In Vancouver, at least, there are three players involved in providing most taxi rides:

* The taxi company, who offers fares to the driver * The driver, who operates the vehicle * The owner, who owns the vehicle

This means that at the end of the night, the taxi driver has to pay out to the taxi company and to the vehicle owner. This makes it very easy for a bad night to be a financial loss for the driver, since they still have to pay out regardless of whether they got good fares and tips or awful fares and tips.

Taxis are a 19th/20th century invention, we can do way better. Uber/Lyft are far superior, we just need to make sure the drivers aren't taken advantage of; probably by making them raise rates a bit and giving that money to drivers as a base pay.

Taxis and real-time ride sharing operate quite differently, for one, I cannot just turn up and hand signal to stop a moving vehicle from the latter.

False, you cannot street-hail all kinds of taxis - for example in New York it's only yellow cabs+green cabs, black car taxis you need to use an app or call.

Uber is a pretty standard black-car taxi service, with an app.

Still different, black cabs usually calculate the fares the same way as yellow cabs, but more expensive due to pre-reservation and luxury vehicles; which are not necessarily the case with RTRS.

Does uber not charge per pickup and per mile? And they certainly do allow you to choose luxury vehicles. Maybe I'm missing the distinction you're trying to draw.

But either way that's irrelevant to the general point of whether Uber's general business model is that of a black-car taxi service.

The feature set doesn't have to match exactly to demonstrate that taxi service will not vanish instantly from California if Uber decides to leave - taxis existed before Uber and they will exist after.

Uber could increase fares and continue operating if they choose. If they decide it's not worth their time, c'est la vie, there will be others who fill this niche instead.

This is just a transparent ploy to use the employees as leverage to reduce their operating costs, they will actually continue operating here even if it passes.

The black cars are called "car service" or limo service or something like that. They are prevented from picking up rides waiving them down precisely because they are not taxis.