Uber's biggest problem is the confrontational way they've expanded their business, often thumbing their nose at regulators the entire time and pissing off a lot of the local communities. Lyft is in the exact same business but you don't see headlines every other day about Lyft going to war with some city or another.

I think Uber's about to be a very expensive lesson about Karma and will hopefully show some of these VC babies that "move fast and break stuff" is a great strategy for software, and a terrible strategy for people.

After the conciliatory approach of Night School in San Francisco got them attacked and shut down by the taxi industry, Uber's approach became inevitable. Lyft consistently operates in cities that Uber has already opened up.

It's one thing to suggest that maybe a nicer, kinder, friendlier approach could have been used. It's another to have an environment where such an approach can succeed in isolation.

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. You can have the best damn idea in the world, if you're an arrogant ass about it, no one is going to listen to you.

I understand why you think that way. Nobody likes an asshole! Nobody wants to work with an asshole! Just play nice, and people with work with you!

Night School believed as you do. They figured they would be most successful by playing ball, cooperating with regulators, and not pissing people off. For their pains, they were shut down by the very people they bent over backwards to play nice with. They caught no flies with honey. Uber, on the other hand...

This is a long-winded way of saying that it's possible that one might consider adapting to the scenario.

This is hardly an apt comparison. Uber is one of the most bloated of the fat VC babies, it's received at this point what must be billions of dollars in burn startup cash, where Night School had none (wasn't around long enough to really get anything.) Night School was also entirely beholden to the regulators because it was planning to use school busses, which if you've ever even tried to book one you already know the issues there.

I mean if we're really committed to the Night School idea that would probably be best done as a Government program, since it's so intertwined with assets that are used heavily by the Government. But I'm also willing to bet if we gave them a couple Billion to burn, they could also make it happen. The question of whether that's worth it or not is quite different, though.

You're absolutely right! It's not reasonable to compare Uber as it is today to Night School. Instead, I suggest comparing Uber of multiple years ago to Night School. Uber wasn't always huge with lots of money behind it, after all.

Uber got to the position of being the most bloated of fat VC babies by not playing nice. Night School never got that far because they insisted on playing nice. They also ran afoul of the taxi industry, who felt threatened by their business model.

We might want to give serious consideration to the possibility that one behavior pattern is not privileged above all others in all possible scenarios.

> Uber's biggest problem is the confrontational way they've expanded their business, often thumbing their nose at regulators the entire time and pissing off a lot of the local communities.

I think regulators' attitude is just as controversial: 'you must do this because we say so,' not 'you must do this because it's a good idea.'

I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law. Origin of the law is irrelevant, if you disagree with a law you can campaign to have it changed. Corporations should not be allowed to violate the law to execute their business model.

We break many laws every day without consequence and often with necessity (speed limit on freeways in large cities for instance). Law isn't quite so straightforward. The Myth of The Rule of Law: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

I'd wager that most corporations are violating one law or another, without any complaints from the people.

I'm just going to point out that Uber is sidestepping all those "useless regulations" and in the process has had issues ranging from abused customers to abused drivers or combinations of the two, repeatedly, since it's inception.

I'm not saying ALL the regulations were put in place for good reasons, and I'm not going to argue that cab companies don't have a monopoly in most places because they do indeed have that. But then to turn that around and say therefore, the Government shouldn't regulate Taxis in any capacity is equally stupid and not supported by the evidence.

And before you say "Well I didn't say they shouldn't regulate at all" please bear in mind that you just said a corporation should be able to violate laws deemed useless by that corporation and/or the general public, meaning the regulations have no teeth and therefore might as well not exist.

No disagreements, though I am sort of offended that you'd try to straw man me into being some sort of anarchist. There is plenty of subtlety in the interpretation of law, and I'd argue that the origin of law definitely matters, as does intent, which is why we have a process through trials in the judicial system.

I also have very little to say about Uber in particular, I was just responding directly to your comment about how we should follow laws to the letter.

I'm not trying to strawman you, I'm pointing out that you're comparing Uber breaking transportation regs to you going a little too fast on your daily commute. If those things are equal in the eyes of the law, might as well burn the regulations, they aren't useful.

