How do you know? My impression is that most taxi drivers are very busy adapting. But I don't know either.
Let's be clear: The people hardest hit by Uber/Lyft is taxi company owners.
> Clearly, asking them to adapt overnight would be too demanding
Uber has been around for half a decade. How many decades does it take?
To be clear: I don't know either. I'm an outsider to this industry. I'm just offering arguments.
> Let's be clear: The people hardest hit by Uber/Lyft is taxi company owners.
I don't think this is true. They're losing the most money, but they have lots of money. Taxi drivers risk losing all their revenue, which is worse.
> Uber has been around for half a decade. How many decades does it take?
I think this is the hardest question. According to the people behind this bill, half a decade is not enough. I agree with that judgment.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/08/05/what-about-taxi...
So they potentially have a lot to lose...
Oh and all the regulation should be the same for taxi vs ridesharing like insurance requirements (commercial insurance is much higher which taxis are required to carry) and inspection requirements etc.
Some Independent owners, having paid upwards of $1 million, are “under water” by hundreds of thousands of dollars on the mortgages they owe on the medallions."
http://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/6471/2016-03-08/uber-ly...
The taxi driver I was taking with was mostly adapting to special-purpose taxi services like delivering IKEA furniture. That already meant a big revenue cut for him in contrast to normal taxi service.
I asked him about Uber and he said last time it was completely impossible to make living for him based on the revenue you get from Uber routes.
Self-driving cars weren't even part of the long-term plan back then...
"Taxi drivers are suffering" actually means "they cannot fleece their customers like they used to". This is a zero sum game - taxi drivers take money from taxi riders, so any change will be met with opposition. The difference is, taxi drivers are better organized and have PR people to tell us about their "suffering", while millions of taxi riders quietly enjoy better service and reasonable prices.
But let's not forget that most taxi drivers are themselves far from well off. It is a working class gig, with a heavy representation from new immigrants. It's long hours, it's physically draining (software developers get to rebel against sitting in front of computers in favour of standing desks, yet what about drivers), and most people do NOT get rich doing it.
It's still an industry that's sick with corruption that has depended on anti-competitive practices and should be destroyed and rebuilt for the betterment of society. But most taxi DRIVERS have few if any options in the upcoming world.
I'm more ok with the taxi businesses themselves going out of business for failing to innovate and getting themselves disrupted. That's on them. However, it does leave another problem... Taxi companies are heavily regulated for a reason. For example, they are required to offer services for disabled people at no extra charge. As far as I know, Uber/Lyft are under no such obligation and do nothing to accommodate the disabled. When taxi companies go away, what happens to that entire group of people?
One solution might be to classify ride-hailing apps as taxi companies as well and apply the same regulations. This also allows taxi companies to compete on a level playing field.
Go back >200 years. In England, Spinning Jennies replaced weavers, and there were luddites who tried to resist, but the solution was not to start subsidizing weavers; and not even a specific tax to weaving machines to provide for the weavers specifically; the solution was to slowly build a social security system, and not just for master weavers (who had been relatively well off) but everyone.
Agreed, taxing one company to pay another does not make sense, but neither does subsidizing people of a certain profession just because they are no longer productive, by putting a burden on something productive just because it is better.
The Luddites were active around 1811 and welfare in the UK seems to have come in around 1906. The solutions at the time were closer to "suck it up". The government used "show trials intended to deter other Luddites from continuing their activities. By meting out harsh consequences, including, in many cases, execution and penal transportation, the trials quickly ended the movement."
That was the era of Charles Dickens and workhouses for the poor.
What aspect of Uber is better than a regular taxi? I can hail taxis from my phone just as well. They take me to the destination. I think Uber found a way to subsidize their fleet with drivers own cars and not pay some taxes to the state which the regular taxi drivers have to pay. Maybe I am missing something...
It's wildly cheaper (1/4-1/2 the price, depending on UberPool vs UberX), the app is more convenient (faster/easier to activate for a ride, better feedback while waiting), and if there's a problem with the ride of some sort, I'd rather deal with Uber than some random city's department of livery licensing. Not driving in a clapped-out Crown Vic with loose wheel bearings and 3-5 warning lights on the dash is a bonus.
