Uber if anything makes taxis less productive and efficient, a big taxi company can take care car repairs in a very efficient way.
The magic of Uber is taking those hidden costs and pushing them on the drivers, now the cars get fixed in a much less efficient way, but the ones taking the risk are the drivers, so Uber wins overall.
This argument is my pet peeve. Taxi companies employed drivers as 'independent contractors' who were paid pretty similar to Uber drivers now- by the ride, not by the hour- and frequently forced the drivers to do or pay for their own repairs on the cars. They were often immigrants, they'd work 12+ hours a day, medallion owners issued them illegal fines or took an overly large chunk of the money they earned, etc. The taxi industry was known as notoriously abusive to its drivers for decades & decades before smartphones were even invented, much less Uber. I'm always a bit amazed at how people now remember the old taxi system as good for drivers, much less riders
> and frequently forced the drivers to do or pay for their own repairs on the cars.
I'm not saying the old medallion system was great, but I thought the cab companies back then owned all the cars. (Source: my in-laws owned a medallion company, and I knew a few other cab company owners in NYC in the aughts.) They would frequently make drivers take responsibility for routine care and maintenance (with the worst medallion companies really stretching the definition of "routine"), but they put up the capital and rented cabs out to drivers at exorbitant rates (e.g., $1500/week in NYC ~15 years ago).
Contrast this with Uber, which imposes the same or worse labor conditions and offloads all capital risk onto the drivers.
I don't like Uber, but it became popular because of convenience, not because of costs.
Pre-Uber/Lift in my city you'd have taxi companies that were operating like a cartel and giving a shitty service. Drivers were borderline rude. You had to call a dispatcher that was also usually rude and then wait 20 mins for a cab to show up.
Uber changed that process for the best by actually allowing me to get a taxi from an app in 30 seconds, they usually showed up much faster and the driver, fearing a 4-stars review, is usually incentivized to at least keep their car clean. It's a game changer and I wouldn't go back.
So no, the magic of Uber is not passing those hidden cost to the driver, it's actually offering a service that I want to use after +40 years of a corrupt industry that couldn't give a shit about improving.
Now that Uber gave them a big scare, they actually improved, but the idea that they would have evolved without an existential threat is madness.
Uber was undeniably a lot cheaper than a taxi for me in 2013. I don't use Uber much any more but I assume the same is true. They were able to undercut not just due to shafting the drivers but also all the VC money pouring in. The cost certainly did help with the popularity. It shifted the calculus from "eh, I'll drive and park" (at the airport or other destination) to "let's just get a ride" in a huge number of cases. So for me, it did not just displace taxi rides, it created new demand.
the previous poster makes a very important point - Uber re-externalized the costs for fleet maintenance and many other costs and push them outside their balance sheet.
I don't deny the externalities of Uber, but the previous poster wrote:
> Uber if anything makes taxis less productive and efficient
Which is blatantly false. Taxi companies were pretty terrible and only got better because of competition. Getting in a taxi and having no idea how much it's going to cost me was a bad customer experience.
It's undeniably more efficient to maintain a motor pool with a centralized mechanic shop.
I get that the taxi experience was not ideal for you, but Uber did introduce a lot of inefficiency into the livery market by decentralizing maintenance, procurement, and financing. Uber was able to do this while undercutting incumbents on price through a combination of fare subsidies, consuming external capital resources (i.e., asking industry outsiders with "excess capacity" (cars that weren't on the road 24/7) to wear down their own private vehicles), and having investors willing to tolerating large, upfront losses.
Yes, it’s just a bad point. Uber was popular even when just the black car service, which wasn’t externalizing anything that didn’t already work like that. No magic accounting there, no exploitation of confused drivers.
> Uber was popular even when just the black car service
Where was this true? This doesn't match my recollection at all, though I did live in a market with dense preexisting taxi and black car services (NYC and SF).
The flip side? They open up the pool of drivers substantially. Where I am it was impossible to get a taxi in the evening before Uber. Had I have access to Uber back then I wouldn’t need a car given my travel need. But I didn’t, so I had to get a car instead
The big savings is creating plausible deniability that lets the uber drivers get away without commercial insurance. They basically took the good ol' pizza delivery boy loophole and applied it to taxis. Vehicle maintenance is a drop in the bucket compared to gas and tires anyway.
The magic of Uber is taking those hidden costs and pushing them on the drivers, now the cars get fixed in a much less efficient way, but the ones taking the risk are the drivers, so Uber wins overall.