With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down on Fake Profit Metrics

Re:With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down o... by 908B64B197 on Thursday August 12, 2021 @02:45PM (#28159940)

It's interesting how it's now fashionable to bash on Uber and Lyft. Seems everyone conveniently forgot about the medallion system Uber and Lyft disrupted. 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...).

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Re:With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down o... by tomjakubowski on Thursday August 12, 2021 @03:34PM (#28160482)

The taxicab medallion system exists only in a handful of US cities.

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Re:With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down o... by 908B64B197 on Thursday August 12, 2021 @03:40PM (#28160543)

Which cities didn't?

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Re:With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down o... by sharkmerry on Thursday August 12, 2021 @06:04PM (#28162164)

According to quick wikisearch, all cities except NYC, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Philly and SF

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Re:With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down o... by 908B64B197 on Thursday August 12, 2021 @06:28PM (#28162430)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion

> Several major cities in the US use these in their taxi licensing systems, including New York City, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

I think you might have misinterpreted the sentence here: these are cited as examples, not at the only cities in the US to have such a system in place.

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Re:With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down o... by sharkmerry on Friday August 13, 2021 @01:24AM (#28165742)

Did you research before asking "which cities didn't?" Or only after I replied?

"Denver taxi medallions" seems to return nothing indicating they have one.

Los Angeles doesn't seem to have one either

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Re:With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down o... by aksss on Monday August 16, 2021 @04:30PM (#28202551)

Is "medallion" a requirement for this search? I think a lot of cities that use this system merely call them licenses. I'm not sure that whether you call the system one of medallions or one of licenses makes them qualitatively different if the principle is that a) only a limited number can ever be issued creating artificial scarcity; b) that scarcity and resulting high cost create a protected group of suppliers; c) the city has a financial interest and even duty to shield the market from competitors and innovation.

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Re:With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down o... by aksss on Thursday August 12, 2021 @11:36PM (#28165099)

Yeah, my city had/has it and is not on list.

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