For most people, more convenient and absurdly cheaper is enough to answer your question.
Their association is also corrupt as hell, so they can't even claim that over Uber.
The big difference between Uber and cabs, however, is that I left the driver a negative review on Uber, and their customer support got back to me. If he keeps pulling that crap he's not going to be able to drive for Uber anymore. There's essentially no recourse for cab drivers. Sure, they may have contact info posted for their company by law, but if you try to contact them you won't reach anyone who cares.
Diverging off-topic, and your account is light on specifics needed for this divergence...
So, sometimes it could be that the Uber (or taxi) driver knows more about the rules of the road that the passenger, and when the passenger complains based on wrong understanding of traffic law, it's not an easy customer-serving situation.
I'm pretty sure it's illegal to use a bike lane to cut off another car that's already stopped at an intersection. Keep in mind this is a road that has a single travel lane in each direction -- there isn't a separate right-turning lane.
> What aspect of Uber is better than a regular taxi?
Higher-quality, rated drivers. Single app that works consistently everywhere. Better reporting mechanism for problems, that also works consistently everywhere. Live mapping of the vehicle picking you up. Payment handled automatically and consistently everywhere. No payment step inside the vehicle.
> I can hail taxis from my phone just as well.
Using one app per city (if the city even has one), or a phone number (vastly worse, and you need to look it up), with the experience varying vastly in different locations. Uber and Lyft work identically everywhere.
For one thing, with Uber, those of us who don't live in a major metro area don't have to wait 30-60 minutes for a cab that might or might not even show up. There's always an available Uber driver nearby.
Think about it. How would Uber have gotten any traction in the marketplace if it weren't better than the incumbent taxi operators in some substantial ways?
I would argue that the reputation system for drivers (and passengers) is an improvement over the current taxi system. The online booking system (app) is massively better than any taxi booking system I've used. These are strong incentives.
Obviously taxi systems involve paying the state for a licence to operate, but the ~500k price (depending on location) is solely due to an articficial scarcity. There needs to be some external regulation, so Uber/etc should pay some per trip/km charge.
One of the biggest problems with Uber and Taxis is insurance. Basically this cost/risk is being directly transferred to the driver, who may have no assets. It isn't acceptable for a service like this to have un-covered liabilities.
The other big gap is that Uber and Taxi companies have terrible employment practices. Failure to pay payroll tax is only the tip of the iceberg.
taxi |ˈtaksi| noun ( pl. taxis ) a motor vehicle licensed to transport passengers in return for payment of a fare and typically fitted with a taximeter.
Uber is a taxi service. Uber _is_ licensed in the sense that they are allowed to operate.
Saying Uber isn't a taxi service is a load of dingos kidneys, in my arrogant opinion.
And that's not an arbitrary distinction: much of the danger and public interest in cans arises from grabbing randos off the street. As car/limo services track that info remotely, they merit correspondingly less regulation.
In many senses, being able to provide meaningful jobs to people with a criminal record is actually a service to the society. At least in my opinion, the idea of punishment is also rehabilitation, not that once you've been convicted of a crime, you could never be trusted with a job where you are in contact with other people or money or anything.
So if Uber can hire them, and even their customer feedback is positive, that is a good thing.
It is not fair to history to keep repeating that. The historical luddites were not against technological change.
1. Taxis are a dying industry, but taxi drivers are not adapting.
2. As a result, taxi drivers are suffering. Their livelihoods, which have brought food to their families' tables for decades, are being taken from them by forces they could not anticipate or control.
Of course,
3. We care about these taxi drivers. Suffering is bad no matter what industry you work in. Suffering is worth avoiding.
Ultimately our answer has to be to say "your job doesn't really exist anymore, you need to find a new one". But it matters how much time we give taxi drivers. Clearly, asking them to adapt overnight would be too demanding, so there's a balance to be made between market efficiency and the realities of our apish learning rates.
In the long run, a lot of jobs are going the way of the taxi, and perhaps basic income is the long-term solution. But we can't implement basic income today. It's a massive solution to what is currently a minor, contained problem.
Every country's policies are a gigantic legacy codebase. Basic income would be re-writing a huge chunk of the code, where this tax is adding yet another minor hack to keep the thing running smoothly.