Things I don't miss about cabs:

1. them complaining about short fair or straight up driving off before I could get in because I wasn't going far enough (lesson learned in Vegas: get in before answering questions) 2. The constant, relentless dance about their "credit card machine being broken" "you can pay cash!" "there's an ATM machine inside"

Uber and Lyft were god sends when I was traveling a lot for work. click button, get in car, arrive at place. None of the adversarial nonsense.

In theory, the idea of regulated, but high, fares for taxis came with a legal obligation to accept all rides.

But that never stopped drivers from playing that game anyway.

>Uber and Lyft were god sends when I was traveling a lot for work. click button, get in car, arrive at place. None of the adversarial nonsense

At the expense of the security of the drivers serving you. You get convenience, they get a subsistence lifestyle.

If they don’t want to follow the terms of the taxi license fuck them. Universal service, take every fare, don’t discriminate by race. If Uber and Lyft destroy the entire taxi industry it can’t come soon enough.

I don't want anyone working a job to live a subsistence lifestyle, but taxis have also always been a nightmare for me (in the US and every country I've ever been in) and I never want to go back. Uber and Lyft are vastly superior and less stressful experiences for the customer in every way. I'd like them to be good experiences for the drivers, too, but the answer isn't to scrap the whole thing and go back to taxis.

In some countries, the meter is just for show and every ride is a negotiated fare. Also, sometimes it's hard to distinguish taxi from pirate. Heck, in some places, even the licensed drivers are notorious for robbing tourists. Yikes.

A living wage and convenient cabs don't need to be mutually exclusive. Also, the adversarial nonsense was more than just a lack of convenience. Some drivers are just not nice people and managed to get away with it.

You think they'd have been that angry if they had a decent lifestyle?

Maybe the causality goes the other way, people like that might have difficulty finding other jobs.

Most low-paying jobs aren't known for having lots of angry/rude people working them. Probably because in most jobs you have to work with other people or interact with customers within view of your co-workers/manager.

But that's partly because, in all likelihood, the taxi driver also couldn't set their own rates. If that taxi driver could have asked $20 instead of the $3.75 legally mandated by the meter, would you have paid it?

It seems like allowing a proper market, where both riders and drivers could bid on rides, would solve both this problem and the SuperShuttle problem.

Taxis work like this in Panama. Prices vary wildly ( but are low by developed world standards) and trying to get across town in times of high traffic is nearly impossible, nobody will take you ( they ask you where you're going, snort and drive away) until you offer at least four times the standard fare.

They're also unsafe, my brother was robbed at gunpoint by a fake taxi. I've heard multiple women who had to jump from a moving taxi to escape a potential rape.

Uber is more expensive in Panama, but I use it nearly exclusively.

It doesn't, because at 3am in a sparsely populated bit of town, there aren't enough participants for a market to work.

For me to have real choice as a rider, I need at least a few different offers from drivers on the table, at which point I can pick the cheapest/fastest/highest rated/whatever.

Likewise, for the driver to have a true choice, he has to have multiple ride offers in front of him to pick the best.

The reality is that in most local markets, most drivers spend the majority of their time sitting around because there are no riders (and therefore would never turn down any work), and riders are frequently so far from drivers that there is only one driver to choose from within 10 minutes waiting time, so they would be forced to accept the ride, whatever the price.

It was a $20-something fare. It'd vary between $22 and $26 based on traffic. I'm not sure how much of that was airport fees. For pleasant drivers, I'd bump it to $30 with tip.

Yeah, $20 and about 1 in 3 were visibly angry and not shy about letting me know it.

Context: I took this route almost weekly for a few years.

As a tourist in Shanghai/Beijing last year, this (technically illegal) practice is quite common if you don't have the right apps set up. We did frequently pay the higher fare, though the difference in currency was like $1 vs $3 iirc.

> Uber and Lyft were so welcome

Then you are lucky. I can't count the times the drivers called me before picking me up, asking me where I want to go and then cancelling if it was nearby (or no answer at all).

I never cancel, but they do.

And when they don't do that, they are extremly annoyed when it's something close to the airport.

I've used both hundreds of times in the US, and that has never happened to me. They would only call to sync our positions to find each other, which happened very rarely.

This is basically the same thing, except cancelling based on pick-up location instead of destination. The app apparently doesn't always tell the driver exactly where the pickup is- it only gives the direction to drive and the next turn or two. It only gives the exact location once they're close to it.

This is to keep drivers from cancelling based on an out of the way pick-up location.

When they call, it's almost always to get information that the app won't give them.

I've gotten burned by both.

I had the same thing, but the driver dropped his phone off with a friend that was still "within the airport" as we drove out the airpot so that he didn't lose his virtual place. He was pretty upset with me.

Sounds like taxi drivers should be paid by the hour instead of per fare.

Strange. I've heard the same stories about Uber: drivers complaining about short, unprofitable rides, and then there was the study about Uber drivers who take more risks while driving making more money.[1]

I suppose the only thing preventing the adversarial behavior is that the driver needs your five-star review.

[1] in the context of why women Uber drivers make less.

>Uber and Lyft were so welcome.

Because these companies are VC and investor subsidized, and apparently breaking labour laws. It isn't a functioning market. If they had to cover the full costs they would face the same issues as taxis.

I have had this exact experience, Taxi's are the worst and there is 0 feedback loop to improve quality. I once had a taxi driver yell at me and ask me why I didn't just take an uber if I live so close to the airport. Good riddance to traditional taxis (in all but a few cities where they are still marginally more convenient in my experience).