But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.
Yes, and they owe their current existence to Uber paving the way for them.
Then if a little guy comes in and tries to challenge them, they don't have the resources to resist the incumbents' pocket government officials and get destroyed. But if a big fish does it, people actually notice if the government tries to enforce stupid laws against them, and then government officials are afraid to do it because the public would not only not like it but actually notice the unreasonableness of the law.
But the problem here isn't that the law isn't being enforced against a well-heeled challenger, it's that those laws exist to be enforced against the little guy, when they should instead be repealed.
When traveling it’s also so much safer than taxis.
My brother was robbed at gunpoint in a taxi. My wife had to jump from more than one moving taxi to escape. My ex girlfriend too. My Swiss friend had his camera and wallet stolen.
You can have issues with Uber too, but not as frequently because there’s a digital audit trail, you can report them to the platform and the police. The threat of those consequences lead to better behavior.
Sure, agreed.
> And the experience is equally mediocre.
Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel.
I think people really forget how utterly terrible Taxis were pre-Uber. I have no idea about competing apps these days, maybe they are similar to Uber, but the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US.
Uber/Lyft certainly has gotten worse - but at least I can fairly reliably get a car when I need it with reasonable reliability. The rest of the "soft" product or pricing I really care far, far, less about than that simple fact.
The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.
Same reason you don't see landscaping crews filled out with stellar employees.
That, of course, was the plan all along. Such august figures as JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller,and Andrew Carnegie all made their fortune by undercutting the competition, putting them out of business through means legal and otherwise, and finally monopolizing the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
Your comment also points out the power that regulation has to enforce and protect monopolies. I’m not saying all regulation is bad obviously, but I think we can see exactly what effect it had on the taxi industry, and I’m sure glad that Uber managed to disrupt it.
Customers pay significantly more, drivers make significantly less, and Uber is still running hundreds of millions in the red. Turns out hiring thousands of devs and dumping absurd capital into... driving people around... doesn't really work.
I'm not saying the existing systems were always good (they weren't), but you need to be willing to overlook a lot of real-world suffering to be "rooting for Uber". Phrases like "taxi cartels" sound nice, but they're hardly neutral phrasings that simplify things to the point of being useless phrases.
And "I'm just going to willingly and knowingly ignore laws I don't like for personal profit" is not a great take-away either. This isn't Aaron Swartz breaking a law as a matter of "civil disobedience" – it's just a plain "how can we make money?"
And where does that leave competitors who are NOT willing to break the law? It's an unlevel playing field; there can be no free market if some people don't need to follow the same set of rules. Uber's actions are fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-free market.
it was a terrible system that sucked for everyone involved. For all of Uber's flaws, would you rather go back to that today? really??
It drives me up the goddamn wall how people will say shit like "the Taxi industry needed to be upended" when like... I mean, maybe? But on balance, given all the negative externalities associated with these companies, are they really a gain? Or are they just a different set of overlords, equally disinterested in providing a good service once they reach the scale where they no longer are required to give a shit?
Just... regulate the fuckers. Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all. Make whatever consequence the government is going to dispense immeasurably, clearly worse than whatever the business is trying to weasel out of doing, and boom. Solved.
The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry would be to actually have the regulations authorities enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western world that having regulations authorities do their job and regulate is like the devil and holy water.
Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves were crap.
In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
VC funding allowed them to move quickly enough that they got to a scale where they could afford legal and lobbying protection when challenges eventually happened.
That's just a trope. They were initially losing money because they had high fixed costs (developing a platform, spending enough on advertising to get a critical mass of people using it), which are long-term investments. If you only spread the cost of the long-term investment over the short-term sales, they were "losing money" in the early years, but that's how all long-term investments work.
Dumping is when you sell below the unit cost, e.g. paying drivers more than you charge customers, which isn't what they were doing in general. And as long as they weren't doing that, the incumbents could have responded by lowering their own prices (and therefore margins) without themselves losing money on each sale, which is competition working as intended. Unless the competition is too hidebound to accept a reduction in profits in order to stay competitive or otherwise insists on using a less efficient method of operating, in which case they go under.
especially with hotels, i would have expected there to be small enough oligopoly to overcome the freerider problem (taxis are more regional, so i don't expect them to be able to fight an (inter)national company very easily)
plus the president owning a hotel chain
Yes there is, I am reminded of this every time I take an uber by the yellow cab medallion buyout fee that I’m charged because of the lobbying power of the TLC lobby in NYC
Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat. Many drivers didn't own their own medallians then had to rent from owners, often making little money. In my city (Toronto) cabs were often dirty, broken, refused short distance fares (illegal) and smelled of cigarette smoke that was obviously from the driver.
Examples (paywalls, but you get the idea):
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/nyregion/amid-a-heritage-...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
The driver can't scam the passenger. The driver can't set the meter wrong, drive an unnecessarily long route, or just be an outright unlicensed taxi. Instead, the driver maintains a relationship with Uber, and the passenger can preview the fare before committing.
The passenger can't scam the driver. In a traditional taxi, you could theoretically just walk out ("dine and dash" style). The passenger can also make a call to dispatch and not show up for the ride. Instead, the passenger maintains a relationship with Uber, and the driver doesn't need to handle any payments.
> Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat.
And thus medallion owners collect economic rent on their artificially scarce resource, distorting the free market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
https://www.londonreconnections.com/2021/uber-loses-appeal-a...
