More or less; I prefer driving myself (those smart cars feel like driving a toy car!) but also Car2Go is cheaper. Uber makes sense when there are more than 2 of us or if I’m too drunk to drive myself home.
haha car puns 
But the current system isn’t working. That’s what I was talking about earlier, and that’s what Fallows says in the piece I linked to:
In residential DC and its suburbs, cabs don’t normally cruise streets off the main avenues. You’d think that phoning for a cab from the main companies – Yellow, Diamond, Barwood-- would be the answer. Hah! Maybe they’ll answer the call, maybe they won’t. Once they do, maybe a cab will come, maybe it won’t – and this applies even when you “reserve” a cab, since all that means is that at the assigned time they’ll put out a bid to see if anyone is interested.
Should we just accept that? Fallows should accept his shitty DC service, and I my nonexistent Brooklyn service?
The system can, in theory, change, but it won’t, because it’s been completely captured and corrupted by current stakeholders.
I’m a member of my community, too, but I don’t feel the need to support a system that isn’t serving my interests, and many people agree.
I’d compare people using Uber to people torrenting movies and tv shows – illegal, yes, but only because a cartel with an outdated business model refuses to heed consumers’ demands. It’s Irish Democracy at its finest. 
Put your feels away. No one is interested.
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The current Taxi “medallion” model isn’t just broken, it’s deeply corrupt to the core, @AcerPlatanoides.
I’ll also add that I have never really had a great experience in a Taxi, but my Uber rides have been a) way more convenient b) generally faster and c) much simpler for me while d) costing negligibly more, though I haven’t had any “surge” rides.
Even if Uber wasn’t displacing an incredibly corrupt system, it’s better.
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SO FIX IT.
Stop justifying lazily breaking the law. It’s a slippery slope, mate. Wonder what happened to America? You can say it was the corruption, but really, it was the people giving up on reforming the system, and just cheating it.
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And likewise, your car service doesn’t work unless you have a pile of drivers already, and no one wants to drive for your service unless you have a pile of users already.
Sure, the barrier for Uber was very low. By flourishing and thereby destroying the initial conditions that allowed Uber to get its start, they’ve raised the barrier to entry for anyone who might follow them.
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Did you read the articles? You can’t just “fix it.” These cartels completely corrupted local regulatory bodies, creating a vast web of laws and regulations that only certain favored businesses can slip through.
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When I was in San Jose this weekend I had a rental car, used Uber twice, and ride a bike. Using the cheapest option at all times is a false economy–dont use the cheapest, use the right one.
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Do you not need any qualification other than a standard (American o_0) driving licence to operate a cab/private hire vehicle? In the UK it’s an extra practical driving test, and quite a hard one.
I think there’s a tricky problem with Uber et al that I had hoped to articulate in discussion with the very angry person who decided he wanted to scream, but perhaps you and I can talk about.
Apps aren’t cheap to develop: good apps that scale and have logistical components costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for an initial release. The money can be replaced by time, and sometimes some angel investment of tens of thousands keep founder/programmers in ramen long enough. It also takes time to program, no matter the funding. Starting from zero, it can take several months or up to a year to build something that meets the task.
Drivers might switch with incentives, but drivers already carry multiple phones. Uber requires using an Uber-provided phone with a custom corporate app, for instance. I believe Lyft etc just requires an app.
So a group devotes a huge amount of time and maybe a sizable amount of money and then needs to:
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Recruit drivers. The notion that angry poster had of “one” driver is silly when there’s competition. For people to install and use an app, there needs from day one to be enough drivers in their area to always have one within a few minutes of most parts of a covered area during daylight and hours and through restaurant and bar closings.
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Get people to install the app. This is surprisingly difficult. Once people are used to something, they stop being as price aware unless it changes dramatically or it’s called out as unfair. Amazon is no longer the price leader on a lot of things, but people assume they are and they are very efficient.
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Uber can compete like crazy. So a new entrant comes in with no money and lots of moxie and a great app and recruits hundreds of drivers somehow. And let’s pretend Uber has raised prices so they’re 30% above cab rates. The entrant comes in and Uber, with a huge bucket of incoming cash from other markets, drops its prices 50% and gives 100% to drivers. What then? Unfair competition?
