentals, etc), so in a time of crisis people can just stop using those services. It will suck for the workers but even in a non-gig model that same problem would occur, although there would be more safety nets like unions and insurance ... What worries me is if essential services start getting "gigged out" in a similar manner, that would be problematic.. Easy to say that would never happen, but "private citizens operating unregulated hotels/taxis" seemed impossible/illegal just a decade ago...
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > but "private citizens operating unregulated hotels/taxis" seemed impossible/illegal just a decade ago Every city has had gypsy cabs and Craigslist hotels since forever.
  - sbarre 5y ago
    Sure but that's not what I'm talking about and you know it. I mean large well-known and easily accessible versions of those.

rzz3 5y ago

Despite all of the negatives, many of which I agree with, the legacy taxi industry really sucked for riders. Riding in a taxi feels dirty to me, to be honest. Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained, having to actually call someone on a phone and tell them where to pick you up, often not accepting Apple Pay, Android Pay, credit cards. Rude drivers with no rating system to disincentivize it… It’s sad that Uber seemingly made such bad business decisions and ultimately has not been successful as a business. However, the “disruption” was widely successful. Hell, they even became a verb. Personally, even as a customer, I strongly prefer Lyft (but I’d never take a Taxi unless I was somehow forced to).

dylkil 5y ago
> Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained maybe in US or UK but in europe taxis are kept to a high standard, albeit way more expensive
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Given how large the US is, and how large Europe is, I doubt your statement. I can certainly find plenty of well maintained taxis in the US, I bet I can find plenty of beat up taxis in Europe.
darth_avocado 5y ago
Legacy taxis were and still are a more expensive and inefficient business. Outside of airports and maybe cities like New York, hailing a taxi was a terrible experience. The scale of Uber despite their shitty business model, allows them to have a lot more drivers constantly on the road than traditional companies. This allows for an quicker availability of a cab at a moment’s notice. Anyone remember leaving a party before Uber, calling a cab and then awkwardly sitting around at the host’s place for another half hour? This also means a generational behavior change where more people use Uber, which in turn allows more continuous business for the driver and a cheaper ride for the consumer. Uber can charge more (which they are doing now), fix their driver pay and still provide a cheaper and more convenient experience for the users.

1270018080 5y ago

Let me preface by saying I hate capitalism. But how did capital win in this arrangement? They lost billions. They're down 25% since IPO a few years ago.

barry-cotter 5y ago

This completely neglects the enormous gains to consumers of having cabs that (1) will actually show up if booked ahead of time (2) don’t discriminate by race/ethnicity (3) don’t take the long way round (4) always take cards instead of the machine being “broken” (5) will pick up and drop you off anywhere. Uber and their competitors are and were 100x better at getting drivers to follow the rules taxis were always meant to follow than their regulators ever were.

tmnvix 5y ago
I have had Uber drivers fail to show up multiple times. They appear to be heading to the pickup point but then park some distance away and just wait. It's very frustrating. I've never had that experience with a taxi service. It's nothing to do with my Uber rating. I've since learned that it has something to do with a scam involving short/undesirable trips and cancellation fees.

scoopertrooper 5y ago

Perhaps, another option would be for the government to help establish a drivers-cooperative app. An app where all the profits collected had to distributed back to the drivers or invested in the common infrastructure to maintain, promote, and improve the app. The drivers could also agree amongst themselves as to matters such as working conditions and minimum pay. Uber and others could still exist, but they'd be at a disadvantage because they'd be ploughing billions into nonsense like self-driving blimps or whatever.

scarface74 5y ago
“The government” is what caused the taxi system to be such a mess.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  It also built the city streets those Taxis and Ubers cruise around on. What's your point?

imtringued 5y ago

I am a bit confused here. This is a money losing company. Yes there has been some shift from labor to capital recently but overall investors are losing money here.

menzoic 5y ago

There's massive efficiency gains. The countless one man businesses have no overhead side from owning a car they already have. They don't need to do anything else besides install and run an app. No need for marketing, managing payment systems, customer acquisition...etc Millions of drivers globally have the business side of things taken care of by a single company. Fragmentation across tens of thousands of taxi companies is inefficient. In the US many neighborhoods and entire cities didn't have access to reliable taxis or any taxi at all. There's significantly more coverage with Uber and ride sharing in general. The same is probably true of other countries.

