21 ms·

> Take Uber, one of their key examples. It'd be one thing if the company had simply outcompeted taxicabs on the merits. Cabs, after all, were themselves a fat a

by mjr00 3y ago

> Take Uber, one of their key examples. It'd be one thing if the company had simply outcompeted taxicabs on the merits. Cabs, after all, were themselves a fat and complacent monopoly. Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! Before ride-sharing apps, the process for getting a taxi was: 1. Stand on a street corner (if you're in a busy area) or make a call if you're not. If you have to make a call, there's a ~20% chance a taxi actually shows up. 2. Get in the taxi, tell your driver where to go and how to get there since they could otherwise take a more expensive and profitable route. 3. When you're at you destination, pay the driver. 80% chance they will say "the machine is not working," offering to take you to an ATM to get cash if needed. Note that the machine magically works when you shrug and tell them you're not obligated to pay if the reader is broken. Ride-sharing apps completely changed the game. Suddenly you know exactly how much you had to pay, in advance. You knew exactly where your ride was so you had an estimated arrival time. You knew exactly what route they were taking. People talk about how Uber/Lyft dodged taxi regulation, which is true, but the reason there was so much regulation around taxis in the first place was because the old system was so ripe for abuse. Imagine being a tourist landing at an airport and taking a taxi to your hotel; what if you got into a cab and they charged a hidden $20 "airport pickup fee," or took the scenic route, or simply charged a higher rate than the car in front of them? That's exactly why the industry was so tightly regulated, and you have things like standardized rates, requirements for rates to be displayed on the interior and exterior of every cab, the meter being visible to the rider, etc. All this to say, any sort of competition on pricing is totally orthogonal to competition on product. Uber and Lyft handily won the product battle against cabs.

