yes, other people are assholes for expecting steakhouses AND fast food places to: hold appropriate business licenses, keep a clean inspected kitchen, and provide accessible restrooms to customers.
Sure. Totally the same, and I’m just a negative nellie for disagreeing with you. Yep.
a safe ride somewhere at a fair price, with an established enforcement regime for violators of the public trust.
You possibly take that for granted, because it’s been that way for 100 years in most places. We can go back to the old way, but you won’t like it in the long run, and we will just go back and regulate them in the end. Same as food trucks, they got regulated because they serve the public. It’s what government is FOR. To keep you safer, to keep you from being cheated, and to make sure everyone else on the road is safe from the tendency for commercial enterprises to cut corners in the name of profit.
In the end, Hodges says, cabbies and passengers have always wanted the same things — “We don’t want to have hyper competition, we don’t want reckless driving, we don’t want drivers about whom we don’t know very much,” he says — and, whether or not it always works perfectly, he believes that history has shown that regulation is the best way to get there.
There’s no place here for anyone telling anyone else to stop being negative. Everyone is entitled to their opinion here, without trying to infer that other opinions are somehow diminished due to persistent negativity.
I’m often accused of persistent optimisim (We’ll see how long that continues as I mod this place!), that doesn’t make my opinions any less relevant than persistent pessimism does, unless I’m acting in bad faith.
Debate the position, don’t question the motives behind the post (or, flag it if you honestly believe it to be trolling. That’s not the case here).
Regardless, this is all offtopic, and further comments along this subject line in this topic will be eaten.
I don’t think I agree with that as entirely accurate. The fares are on the door, the cabbies ID is posted, there are often cameras, and there is a public (as opposed to waiving your rights and accepting private binding arbitration when you get in the not-a-cab) mechanism for enforcement and auditing. You don’t know to the dollar, but you know more or less. And you take responsibility for paying for traffic, as well as miles. That’s not unfair, you’d be paying for your own gas in your own car. You’re also paying for the drivers time, and the opportunity cost of a fare that isn’t going to get stuck in traffic (they make more per mile than they do waiting in traffic).
Uber is hardly the devil, but all the things you mention would work just fine if added into the cab or black car experience. Uber would cease to be profitable if they had to follow the hack regs. I don’t see the loss in a business not existing if it’s not profitable because of reasonable regulations.
DDT is cheap to make, and it’s super effective… but the nagging ‘externalities’ like bird eggs and cancer are often looked past by, well, capitalists. I like capitalists, when they are checked. I vote and act for more civilization, not less!
You’re right, of course - there’s nothing Uber does that couldn’t be replicated.
However, it hasn’t been. As it stands today, I can get in an uber in nearly every city I travel in, and know three things: 1) if I have a problem with the driver, I get to avoid confrontation with the driver (possibly in an unknown city) and can just take it up with Uber itself later. 2) I don’t have to worry about carrying cash, or being pressured to use cash instead of credit by the cabbie, and 3) If I’ve contacted an Uber to come get me, I can clearly see where they are, who they are, and when they’ve arrived, before they get there, instead of having to trust the dispatcher’s estimate as to the Cab’s arrival.
On top of that there’s a record of the exact route I was taken on (and when), and the fare pretty clearly laid out before I’ve even stepped in the vehicle (oh, and I’ve had the option to choose the type of ride I wanted, too). None of that is beyond the capability of the existing taxi system, but currently this level of convenience doesn’t exist with any other carrier.
If Toronto started offering a local app that let me track rides, take disputes out of the heated situation of the here and now, and handled payment, I’d probably use it locally (or regionally, or whatever), especially because Uber itself seems like such a vile operation. But for international travel, I literally feel safer in an Uber than taking my chances with each local cab monopoly.
Sure, I have no problem with Uber operating in places with little to no enforcement of hack regulations. I do have a problem with them undercutting people following the rules and patting themselves on the back for ‘disrupting’ the status quo and then call you names for responding to the disruption as though it isn’t actually progress.
I think your 1, 2, and 3 can be fixed through the democratic process here in the USA (or there in Canada).
And clearly, we now have an anecdote or two regarding what can happen if you happen to cause an Uber driver to feel insulted (the post and in the comments) - and its no better than any cab I’ve been in.
Regulations should curb the excesses and level the power relationships, as I see it. Transportation is a public utility in some places, after all.
Sounds like a good project. That would probably work in Canada. You seem to democracy better than we do most of the time.
That’s the costs of the regulated maintenance, inspections, licensing, and the value of the medallion itself (that’s a matter that does need fixing, Medallions don’t need to be so scarce).
But not getting the regulated maintenance, inspections, and licensing - pocketing that cash instead of paying other qualified people to validate that you are safe and secure - is the corrupt part of it, as I see it. Uber does not have a transparent process. They should. Instead they have data modeling that apparently tries to outsmart the police who might be enforcing laws applicable to their drivers?? They make money by half-assing what a taxi is.
Semantics about fraud are tiring, but par for the course. I will never tire of knocking down antisocial nonsense, sorry if it takes food off your plate, but you’re sort of bragging about taking food of the plates of others. We can find a balance if we stop taking it so personal and accept regulation as a cost of doing business, because it is.
That’s only partially true, though - in this case, If I’d been pissed at the driver for whatever reason (let’s say, as the “brats” suggested, he was in the wrong place) I’d probably mention it to the driver when I got in, but I would surely ping Uber’s customer service afterwards and probably get, at minimum, a partial refund, without having to fight with the driver about it. That just doesn’t work with traditional taxis. Pre-uber, I’ve had a few instances of bad driving occur, and when I did, I first tried complaiing to the taxi company (who apologized, but that’s the end of it), and to the provincial “bad cab” hotline (who basically said if I wanted to press charges they’d assist, otherwise they can’t do anything, and obviously I’m not going throigh all that effort!).
If I’m left waiting for ten minutes because the driver went elsewhere, Uber can see that 1) I was where I said I was and not moving, 2) where the driver was where they said they were, and 3) if either I or the driver tried to contact each other. The existing system simply cannot offer this level of detail for dispute resolution.
The other issue is that, pre-uber, taxi companies knew you had no other options, and could be complete asshats as a result. The whole reason I joined Uber in the first place was the deplorable state of Taxis in San Francisco. If nothing else, the very existence and success of Uber has forced those companies out of their monopolistic complacency and required them to compete.
Monopolies shouldn’t exist, we probably agree there too. I think the problems with urban cabs (in North America) are best solved by flooding the market with medallions, which has always been the artificially scarce resource that has driven up prices. Medallions locally, before Uber, usually cost about 10x the cost of the cab itself. And that was just for the medallion, cash that went to the last medallion holder… that is capitalism gone wrong.
Meters can easily be modernized, and the conflict resolution can be made more fair, within the existing system. Modernizing that will make enforcement and auditing easier, and the costs to achieve these improvements have never been lower. Your proposed app could go so much further! That app could do the documentation, and you could probably automatically get a reduced fare on the spot, if the driver is that awful or inefficient. Heck, it could hail you another cab, from a different company, if the first cab wasn’t making it on time, and that would be transpartent to you. You could probably ask such an app from a ride only from one of your favorite providers, and avoid Bills Cab Company because you had a bad time with Bill that one time. That seems fair.
I’m glad that change will come, but I don’t think Uber is doing us any favors by undercutting people trying to make an honest living who follow the local laws to the letter, by undermining law enforcement with data manipulation, and by maintaining such opaqueness about who their drivers are. background chaecks are hardly onerous, but you;d think it was cutting off their left hand the way they go on ahistorically about how ANY regulation is too disruptive to their brilliant new business model.