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And Uber can already force pricing. In some market it has given drivers 100% of the revenue net credit-card fees instead of 80% in order to drop prices temporarily and force Lyft, etc., to burn investor’s money.
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No. A valid normal license, insurance, a newish car, and a five hour online training course from uber. Uber then provides a limited liability insurance and a smartphone.
Totally right on. I may sound like I am opposed in some fashion to Uber. I am not. However, I am concerned that the way the market is developed, we will have consequences that aren’t accounted for by them being able to work outside all regulations. (There’s a whole thing I didn’t get into here about non-discriminatory access to taxis that Uber is bound by, but which lacks an effective enforcement mechanism. I may write separately about that.)
The cab system is broken and designed to benefit medallion/license owners and screw passengers and most drivers. (Some drivers and co-ops own medallions and drive sometimes and lease out other times.)
I was in DC a few times a couple of years ago and was left in the pouring rain because cabbies violating the hailing law as I wasn’t going to Virginia, only intra-city. It’s terrible.
But will Uber, in its current market model and current regulatory framework, wind up ultimately being better? Probably! But I think we need to consider what happens when they capture an entire market.
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Bloody hell. I’ve just seen they’re in London too, so must be similar here then.
Yeah, most paying attention to the issue aren’t thrilled about that. Especially London, that is a… Uh… special place to have to drive in.
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This is the part of your argument I feel least qualified to argue against, from a purely technical standpoint. I personally don’t think they’ll be able to establish or sustain any kind of monopoly, but I honestly don’t know.
Isn’t it though?
No. At least not in California. People driving buses and large trucks and so forth need special driving licenses but a taxi is just a car. There could be an argument made that taxi drivers need to be better drivers, but that’s not what the medallion system is about. Basically, buying one of the artificially limited “medallions” (at a cost of $100K to over $1M in some cities) gives you the right to run a taxi. In most places, you don’t even have to drive it – you hire a driver to do it for you.
[quote=“jhbadger, post:59, topic:35988, full:true”]
No. At least not in California. [/quote]
There are no state regulations, but individual municipalities can and do impose extra regulations. For example, in San Francisco there is a mandatory training course (around 30 hours) as well as pre- and postscreening and a fairly extensive background check. (This is for a driving permit, not the medallion.)
Four decent programming friends can easily replicate Uber. You can offload the serve support to Amazon which will scale the price as you start to get usage. Apps are cheap to produce compared to basically everything else. I struggle to think of an industry that is cheaper. I can’t just slap together a factory, or plop down a new TV station. Even an indie movie takes a pretty large cast. To make something like Uber? You can literally start 4 people and it scales smoothly. There is almost no other cheaper industry to jump into in this world, so get some perspective. Hell, just starting a boring old restaurant takes more staff and money than starting something like Uber. Granted, you need to scale up, and that takes money and manpower. However, if you and a few friends wanted to start a competing Uber in Chicago and were not afraid of having your kneecaps broken by corrupt politicians, you could.
Again, those are all child sized barriers to entry. An app and a phone (which most people already have) is one of the smallest costs to entry I can imagine.
They need to do a bunch of boring stuff that you have to do when you start literally any type of company. You need to wedge in, compete, get customers, etc. These are not magically high barriers. They are boring and normal barriers that are LOWER than most other barriers to entering a market. Look, I’m not saying it is easy. Companies will try, many will fail, this is how our system works. I don’t start a company because I get a heartburn thinking about working that much and having that much stress. This isn’t something special though. This is boring and mundane competition. Not only is it boring and mundane, it is way the fuck lower than almost any other industry you can imagine. I honestly struggle to think of industries easier to enter than one where you just manager connecting drivers and passengers. It will be hard, people will fail, Uber will have a first mover advantage, but it is hardly some massive unscalable monopoly.
Vastly more importantly, is that a system with competition, even if people can envision a monopoly (which you can do for literally any other industry), it is better than what we have. What we have as a political bribing scheme. It is on par with how some nations have the military running industries. The system is setup to act as a method of bribery and serves absolutely no other public good. It actively hunts down public good and murders it. I’ll risk a small upstart one day becoming a monopoly over a legalized form of corruption any fucking day of the week.
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