cratermoon 3y ago
> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! Uber's predatory and illegal practices are pretty well documented. It's not revisionist to say that without deliberately putting their thumb on the scale, Uber would not have even been able to get into the market.
rib3ye 3y ago
1a. The cab shows up but then picks up another person who flagged them down 1b. You have an emergency and need to cancel or the cab can't find you and the company blacklists your phone number.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Because 1b never happened with tech companies. I didn't see thebtopic hit HN front page this week so far, if that counts as proof.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    The 1b that happens with tech companies is different than calling a taxi and not taking it. In this situation Uber/Lyft is still able to charge you and so they won't feel as slighted. > [1] If you no longer need your scheduled or requested ride, feel free to cancel it. You may be charged a cancellation fee in certain conditions. [1]: https://help.lyft.com/hc/e/all/articles/115012922687-Cancel-and-no-show-policy-for-riders https://help.lyft.com/hc/e/all/articles/115012922687-Cancel-...
  - kibwen 3y ago
    Uber blacklists people all the time for pursuing chargebacks when Uber charges a customer despite failing to provide the service. Here's an example of predatory behavior from just yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/UberEATS/comments/151k5hq/whats_wrong_uber_now_instructs_their_employees_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/UberEATS/comments/151k5hq/whats_wro...
    - rib3ye 3y ago
      My counter anecdotal example is that this never happened to me or anyone in my social sphere after 10 years of Uber rides, but phone number blacklisting happened to almost everyone I knew. /shrug In SF, there really isn't "another cab company" other than Yellow Cab. To echo the parent, they may have been unethical and borderline illegal about scooping marketshare from cab monopolies, but there were no complaints from the consumer.
fsqkdnionoi 3y ago
[flagged]
gwbas1c 3y ago
> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! Although your point is poignant, it would be more valid if their price structure was (cough) sustainable. What if Lyft and Uber were 25% cheaper than taxis; primarily because they didn't need to pay a dispatchers' salaries? This would be the classic case of automation lowering prices. IMO, they could have out-competed traditional taxis without needing to price below cost; which would make your observation 100% true. Instead, Uber and Lyft merely demonstrated that there is a market for the self-driving taxi business. Unfortunately, their relentless expansion shows the danger of letting ones' imagination run away and overestimating how quickly tech can be built. Self-driving cars is a hard problem; and building a business assuming that "AI can be delivered on a date" is a huge, huge, risk. Clearly both companies lost the bet (that self-driving cars would work in time for their price model to work). Perhaps the Uber and Lyft stories are bad examples of the overall thesis of the article?
- ghaff 3y ago
  >Clearly both companies lost the bet (that self-driving cars would work in time for their price model to work). Of course, the companies may have known it was a rash bet in the vein of this fable about teaching a horse to talk: https://naomistanford.com/2009/02/09/teaching-the-horse-to-talk/ https://naomistanford.com/2009/02/09/teaching-the-horse-to-t... Uber and Lyft could win--depending on location--based on product. But they also deeply undercut taxis on the basis of price until people got used to using them. >What if Lyft and Uber were 25% cheaper than taxis; primarily because they didn't need to pay a dispatchers' salaries? I'm pretty sure dispatchers are cheaper than expensive SV engineers.
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    > >What if Lyft and Uber were 25% cheaper than taxis; primarily because they didn't need to pay a dispatchers' salaries? >I'm pretty sure dispatchers are cheaper than expensive SV engineers. That’s like saying paying human computer wage is less than electrical engineers who develop electronic computers. Non-recurring engineering cost is higher BUT IT’S NON-RECURRING and largely independent of the number of users, unlike dispatchers.
whateverman23 3y ago
NYC is the only city I've found that seems to be good at #2 and #3. #2 because route finding is generally pretty easy to follow so scamming people is harder. #3 has been much much better since its been made illegal to get to the destination and then reveal that the card reader is broken. (I'm sure there are other cities that get it right, but they're hard to find in the US).
AlexandrB 3y ago
> All this to say, any sort of competition on pricing is totally orthogonal to competition on product. I disagree. Without money-losing subsidies early Uber would have remained in the "Black Cab" market. Quality helps, but most people are not willing to pay a huge premium for it (see the race to the bottom in the airline industry). It's also a mistake to take the large American city (New York? LA?) cab experience and project it onto the rest of the world. I live in a small-ish (< 1M) Canadian city and I've never experienced any of the listed antics when calling a cab here (and this was before Uber existed). Yet Uber still became quite dominant - probably because, for a long time, it was the cheapest option.
- jen20 3y ago
  I’ve taken cabs in Canada (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, always as a tourist/business traveler) and it was exactly as described. Now that cab companies have somewhat caught up in technology, with pay by phone and app-based booking, I’m prepared to consider them again. Price was never an issue.
- Zaheer 3y ago
  Having traveled and taken cabs in many other places of the world I can confidently say Uber/Lyft/Similar apps are miles ahead in user experience than the old way. In other cities (ex. Istanbul) apps haven't quite caught on and the cab experience is much worse.
  - coredog64 3y ago
    9 years ago I spent a significant amount of time in Dublin and was impressed by how the local taxi drivers integrated with Hailo. The app allowed you to call a cab from an out of the way location, you could see where the cab was, and you pay (and tip) in the app. If Yellow Cab had adopted this 10 years ago, Uber would be a cautionary tale like pets.com.
    - pigeonhole123 3y ago
      I read that Hailo ran out of money trying to expand to NYC. I lived in London when it was big and it seemed to just disappear at some point. Failing like that after becoming dominant in London is simply puzzling to me. Sounds like a license to print money once most of the cabs use it.
DrScientist 3y ago
One of the things that's interesting here is what's the fundamental difference between using your phone to order a cab using your voice, and using your phone to order a cab with your fingers ( an app ). Pricing mechanisms could be the same - pre-agreed price etc. The real key difference is the realtime feedback of where the cab is in terms of coming to pick you up. ie the diminishing of the anxiety of that uncertain wait. That's it - that's the only thing traditional cab firms couldn't provide - and now many of them now have their own apps - as apps aren't that hard.
- Zak 3y ago
  Don't underestimate how much some people dislike talking on the phone.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
HWR_14 3y ago
That may have been an experience, but it was not my experience at all. I have found taxis to just be better than Ubers/Lyfts. And yes, that includes when they were new. I found taxis waiting in taxi stands in known locations of busy areas, or they would come if you call. If they had to come, I found them far reliable in terms of "when the vehicle would get there" than Uber or Lyft. Both of which promise arrivals and then often have to recalculate. I found taxis to be more predictable in price. I could get a pretty accurate estimate from a taxi driver. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft only gave you their estimate and had no problem silently charging you more. (I believe that has been fixed). And cabs ability to take cash was great. Yes, rarely they tried "the machine is not working", but that was rare and easy to deal with like you said. Meanwhile, if you wanted to do something non-standard (e.g. make multiple stops[0]) you could, either by paying a small cash extra or because they were a person not a machine they could handle it. Meanwhile, the reason there was so much taxi regulation was that without it traffic becomes unbearable. There would be hour long traffic jams of ubers going to pick people up near the front door whenever an event let out, as opposed to people walking to where the taxis had to pick them up.[0] But in general they are horrible for traffic. [0] Uber/Lyft can handle that now, but could not earlier
