You can always take a regular cab. Low profit routes were pretty much impossible to get pre-Uber. I am almost certain that Uber is more likely to obey disability laws than "Joe's taxi" with a few cars.
> Depends. Regular taxis tended to cost a bit more, but had much lower variance.
My experience with cabs is calling a dispatcher while in route and getting a price. I was charged $30 for a two mile trip to the train station before. No reasoning. Also they were much less likely to pick up minority passengers, or people in poorer neighborhoods. Also "credit card machine was broken" very often. Also you don't know the route the driver will take. I guess my experience with cabs pre-Uber was different from yours, but it was incredibly high variance.
> That seems implausible at best.
Many places you had a gatekeeper. You can't just ride a taxi, and would have to purchase a medallion or sign on to an existing vendor where there's much less competition. They would also be much less flexible with hours
Knowing the lawsuits from people who've been refused rides from a regular Uber because they have a service dog, or their wheelchair 'probably won't fit' (I think I can tell you whether the wheelchair I usually put in the trunk of a car is likely to fit in your trunk, thank you), I am not.
But there are also specific accessible taxis. How do I call an Uber that will take a powered wheelchair?
No idea how it works in practice but it’s a thing in Toronto.
In cities, that's absurd - car services existed for decades serving just this part of the market, and they let you schedule in advance!
In the suburbs and exurbs, probably less so, but this is where everyone has a car as a prerequisite for living in a house with a multi-car garage.
You could schedule in advance. Now having them actually show up? That was debatable. lol
In cities, there were were either no taxis around in certain neighborhoods, or they simply would not come at all even if you called and asked the taxi company and the dispatcher told you they had sent a driver. Both of these I experienced personally.
Sure but that doesn't work very well for when you want to spend the weekends drinking. The cities in the US that have grown the most over the last 10 or 20 years are still very much suburban and lack good public transportation. The lack of low cost and convenient transportation services quite literally resulted in fatal accidents.
> When accounting for the ride-sharing company’s commissions and fees, vehicle expenses and a modest health insurance package, Uber drivers end up earning just $9.21 in hourly wages, according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-uber-driv...
The problem with that is that there is a supply of cab drivers and demand for cabs that drives the price. If you put in a medallion system, the price of the medallion will be bid up such that the cab driver's wage is in line with the market wage. You can't just wave a magic wand and set prices without unintended consequences. So what happened was cab drivers had to take out massive debt to finance these medallions or work for some middle man that is essentially a financing arm. And when the price collapsed, they were stuck with this debt and some even got bailed out by taxpayers.
I wish Uber was around when I was younger. I had a car and a lot of spare time. I would have gladly accepted a low wage if I had a few hours to kill. No other job affords that flexibility which is probably why its so popular.
with that said, this is all supposition, i just find it a reasonable argument.
It maybe made sense though, as your payment was your license to work, and selling the medalion on was your retirement plan. Uber screwed this up - but my feelings are mixed.
More predictable as in you know the fair before you get in. I did have to take a taxi in Los Angeles from the airport earlier this year and the guy wouldn't tell me how much it would cost. Gave me a ballpark that was $22 less than what it ended up being.
There's a long, long, long list of reasons Uber has screwed over great many people, and continues to. From regulatory arbitrage, duping drivers into unprofitable deals, lack of proper insurance, privacy violations, harassing journalists, harassing employees... This has been covered non-stop on HN for pretty much a decade now. I invite you to do some searching, and you'll quickly see how Uber is one of the most ethically challenged companies of the 21st century.
> More predictable as in you know the fair before you get in.
Yes. And by higher-variance I meant that you never know what fare you'll have to either accept, or abandon the trip. With traditional taxis, the prices are variable, but it's easier to ballpark them (at least traveling in the city you know), and they have much tighter range.
I guess if you prefer being able to ballpark a taxi cost then that's cool! You can still use taxis. But most people prefer to see the price before they get in. Certainly the choice existing is better for the consumer and has helped keep taxi fares lower - even if you choose not to use an uber.
Do you have any evidence, for any taxi network in any city on the planet, of that taxi network doing anything even remotely as illegal or antisocial as Uber has been (and still is) doing? Uber's transgressions are well documented, there is great many of them, and quite a few were done at scale.
For the "deserving" part - they were there. Good or bad, I don't think any business deserves being steamrolled by an aggressive foreign multinational corporation, with practically infinite budget to undercut competitors and keep law enforcement at bay. Local businesses don't get to break the law without impunity.
For being better to their employees, I honestly don't know. But in all the rides with traditional networks I took over two decades of my life, I don't remember any driver actually complaining about their job. Ironically, the drivers of Uber-like[0] services keep complaining all the time - mostly about constantly changing terms of contracts, and constantly testing new kinds of customer acquisition schemes, that tend to take away money from the drivers.
> But most people prefer to see the price before they get in.
I never said I didn't want it either. I like this feature - and guess what, I had that, way before Uber was a thing, thanks to a private company that fought for improvement in transport regulations. That's how I know sociopathy wasn't necessary to disrupting the taxi market.
--
[0] - I don't use Uber itself, it's a matter of principle.
Stop defending Uber. Even if you work for them it is incumbent on you as a citizen to be honest about what they were doing.
According to Uber?
> Additionally, it has enabled millions of people in cities to skip buying a new car/any car which saves tons of emissions.
Citation needed. I believe the last analysis I read showed that most people used Uber etc to replace transit or walking, which means it adds to emissions.
I've used taxis in multiple cities that I booked through an app and got a fare ahead of time. At this point Uber is "a taxi, but with no guarantee of quality* and no cap on how many of them are creating traffic"
*GPS routing does no good when the driver clearly can't read a map and doesn't know where they are or how to follow directions.
- Taxi drivers (outside of NYC) in the US are going to get less rides per hour than uber drivers
- Taxi drivers traditionally have to give a larger share to the taxi company than uber drives give to Uber. If they are independent then they have identical car expenses as an uber driver.
I 100% believe that a lot of Uber drivers barely break even. I guess I'm fine with that - I bet if you try to do that 9-5 and can't do your own car maintenance you are going to be inefficient at it. I had a friend in Los Angeles who would only work nights, was fine working 2am, and could do basic tire/oil/car repair. He made 2x what he had been making as a busboy at a restaurant. I don't see why this is considered a bad option for people, especially since he enjoyed the flexibility.
On average, in certain locations. In others, not so much. And let's not forget surge pricing. Or people living, or wanting to get to a place, along low-profit routes. Or people with disabilities.
> more predictable with pricing
Depends. Regular taxis tended to cost a bit more, but had much lower variance.
> Uber drivers make more money today than taxi drivers used to/or do today.
That seems implausible at best.
> There are also way more job openings in this than there used to be
These aren't jobs, though. They're gigs. And highly unpredictable ones, wrt. your take-home pay.
> The world is not a zero sum game. Technology made this a win-win long-term
Absolutely true.
The problem isn't technology, it's businesses - particularly businesses that purposefully play a negative-sum game, where the losing side is society at large. Externalizing risk, costs, performing regulatory arbitrage. Making owners much better off, customers a bit better off, at the cost of making everyone else slightly worse off. And much like with greenhouse emissions - a bit here, a bit there, barely measurable puff, up until it adds up to a global crisis - these companies are killing civilized society, one VC-subsidized shiny app at a time.