Here in Denmark, I can report that taxis always worked well and continue to work well.
Uber is not present here as a court has found that their operation is illegal unlicensed taxi driving. This kind of makes sense, as you need a special driver’s license, with focus on passenger security among other things, to drive a cab here.
In fact, we have a word for the likes of Uber - we call it “pirate taxi”. It existed long before Uber, Uber only made an app and decided that each ride should be taxed by an American company. Some people think our transport system might work better without that kind of thing.
Maybe someone will come up with a best-of-both worlds solution— sell a software platform to the traditional cab companies, so they get the convenience of the smartphone interface that everyone loves, but can still hire and run their own cars and drivers.
I was in Rio de Janeiro in 2015, and everyone was ordering caps with their apps. Ordinary old-school cabs, mind you. You ordered the ride & you could see if it was accepted.
The traditional cabs here in SF Bay Area already have ride hailing apps. In fact, there’s many of them, one for each different company.
What is needed is an open-source app where any licensed car service could shop their services all in the same place… It would be open-source, so it wouldn’t scrape the profits from every ride and deposit them in some distant corporate bank account. That would be good for the customer, the driver/fleet operator, and local municipalities.
Hmm - my experience is the opposite (at least in the US).
Most cities (with some exceptions - Boston, San Francisco, and DC among them) had more or less functioning taxi markets but rural and semi rural areas did not. Now Lyft and Uber serve those areas where there were no alternatives to drunk driving or finding friends or family to take you places and collect you.
I think those areas are where the “disruption” argument works better as well - in that they were not served or served so poorly that something needed to change. Nothing (major) needed to change in NYC or Chicago
All of those different car services in a given city are in cut-throat competition with one another. A non-partisan app for hailing whatever cab is nearest would have them all up in arms. Making an app that allocated riders among all of the companies in town in a way they all agreed was fair is a hard ask.
Since each town is going to have a different mix of companies of different sizes with different overlapping geographic coverage, each city will require a different set of balancing algorithms to allocate customers fairly. You’re talking a massive programming effort if you want to launch this app in more than one city. Programmers cost money - if the app doesn’t skim off a percentage of the fares, then how will we enable those programmers to eat and pay rent? Billing the cab companies won’t work - each company will look at their share of the bill to create the app and say, “let’s just spend a tenth of this on an app for our own company only.”
Na, these companies are struggling to get people to use their app right now, since most people don’t know about them, and they’re all using separate ones, or uber and lyft. If these car companies could get access to a much larger share of the market, they’ll go for it. Especially if it were the only game in town
No ride allocation required. The app would be a market place where the drivers can set rates (within local controls). Maybe there are restrictions about who can bid for a job based on how near you are to the hail.
How do you pay for the app? There’s many ways you could do it. It would be a public good. A government program. If you want a more free-market type thing, municipalities charge drivers license fees if they want to “ride share.” Licence fees would pay for the app in a given area. If you don’t like that, then maybe cities or counties buy the app SAAS style. Also, I think you over-estimate the cost to develop and maintain such a system.
I respect your critiques of my very under-developed idea (I just spit it out)… The obstacles you mention are real and significant, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable. I’m also more motivated to think of a way to create a better functioning, more equitable system, and less about whether the current marketplace would allow for it to happen. Sometimes the rules of the market need to change to create the best solutions.
Same in the UK. I can’t see any reason to use Uber at all (we make the Uber drivers get taxi plates anyway). You can pay on a card with taxis here too.