- itzworm 3y ago
  > I found taxis waiting in taxi stands in known locations of busy areas, or they would come if you call. I'm guessing you live in one of the top 5-10 populated cities in the US. (Or a major city outside the US). The issue is taxis are generally fine in these area, but outside being a dense population center calling a taxi is a flip of the coin.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Taxis probably aren't great in smaller areas, and if Ubers were primarily trying to locate themselves there and compete against cars that come when you call in those areas it would probably would work fine. I have to admit my experience with taxis is less dense areas was fine, but is probably more skewed, because taxi services were optimised to take people to/from transportation hubs (e.g. airports, trains) and hotels, and that's how I used them. However, those smaller areas don't have taxi medallions to avoid and typically have less taxi regulations in general. Obviously, there is still a dumping component where Ubers are sold at a loss, but the main concern I heard most people have with Ubers was them ignoring the various taxi regulations that made it work in dense areas. Things like horrible traffic jams caused by too many Ubers all converging on one location, refusing to pick up minorities, etc. Edit: To clarify, since I was misunderstood. I don't mean taxis are good at picking up minorities. They, historically and through today, have not been (with some minorities). That's why there are laws that try to make it so taxis have to pick them up. That is one example of a regulation that Uber/Lyft have ignored. AFAIK, this has caused some issues with Uber drivers and no way to appeal except to hope that Uber corporate believes your story.
nickphx 3y ago
Right... So the regulations exist to prevent exploitative behavior from unscrupulous drivers... like Uber's innovative idea of surge pricing?
- phailhaus 3y ago
  You know the surge price before you even order the Uber, and if you want you can decide that you'd rather roll the dice with a taxi.
OO000oo 3y ago
Uber and Lift don't pay drivers nearly enough to afford regular vehicle maintenance. I trust a taxi company's fleet maintenance 1000% more.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  I think part of the problem is tipping. Remember how Uber used to say tips weren’t necessary and then they decided to encourage tipping so that they could pay drivers less. The problem is a huge chunk of users don’t bother tips. I tried driving Uber/Lift for a couple days in 2019 to see if I could make extra money and noticed that the majority of my fares were just people going to their job at Burger King and I’d make like 4 bucks for that and no tip. And I wouldn’t really expect people using Uber as transportation for their low wage job to be tipping much but it just showed me that the whole system was pretty broken.
phkahler 3y ago
>>:All this to say, any sort of competition on pricing is totally orthogonal to competition on product. Uber and Lyft handily won the product battle against cabs. Pricing may be orthogonal to product, but both are needed profitability. You gotta have something people want AND make a profit.
- koolba 3y ago
  If VC has showed us anything, it’s that you don’t have to be cash flow positive. You just have to present the illusion that you just might be one day long enough to cash out. The real people being scammed by all this are secondary investors and pension funds.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    >The real people being scammed by all this are secondary investors and pension funds. No, it's the real, legitimate businesses and employees that are in the space being """disrupted""" and lose their shirts and jobs because it's impossible for a legitimate business to compete with selling one dollar for fifty cents. Add to that all the normal people who liked using those businesses and liked how small they were and were perfectly happy and now are stuck using a shitty evil megacorp
    - koolba 3y ago
      There’s nothing inherently evil about large corporations and there’s no inherent right to a business model in the face of undercutting competition. Just relax and enjoy the subsidized rides and grocery deliveries while it lasts.
      - kcartlidge 3y ago
        > There’s nothing inherently evil about large corporations The post you're replying to was specifically referring to the megacorps involved in the disruption and predatory pricing. They never said there was anything inherently evil about large corporations. That said, I do agree with your prior comment: > The real people being scammed by all this are secondary investors and pension funds. Not exclusively, of course. You've both identified valid sets of victims.
hguant 3y ago
> 1. Stand on a street corner (if you're in a busy area) or make a call if you're not. If you have to make a call, there's a ~20% chance a taxi actually shows up. option 3 - go to a hotel, and have them call a cab for you, or get one from the stand there. This is my go to for cities I'm unfamiliar with, and it's never let me down. The taxi companies might not have an incentive to show up promptly for _you_, random person calling them, but they do for the hotel in their area.
musicale 3y ago
> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history > People talk about how Uber/Lyft dodged taxi regulation, which is true Taxis sucked (and still do), but Uber/Lyft's not-so-secret sauce was regulatory evasion, claiming that their taxi service wasn't a taxi service and that their employees weren't employees.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  Also Uber/Lyft were "dumping" their product, selling rides below cost by partially funding every ride with VC investment money. This made their product artificially competitive.
  - tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
    I always see people say this but I don't know how they were subsidizing rides. I was an early Uber driver when I was in grad school and I received roughly 2/3rds of what riders paid. Was Uber's third take too low? I would also receive a lower fare when the rider used a coupon or had a promotion. It always seemed more like I was subsidizing the rides rather than Uber.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Maybe, just maybe, your singular experience is not accurately representative of Uber's business? You can go look up how they were clearly subsidizing fares.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    Right—I'm sure they won some business because they were actually a better experience in some ways, but I've ridden in like three taxis ever in my nearly 40 years on this planet, and never in the place where I live, but have taken probably thirty or forty ubers/lyfts, most of them near home. Why? Taxis were too expensive, so I never even considered them an option. Ubers and Lyfts were stupid-cheap for a long time.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
What is this crap people in the valley have to say about taxis? That's a problem with where you live, not with taxis. Taxis everywhere I've lived have always been fine, safe, clean, boring, and the prices aren't great, but neither is uber--they seem on par where I live Except taxi drivers get paid enough to raise a family
- Matticus_Rex 3y ago
  I live on the east coast. A decade ago driving nights for Uber across three different cities and picking up passengers from all over the country, half the people I picked up wanted to tell me their taxi horror stories. Your experience is the exception.
- theragra 3y ago
  I dunno where you live, but every time I used a taxi in different countries I was unhappy.
- have_faith 3y ago
  There's no way this is a valley thing. I've had mostly terrible taxi experiences across the UK. The exception being advanced airport rides, where they are paid more for the ride and the cost is fixed. Two taxies in a row at the train station recently said their meter wasn't working and it's cash only.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I agree. In my area, taxis were never bad at all, and Uber/Lyft was not much of an improvement. Uber/Lyft got a foothold here purely because they were cheaper.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Taxis are globally well known for being terrible and scammy, especially from airports.