ISL 5y ago

Uber adds more value to the rider than a balkanized taxi environment. No matter where you are, it is likely to work and work in a familiar way.

scarface74 5y ago

Why do you take it as a fact that the legacy taxi companies were better?

cornel_io 5y ago

Almost every useful scalable service ends up shifting economic gains from labor to capital. And consumers benefit from it, because as a very rough economic rule of thumb, the more value that flows to labor the less efficient the service is and the higher price consumers pay. From a customer POV taxis were horrible, full-stop, and Uber/Lyft are fantastic. I can actually get a reliable, safe ride almost anywhere now, and that was impossible before (ever been held up by a gypsy cabbie because yellow cabs won't go to certain parts of NYC? Not fun...).

amelius 5y ago
> And consumers benefit from it As a consumer, I don't want to pay for unfair work practices. Taxis may have been horrible, taking rides with people who are systematically exploited is even more horrible.
- scarface74 5y ago
  As if taxi drivers weren’t exploited when they had to rent medallions. But if you don’t want to support “exploited workers”, are you willing to give up all electronics?
- cornel_io 5y ago
  I'm sorry...drivers are making a choice, they are not as naive as you seem to think they are and they have infinite other options for unskilled labor if it's really that "unfair", but most of those options pay less per hour - yes, they don't put as many miles on people's cars, but that's a tradeoff for getting cash now, which is often what people want. I delivered pizzas as a college kid, and made 1/3 of what Uber drivers make while driving the same amount, even accounting for inflation. "Systematically exploited" is a really paternalistic view.

yitr 5y ago

where did you learn this?

lhorie 5y ago

But it's not like people are necessarily worse off by choosing to drive for Uber. The thing is that for a lot of drivers, Uber is complementary income on top of a primary, inflexible income source. AFAIK, there's nothing else other than gig economy that lets someone supplement income piecemeal. If you think in terms of socio-economic mobility, isn't the ability to squeeze extra earning opportunities in between other responsibilities a good thing? Also, Uber has shown that it isn't 100% effective at "exploiting" its market. Last year, a lot of drivers were taking home 6 digit gross income due to driver shortages and the ability to opt into stupidly long work weeks. That's pretty significant for what is effectively a unskilled job.

amelius 5y ago
> Last year, a lot of drivers were taking home 6 digit gross income due to driver shortages. That's pretty significant for what is effectively a unskilled job. Source needed. Might just as well be a publicity stunt by Uber.
- lhorie 5y ago
  One source is just an acquaintance of mine. A couple of others are people on youtube. Mind you, the caveat is these people worked 50+ hours per week. If you want something that looks less anecdotal, google "uber salary". Glassdoor lists a range from 18k-93k/yr.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Is that the take home after all cost, maintenance, depreciation and so on?
    - lhorie 5y ago
      It's gross income, so no. For my acquaintance it was still better net income than the job he had been laid off from (we're talking a difference of more than 2x), the trade-off is that the income boost comes from opting into putting long hours. He was able to use the extra income to pay off some debt, FWIW. If you're interested, some of the YouTube videos go into the earnings breakdown and take home amount after setting aside a maintenance fund.

pdonis 5y ago

> Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital But if the company is losing money, there are no economic gains; there are economic losses. Who is taking the losses?

injidup 5y ago

As a customer I don't care about economic theory. What I care about is that I take out my mobile, press a couple of buttons and I know the price and time of pick up. This is innovation. Before über nobody was doing this. This has been a huge efficiency gain. The service is safe and reliable and trackable. This really has nothing to do with employees vs contractors. If the government legislated that uber drivers had to be treated as employees, the innovation that uber brought to the market would not disappear. Might be a bit more expensive but we would not be going back to hailing random taxis on the street or calling numbers and negotiating with call centres.