19 ms·

I rooted for Uber to smash the Taxi cartels. Let us not forget that Taxi Cartels were also insidious beasts. Taxi drivers abused their walled garden with their

I rooted for Uber to smash the Taxi cartels. Let us not forget that Taxi Cartels were also insidious beasts. Taxi drivers abused their walled garden with their price gouging by taking longer routes, refusal to take a credit card, and extremely poorly maintained fleets of vehicles. I have had mostly good experiences with Uber, whereas I had experiences that mostly bordered on general condescension toward me whenever I took a ride in a Taxi. I am glad the political will to block Uber never materialized.

walrus01 2y ago
What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. The pendulum has swung back the other way. The only thing they have going for them now is the app based convenience, which is eroding as more "yellow cab" type traditional taxis band together and get set up with their own sort of city-specific app.
- oremolten 2y ago
  It does always seem like a race to the bottom.
- gardnr 2y ago
  I remember calling a taxi 3 hours before my flight to get to SFO. After an hour and four different phone calls to the taxi company, I took BART and barely made it before the counter closed. The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    This is getting off-topic, but I am curious, why didn't you go with BART in the first place? If you had an hour to call the taxi company and still arrive in time, presumably, you had more than enough time. I know there are reasons for not going with public transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a train line can get you there in time maybe has more to say about public transport than about taxis. Well functioning rail is typically one of the most effective and reliable way of getting to an airport, and often much cheaper than taxis.
    - godot 2y ago
      Not OP but many many reasons. If you have the money and you prefer comfort (and/or have kids along) taking a taxi/uber/etc. is much more preferable than dragging several (probably heavy) luggages up and down platforms (elevators may or may not work), walking long paths, etc. especially when you consider the alternative is simply putting luggages in a trunk, sit down and relax, and most likely get there faster. And all of this is before we even talk about any safety issues with BART.
    - rangestransform 2y ago
      I refuse to take public transit with a checked bag until the NYC subway has 99.9% escalator uptime and escalators at every station, realistically possible with redundant escalators. We will never have nice things as long as we let the trade unions bend us over
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    I’ve waited an hour for a Lyft while driver after driver accepted then canceled the ride. Ridesharing does not have great reliability either.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  The price people are willing to pay sets how nice a cab fleet can be while still turning a profit. Same reason you don't see landscaping crews filled out with stellar employees.
- cratermoon 2y ago
  > What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. That, of course, was the plan all along. Such august figures as JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller,and Andrew Carnegie all made their fortune by undercutting the competition, putting them out of business through means legal and otherwise, and finally monopolizing the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
- phil21 2y ago
  > What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. Sure, agreed. > And the experience is equally mediocre. Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel. I think people really forget how utterly terrible Taxis were pre-Uber. I have no idea about competing apps these days, maybe they are similar to Uber, but the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US. Uber/Lyft certainly has gotten worse - but at least I can fairly reliably get a car when I need it with reasonable reliability. The rest of the "soft" product or pricing I really care far, far, less about than that simple fact.
  - haswell 2y ago
    > the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US It seems impossible/problematic to generalize the taxi experience to “The US”. If you’re in a city center, cabs can be far easier. The number of times I’ve ordered an Uber or Lyft and regretted it while watching taxi after taxi drive by has been increasing. But I expect the Chicago loop experience to be quite different from say, the suburbs.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      > quite different from say, the suburbs. My small rural town of 9000 people had multiple taxi services that poorer people relied on to do even their grocery shopping. We didn't need "disruption" Tech bros generalizing a negative experience from NYC or SV to the entire US has been so stupid.
