Can you give an example? I've never heard of that. They usually lack any power at all.
> nearly every municipality had a taxi service with negative press
Everyone seemed satisfied in my experience. I did see Uber's talking points everywhere on social media - how terrible taxis were. Unforunately, taxis lacked the money to run their own information campaign.
Not everything is about an information campaign but factors in common pain points from consumers.
You know, I was a taxi driver in Phoenix when Uber/Lyft came to town and watched the fallout of their actions — absolutely nobody cares about that and every time I post about my firsthand experience in some Uber article I get downvoted to nothing.
The disconnect (and astroturfing) is phenomenal. I don’t think people would cheer on the Robber Barons 2.0 if they didn’t personally benefit through direct subsidies. The funny thing is rates are basically what they were before they destroyed the taxi industry with the exception that drivers get paid a lot less than before, once the daily (or weekly) lease was paid up on the cab the rest of the money went to the driver. On a good day you could have the car paid for in the first few hours and then it’s easy money. When I lived downtown I’d get up early and do 2, 3, 4 back-to-back airport trips ($15 airport special which usually paid $25ish) in an hour or so and have half the car paid off before the medical appointments started to come out. I also used to make two or three hundred on Friday and Saturday nights just working out a cab stand at one bar.
Then Uber/Lyft came along and started charging less than cost and all that went away. You basically had to figure out who had what medical appointment when and be sitting on that call to even think about paying for the cab let alone gas and maybe, if you had a good day, could get all fancy with some Carl’s Jr.
It's always been that taxis don't come when I need them. Sometimes they're fine if you're at a bar and a cab will come by for hailing because they know business will be there, but if you're carless and need to get somewhere at a particular time cabs have always been a nightmare.
I've called to get a cab to come pick me up and then waited 2 hours while dispatch couldn't find a cab to come because they were all too busy picking up opportunistic rides. I've never had an experience anything like that with uber or lyft.
I would -- and now that the money train has dried up for uber a bit, do -- pay as much for an uber as I did before for a cab, except now the uber actually comes. In my particular city most cab drivers also aren't union, and they pay to rent their cars for their shifts from the people who own the plates. Most of the protest of uber coming to town was from cab owners (some operators, but many not) who were using their license as a retirement plan.
I recognize that the drivers were put in a tough spot, and most of this isn't their fault, but things were deeply broken before, and they still are. But I think there's a lot of rose tinted glasses going on here, and people who needed cabs were often literally left out in the cold by the way things were.
(1) Pretty much the only city I've ever had good experiences with cabs is NYC.
Uber/Lyft also use corruption to get free use of our public commons - the streets that they clog - while with cabs it was fairly distributed in free market bidding for the public resource (i.e., medallions).
Thousands? That’s daily commute level which puts you in one of the extremely rare locations that had a semi functional cab system.
You don’t understand how miserable the cab system was (and generally still is) in most of the US because you lived in an aberration.
> Uber/Lyft also use corruption to get free use of our public commons - the streets that they clog
Not even on the top 10 of concerns surrounding Uber for the 95% of the population who don’t live in a super dense city. Also, it’s not free use because the drivers pay the same road taxes we do. They just aren’t double taxed without the medallion system.
