How are they a taxi company? Certainly not thought of that way by your average person. Its taxis vs ride sharing.

I think your average person does think that way.

This entire debate and court case is between Taxi's and Uber, because they're competing by providing essentially the same thing.

The passenger clearly doesn't care if the person driving them from A to B is using a company vehicle vs their own vehicle. Ride sharing is a silly name, as you're not really sharing the ride if the driver isn't going to the same place are they.

"Ride sharing" is the silliest euphemism, it's not sharing a ride unless the driver was going there already.

If you don't want to lump them in with taxis, they're a car service with contract workers. That's all they are.

> Certainly not thought of that way by your average person. Its taxis vs ride sharing

Uber operates primarily as a taxi service with an app

Ride sharing is a non-core feature called UberPool, which lets users share Uber taxis with other users.

Disagree there. I think most people would prefer uber over taxi for service/convenience/cost, but I doubt modern uber would be considered that different to a taxi service.

“a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice.” So yea that sounds like Uber/Lyft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi

I regularly see people say they’ll call a cab and then use Uber/Lyft.

Ride sharing generally means carpooling/picking up hitchhikers etc. Where the driver is going on the route anyway and is adding passengers for HOV access, gas money, or just conversation. https://rideshare.org/

Uber’s initial intention was carpooling where someone would put in their intended destination and could pick people up for money. However the business model clearly switched to a taxi model with a paid driver not staying at the destination. They still wanted to call it ride sharing because what they where doing was often blatantly illegal

PS: Their initial subsidized prices convinced many people to advocate for an exception which was often granted. That’s the bit that’s rarely talked about, they essentially bribed the general public.

> Uber’s initial intention was carpooling where someone would put in their intended destination and could pick people up for money.

Historically incorrect. Uber started out as a black car service (with California tpc licenses). Lyft started as a pivot of the carpooling app zimride named after the founder.

> Their initial subsidized prices convinced many people to advocate for an exception which was often granted

That's not really what moved the needle. What moved the needle on exceptions was the sharp drop in drunk driving incidents and fatality.

> Lyft started

Ahh ok.

PS: There was sharing but it was time sharing Limos, so I can see getting those swapped.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/11101...

> Initially, the idea was for a timeshare limo service that could be ordered via an app. After the conference, the men went their separate ways. However, when Camp returned to San Francisco, he continued to be fixated on the idea and bought the domain name UberCab.com.

We hereby witness the effectiveness of Uber's PR machine tasked with creating that category with the specific goal of evading taxicab regulations.

Laws are not strongly typed.