      - tmnvdb 2y ago
        If you didn't need disruption, why did people choose to use the new service?
        haswell 2y ago
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's not really that surprising when the cities are passing laws to try to turn Uber back into the taxi cartel by e.g. making it harder for them to use part-time and on-demand contract drivers. The way you get the price down is by reducing friction, increasing flexibility and supply and taking advantage of efficiencies like people willing to do a dozen rides a week during surge pricing without making it a full-time job. Pass bad laws that make things more rigid and they get more expensive.
  - immibis 2y ago
    You think that workers having certainty of their work hours is a bad law? What are your work hours?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Forcing them to have certainty? Yeah, that's a bad law that screws over the workers. There are people who are at home doing chores or making stuff for Etsy or doing some other contract work who would like to leave the app open and then accept a fare whenever there is one, or would like to open the app to see if anyone else would pay them for a trip they were going to make themselves anyway, regardless of whether the app can guarantee back to back fares. Instead, laws like that cause Uber to set their hours and then they can't switch on and off whenever they please and have to work miserable graveyard shifts or split shifts if that's what they're assigned. Meanwhile there is nothing stopping anyone from taking a job with contractually guaranteed hours if that's what they want. There are plenty of jobs like that, you don't have to mandate all jobs be like that and screw over anyone who wants something different.
- rangestransform 2y ago
  Last time I used curb, the cabbie told me that the curb payment wasn’t working and I had to Zelle him, ended up needing to report the driver to Curb to get my money back. Shoulda taken an uber!
burningion 2y ago
This argument ignores the fact that there were other alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break the law! Believe it or not, there were multiple ride hailing apps on the iPhone, but none were as great at accumulating capital or breaking the law without recourse.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The laws they allegedly broke were the taxi medallion cartel laws, which were the things keeping taxis terrible by limiting supply and competition. And those laws in general apply to the drivers rather than the ride hailing service. There is also a lot of ambiguity there, e.g. if you have a ride sharing service where people go on the app to find people to carpool with on a trip they'd be making anyway and then contribute gas money, is that a taxi service? But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.
  - burningion 2y ago
    No, these are not only the laws they allegedly broke. They created a project named Greyball to identify law enforcement and mislead them. They created a kill switch for the event of a government raid to gather evidence. They ordered and then canceled rides on competitor apps. They tracked journalists and politicians... The list goes on and on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Several of those things aren't even necessarily illegal and are the sort of things they shouldn't have had have any reason to do unless they were being targeted by a media campaign or captured government. There is also some dispute about whether some of those even happened or are just mischaracterizations from the media campaign. It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.
brisky 2y ago
It is possible that digitization and improvement of taxi services was inevitable anyway
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be well maintained and must accept all major forms of payment. And yeah, the Taxi industry would've fought it because every company ever has fought every regulation ever no matter how much it stands to benefit both their customers and they them-fucking-selves but companies having a say in how they are regulated is both how a Taxi company would fight this, and how Uber, AirBnb, OpenAI, Meta, etc. blatantly and flagrantly violate the law and instead of consequences, they get fines, and court hearings. So maybe we just shouldn't be allowing that? It drives me up the goddamn wall how people will say shit like "the Taxi industry needed to be upended" when like... I mean, maybe? But on balance, given all the negative externalities associated with these companies, are they really a gain? Or are they just a different set of overlords, equally disinterested in providing a good service once they reach the scale where they no longer are required to give a shit? Just... regulate the fuckers. Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all. Make whatever consequence the government is going to dispense immeasurably, clearly worse than whatever the business is trying to weasel out of doing, and boom. Solved.
