I called ahead to have taxis pick me up for early morning rides to the airport, and they were always early and helped me with my bags. I took taxis over to the Boston College area when I was taking music lessons at a studio there. I took taxis home from sports events and concerts near Fenway. Even when coming out of a crowded show at House of Blues, it was a short wait for taxis.
I never once experienced a broken credit card machine. I once did ask a driver if they accepted credit cards, he said no, and I waited about 30 seconds for the next taxi to come by -- on a side street on the Somerville side of Porter Sq, so not even close to usual taxi spots.
Getting taxis in Boston is cheap, safe, and reliable, with pretty short wait times, easy to deal with dispatchers, drivers who show up on time, cars that are clean and 99.999% of the time have functioning credit card machines.
I honestly don't know what on earth you're talking about.
None of this is an argument against Uber anyway, because people use Uber for features that even good taxis don't have, including price reduction, better real-time tracking, an app interface, and other things. And Uber drivers certainly can do things worse than taxis -- such as simply fail to show up, treat you rudely during the ride, or try to make you exit the car in an inconvenient/unsafe spot of the street at your destination. Uber is not intrinsically better about this kind of thing than taxis.
But some things you absolutely cannot say, at least about taxis in the Boston area, are that they are anything but clean, safe, reliable, punctual, and able to take your credit card.
We quite frequently found ourselves in cabs with credit card readers, only to be told they didn't work when it came time to pay. I also simply gave up using cabs trying to get to Logan because while they would usually be on time, there were others when they simply wouldn't show up at all. Now you're under the gun to find a ride - not sure if they're late or just not coming.
All I can say is that while I believe you when you say these things (I have no reason to think you'd lie to make a point), I also think you've simply lived a very charmed life when it comes to taxi service in Massachusetts.
The fact is, the taxis in Boston had very little reason to improve their service prior to competition from Uber. Now they're being forced to adapt to survive.
Edit: spelling
Safe, sure, to the best of my knowledge. Clean? Nuh-uh. Punctual? Nuh-uh. Able to take my credit card? Maybe 50% of the time. "It's broken," and suddenly it's not broken when I shrug and get out of the car.
And with one exception (a dedicated airport service), every dispatcher I ever dealt with was at best a prick. The only time I use taxis now is departing Logan, where I have no choice because they banned Ubers.
But ride services want to promulgate the idea to cities they bring safety in order to counterbalance the annoyed voices of the yellow cabs decrying the conditions the ride service drivers must endure...
Fair inquiry, but no. They studied the top 100 metro areas, not the Podunks. Now, it does not say whether the rate has remained steady despite, perhaps, an increase in people who now feel comfortable getting drunk cuz they can get a cab fairly easily with the intro of ride services. However, they have not decreased the totals, as they have claimed, according to the findings.
So dropping Uber into a city, giving them another option for getting home, might increase the overall level of drinking. This would muddy the drink-driving numbers. For every drunk driven safely home by Uber there may be some other person out there pressured into having a drink that otherwise wouldn't. And some of them might drive.
Drink driving became socially unacceptable in Britain only in the last 20-30 years but alcohol consumption hasn't really changed. The anti drink driving ads on TV every Christmas were really quite hard hitting. I've seen nothing similar in the US.
The best analysis would likely need to use ride volume data; there's no hint in this study's abstract they've done that, and the paper is paywalled.
In places where Uber has launched, they're probably just picking up riders that would normally take a cab or a train if Uber wasn't there.
In San Francisco, it appears Uber/Lyft have massively increased the total number of paid-rides taken. They're not just shifting trips from taxis or public transit, but also from private car usage – and creating new trips where people would've just stayed in or walked.
That points out another stat a 'gold standard' study should try to identify: fatalities per trips (or ride-miles) taken, rather than just absolute number of fatalities. If cities with Uber have the same number of fatalities, but spread over twice as much travel, that's giant safety and welfare win, too.
Using a differences-in-differences specification, we find that fatal accident rates generally decline after the introduction of Uber. Specifically, in the unweighted regressions, we find that entry is associated with a 6 percent decline in the fatal accident rate. Fatal night-time crashes experience a slightly larger decline of 18 percent. In both the weighted and unweighted estimations, we also discover a continued decline in the overall fatal crash rate and the rate of vehicular fatalities for the months following the introduction of Uber. For each additional year of operation, Uber’s continued presence is associated with a 16.6 percent decline in vehicular fatalities.
...
Again employing a differences-in-differences specification, typically with county specific trends, we find a large and robust decline in the arrest rate for DUIs. Depending upon specification, DUIs are 15 to 62 percent lower after the entry of Uber. The average annual rate of decline after the introduction of Uber is 51.3 percent per year for DUIs.
[1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2783797
The headline, then: "Uber hasn't had an effect".
Ie - suburban to exburban uber is just expensive and rare, (low coverage), and therefore people are more likely to drunk drive. I mean, how many taxis to start with are there in small suburban towns?
