No, because if there is no viable business model then the business simply won’t exist, leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling.

or taxis, i mean, they’ve been around since the horse and buggy days and probably even way before that, i don’t know enough about the history, but i’m guessing taxi style travel services were even around during the silk road era. uber didn’t invent travel for hire.

this is going to be a rant, but i mean…

the reason uber and lyft (and countless other “disrupters”) disrupted anything is they pretended the externalities didn’t exist/ignored the very externalities the already existing industry had previously already sorted out and lived through.

and lo and behold, no one even halfway intelligent is shocked that all of these issues arose at scale.

i’ll repeat what i’ve said countless other times: anyone who thinks they have a “disruptive” idea yet hasn’t extensively studied why the already existing industry does things a certain way, is an absolute lightweight and no one should be investing in with them.

we have a major problem in some of our industries of people who have deluded themselves that the people who came before were somehow primitive or less enlightened.

we see this all over the place, from people who want entirely rebuild large software packages from the bottom up, from submarine tourism companies, to “house flippers”, to short-term rental apps, who because their egos refuse to let them explore the history of their project, they just end up in the exact same place. only they took a really long, wasteful, and stupid detour to get there.

if an industry is doing something you think is wrong, explore the history of why it is done this way. don’t pretend like that problem doesn’t exist and then call yourself a disrupter. this is a recipe to have everyone laugh and go “it’s not like you weren’t warned there was giant hole around the corner and then you drove right into it.”

and even worse, if they have explored the history of their project, know very well the problems coming, but try to externalize that to wider society, it’s outright malicious.

> leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling.

again, taxis have been around for pretty much ever.

Taxis are extensively price regulated. That was my point, thank you.

Dont drivers have the option to refuse rides ?

Or simply stop using uber ?

No, haven’t you heard? They’re literally slaves/indentured workers.

Are there no prisons or workhouses?

Well, the original notion was silly:

> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.

You can't have a race to the bottom without competitors still in the market.

If competitors like Uber leave the market, Lyft can raise prices.

In the long run, there will be a balance between competitors entering and exiting the market just around the point where the industry is barely viable as a business.

That's also how eg restaurants or cafes work in many big cities; and this explains why so most cafes fail, but why there are also always some cafes around.