  - drdaeman 2y ago
    > Just... regulate the fuckers. That's true, however we must also keep in mind that Uber (and alikes) happened because regular institutions failed to do this for some reason or another. I won't try to speculate why, because I have no idea (and of course it looks obvious in the hindsight). There was a demand for safer and more reliable taxis. There was not enough supply for that. Government haven't paid enough attention to the sector. So, naturally, someone came and used that whole situation to provide supply for this demand. Of course it's not this simple, and there were a lot of other things going on. But if we narrow the scope down to just this, then we can see that the core problem here wasn't Uber, it was that that governments were too slow to react in time.
mschuster91 2y ago
The solution to that would not have been rabid capitalism just bulldozing over laws because the laws suck and further entrenching that "laws only matter for the poor". The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry would be to actually have the regulations authorities enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western world that having regulations authorities do their job and regulate is like the devil and holy water. Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves were crap.
- Domenic_S 2y ago
  Let's not pretend that the taxi situation was hunkey-dory before big-bad-tech came onto the scene. There's no regulation that says if I call dispatch to request a taxi one has to show up, and "we'll pick you up when we pick you up" was (and is still) a common mode of operation. In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way. That's precisely what I meant with "in some cases the regulations themselves were crap". But that doesn't imply the idea of regulation is bad - it is saying that maybe voters should make their voice clear to lawmakers and parties to get stuff changed. Regulation can only be as good or bad as the voters allow it to be.
thatcat 2y ago
Political will shouldn't be required to enforce existing law. If i started a 1 man illegal taxi service it would be shut down even though it has little effect on the community, but saudi vc funded startup wasn't shut down even though it violated laws in every major city. That is a weird asymmetry as a us citizen.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  What's really happening here is that the laws are supposed to reflect the political will, i.e. the will of the people, but in many cases they don't, because the lawmakers have been captured by incumbents. Then if a little guy comes in and tries to challenge them, they don't have the resources to resist the incumbents' pocket government officials and get destroyed. But if a big fish does it, people actually notice if the government tries to enforce stupid laws against them, and then government officials are afraid to do it because the public would not only not like it but actually notice the unreasonableness of the law. But the problem here isn't that the law isn't being enforced against a well-heeled challenger, it's that those laws exist to be enforced against the little guy, when they should instead be repealed.
  - thatcat 2y ago
    i will simply disagree that the dominant social dynamic leading to this favoring of foriegn capital over us law is not systemic corruption.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      So there are two different categories of things here. One is, they ban cannabis and put individuals in prison for it, but then if you pay thousands a year for overpriced health insurance and the insurance pays thousands of dollars for a doctor to ask you some cursory questions and a pharma company to manufacture the drug, you can get a prescription for opioids, which are way more dangerous. But that isn't the big guys violating the law, it's them following a law that they bought and paid for. That's bad in a different way. The relevant thing here would be that they pass excessive copyright laws, but then Meta violates them and maybe gets away with it because they're doing it in a sympathetic way and the government doesn't want to hamstring emerging industries in their country, whereas if an individual would be sued into oblivion even if the thing they were doing was equally sympathetic. Because it's not just about the public noticing it, it's about the public noticing it in time to do something about it. If an individual gets sued or arrested, they're immediately screwed and will be under pressure to settle or plea bargain before they're bankrupted by legal fees. But once they do, the case is over. Whereas large companies can fight, or pay lawyers to stall while they wage a media campaign to counter the usual imperious press releases from the prosecution, or use their money to lobby the government while public opinion is in their favor.