Sorry if that came across a little aggressive, not my intent at all. :)

I see, okay that's fair. I think that the fact that laws are flexible and fuzzy doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws, but it means that until an actual court decision, who knows if uber was "right" or "wrong" in the eyes of the law. For instance like the article mentioned, Uber initially started by breaking the spirit of the law, not the actual law, since the existing regulations didn't take into account the possibility of cellphones as dispatching tools. I don't know if that was ever taken to court but a sharp judge could have nailed Uber for that despite Uber technically obeying the law.

That isn't justification to say because we break law X all the time we can also break law Y. Flawed logic.

I wasn't trying to imply that. I was merely pointing out that the parent's assertion that:

> I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law.

Wasn't exactly true. I also have disagreements with other parts of the post, including "Origin of law is irrelevant" (what if the law arose from lobbying by a powerful industry vs for the common good) and "If you disagree you can campaign to have it changed" (and I assume obey it in the meantime) vs something like civil disobedience or jury nullification.

Maybe at the expense of consumers, but not necessarily to the detriment of citizens.

Anecdote, not data, but my experiences using Uber have been universally better than using taxis and the same is true for everyone I know who has moderate recent experience with both in the US.

There may still be arguments to make that it's detrimental, or at least not beneficial for other reasons, or there may be data that contradicts my anecdote (if so, please link it), but I'm glad Uber exists and probably opposed to any regulation that makes it difficult or impossible for it to operate in a given place.

+1

I know of no one in any of the dozen or so cities I've lived who doesn't prefer a typical uber driver to a typical cab driver.

A lot of people say the same thing you do -- their diverse anecdotes agree that regular cabs are obviously (better, worse) than uber/lyft/etc.

The trouble is, they don't agree which way it goes.

I think the resolution to this conondrum is, it varies based on city/region. Some areas had traditional taxis that are worse than ridesharing, and some better.

Name a region where taxis provide better service than "rideshare".

It might be hard to believe, but there are urban places, outside the US, where public transportation works (so Uber and taxis are still luxury items, so taxis themselves are nice and clean), where taxis are plentiful (so no problems finding one, even at 3am) and either electronic cash works (ie; not credit cards that drivers accept), or credit card readers are required (and effectively enforced so there are no problem paying with credit card), or cash is still king (if your job is paying you in cash, paying cabs with cash is not a burden). On top of that, Google maps/GPS/whatever is unfortunately terrible in many places, so an Uber driver being directed by an app may never get you where you're going, greatly hurting adoption.

Makes sense. However, I travel frequently, but have yet to encounter this situation. In the US the taxi monopoly results in poor customer service and/or difficulty getting a ride. In the various countries I've visited outside, the wealthy countries have had slightly better Ubers than taxis. In the poor countries, I'm incredibly happy to find Uber has arrived as I no longer fear for my life or worry that I'm being cheated. And no, I'm not exaggerating. These are places where the tourism office says to avoid taking public transport for fear of robbery/murder. Thus my belief that Uber is wonderful.

Come to Stockholm, the situation is 90% close what your parent comment said.

And taxis are allowed to be Ubers too, we have Teslas S, Mercedes-Benz E and S classes and normal VW Passat taxis, all of them probably working also for Uber.

Taiwan. I'd definitely take standard taxis in Taiwan over Ubers. In fact, I've made that choice at least a hundred times.

Especially in Taipei, they hit a price and convenience point where taking an Uber is essentially doing a task on my phone in exchange for having to wait longer to get a ride. To be clear, it usually takes about 15 to 90 seconds of waiting to get a cab.

Outside of Taipei, any convenience store (which are basically all over the place) will call a cab for you and again, it's still a pretty short wait unless you're in a remote area in the mountains or something.

NYC. Ask anyone who's recently tried both yellow cabs and uber a bunch of times. Yellow cabbies tend to be more experienced, and it shows in their driving.

Xapata, you must really be a heck of a globetrotter to be able to so confidently ask a question like that!

Enough of one I suppose. Obviously there's some areas I haven't made it out to in a while. And it's not like I systematically study drivers.

Confidently? More curious than confident. It's best not to assume tone in text.