lynx23 3y ago
Well, location and (aparently) attitude of workers/service providers does matter. If I call a taxi, it arrives with a 99.9% probability. And it usually takes around 5 minutes to arrive. In fact, fiddling with an app to order a taxi would be more time consuming then the 10 second phone call. IOW, if you have working infrastructure, Uber isn't even a competitor.
nova22033 3y ago
Before ride-sharing apps, the process for getting a taxi was: Also... Step 0: Don't be black
meling 3y ago
Oh wow, I didn’t know you could say that. I should have told the taxi driver this when he said my card was declined (the reader was broken, so he had to use his phone with the Square dongle). I ended up having to use my other (debit) card, which annoyed me a lot… Paying cash was not an option, since I needed a receipt. He didn’t even have a printer, so I had to enter my email, which annoyed me even more. This was from Orlando airport to a hotel ($65 wo/tip)… going back I went with Lyft and it cost ($42 incl tip) and there is no problem paying.
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  That's just a scam. My first job was working on payment systems in taxis. The biggest issue we had? Taxi drivers ripping them out so they can charge cash. I'm 20years out of the taxi industry but I wish Uber and Lyft would kill that industry completely. It's what I call a scam industry. Like car dealerships the entire industry is focused on squeezing every dollar they can from every transaction. It's horrendous. I also can't believe anyone would defend taxis here. Naivety I assume.
monocasa 3y ago
There's also the increased security aspect. Before you get in a car, there's a map, with both you and the driver's phones reporting GPS updates back to the mothership. Previously my wife had an issue with a taxi in LA where she was riding with one of her friends, the friend rightly pointed out that they were in a grid section of town and the circuitous route didn't make sense, and the driver locked the doors while saying "I'll take you anywhere I please". I've heard similar stories from many women.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  This is the same Uber that keeps hiring people who rape their passengers right? Go ahead and look up Uber and sexual assault. https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/09/uber-settles-lawsuit-with-woman-who-accused-executives-of-obtaining-medical-records-after-she-was-raped/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/09/uber-settles-lawsuit-with-...
  - monocasa 3y ago
    You don't get the issue down to zero (and probably can't without self driving cars), but you do get the benefit of a record of where the car goes. It's not perfect, but it's markedly better than it was.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Except nobody is showing any evidence there has been an improvement, rather, everyone just says "Surely Uber does it better and does the right thing", which is absurd.
      - monocasa 3y ago
        I know the women in my life feel structurally much safer. They don't have some weird attachment to the companies, but recognize that the overall system involved makes the possibility for shenanigans much less likely. There's an emergency contact button right in the app, linked to the GPS tracker. It doesn't take a genius to see how that is safer than jumping into a random car with no record of having done so. They're not saying "surely the ride share companies do it better"; the reasons why they think it's better are apparent to them with little trust needed.
magicalhippo 3y ago
> All this to say, any sort of competition on pricing is totally orthogonal to competition on product. I've visited the US on a few occasions, and each time I've used Uber or Lyft for precisely the reasons you state. I could bring up the app, enter my destination and get a price and an ETA. Either I liked what I saw or I didn't, and I could make my choice. Back here in Oslo, Norway, every now and then I take a cab home after being out all night. Uber and friends don't exist here because laws and regulations. And it sucks. Even as a local they try to take detours, and who knows how much it'll cost to get home this time.
stcroixx 3y ago
Dodging regulation, aka cheating, disqualifies a party from a competition. And today we have rideshare drivers refusing to drive into bad neighborhoods just like cabbies did before regulation - consumers are worse off in that example and there are others.
apexalpha 3y ago
A few weeks back there was a train outage and I couldn't get home. Had to take a taxi for the first time in years. I went out to the taxi spot next to the train station and asked how much € to Amsterdam etc.. Immediately another taxi driver runs up and tells me I shouldn't take this driver because he is not from the right area, apparently. Then they start shouting at each other while I, a potential customer was there. Eventually more drivers take sides and almost start fighting. I walk away for a bit and ask another driver. I ask how much to Amsterdam he says: "how much are you willing to pay"? What kind of question is that, ffs. It's 23:00 and I want to go home, just give me your price. He refuses a few more times and I walk away. Then he suddenly says €100. I say too much, he counters with €80. I say €60 so we agree on €70. When we're on the highway he says his machine is broken so we have to pay cash... Goodbye reimbursement from the train company because he's also not printing a receipt. Finally home I lay in bed thinking how god awful the entire taxi experience is when you're not using Uber.
- 89vision 3y ago
  is there no Uber in Amsterdam?
  - apexalpha 3y ago
    There is but my phone was out. Plus I thought: the taxis are right here, how hard can it be? Turns out it was pretty hard.
  - pixelpoet 3y ago
    It's below sea level, they only have Unter.
    - nborwankar 3y ago
      <clap emoji> * 3
- noja 3y ago
  > Goodbye reimbursement from the train company because he's also not printing a receipt. He can write a receipt. Did you ask him to?
ativzzz 3y ago
Another big impact of Uber/Lyft was safety of getting around in poorer foreign countries, particularly ones where you don't speak the language. It's much more safe and consistent to take an Uber at night in Colombia as a foreigner
- dboreham 3y ago
  Yes but that same service can be provided by taxi+website, which exists and functions acceptably in some places (Rome, Paris).
darth_avocado 3y ago
> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! That is a very generous version of what actually happened. Uber/Lyft were not replacing taxis outside a few big cities with established taxis operations, they were replacing consumer behavior entirely. It was near impossible for them to charge market rates and get a user base that had no need for taxis. If they weren’t heavily subsidizing the rides, they would have never been successful. They most definitely were charging next to nothing when they were in “growth phase”. At the height of it, it was almost as cheap as public transportation and not market rate.
pnathan 3y ago
> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! quite correct! The Uber/Lyft "package", as it were, is easily worth a full 20% over conventional taxi systems circa 2010ish. Since using Lyft, I have since only used traditional taxis when Lyft/Uber was not available. Because the old model was bad.
CPLX 3y ago
Everything you’re mentioning happened due to the invention of the smartphone, a nearly perfect ride hailing device with GPS and payment ability included. It’s like saying Netflix invented streaming video.
colpabar 3y ago
You forgot to mention that even if you call a cab, and even if it shows up, someone else can just take it. The one time I tried taking a cab, we called and ordered one, waited outside, and then watched as it picked up a group of people up the street and drove away.
sangnoir 3y ago
> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! You're right about downsides of cabs, but I'm afraid you are also revising history on the issue of merit. For a long time, Uber (and Lyft) rides cost a lot more than clients were paying - many people noticed this and wrote about it, and the edgier ones characterized ride-sharing as a wealth transfer from VCs to riders. The setup was clearly not "competing on merit" and was closer to predatory pricing. It's obvious the investors would have demanded massive hikes had they managed to drive competitors out of business.
tmaly 3y ago
This just reminded me of a trip to Italy I took back in 2009. There was this taxi I took that charged me 100 Euros to go a kilometer. Never again will I do that.