arp242 2y ago
It really screwed over a lot of regular working-class people. In some European cities getting a taxi license was a serious monetary investment. People took our huge loans for this. This was now suddenly worthless. It's like being told your very expensive university education is no longer accredited, but the student loan still exists. kthxbye. I'm not saying the existing systems were always good (they weren't), but you need to be willing to overlook a lot of real-world suffering to be "rooting for Uber". Phrases like "taxi cartels" sound nice, but they're hardly neutral phrasings that simplify things to the point of being useless phrases. And "I'm just going to willingly and knowingly ignore laws I don't like for personal profit" is not a great take-away either. This isn't Aaron Swartz breaking a law as a matter of "civil disobedience" – it's just a plain "how can we make money?" And where does that leave competitors who are NOT willing to break the law? It's an unlevel playing field; there can be no free market if some people don't need to follow the same set of rules. Uber's actions are fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-free market.
- 6510 2y ago
  I always tell the story of this restaurant 18 km from my house. If I order their cheapest 6 euro hamburger they deliver it for free within 30 minutes. If I take a taxi to the restaurant I may have to wait for an hour and it costs about 100 euro and another 100 to get back.
  - decimalenough 2y ago
    There is no way anybody is making a profit on driving 36 km to deliver a hamburger for 6 euros, and it's a matter of time until whatever faucet of VC money subsidizing this runs dry. In much of the world the price of food delivery has risen to the level needed to make it profitable, and it's not cheap. I paid around $10 in fees plus Uber's 30-50% markups on the food itself to get a couple of burritos yesterday from a shop a mile down the road.
    - 6510 2y ago
      A 30 min drive would be 7 euro and 3 cent in minimum wage. Then you need a car and you have to fuel or charge it. The only solution to the riddle I can think of is that (like postal services) they can cleverly combine orders and rarely lose money on delivery. The fast delivery would have to be luck or perhaps the burger preserves poorly? That the food is absolutely fantastic might also have something to do with it. If they can get food into your mouth repetition is almost guaranteed.
slashdev 2y ago
Uber definitely improved things. When traveling it’s also so much safer than taxis. My brother was robbed at gunpoint in a taxi. My wife had to jump from more than one moving taxi to escape. My ex girlfriend too. My Swiss friend had his camera and wallet stolen. You can have issues with Uber too, but not as frequently because there’s a digital audit trail, you can report them to the platform and the police. The threat of those consequences lead to better behavior.
- kmoser 2y ago
  Were these acts committed by the drivers or somebody else?
  - slashdev 2y ago
    Drivers
- leshow 2y ago
  It didn't improve things for the drivers
  - slashdev 2y ago
    That’s not universally true
- cookie_monsta 2y ago
  Here's another data point: I have taken literally thousands of taxis on 5 continents and none of this has ever happened to me
Forgeties79 2y ago
Unfortunately now Ubers are exactly the same experience but more expensive/unpredictable. It’s only nicer if you spend more on black and such, which makes it easily double a standard cab fare.
consteval 2y ago
The problem with Uber is that it's a lose-lose-lose money pit scenario. Customers pay significantly more, drivers make significantly less, and Uber is still running hundreds of millions in the red. Turns out hiring thousands of devs and dumping absurd capital into... driving people around... doesn't really work.
rzz3 2y ago
You should look at what’s going on in Cancun Mexico with Uber and the taxis right now. Your description in the first sentence is quite accurate. Your comment also points out the power that regulation has to enforce and protect monopolies. I’m not saying all regulation is bad obviously, but I think we can see exactly what effect it had on the taxi industry, and I’m sure glad that Uber managed to disrupt it.

