I also don’t remember getting there via a wardrobe… Seems to me that planes and customs were involved.
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Were some of those customs agents a bit… fawny?
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Depends. Hacks aren’t, no, but minicabs are. The best place I’ve ever found for cheap minicabs is Leeds, where if you look like you could beat the driver in a fight, you can go anywhere for three quid 
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Just pay an extra 5k to “expedite” the paperwork…
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I didn’t think so. Maybe I was wrong?
I am not sure that the fact that the medallions create artificial property excuse the fact that we are screwing over people who bought in. It’s hard to blame Cabbies who followed the law and bought a medallion, even if the Medallion idea is bad.
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The problem though is that any “reforms” to the existing system come up smack against the entrenched interests of the medallion owners and their bought regulators and politicians, for all of whom the status quo is working perfectly.
To force any kind of change, you have to have competition from a completely different business model, a model over which they have no decision making power. Good or bad as that new model may be…
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Tried and true American path to success: inherit it.
Personal anecdote: Was in San Francisco on a busy day out by the marina (blue angels or some shit nearby) attending the Death Salon. Didn’t want to drive my car into the city from Oakland. Took BART in and called an SF cab to get out to the marina…called three times in fact. Got a cab after about a 30 minute wait right next to Market, which is a main drag. After my event was over, tried to call a cab to do the reverse trip. After two different cab companies were called about three times each (with being told a driver was on its way each time) and waiting most of an hour, I installed the Uber app on my phone and called an Uber car. Showed up 10 minutes later, took me to BART directly, and dropped me off.
I’m sorry cabbies are hard pressed in places but this kind of shit is why I never call cabs anymore, regardless of what city I’m visiting. I just summon an Uber vehicle now.
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Well, that’s the rub here, eh. It sounds like it can be a successful and effective model for the consumer with cash to throw around (I’m guessing many of us do). But it’s the labor aspect we really need to interrogate here, not the consumer aspect. Is the Uber guy showing up so quick out of protestant work ethic or worker desperation in the neo-liberal era? It’s not solely Uber, lyft, AirBnB, etc, driving this, but the insecurity of modern labor writ large. We’re in the middle of huge labor disruptions because the economy is changing. More people are in the service sector, which has historically been paid less well, and was less likely to have benefits. Sure, serving others can be a fulfilling mode of working, but does it support a family and pay the bills? Less likely to do so… Bethany Moreton has written some great stuff on this with her work on Wal-Mart, which describes the rise of Wal-Mart and the feminization of labor in the neoliberal economy:
The whole point of cab medallion systems is to artificially limit the supply of cabs.
So on a day where there is a big event scheduled that causes lots of people (including you) to not want to drive their cars, it should not be in the least surprising that the traditional cab service can’t meet public demand.
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Maybe he just doesn’t hold his customers in utter contempt…
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I would agree with you, except for the fact that I can’t get any Chicago cab company to dispatch a cab to my home even if I call several days in advance with a specific pickup time.
I don’t actually use Uber myself, but most of my neighbors do, for that reason.
Sure. That’s another possibility. What does that have to do with talking about the issues of labor and uber’s labor practices?
It’s difficult to take your complaints about Uber’s labor practices seriously when the regular taxi market is so terrible for drivers who lease, are regular employees, or in any other way don’t own the medallion. The very nature of being independent makes it easy for drivers to switch to Lyft or Sidecar, even drive for all of them in the same day. That is better than being trapped under a medallion lease. I understand that they don’t like the competition from part-timers, though, any more than anyone else, say dentists making it so hygienists can’t clean teeth without a dentist in the office, or car dealers wanting to be involved in the car selling process, or people wanting to make it harder to operate home daycare or food trucks so as not to compete with the professionals who have invested more capital.
The medallion market is horrible and shouldn’t have existed in the first place, but there are a lot of drivers who borrowed a ton of money to finance leasing one who are getting crushed. I do feel sorry for them for getting involved in the racket.
Note that you can’t have restrictions on the number of cabs without the corruption and high medallion prices, however you like the supposed motivation. Just like how restrictions to ensure high quality dental care mean that Alaska Natives go without, and other well meaning restrictions on food trucks and home daycare hurt the poor.
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Yes, just like how Tesla has attempted to sell cars in an unlicensed / illegal way in a lot of states until stopped. Same with many food trucks. The licensing regimes have the same dubious motivations.
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It doesn’t. It’s a different possibility as to why Uber drivers deliver better service than medallion holder, whose policy seems to be “they’ll wait for us, they need us”. Guess what cabbies, we don’t anymore.
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You could say the same about public transit or having a car. And of course, I’m sure that uber can be just as spotty as taxi services, because it’s run by people. Again, it’s a labor issue that seems critical to understand here. It sort of feels like talking about who provides the better value for the consumer is shifting the focus of the discussion. Does the medallion provide a better system of labor protection for workers? That’s probably up for debate. But the end all and be all of sorting out these issues are not necessarily only in how well they serve the customer. It’s part of the conversation, certainly, but it isn’t the only measuring stick, or even the most critical one.
I believe this may be referred to as the “Marxian Apocalypse” by Thomas Piketty, and he asserts it has not (and will not?) happen due to other forces, such as education, &c. However, I have read byt 5 pages of the introduction of his Capital so I could be waaaaaaaay off-base.
By Internet standards, however, I am thus an accredited economist, so I feel qualified to answer.
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Let me tell you about the residents of hyper-cities. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born a resident of a hyper-city, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
The London of the 90s wasn’t real. If you didn’t want it to be real, you just paid some money.
Questions for discussion:
- Which of these videos “feels” “more real”?
- Did the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald “reflect” “reality”?
- If so, does his writing still feel real “today”?
- What is the influence of Zelda Fitzgerald’s schizophrenia on our reality?
- Would you pay money to make these questions go away?
- If so, how much?
- Really?
