While it's always nice to see a broken rent-seeking system in our world become eroded we should not laude the transfer to another fiat regency.
Creating and maintaining software that connects a person with a device to a driver with a device and routes them from point A (driver) => A' (person) => B (destination) isn't some trivial nothing that you can just rent-seek into existence. I believe 'wealth' was added to the economy that did not previously exist when people had to deal with hailing cab drivers, not have a map of their route, and not know an approximation of their fare ahead of time.
Remember the sign on cabs that said they accept all major cards, only to find out the "card reader doesn't work?".
Do I?! It's still commonplace! I have lost every ounce of sympathy I ever held for taxi drivers.
> a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air
In what way is Uber not a rent-seeker taking advantage of often poor new immigrants?
The fact that the old system was so poor just lowers our standards for anything that may seek to replace it, but that's no reason to throw all critical thinking out the window.
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Europe is a really good example to look at. Uber entered the market in most (all) European countries, but they simply couldn't compete with what already existed. (speaking only of Uber taxis; Uber Eats is doing fine in Europe)
Doesn't trap them.
Used cars are a liquid market (with a lot of transactions) with well established pricing. It's easy to buy and sell at the blue book's price and get cheap financing. This makes it easy to get into Ubering and out of it, as at any point you know exactly how much money the car is still worth.
Compare that to a taxi medallion, often financed through "alternate means" (no banks will touch them), completely opaque pricing (there's no market place, transactions are often done privately) and at the mercy of regulators (tomorrow the city council might create 10x the current amount of medallions out of thin air, thus crushing the price of existing ones).
Uber in particular is interesting, as it's a vastly superior service built by somehow even more morally deficient individuals.
Instead of a physical medallion bolted on the car, it's a verified driver ID and rating in Uber/Lyft app.
Uber/Lyft are now collecting what the medallion owners were collecting previously from the drivers.
The apps are more convenient for riders and there are more efficiencies in the routes. But, it's still the same system. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Sure perhaps there could have been a national taxi license like how truck drivers receive it if one is talking about safety and other regulations but per city never made any sense beyond rent-seeking by both the city and the taxi companies
Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).
The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.
And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648