I can't agree more strongly about the trouble assuming tone in text. I apologize for assuming

How about Singapore?

Clean, cheap usually friendly drivers with lots of local insight and you're guaranteed not to be cheated.

What's the difference? Please elaborate. As I see it, there are only a few citizens who benefitted-- those involved in the ownership of taxi companies & medallions.

Untrained Uber and Lyft drivers are all but required to violate the law and endanger others, in pursuit of "customer service." Pull over RIGHT HERE. Flip a U-turn RIGHT HERE. Customer must not walk FIVE FEET. Customer can open door RIGHT HERE. Ad nausuem.

I bike commute in San Francisco and on a typical day I dodge literally dozens of illegally double-parked ride share cars occupying marked bike lanes. I have been nearly doored multiple times, nearly run into parked cars multiple times, been forced into traffic innumerable times, etc.

This is not the 'fault' (sic) of individual drivers. It's the business model, and I hold Uber and Lyft accountable.

EDIT: taxi drivers do this 2% as often; I've bike commuted in the city 20 years and it is apples and oranges

Agree 100% that the experience is similar in NYC. Non-yellow cabbies in NYC seem much less experienced (I mean on average, of course) with urban traffic -- when I'm cycling, I am much warier of the black uber cars than of the yellow cabs -- the yellow cabs are aggressive too, but are very experienced and their aggressiveness is thus very practiced and predictable, easy to deal with and not really usually a danger as long as you know the drill

And when I'm on the other side and need to take a cab, I much prefer to take a yellow cab, because they get there faster. Even with GPS, a dense urban environment is filled with little foibles and tricks that only experience can handle

My experience in NYC was that the medallion taxi drivers were much more willing to violate traffic laws. I've been hit by a taxi, never by an Uber.

Other people on the road benefitted, at least in some places. A major reason for taxi regulation in NYC was to reduce road congestion - they calculated that adding more taxis would increase the average travel time. Now Uber has upended this.

I think that pricing congestion directly would be better, but in the absence of that, this is an example of Uber hurting some citizens who are not taxi companies.

The road congestion theory is a backwards rational -- someone was trying to come with reason for why medallions should still exist and came up with it. There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions; to call it a "major" reason for why tax medallions were created is completely absurd.

To cite road congestion as being part of the "spirit" of why taxi medallions were created leaves me with the impression of someone being disingenuous.

> There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions

What on earth makes you assert this? The intense and (to modern eyes) borderline insane levels of traffic congestion in NYC at the dawn of the automobile age are very well documented. There are pictures and videos you can easily find, that make today's horrible congestion look bearable and civilized. A lot of traffic rules and devices have their dawn in the same era.

A taxi monopoly can help citizens at the expense of consumers only to the extent that citizens are not consumers. If few citizens are consumers, it seems the taxi monopoly is not serving most citizens well. Isn't that a contradiction?

While true, that still doesn't justify Uber's actions. Uber doesn't give a crap about those regulations, or reforming them. In fact, they want them to stay in place so they can have an unfair advantage.

Absolutely true. But just like we shouldn't forgive Uber their sins because they improved the market, nor should we condemn their market changes because of their wrongdoing.

And "caring" is something almost no companies do. Even in pure capitalism, companies don't WANT competition. They don't CARE about their consumers - they just want to make as much money as they can.

I deleted Uber after all of this, but You are wrong. I lived in SF during 2010-2012 and calling taxis was a huge pain. I started using Uber when it was only black cars because they showed up. I would call yellow cab and after an hour they didn't even show up, so I called them again and they said "well, if you didn't see a car after 20 mins, you should have called back."

I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint.

The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation.

While I support Lyft now instead of Uber, the ride sharing business is just the competition the industry needs to shake it's complacency.

> I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint.

> The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation.

Unfortunately, these Taxi drivers are now working for Uber and Lyft.

I take Lyft a lot (and I used Uber for a while but went back to Lyft after reading Susan Fowler's post); I've been riding for about two and a half years, and I typically take dozens of rides a month. Most drivers I've dealt with are perfectly pleasant people, but I've encountered a few who are just horrendous. I'm fairly sure most of these people are former cab drivers.