by mjr00 3y ago

cratermoon 3y ago

> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! Uber's predatory and illegal practices are pretty well documented. It's not revisionist to say that without deliberately putting their thumb on the scale, Uber would not have even been able to get into the market.

rib3ye 3y ago

1a. The cab shows up but then picks up another person who flagged them down 1b. You have an emergency and need to cancel or the cab can't find you and the company blacklists your phone number.

hef19898 3y ago
Because 1b never happened with tech companies. I didn't see thebtopic hit HN front page this week so far, if that counts as proof.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  The 1b that happens with tech companies is different than calling a taxi and not taking it. In this situation Uber/Lyft is still able to charge you and so they won't feel as slighted. > [1] If you no longer need your scheduled or requested ride, feel free to cancel it. You may be charged a cancellation fee in certain conditions. [1]: https://help.lyft.com/hc/e/all/articles/115012922687-Cancel-and-no-show-policy-for-riders https://help.lyft.com/hc/e/all/articles/115012922687-Cancel-...
- kibwen 3y ago
  Uber blacklists people all the time for pursuing chargebacks when Uber charges a customer despite failing to provide the service. Here's an example of predatory behavior from just yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/UberEATS/comments/151k5hq/whats_wrong_uber_now_instructs_their_employees_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/UberEATS/comments/151k5hq/whats_wro...
  - rib3ye 3y ago
    My counter anecdotal example is that this never happened to me or anyone in my social sphere after 10 years of Uber rides, but phone number blacklisting happened to almost everyone I knew. /shrug In SF, there really isn't "another cab company" other than Yellow Cab. To echo the parent, they may have been unethical and borderline illegal about scooping marketshare from cab monopolies, but there were no complaints from the consumer.

fsqkdnionoi 3y ago

[flagged]

gwbas1c 3y ago

> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! Although your point is poignant, it would be more valid if their price structure was (cough) sustainable. What if Lyft and Uber were 25% cheaper than taxis; primarily because they didn't need to pay a dispatchers' salaries? This would be the classic case of automation lowering prices. IMO, they could have out-competed traditional taxis without needing to price below cost; which would make your observation 100% true. Instead, Uber and Lyft merely demonstrated that there is a market for the self-driving taxi business. Unfortunately, their relentless expansion shows the danger of letting ones' imagination run away and overestimating how quickly tech can be built. Self-driving cars is a hard problem; and building a business assuming that "AI can be delivered on a date" is a huge, huge, risk. Clearly both companies lost the bet (that self-driving cars would work in time for their price model to work). Perhaps the Uber and Lyft stories are bad examples of the overall thesis of the article?

ghaff 3y ago
>Clearly both companies lost the bet (that self-driving cars would work in time for their price model to work). Of course, the companies may have known it was a rash bet in the vein of this fable about teaching a horse to talk: https://naomistanford.com/2009/02/09/teaching-the-horse-to-talk/ https://naomistanford.com/2009/02/09/teaching-the-horse-to-t... Uber and Lyft could win--depending on location--based on product. But they also deeply undercut taxis on the basis of price until people got used to using them. >What if Lyft and Uber were 25% cheaper than taxis; primarily because they didn't need to pay a dispatchers' salaries? I'm pretty sure dispatchers are cheaper than expensive SV engineers.
- Robotbeat 3y ago
  > >What if Lyft and Uber were 25% cheaper than taxis; primarily because they didn't need to pay a dispatchers' salaries? >I'm pretty sure dispatchers are cheaper than expensive SV engineers. That’s like saying paying human computer wage is less than electrical engineers who develop electronic computers. Non-recurring engineering cost is higher BUT IT’S NON-RECURRING and largely independent of the number of users, unlike dispatchers.

whateverman23 3y ago

NYC is the only city I've found that seems to be good at #2 and #3. #2 because route finding is generally pretty easy to follow so scamming people is harder. #3 has been much much better since its been made illegal to get to the destination and then reveal that the card reader is broken. (I'm sure there are other cities that get it right, but they're hard to find in the US).