walrus01 2y ago

What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. The pendulum has swung back the other way. The only thing they have going for them now is the app based convenience, which is eroding as more "yellow cab" type traditional taxis band together and get set up with their own sort of city-specific app.

oremolten 2y ago
It does always seem like a race to the bottom.
gardnr 2y ago
I remember calling a taxi 3 hours before my flight to get to SFO. After an hour and four different phone calls to the taxi company, I took BART and barely made it before the counter closed. The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  This is getting off-topic, but I am curious, why didn't you go with BART in the first place? If you had an hour to call the taxi company and still arrive in time, presumably, you had more than enough time. I know there are reasons for not going with public transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a train line can get you there in time maybe has more to say about public transport than about taxis. Well functioning rail is typically one of the most effective and reliable way of getting to an airport, and often much cheaper than taxis.
  - godot 2y ago
    Not OP but many many reasons. If you have the money and you prefer comfort (and/or have kids along) taking a taxi/uber/etc. is much more preferable than dragging several (probably heavy) luggages up and down platforms (elevators may or may not work), walking long paths, etc. especially when you consider the alternative is simply putting luggages in a trunk, sit down and relax, and most likely get there faster. And all of this is before we even talk about any safety issues with BART.
  - rangestransform 2y ago
    I refuse to take public transit with a checked bag until the NYC subway has 99.9% escalator uptime and escalators at every station, realistically possible with redundant escalators. We will never have nice things as long as we let the trade unions bend us over
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I’ve waited an hour for a Lyft while driver after driver accepted then canceled the ride. Ridesharing does not have great reliability either.
potato3732842 2y ago
The price people are willing to pay sets how nice a cab fleet can be while still turning a profit. Same reason you don't see landscaping crews filled out with stellar employees.
cratermoon 2y ago
> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. That, of course, was the plan all along. Such august figures as JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller,and Andrew Carnegie all made their fortune by undercutting the competition, putting them out of business through means legal and otherwise, and finally monopolizing the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
phil21 2y ago
> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. Sure, agreed. > And the experience is equally mediocre. Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel. I think people really forget how utterly terrible Taxis were pre-Uber. I have no idea about competing apps these days, maybe they are similar to Uber, but the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US. Uber/Lyft certainly has gotten worse - but at least I can fairly reliably get a car when I need it with reasonable reliability. The rest of the "soft" product or pricing I really care far, far, less about than that simple fact.
- haswell 2y ago
  > the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US It seems impossible/problematic to generalize the taxi experience to “The US”. If you’re in a city center, cabs can be far easier. The number of times I’ve ordered an Uber or Lyft and regretted it while watching taxi after taxi drive by has been increasing. But I expect the Chicago loop experience to be quite different from say, the suburbs.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    > quite different from say, the suburbs. My small rural town of 9000 people had multiple taxi services that poorer people relied on to do even their grocery shopping. We didn't need "disruption" Tech bros generalizing a negative experience from NYC or SV to the entire US has been so stupid.
    - tmnvdb 2y ago
      If you didn't need disruption, why did people choose to use the new service?
      - haswell 2y ago
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
It's not really that surprising when the cities are passing laws to try to turn Uber back into the taxi cartel by e.g. making it harder for them to use part-time and on-demand contract drivers. The way you get the price down is by reducing friction, increasing flexibility and supply and taking advantage of efficiencies like people willing to do a dozen rides a week during surge pricing without making it a full-time job. Pass bad laws that make things more rigid and they get more expensive.
- immibis 2y ago
  You think that workers having certainty of their work hours is a bad law? What are your work hours?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Forcing them to have certainty? Yeah, that's a bad law that screws over the workers. There are people who are at home doing chores or making stuff for Etsy or doing some other contract work who would like to leave the app open and then accept a fare whenever there is one, or would like to open the app to see if anyone else would pay them for a trip they were going to make themselves anyway, regardless of whether the app can guarantee back to back fares. Instead, laws like that cause Uber to set their hours and then they can't switch on and off whenever they please and have to work miserable graveyard shifts or split shifts if that's what they're assigned. Meanwhile there is nothing stopping anyone from taking a job with contractually guaranteed hours if that's what they want. There are plenty of jobs like that, you don't have to mandate all jobs be like that and screw over anyone who wants something different.
rangestransform 2y ago
Last time I used curb, the cabbie told me that the curb payment wasn’t working and I had to Zelle him, ended up needing to report the driver to Curb to get my money back. Shoulda taken an uber!

burningion 2y ago

This argument ignores the fact that there were other alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break the law! Believe it or not, there were multiple ride hailing apps on the iPhone, but none were as great at accumulating capital or breaking the law without recourse.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
The laws they allegedly broke were the taxi medallion cartel laws, which were the things keeping taxis terrible by limiting supply and competition. And those laws in general apply to the drivers rather than the ride hailing service. There is also a lot of ambiguity there, e.g. if you have a ride sharing service where people go on the app to find people to carpool with on a trip they'd be making anyway and then contribute gas money, is that a taxi service? But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.
- burningion 2y ago
  No, these are not only the laws they allegedly broke. They created a project named Greyball to identify law enforcement and mislead them. They created a kill switch for the event of a government raid to gather evidence. They ordered and then canceled rides on competitor apps. They tracked journalists and politicians... The list goes on and on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Several of those things aren't even necessarily illegal and are the sort of things they shouldn't have had have any reason to do unless they were being targeted by a media campaign or captured government. There is also some dispute about whether some of those even happened or are just mischaracterizations from the media campaign. It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.

brisky 2y ago

It is possible that digitization and improvement of taxi services was inevitable anyway