Some examples:

- At my last job, there were multiple drivers who insisted on parking a block away and making me walk to their car, typically through an unlit area at night. This was in a suburban office park, not a crowded city street; there was no excuse to make me walk, and over time I developed a theory that it's because I'm a woman and they want to assert their dominance. I always cancel when they pull this shit, and I eventually memorized their names and began cancelling every time someone with a history of this accepted one of my requests.

- One of the above was particularly bad. This was pretty early on, and it was one of the only times I actually walked over to him. As soon as I got in the car, he started yelling "You kept me waiting for three minutes!". I then said "I was expecting you to come to where I actually am". He then told me to get out. As I was getting out, I told him I was reporting him to Lyft, at which point he said "Yeah, well I work for myself" (people like him are why I just want Uber and Lyft to declare their drivers as employees and not contractors). As I was walking back to my office building to call another, I see his car double back towards me. As he pulls into the parking lot, I start walking faster, and he gets out of his car and chases me into the building. Luckily, I got into the elevator before he could, took it up to where I worked, and told my boss what happened. My boss called 911, we waited until the cops made sure he was gone before I left again, and then a co-worker gave me a ride home.

- Driver once stopped at a street corner before picking me up and texted me demanding to know my destination address. When I told him I already put my destination into the system, he cancelled on me.

- A few drivers think it's acceptable to drive out of the way and get gas after they accept the ride, before picking me up. I cancel on them. One of them, after I cancelled on him, drove up to my house about 10 minutes later while I was waiting outside for the driver I called after I cancelled on him and said "Hey you, you called a ride?". I screamed and went back inside. I came within a hair of calling the cops.

- One driver kept a logbook of every passenger's name plus their source address and destination address. He was perfectly pleasant to talk to, but that logbook creeped me out.

- Back when I was new to Lyft, I thought I had to stay in the car while I rated and tipped the driver after the ride (I think this was when Lyft was still operating on a donation model in Dallas). Of course, my phone was acting slow then (it was a recurring problem with my old Nexus 5), so it was taking a while. During this time, the driver repeatedly screenshotted the Lyft app on his phone with my profile picture visible and kept asking over and over how much Lyft charged me for the ride. I found it creepy, so I just kept lying to him and saying that the screen hasn't loaded yet. It gets weirder. He dropped me off at a bar, and my usual MO at that bar was to get a drink at the bar and then go out on the patio. When I got to the patio, he was still parked in the same spot he dropped me off at, and he was staring at me with my drink on the patio, so I went right back inside. Seriously frightening. I hope he wasn't fapping to the screenshots he took of my profile picture.

- I had a driver pick me up from home to take me to a bar. He went to the wrong place, and I tried to give him instructions, but his English was word salad, and he couldn't understand me when I gave basic directions like "keep driving forwards", either. Somehow he made it to my place. As I was getting in the front seat, he screamed at me "Hey I'm up here! Get in back!" at the top of his lungs. It was the only coherent thing I ever heard from him. I let him drive me there just so I could 1-star him (he was already at 4.5, which was below Lyft's termination threshold).

- One guy made me sit in the back for no reason (I hate sitting in the back, and making me sit in the back guarantees no higher than a 3-star rating unless they end up being a spectacular conversationalist). On the way, he made a wrong turn into an express toll lane. Because of that, we ended up having to go out of our way to get out of the express lane and double back to where we were supposed to be going. While in the express lane, he starts going into an angry rant about how he's trying to run a business here but we keep dinging him with tolls. Another reason why Lyft needs to give up on the idea of classifying drivers as contractors; every driver I've seen who treats being a driver as running their own business has been a terrible person.

- One guy made me ride in the back because he had the insides of the back doors and the backs of the front seat plastered with advertising for his private driver service. If I knew at the time that was a violation of Lyft's TOS, I would've reported him.

- One guy parked at a hospital across the street from where I was. I called to tell him my location... he said "I'm at the hospital.", I said "I'm not. I'm at..." and then before I could tell him where I am, he barked out "Call another!" and cancelled. I was glad, actually. I rode with him once before that; he had a really creepy van, and he made me ride in the back in a pretty creepy way (he opened the automatic sliding door as I was walking up to him), so I was actually glad I didn't have to ride with him again. I don't remember why I didn't 3-star him the first time I rode with him. I think I just forgot to rate him at all.