AlexandrB 3y ago

> All this to say, any sort of competition on pricing is totally orthogonal to competition on product. I disagree. Without money-losing subsidies early Uber would have remained in the "Black Cab" market. Quality helps, but most people are not willing to pay a huge premium for it (see the race to the bottom in the airline industry). It's also a mistake to take the large American city (New York? LA?) cab experience and project it onto the rest of the world. I live in a small-ish (< 1M) Canadian city and I've never experienced any of the listed antics when calling a cab here (and this was before Uber existed). Yet Uber still became quite dominant - probably because, for a long time, it was the cheapest option.

jen20 3y ago
I’ve taken cabs in Canada (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, always as a tourist/business traveler) and it was exactly as described. Now that cab companies have somewhat caught up in technology, with pay by phone and app-based booking, I’m prepared to consider them again. Price was never an issue.
Zaheer 3y ago
Having traveled and taken cabs in many other places of the world I can confidently say Uber/Lyft/Similar apps are miles ahead in user experience than the old way. In other cities (ex. Istanbul) apps haven't quite caught on and the cab experience is much worse.
- coredog64 3y ago
  9 years ago I spent a significant amount of time in Dublin and was impressed by how the local taxi drivers integrated with Hailo. The app allowed you to call a cab from an out of the way location, you could see where the cab was, and you pay (and tip) in the app. If Yellow Cab had adopted this 10 years ago, Uber would be a cautionary tale like pets.com.
  - pigeonhole123 3y ago
    I read that Hailo ran out of money trying to expand to NYC. I lived in London when it was big and it seemed to just disappear at some point. Failing like that after becoming dominant in London is simply puzzling to me. Sounds like a license to print money once most of the cabs use it.

DrScientist 3y ago

One of the things that's interesting here is what's the fundamental difference between using your phone to order a cab using your voice, and using your phone to order a cab with your fingers ( an app ). Pricing mechanisms could be the same - pre-agreed price etc. The real key difference is the realtime feedback of where the cab is in terms of coming to pick you up. ie the diminishing of the anxiety of that uncertain wait. That's it - that's the only thing traditional cab firms couldn't provide - and now many of them now have their own apps - as apps aren't that hard.

Zak 3y ago
Don't underestimate how much some people dislike talking on the phone.

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HWR_14 3y ago

That may have been an experience, but it was not my experience at all. I have found taxis to just be better than Ubers/Lyfts. And yes, that includes when they were new. I found taxis waiting in taxi stands in known locations of busy areas, or they would come if you call. If they had to come, I found them far reliable in terms of "when the vehicle would get there" than Uber or Lyft. Both of which promise arrivals and then often have to recalculate. I found taxis to be more predictable in price. I could get a pretty accurate estimate from a taxi driver. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft only gave you their estimate and had no problem silently charging you more. (I believe that has been fixed). And cabs ability to take cash was great. Yes, rarely they tried "the machine is not working", but that was rare and easy to deal with like you said. Meanwhile, if you wanted to do something non-standard (e.g. make multiple stops[0]) you could, either by paying a small cash extra or because they were a person not a machine they could handle it. Meanwhile, the reason there was so much taxi regulation was that without it traffic becomes unbearable. There would be hour long traffic jams of ubers going to pick people up near the front door whenever an event let out, as opposed to people walking to where the taxis had to pick them up.[0] But in general they are horrible for traffic. [0] Uber/Lyft can handle that now, but could not earlier

itzworm 3y ago
> I found taxis waiting in taxi stands in known locations of busy areas, or they would come if you call. I'm guessing you live in one of the top 5-10 populated cities in the US. (Or a major city outside the US). The issue is taxis are generally fine in these area, but outside being a dense population center calling a taxi is a flip of the coin.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Taxis probably aren't great in smaller areas, and if Ubers were primarily trying to locate themselves there and compete against cars that come when you call in those areas it would probably would work fine. I have to admit my experience with taxis is less dense areas was fine, but is probably more skewed, because taxi services were optimised to take people to/from transportation hubs (e.g. airports, trains) and hotels, and that's how I used them. However, those smaller areas don't have taxi medallions to avoid and typically have less taxi regulations in general. Obviously, there is still a dumping component where Ubers are sold at a loss, but the main concern I heard most people have with Ubers was them ignoring the various taxi regulations that made it work in dense areas. Things like horrible traffic jams caused by too many Ubers all converging on one location, refusing to pick up minorities, etc. Edit: To clarify, since I was misunderstood. I don't mean taxis are good at picking up minorities. They, historically and through today, have not been (with some minorities). That's why there are laws that try to make it so taxis have to pick them up. That is one example of a regulation that Uber/Lyft have ignored. AFAIK, this has caused some issues with Uber drivers and no way to appeal except to hope that Uber corporate believes your story.

nickphx 3y ago

Right... So the regulations exist to prevent exploitative behavior from unscrupulous drivers... like Uber's innovative idea of surge pricing?

phailhaus 3y ago
You know the surge price before you even order the Uber, and if you want you can decide that you'd rather roll the dice with a taxi.

OO000oo 3y ago

Uber and Lift don't pay drivers nearly enough to afford regular vehicle maintenance. I trust a taxi company's fleet maintenance 1000% more.

lotsoweiners 3y ago
I think part of the problem is tipping. Remember how Uber used to say tips weren’t necessary and then they decided to encourage tipping so that they could pay drivers less. The problem is a huge chunk of users don’t bother tips. I tried driving Uber/Lift for a couple days in 2019 to see if I could make extra money and noticed that the majority of my fares were just people going to their job at Burger King and I’d make like 4 bucks for that and no tip. And I wouldn’t really expect people using Uber as transportation for their low wage job to be tipping much but it just showed me that the whole system was pretty broken.

phkahler 3y ago

>>:All this to say, any sort of competition on pricing is totally orthogonal to competition on product. Uber and Lyft handily won the product battle against cabs. Pricing may be orthogonal to product, but both are needed profitability. You gotta have something people want AND make a profit.