> The passenger can't scam the driver.
Progress! Uber scams both passenger and driver. Hooray for Free Markets™!
Sure, taxi services aren't usually known to be paragons of virtue, but then they weren't that bad everywhere; Uber is just another case of an US org trying to address an US-specific problem and then bludgeoning the entire world with their solution, whether the rest of the planet has such problems or not.
Ok, but “everywhere” isn’t my problem. They sucked everywhere I had to use one which is my problem.
> they weren’t that bad everywhere
They were beyond a joke where I am from, which is not the US. Even today, they remain a worse option.
> US specific problem
There was nothing US specific about it.
But at least I didn’t give Uber any money…
in bay area, it absolutely makes sense to invent uber, because the taxis were awful. and in vancouver (canada), they're also awful, and deserve the disruption: they would often tell you it'd be a 40 minute wait, and then just not show up
taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps. i've been in an uber/lyft a handful of times in nyc, but they're just worse (possibly cheaper, but the subway also gives them stiff competition, and i don't care that much if i'm in enough of a hurry to take a cab)
Unless you weren't white, or you wanted to leave Manhattan (or even go north of 96th street). Otherwise, yeah I guess they were okay.
The thing that Uber and Lyft really provided was a surveillance economy to keep both the drivers and riders somewhat in-line. Without it, every ride is an almost anonymous one-shot transaction with almost no recourse on one side, so the game theory suggests that service only has to be good enough that the police aren't called.
This is only true in a small subset of New York.
Post-2008, ZIRP and QE pumped trillions into financial markets, making capital nearly free for those who could borrow at scale. That money didn’t go into raising wages; it went into inflating asset prices. If you owned stocks or real estate, you got richer. If you earned a paycheck, you watched housing and living costs go up while your wages stagnated.
VC was one of the biggest beneficiaries. With bonds yielding nothing, institutional investors had to chase returns, flooding venture funds with capital. That’s how we got an era of insane startup valuations, SoftBank-style mega-funds, and entire sectors built on free money. Growth-at-all-costs became the norm because the cost of capital was effectively zero.
Then COVID hit, and the Fed doubled down—more QE, more stimulus, even lower rates. Another massive wealth transfer. Money printer go brrr, asset prices moon, and suddenly we have SPACs, meme stocks, and a startup funding frenzy. Meanwhile, workers got a couple of stimulus checks, and by the time the dust settled, everything from rent to food to cars was way more expensive.
Now AI companies are running the same playbook that cloud megascalers ran before them—monetizing open-source work while locking out the people who actually built it. Cloud providers took open-source databases, infrastructure, and developer tools, turned them into managed services, and extracted billions in profit without meaningfully compensating the people who did the work. AI companies are now doing the same thing—scraping open-source repositories, academic papers, and public datasets, building models upon it then slapping on proprietary fine-tuning and charging for API access all the while blatantly raising capital by promising to make the same workers they stole from obsolte. All of it built on the backs of researchers, engineers, and artists who never see a dime, but also on the backs of everyone else via the cantillon effect.
Now rates go up, the bubble deflates, and who gets left holding the bag? Not the VCs who cashed out early. Not the bankers who took their fees. It’s the workers, the middle class, the open-source devs, and the late-stage startup employees who thought they had something real. The cycle repeats.
Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a domestic industry, in trade disputes?
What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company spend? What portion is its stock diluted by?
We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers well below cost until their site folded.
If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you, then it does not apply to you.
Laws are ment to be broken. Especially in cronist systems where incumbents write the laws.
Taxis were discriminatory and "uncool" to the point were Uber has saved thousands by preventing drunk driving.
Now if you go out with the boys and get drunk, it's a 30 second casual call to get an Uber and get home.
Live in a neighborhood Taxis are afraid to service，you can either make some extra income working for Uber or use it yourself. When Ubers used as its intended purpose, to basically make a quick buck, it's a lifeline to many low income people .
Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen. It's not really a career though...
Maybe... I really don't get how the economics work out here though. If you look at the numbers, it mostly just seems like you're converting car equity into cash via depreciation.
But also, I'd guess that for a big chunk of people who are going to have trouble paying rent with any regularity, they'd have to overpay for their car in the first place to get something that's Uber-appropriate. My car's a couple years too old for Uber now, but is still perfectly functional, and there's just no way the math would work for me to buy a newer car so that I can convert its capital cost into cash via Uber.
that sounds so incredibly dystopian, not sure if that was the intention :(
I consider it similar to access to unsecured credit that way - it's easy to feel like "wow this industry is scamming these people it should be illegal" but people without any other backstop will probably need access to unsecured credit sometime and it's better than losing their house/car/job/pet/family etc..
What's better. Taking out a 300% APR payday loan, getting evicted or working an extra 20, 30 hours of Uber.
Laws matter to the extent that they don't interfere with actual progress. Laws that would have prevented the LLMs we have today from being developed should be ignored, as should laws requiring us to pay tribute to taxi and hotel cartels.
Respect for the law is going to be an increasingly-hard sell going forward, and that's mostly the lawmakers' own fault. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
There's no purpose of having an executive branch of government separate from the other two branches if not to cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other branches of government.
What? No, the purpose of having a separate executive is separation of powers and checks and balances.
Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's simply to enforce written law?
Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law?
Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?
