[edit] warning: you might find this comment irrelevant, annoying or even false
You forgot the juiciest parts:
- private company plays on legal gray areas on purpose
- private company invest aggressively to expand faster than law can react in order to grab said monopoly
This is basically capital cancer, they had a real value but dismissed everything a company is to a society:
- stable for employees
- stable for users
- stable for society
Any company can play rough when let loose with massive funds, but when reality occurs, just like anybody else, they'll have to round their corners and .. surprise.. they stop being interested and competitive.
No, they weren't. Taxi companies operated legally. Uber routinely broke the law.
Also it still perplexes me that Uber managed to convince so many people with their bullshit PR campaign about the small upstart facing the Taxi Mafia - when from the beginning it was a heavily-funded company, later turned multinational corporation, fighting small local providers with underhand tactics.
I'm not trying to excuse Uber but taxi companies in some places also routinely broke the law by refusing to travel to certain areas, pick up some minority passengers, or accept credit cards. In theory they were accountable to local taxi commissions but in practice that was totally ineffective in forcing drivers to obey the law.
It still perplexes me that people believe that Uber needed to convince anyone about Taxi mafia. The taxis in US are amazingly backwards -- for example, there were no online tracking, no pre-defined fares, and no online ordering.
I remember having to use "car services" just because the taxis were so unpleasant.
It actually wasn't Uber + Lyft (or their class better UXs) that convinced me. It was a taxi cab driver turned Uber + Lyft driver who looked at me incredulously when I asked him if Uber/Lyft was worth it.
"You bet ya!", he said, "I'm on vacation!" he said. He went on to talk about how the taxi cab industry was a dirty industry and uber/lyft reformed it.
Meanwhile one of my journalist friends declaims the "tyranny" of Uber/Lyft. It's not hyperbole its simply inaccurate.
It sounds like you've never been stranded late at night waiting hours for a cab that was "5 minutes away." I don't participate in the bar scene anymore. I don't benefit from the increased user experience of knowing exactly where your cab is, and if they cancel. Legal or not, I sure am glad those jackasses got their comeuppance.
Taxi companies provided a horrible customer experience, routinely discriminated, and often defrauded their customers. I know because I suffered from it long before Uber ever existed.
And, in addition, in many places taxi companies became a cartel: remember the TLC medallion madness where some crooks were reaping the cream of the crop.
> No, they weren't. Taxi companies operated legally. Uber routinely broke the law.
No, they didn't. At least, not in most US cities - I don't know how the laws work abroad. All a taxi medallion does is allow you to accept rides from people that hail you from the street. That's it. Limo companies and vans that you scheduled beforehand did not need medallions. There's functionally not much different from the service Uber provides and existing charter services, except for the fact that Uber used technology to make scheduling rides much faster.
The "Taxi Mafia" very much existed, though calling it a cartel is probably more accurate. Governments deliberately constrained the supply of taxis through medallions. Naturally, this resulted in inflated prices and poor service due to lack of competition. There's a reason why many people have little sympathy for the taxi industry's struggles to compete with ride sharing: taxis sucked.
I took a cab from the las vegas airport to my hotel recently as I was in a hurry and didn't know where the uber pick up area was. When we got to the hotel, suprise suprise, the credit card machine was broken and it took a 15 minute call for the driver to get things sorted and charge the card manually via calling his dispatcher.
Taxi had a lot of substandard features. But their employees weren't random guys without insurance nor training. They also had some semblance of career. I don't know all, but many Uber drivers didn't get their investment back yet and changing prices and rules make it a risky bet.
Even in the USA, that wasn’t true, let alone outside of the states. Taxi drivers don’t make back their investment (car/medallion rental) often, much more than an Uber driver who can use their own car and need no medallion at all. And...career as a taxi driver? There is a reason driving a cab is on the low wrung of new immigrant jobs, you can barely survive on it.
I guess they did have insurance (again, at least in the states), but so do Uber drivers.
Maybe 30 years ago that was true? Definitely not today, well, for some definition of raise a family I guess. If you are doing it to support your family back in Nigeria, it could work out.
I agree Uber's not a monopoly, but I also think crappy taxi companies are a local problem.
I don't use Uber or taxis often, but have used both several times over the years. There's never been a practical difference for me. If anything, Uber is less convenient because I need to sign up and install an app. Maybe one was a little cheaper, but not so much that I noticed.
> This is basically capital cancer, they had a real value but dismissed everything a company is to a society:
> - stable for employees
> - stable for users
> - stable for society
No. Stability comes at the expense of dynamism. Innovation disrupts stability, and society is more often than not better off for it. You pay a needless tax whenever you buy a CD or flash drive which gets handed off to record companies in the presumption that you will pirate music. Politicians decided that the music industry needed more stability, and passed laws to make consumers fork over tax money to subsidize them.
There was a push to make ride-share companies wait at least 30 minutes before pairing riders up with a car. Not to guarantee any sort of safety or to fight congestion. It was literally just degrading service in order to make taxi companies more competitive with Uber, Lyft, etc.
Trying to achieve stability frequently hurts users and degrades quality of service.
This is a bad comment. The OP had a valuable point that applies to companies inside and outside of this "gray area[]". You're just making a tired and repetitive dig at Uber itself. It may be that Uber's gig economy model has important downsides of its own, but the salient problem is of private control of what's become public infrastructure, and that has nothing to do with Uber being cancer or something.
Did Uber not do exactly what op said? Aggressively grow to capture markets before the legal system could react? How is that a bad comment? I mean, the original article is about Uber. How is op in the wrong by describing exactly the business model they adopted?
The OP isn't wrong: the problem is that his point is irrelevant. The real question, to which nobody has an answer, is this: what do we do as a society when a small number of private companies corner the market for an essential part of modern life and then institute arbitrary criteria for refusing service to people? How this situation came about doesn't matter. Uber making all drivers full employees would not change the dynamic one bit.
Complaining about Uber's employment model instead of discussing this really important control question just annoys me. It deflects a potentially interesting conversation into grievance-airing about gig jobs.
It’s irrelevant that a company is able to skirt regulation? Would Uber be in the position to “institute arbitrary criteria” if they had to compete in an environment with proper governance being in place?
The crux of your argument is we shouldn’t care about how we get there but what happens next or essentially, how do we react.
If you want to solve a problem, identify and fix the root cause instead of reactively applying some patch to cover the bleeding.
Getting “annoyed” at someone discussing the root cause is misguided.
On the contrary, we need to really understand how we got here first, in order to be able to recognize patterns of the problem and determine how to avoid it in the future.
As the saying goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
It's somewhat relevant because it was plain as a day through continued behaviour that Uber is a sociopathic company. So while not all companies would follow the mechanic in question, and different companies may follow it at different pace, it was always obvious that Uber will screw riders over as soon as possible.
Fair point. I was a bit easy to comment. But there's a public side to my point. Services can be wiped with such business models which is detrimental to society. Amazon pushed a lot of people aside, now their prices are all but guaranteed to be fair.
You forgot the juiciest parts:
- private company plays on legal gray areas on purpose
- private company invest aggressively to expand faster than law can react in order to grab said monopoly
This is basically capital cancer, they had a real value but dismissed everything a company is to a society:
- stable for employees
- stable for users
- stable for society
Any company can play rough when let loose with massive funds, but when reality occurs, just like anybody else, they'll have to round their corners and .. surprise.. they stop being interested and competitive.