koolba 3y ago
If VC has showed us anything, it’s that you don’t have to be cash flow positive. You just have to present the illusion that you just might be one day long enough to cash out. The real people being scammed by all this are secondary investors and pension funds.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >The real people being scammed by all this are secondary investors and pension funds. No, it's the real, legitimate businesses and employees that are in the space being """disrupted""" and lose their shirts and jobs because it's impossible for a legitimate business to compete with selling one dollar for fifty cents. Add to that all the normal people who liked using those businesses and liked how small they were and were perfectly happy and now are stuck using a shitty evil megacorp
  - koolba 3y ago
    There’s nothing inherently evil about large corporations and there’s no inherent right to a business model in the face of undercutting competition. Just relax and enjoy the subsidized rides and grocery deliveries while it lasts.
    - kcartlidge 3y ago
      > There’s nothing inherently evil about large corporations The post you're replying to was specifically referring to the megacorps involved in the disruption and predatory pricing. They never said there was anything inherently evil about large corporations. That said, I do agree with your prior comment: > The real people being scammed by all this are secondary investors and pension funds. Not exclusively, of course. You've both identified valid sets of victims.

hguant 3y ago

> 1. Stand on a street corner (if you're in a busy area) or make a call if you're not. If you have to make a call, there's a ~20% chance a taxi actually shows up. option 3 - go to a hotel, and have them call a cab for you, or get one from the stand there. This is my go to for cities I'm unfamiliar with, and it's never let me down. The taxi companies might not have an incentive to show up promptly for _you_, random person calling them, but they do for the hotel in their area.

musicale 3y ago

> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history > People talk about how Uber/Lyft dodged taxi regulation, which is true Taxis sucked (and still do), but Uber/Lyft's not-so-secret sauce was regulatory evasion, claiming that their taxi service wasn't a taxi service and that their employees weren't employees.

droopyEyelids 3y ago
Also Uber/Lyft were "dumping" their product, selling rides below cost by partially funding every ride with VC investment money. This made their product artificially competitive.
- tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
  I always see people say this but I don't know how they were subsidizing rides. I was an early Uber driver when I was in grad school and I received roughly 2/3rds of what riders paid. Was Uber's third take too low? I would also receive a lower fare when the rider used a coupon or had a promotion. It always seemed more like I was subsidizing the rides rather than Uber.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Maybe, just maybe, your singular experience is not accurately representative of Uber's business? You can go look up how they were clearly subsidizing fares.
- bamfly 3y ago
  Right—I'm sure they won some business because they were actually a better experience in some ways, but I've ridden in like three taxis ever in my nearly 40 years on this planet, and never in the place where I live, but have taken probably thirty or forty ubers/lyfts, most of them near home. Why? Taxis were too expensive, so I never even considered them an option. Ubers and Lyfts were stupid-cheap for a long time.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

What is this crap people in the valley have to say about taxis? That's a problem with where you live, not with taxis. Taxis everywhere I've lived have always been fine, safe, clean, boring, and the prices aren't great, but neither is uber--they seem on par where I live Except taxi drivers get paid enough to raise a family

Matticus_Rex 3y ago
I live on the east coast. A decade ago driving nights for Uber across three different cities and picking up passengers from all over the country, half the people I picked up wanted to tell me their taxi horror stories. Your experience is the exception.
theragra 3y ago
I dunno where you live, but every time I used a taxi in different countries I was unhappy.
have_faith 3y ago
There's no way this is a valley thing. I've had mostly terrible taxi experiences across the UK. The exception being advanced airport rides, where they are paid more for the ride and the cost is fixed. Two taxies in a row at the train station recently said their meter wasn't working and it's cash only.
JohnFen 3y ago
I agree. In my area, taxis were never bad at all, and Uber/Lyft was not much of an improvement. Uber/Lyft got a foothold here purely because they were cheaper.
dotnet00 3y ago
Taxis are globally well known for being terrible and scammy, especially from airports.

lynx23 3y ago

Well, location and (aparently) attitude of workers/service providers does matter. If I call a taxi, it arrives with a 99.9% probability. And it usually takes around 5 minutes to arrive. In fact, fiddling with an app to order a taxi would be more time consuming then the 10 second phone call. IOW, if you have working infrastructure, Uber isn't even a competitor.

nova22033 3y ago

Before ride-sharing apps, the process for getting a taxi was: Also... Step 0: Don't be black

meling 3y ago

Oh wow, I didn’t know you could say that. I should have told the taxi driver this when he said my card was declined (the reader was broken, so he had to use his phone with the Square dongle). I ended up having to use my other (debit) card, which annoyed me a lot… Paying cash was not an option, since I needed a receipt. He didn’t even have a printer, so I had to enter my email, which annoyed me even more. This was from Orlando airport to a hotel ($65 wo/tip)… going back I went with Lyft and it cost ($42 incl tip) and there is no problem paying.