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be well maintained and must accept all major forms of payment. And yeah, the Taxi industry would've fought it because every company ever has fought every regulation ever no matter how much it stands to benefit both their customers and they them-fucking-selves but companies having a say in how they are regulated is both how a Taxi company would fight this, and how Uber, AirBnb, OpenAI, Meta, etc. blatantly and flagrantly violate the law and instead of consequences, they get fines, and court hearings. So maybe we just shouldn't be allowing that? It drives me up the goddamn wall how people will say shit like "the Taxi industry needed to be upended" when like... I mean, maybe? But on balance, given all the negative externalities associated with these companies, are they really a gain? Or are they just a different set of overlords, equally disinterested in providing a good service once they reach the scale where they no longer are required to give a shit? Just... regulate the fuckers. Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all. Make whatever consequence the government is going to dispense immeasurably, clearly worse than whatever the business is trying to weasel out of doing, and boom. Solved.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  > Just... regulate the fuckers. That's true, however we must also keep in mind that Uber (and alikes) happened because regular institutions failed to do this for some reason or another. I won't try to speculate why, because I have no idea (and of course it looks obvious in the hindsight). There was a demand for safer and more reliable taxis. There was not enough supply for that. Government haven't paid enough attention to the sector. So, naturally, someone came and used that whole situation to provide supply for this demand. Of course it's not this simple, and there were a lot of other things going on. But if we narrow the scope down to just this, then we can see that the core problem here wasn't Uber, it was that that governments were too slow to react in time.

mschuster91 2y ago

The solution to that would not have been rabid capitalism just bulldozing over laws because the laws suck and further entrenching that "laws only matter for the poor". The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry would be to actually have the regulations authorities enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western world that having regulations authorities do their job and regulate is like the devil and holy water. Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves were crap.

Domenic_S 2y ago
Let's not pretend that the taxi situation was hunkey-dory before big-bad-tech came onto the scene. There's no regulation that says if I call dispatch to request a taxi one has to show up, and "we'll pick you up when we pick you up" was (and is still) a common mode of operation. In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way. That's precisely what I meant with "in some cases the regulations themselves were crap". But that doesn't imply the idea of regulation is bad - it is saying that maybe voters should make their voice clear to lawmakers and parties to get stuff changed. Regulation can only be as good or bad as the voters allow it to be.

thatcat 2y ago

Political will shouldn't be required to enforce existing law. If i started a 1 man illegal taxi service it would be shut down even though it has little effect on the community, but saudi vc funded startup wasn't shut down even though it violated laws in every major city. That is a weird asymmetry as a us citizen.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
What's really happening here is that the laws are supposed to reflect the political will, i.e. the will of the people, but in many cases they don't, because the lawmakers have been captured by incumbents. Then if a little guy comes in and tries to challenge them, they don't have the resources to resist the incumbents' pocket government officials and get destroyed. But if a big fish does it, people actually notice if the government tries to enforce stupid laws against them, and then government officials are afraid to do it because the public would not only not like it but actually notice the unreasonableness of the law. But the problem here isn't that the law isn't being enforced against a well-heeled challenger, it's that those laws exist to be enforced against the little guy, when they should instead be repealed.
- thatcat 2y ago
  i will simply disagree that the dominant social dynamic leading to this favoring of foriegn capital over us law is not systemic corruption.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    So there are two different categories of things here. One is, they ban cannabis and put individuals in prison for it, but then if you pay thousands a year for overpriced health insurance and the insurance pays thousands of dollars for a doctor to ask you some cursory questions and a pharma company to manufacture the drug, you can get a prescription for opioids, which are way more dangerous. But that isn't the big guys violating the law, it's them following a law that they bought and paid for. That's bad in a different way. The relevant thing here would be that they pass excessive copyright laws, but then Meta violates them and maybe gets away with it because they're doing it in a sympathetic way and the government doesn't want to hamstring emerging industries in their country, whereas if an individual would be sued into oblivion even if the thing they were doing was equally sympathetic. Because it's not just about the public noticing it, it's about the public noticing it in time to do something about it. If an individual gets sued or arrested, they're immediately screwed and will be under pressure to settle or plea bargain before they're bankrupted by legal fees. But once they do, the case is over. Whereas large companies can fight, or pay lawyers to stall while they wage a media campaign to counter the usual imperious press releases from the prosecution, or use their money to lobby the government while public opinion is in their favor.