- Some of them just don't know how to make conversation. I've had more than a few, after picking me up at my office building, just bark out "What kind of building is that!?". They say it in a tone like they're interrogating an enemy spy, and they seem to not know what a multi-tenant office building is. Normal people don't do that. Normal people ask "Just getting off work?", sometimes followed by "So, what do you do for a living?", and that usually leads to pleasant conversation. Not "What kind of building is that!?" spoken like they're about to get out the waterboard if I don't answer fast enough.

- I've had a small handful of drivers lately who insist on blasting violent gangsta rap on the radio, and they get upset when I ask them to turn the radio off. One of them, though, was the worst. This guy just turned it down a little, and when I said "I asked you to turn it off", he said "hey, I turned it down, what more do you want?". I made him let me off right there, and because he was using his sister's Lyft account (a huge violation of their policies; I wouldn't have gotten in at all if I'd paid attention to the name and face on the Lyft profile before I got in), I called their Critical Response Hotline and reported him. Based on the response I got from them, I'm fairly sure both he and his sister got banned from the platform.

- One Uber driver blatantly ran a red light with me in the car. It wasn't even yellow when he was approaching, he didn't even try to slow down when the light turned yellow, and it was red for a few seconds by the time he entered the intersection. I wrote up a nice long report for that one.

- One woman flipped her shit when I politely asked her to not use Waze. Waze's algorithm is actually incapable of getting me home (it insists on cutting through a gated community I don't have access to). It's not uncommon for drivers to use Waze, and when I say "please don't use Waze", other drivers have no problems letting me manually guide them. This lady, though, had a full on temper tantrum. She started screaming at me saying "Waze is all I have" and "I can't turn it off" (bullshit; I've had lots of drivers close the app). She even punched the steering wheel. She also said "you'll have to guide me then!" in the nastiest, most angriest way possible. I have no problems whatsoever manually guiding people, but the way she said it made it sound like manually guiding her was offensive. I asked her to let me out, and as soon as I got out, I called the Critical Response Hotline. I've never seen a driver so immature and so nasty; I wonder if she was on meth. The person I talked to was just as shocked and horrified as I was.

> One driver kept a logbook of every passenger's name plus their source address and destination address. He was perfectly pleasant to talk to, but that logbook creeped me out.

I don't know what kind of information Uber/Lyft sends back to their drivers, so this could easily be a mileage record for tax purposes.

That's still creepy as fuck.

Then Uber and Lyft are creepy, and you shouldn't use them.

That is an insane amount of negative experiences. Have you considered purchasing a car?

> healthy markets

Taxies are a regulated monopoly, definitely not a healthy market. Hordes of consumers moved to a better alternative like Uber at the first chance they had.

> Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed.

Uber, whether you like it or not, has revolutionized personal transportation for better. Consumers are using Uber because Uber is a better product. That's a fact.

> acting solely out of greed.

That's a weird thing to complain about. In a capitalist country, how would you prefer companies act? Not greedy? The whole point of a free market is that everyone tries to maximize profit. There are a lot of things you can point at to claim that Uber is evil, but I don't think greed is one of them.

No, they're a criminal organization that took over for another criminal organization. It's true that in the end, two wrongs failed to make a right, but there's no need to demonize the notion of upending the disgusting monopoly taxis have enjoyed.

There's civil disobedience to unjust laws and there's giving no fucks about the legal system.

Your argument is basically valid, but fails to account for Uber's consistent violations of law at several levels of government and geographic areas.

"consistent" is exactly what you'd hope for when attempting to systematically demonstrate an improvement that a class of regulations prevents; "consistent" here means alignment with a clear goal, focusing on the things that achieve that goal, and treating every restriction preventing that goal in the same way.

The article suggests, and I'd agree, that the problem wasn't Uber avoiding or ignoring taxi regulations; the problem was them applying that same gleefully transgressive attitude towards other areas that had nothing to do with their goal.