AnotherGoodName 3y ago
That's just a scam. My first job was working on payment systems in taxis. The biggest issue we had? Taxi drivers ripping them out so they can charge cash. I'm 20years out of the taxi industry but I wish Uber and Lyft would kill that industry completely. It's what I call a scam industry. Like car dealerships the entire industry is focused on squeezing every dollar they can from every transaction. It's horrendous. I also can't believe anyone would defend taxis here. Naivety I assume.

monocasa 3y ago

There's also the increased security aspect. Before you get in a car, there's a map, with both you and the driver's phones reporting GPS updates back to the mothership. Previously my wife had an issue with a taxi in LA where she was riding with one of her friends, the friend rightly pointed out that they were in a grid section of town and the circuitous route didn't make sense, and the driver locked the doors while saying "I'll take you anywhere I please". I've heard similar stories from many women.

mrguyorama 3y ago
This is the same Uber that keeps hiring people who rape their passengers right? Go ahead and look up Uber and sexual assault. https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/09/uber-settles-lawsuit-with-woman-who-accused-executives-of-obtaining-medical-records-after-she-was-raped/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/09/uber-settles-lawsuit-with-...
- monocasa 3y ago
  You don't get the issue down to zero (and probably can't without self driving cars), but you do get the benefit of a record of where the car goes. It's not perfect, but it's markedly better than it was.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Except nobody is showing any evidence there has been an improvement, rather, everyone just says "Surely Uber does it better and does the right thing", which is absurd.
    - monocasa 3y ago
      I know the women in my life feel structurally much safer. They don't have some weird attachment to the companies, but recognize that the overall system involved makes the possibility for shenanigans much less likely. There's an emergency contact button right in the app, linked to the GPS tracker. It doesn't take a genius to see how that is safer than jumping into a random car with no record of having done so. They're not saying "surely the ride share companies do it better"; the reasons why they think it's better are apparent to them with little trust needed.

magicalhippo 3y ago

> All this to say, any sort of competition on pricing is totally orthogonal to competition on product. I've visited the US on a few occasions, and each time I've used Uber or Lyft for precisely the reasons you state. I could bring up the app, enter my destination and get a price and an ETA. Either I liked what I saw or I didn't, and I could make my choice. Back here in Oslo, Norway, every now and then I take a cab home after being out all night. Uber and friends don't exist here because laws and regulations. And it sucks. Even as a local they try to take detours, and who knows how much it'll cost to get home this time.

stcroixx 3y ago

Dodging regulation, aka cheating, disqualifies a party from a competition. And today we have rideshare drivers refusing to drive into bad neighborhoods just like cabbies did before regulation - consumers are worse off in that example and there are others.

apexalpha 3y ago

A few weeks back there was a train outage and I couldn't get home. Had to take a taxi for the first time in years. I went out to the taxi spot next to the train station and asked how much € to Amsterdam etc.. Immediately another taxi driver runs up and tells me I shouldn't take this driver because he is not from the right area, apparently. Then they start shouting at each other while I, a potential customer was there. Eventually more drivers take sides and almost start fighting. I walk away for a bit and ask another driver. I ask how much to Amsterdam he says: "how much are you willing to pay"? What kind of question is that, ffs. It's 23:00 and I want to go home, just give me your price. He refuses a few more times and I walk away. Then he suddenly says €100. I say too much, he counters with €80. I say €60 so we agree on €70. When we're on the highway he says his machine is broken so we have to pay cash... Goodbye reimbursement from the train company because he's also not printing a receipt. Finally home I lay in bed thinking how god awful the entire taxi experience is when you're not using Uber.

89vision 3y ago
is there no Uber in Amsterdam?
- apexalpha 3y ago
  There is but my phone was out. Plus I thought: the taxis are right here, how hard can it be? Turns out it was pretty hard.
- pixelpoet 3y ago
  It's below sea level, they only have Unter.
  - nborwankar 3y ago
    <clap emoji> * 3
noja 3y ago
> Goodbye reimbursement from the train company because he's also not printing a receipt. He can write a receipt. Did you ask him to?

ativzzz 3y ago

Another big impact of Uber/Lyft was safety of getting around in poorer foreign countries, particularly ones where you don't speak the language. It's much more safe and consistent to take an Uber at night in Colombia as a foreigner

dboreham 3y ago
Yes but that same service can be provided by taxi+website, which exists and functions acceptably in some places (Rome, Paris).

darth_avocado 3y ago

> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! That is a very generous version of what actually happened. Uber/Lyft were not replacing taxis outside a few big cities with established taxis operations, they were replacing consumer behavior entirely. It was near impossible for them to charge market rates and get a user base that had no need for taxis. If they weren’t heavily subsidizing the rides, they would have never been successful. They most definitely were charging next to nothing when they were in “growth phase”. At the height of it, it was almost as cheap as public transportation and not market rate.

pnathan 3y ago

> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! quite correct! The Uber/Lyft "package", as it were, is easily worth a full 20% over conventional taxi systems circa 2010ish. Since using Lyft, I have since only used traditional taxis when Lyft/Uber was not available. Because the old model was bad.

CPLX 3y ago

Everything you’re mentioning happened due to the invention of the smartphone, a nearly perfect ride hailing device with GPS and payment ability included. It’s like saying Netflix invented streaming video.

colpabar 3y ago

You forgot to mention that even if you call a cab, and even if it shows up, someone else can just take it. The one time I tried taking a cab, we called and ordered one, waited outside, and then watched as it picked up a group of people up the street and drove away.

sangnoir 3y ago

> Uber/Lyft did outcompete taxis on merit, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist history! You're right about downsides of cabs, but I'm afraid you are also revising history on the issue of merit. For a long time, Uber (and Lyft) rides cost a lot more than clients were paying - many people noticed this and wrote about it, and the edgier ones characterized ride-sharing as a wealth transfer from VCs to riders. The setup was clearly not "competing on merit" and was closer to predatory pricing. It's obvious the investors would have demanded massive hikes had they managed to drive competitors out of business.

tmaly 3y ago

This just reminded me of a trip to Italy I took back in 2009. There was this taxi I took that charged me 100 Euros to go a kilometer. Never again will I do that.