Uber also wouldn't be a thing today if they didn't have billions in VC money buying them lawyers and lobbyists, and developing Greyball to help drivers avoid giving rides to people identified as regulators.

Please don't make it seem like Uber's law-breaking is some kind of brave sacrifice protecting mom-and-pop restaurants everywhere.

I'm not sure if your comment is a response to mine.

And that's a bad thing?

Startups in general seem to benefit just one category of people: investors, and it's usually to the detriment of Joe B. Average who happened to use their product/service.

I don't know anyone who would choose a taxi over lyft or uber even if it was cheaper. Taxis are terrible.

I don't use taxis a lot. I have had a car and a licence basically since I was 17, but when I have had to use them, they've mostly been fine. Mostly to or from an airport/hotel.

One nearly killed me, but I don't judge all other drivers by his lack of sleep/attention/whatever prescription drugs he relies on to stay awake.

My issue with uber/etc is that they spend more money, campaigning against laws that would require background checks for their drivers, than it would cost for them to actually do the background checks. If that doesn't raise some questions for you, you may as well just look for vans with "free candy" spray painted on the side, I'm sure they'll be great.

"Taxis are terrible" is such a vague blanket statement its almost meaningless.

Uber/Lyft are great for getting between two points in an overcrowded city where you would neither be able to park your own car nor hail a taxi. Taxis are terrible because of the lack of convenience and lack of a rider rating system.

And then you have apps (at least outside the US) for hailing taxis with the same UX for Uber. In some countries the Uber app hails taxis too.

> Uber/Lyft are great for getting between two points in an overcrowded city where you would neither be able to park your own car nor hail a taxi

I've literally never "hailed" a taxi in my life - I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel). Even as someone who uses taxis very rarely, I'm well aware of taxi booking apps both here in Thailand and in Australia.

Your argument is essentially "American taxis are crap, therefore uber is good for breaking the law". Why exactly couldn't Uber have just operated as a better taxi company? Oh right. Because then they'd have to follow the laws, and pay the drivers an actual income.

The main reason for me to use Grab while on holiday in Thailand was the fact that not getting scammed by a taxi driver in Thailand was almost impossible for me. I'm not sure if this is an issue for everyone, but I dare to say that as much as 50% of all taxi drivers in Bangkok just drove away the moment we asked for 'on the meter'. And this is saying something because we have used taxis at least twice a day for 2 weeks.

The second reason was that not 1 of the non-Grab taxi drivers uses anything like Google Maps. So I was never sure if we actually ended up at our hotel or somewhere else. Also because our hotel (Aetas) had (at least) 2 locations in Bangkok it made it all worse. This is assuming that a taxi driver actually knows where to go, we've also encountered multiple times the situation where a taxi driver didn't know where to go.

Grab on the other hand always provided the amount upfront and every driver had Google Maps for navigation.

Edit: I'd rather use the official taxis, but the number of conveniences Grab added with a single app was worth it to me.

I believe you're missing a few things, considering taxi medallions are basically impossible to come by, and that what taxi driving laws here in the US allow are not incredibly unlike what Uber does to its drivers.

> I believe you're missing a few things, considering taxi medallions are basically impossible to come by

You mean none of the existing holders will sell them? $22B. Twenty two billion fucking dollars. That's how much VC money has been pumped into this bullshit company. And you're saying they can't buy some taxi medallions?

Can you please not post acerbic rants to HN?

I think the answer is yes. (Or more accurately, not enough to be competitive.)

Why would they? Medallions are a MLM

If you've never hailed a taxi then I supposed you've never travelled abroad?

Not at all. Try reading what I wrote. Hint: look for the parts where it says:

> I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel)

But even when I have traveled, I generally don't use taxis much. I've only ever been to a few countries where I didn't end up driving - Hong Kong and Singapore, where public transport is beyond amazing, and a wedding (and thus spent the whole time at a resort) in Fiji years ago.

taxis aren't terrible. the distribution of medallions in most cities is the problem.

Taxis are terrible.

No. They benefit their customers and their investors. There investors usually one or two digits so its negligible.

Would that be the customers whose private data is surreptitiously gathered and analysed and re-analysed, to show some kind of 'value' to investors, or would it be the customers who use a service, and then find it's cancelled with one months notice, because it turns out you can't just keep spending someone else's money and hope for it to become profitable by magic?

You have to wonder how big Facebook would be today if a GDPR-esque law already existed and was common in most countries at the time of its launch.

On the flip side, if Facebook had never existed and never committed the privacy violations it has, would the GDPR exist?

I'm not sure this is right. One of the very clever things Uber did was take advantage of a loophole in the hackney laws that allowed drivers to operate for hire without taxi medallions as long as they did not perform street hails. From the point of view of taxi operators who had long relied on this system to protect them from meaningful competition, this was a flouting of the intent of the law, if not the actual language of the law itself. They did not however, as far as I know, actually break the law.

Uber broke limousine chauffeur laws, not taxi laws. It varies from state to state, but generally you need a chauffeur license to pick someone up for hire. From what I understand there is generally no limit to how many might drive around but they are not allowed look for customers, the customer must find them.

The taxi industry was hurt the most, but it wasn't taxi laws that were broken it was chauffeur laws.

What? In the UK, private hire licensing is & always was a normal thing and the way Uber uses it is entirely normal too. It's not a loophole. They weren't even the first to allow booking without phoning.

Uber was banned in the UK. And they keep appealing. They're still in service. It's hilarious.

Your comment seems to lack much in the way of fact.

They weren't banned in the UK. Or London. Their application for a license renewal was temporarily denied in London. They appealed, once.

They worked with TfL to resolve their concerns and were granted a new license - though slightly shorter term than normal. They're not entirely off the hook and will need to continue to show that they're behaving appropriately, but they're absolutely fine to operate now and that is not likely to change any time soon.

Just remember this the next time people say that Zuckerberg should go to jail or that the US needs something like GDPR.

In my observation, startups aren't just breaking unjust laws.

I think Uber not being a thing might have been for the best.

That's the stupidest thing I've heard today.