arp242 2y ago

It really screwed over a lot of regular working-class people. In some European cities getting a taxi license was a serious monetary investment. People took our huge loans for this. This was now suddenly worthless. It's like being told your very expensive university education is no longer accredited, but the student loan still exists. kthxbye. I'm not saying the existing systems were always good (they weren't), but you need to be willing to overlook a lot of real-world suffering to be "rooting for Uber". Phrases like "taxi cartels" sound nice, but they're hardly neutral phrasings that simplify things to the point of being useless phrases. And "I'm just going to willingly and knowingly ignore laws I don't like for personal profit" is not a great take-away either. This isn't Aaron Swartz breaking a law as a matter of "civil disobedience" – it's just a plain "how can we make money?" And where does that leave competitors who are NOT willing to break the law? It's an unlevel playing field; there can be no free market if some people don't need to follow the same set of rules. Uber's actions are fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-free market.

6510 2y ago
I always tell the story of this restaurant 18 km from my house. If I order their cheapest 6 euro hamburger they deliver it for free within 30 minutes. If I take a taxi to the restaurant I may have to wait for an hour and it costs about 100 euro and another 100 to get back.
- decimalenough 2y ago
  There is no way anybody is making a profit on driving 36 km to deliver a hamburger for 6 euros, and it's a matter of time until whatever faucet of VC money subsidizing this runs dry. In much of the world the price of food delivery has risen to the level needed to make it profitable, and it's not cheap. I paid around $10 in fees plus Uber's 30-50% markups on the food itself to get a couple of burritos yesterday from a shop a mile down the road.
  - 6510 2y ago
    A 30 min drive would be 7 euro and 3 cent in minimum wage. Then you need a car and you have to fuel or charge it. The only solution to the riddle I can think of is that (like postal services) they can cleverly combine orders and rarely lose money on delivery. The fast delivery would have to be luck or perhaps the burger preserves poorly? That the food is absolutely fantastic might also have something to do with it. If they can get food into your mouth repetition is almost guaranteed.

slashdev 2y ago

Uber definitely improved things. When traveling it’s also so much safer than taxis. My brother was robbed at gunpoint in a taxi. My wife had to jump from more than one moving taxi to escape. My ex girlfriend too. My Swiss friend had his camera and wallet stolen. You can have issues with Uber too, but not as frequently because there’s a digital audit trail, you can report them to the platform and the police. The threat of those consequences lead to better behavior.

kmoser 2y ago
Were these acts committed by the drivers or somebody else?
- slashdev 2y ago
  Drivers
leshow 2y ago
It didn't improve things for the drivers
- slashdev 2y ago
  That’s not universally true
cookie_monsta 2y ago
Here's another data point: I have taken literally thousands of taxis on 5 continents and none of this has ever happened to me

Forgeties79 2y ago

Unfortunately now Ubers are exactly the same experience but more expensive/unpredictable. It’s only nicer if you spend more on black and such, which makes it easily double a standard cab fare.

consteval 2y ago

The problem with Uber is that it's a lose-lose-lose money pit scenario. Customers pay significantly more, drivers make significantly less, and Uber is still running hundreds of millions in the red. Turns out hiring thousands of devs and dumping absurd capital into... driving people around... doesn't really work.

rzz3 2y ago

You should look at what’s going on in Cancun Mexico with Uber and the taxis right now. Your description in the first sentence is quite accurate. Your comment also points out the power that regulation has to enforce and protect monopolies. I’m not saying all regulation is bad obviously, but I think we can see exactly what effect it had on the taxi industry, and I’m sure glad that Uber managed to disrupt it.