This is a good outcome! Uber and Lyft have dragged taxi companies into the 21st century, with apps like Flywheel making the process of getting a traditional taxi not the horrifying experience it used to be (call a dispatcher, get told 20 minutes, wait an hour, cab never shows).
I frankly don't care what service takes me home. I just want it to be safe, reliable, clean, and reasonably priced, and I want the driver to be accountable for any issues. If a taxi now fits that bill, great. Competition and choice are good things.
I'm not sure. I think if we look at the net of what's happened: Uber execs and investors made (m/b)illions, taxi drivers got absolutley hosed - most now essentially are just extracting against the equity in their cars, and riders have got a marginally more reliable service.
So to put this in terms - the rich got much richer, and the middle class benefitted by exploiting the working class. That's doesn't seem like a good outcome to me (not least because the billionaires that benefit literally spunk their profits into outer space befroe thinking about paying tax).
Pre-Uber, driving a taxi was a survival job for most and they could (and often did) switch to Uber. The only drivers who made significant money drove 24-7 and had a relationship with their customers. I doubt they were hurt either.
The group that I assume got screwed were owners of local taxi companies and they were just corrupt cronies of the local government and screw them.
So the quality of service of a product is secondary to the wage dynamics of those who provide it? The point of the person you responded to is that for the consumer this was an unambiguous win, the industry is better for riders in nearly every way. Marginally does not even begin to approach it, it is a giant leap forward in quality of service that further extends to many things (reducing drinking and driving for instance).
I’d say the real problem with the outcomes here may be venture capital. That is what made the rich richer and allowed them to explode on a model that didn’t require them to be profitable. It’s possible this business model can’t succeed without that support, it’s also possible it could with higher prices, better wages and more time.
Yes the rich provided the middle class a new way to exploit the poor. The reason taxis were expensive is because taxi drivers have to pay rent and buy food. The incredible innovation of Uber is that drivers are pushed into poverty wages. In a functioning democracy that would be prevented by regulations like the minimum wage and union protections.
The problem with taxis has nothing to do with their prices. Look through this thread at various folks mentioning problems with the old systems and see how often price is among them. I’ll happily pay more, and various studies in the past have shown that ridesharing services charge much less than they could (in the name of growth and stamping out competition powered by venture money).
How many Uber/Lyft drivers were taxi drivers before you think? I’d say not a hugely large percentage. In other words, the “exploited” here are also apparently compelled to flock to such a job in previously untold numbers. This in turn drives down prices, and the reverse trend since the pandemic is the reason they’re back on the rise. The convenience provided here is not just for riders but for drivers.
All this to say your perspective reeks of political oversimplification that forces you to ignore various factors at play, many of them good, to churn out rhetoric. This ironically prevents seeing actual solutions to the problem you claim to care about.
Slightly off topic, but every cent that was spent "on space", was also spent "on earth". If you pay someone to build a rocket, that human lives on earth, not in space. Where the rocket goes is not the same place as where the money goes. This extremely basic economic misunderstanding undermines any other point you were trying to make.
> So perhaps it's not just competition, and we should give some credit to the regulation too.
Or we could accept that "competition" doesn't just have to occur within a free market, and that a regulated market can be efficient while also accounting for externalities that a free market cannot.
EDIT: to clarify, I am agreeing with you overall. I didn't mean my tone to come across as agressive, which re-reading it, I feel it does.
I ran into this recently on a flight that arrived much later than it was scheduled. The airport was busy from several flights arriving at once, and uber / lyft surge prices were insane. It was too late for a bus, so I wandered over to the taxi stand. No one was working there, but a few minutes later a few cards started showing up, and I ended up getting in one.
What was weird is that all of the "taxis" were regular cars with magnetic "taxi" labels on them, and at the end of the ride, my driver charged me on a square terminal, with no option / chance to tip. I honestly don't know if it was just some enterprising person that showed up at the airport, or what the heck happened.
I recently had a similar experience in Richmond, VA. Normal pricing is $35 for uber/lyft and $78 for a taxi to my house from the airport. With the surge pricing, they wanted over $100 with a 10-20 minute wait for pickup, so I just took a taxi and avoided waiting.
I was a longtime SF resident and remember very well how truly awful the taxi service was in SF before the rideshare apps. You'd call a cranky operator to request a taxi and an hour or two later one might show up. Hail a taxi downtown (if you can find one) and ask to go to the Richmond district only to have the driver tell you to get out of the car because they don't want to go that far. And of course the credit card machines were always "broken" so you had to pay with cash.
Now I'm in NY and I use taxis almost as often as rideshares. The Curb app makes it easy to find a taxi and the prices are almost always lower. But half the time I can't get a taxi through the app at all and have to wander the streets or use Lyft/Uber.
The combo now of some cities such as Barcelona making an Uber-style taxi app is working great, where the city declined to allow Uber but built their own. Some of them combine bike and motorcycle sharing in the apps. For me, this has been a huge gain for which I'm thankful for the tech revolution started by Uber. Also, in some dangerous cities it's now safer given the ride is fully tracked.
This is awesome! The ride sharing platforms should plug into the universal transportation app that serves public transit, cabs, car share, etc. I gotta see Barcelona.
This sounds like an excellent idea and also a terrible idea.
In the US that would mean allowing the same bureaucratic organization that manages Medicare/Medicaid to manage a transportation app. And then you'd deal with the Intuits of transportation that would legally hobble any meaningful development in favor of their bespoke (and expensive) ride-hailing service...
And so on. Maybe I'm just a cynic about these things.
We could instead regulate a distributed ride-sharing communications system that companies could build apps for and drivers could hook in to. Well regulated industries tend to thrive (look at internet/cellphone providers in Japan).
My understanding (outsider perspective, based on what people have told me) is a combination of silly complicated laws pushed by politicians to keep people from abusing the service, lobbying by private healthcare providers (insurance etc) to keep government assistance limited and purposefully annoying and politicians against "big government" underfunding institutions to see them fail.
Where I live there's an API for buses in the capital city and anyone can build an app on top of that. Not quite sure you need to apply for an API key or if it's completely public. That sounds like a nice solution to me.
Every large organization is bureaucratic. The US federal government does pretty well, IME: Parks, highways, air travel, food safety, drug safety, medical and scientific research, public universities, NASA, military, etc etc. It's not perfect, but nothing is.
I'm hesistant to say this because I don't live in the USA and so it's not really my business but ....
You know you really don't have to live in this society where large organisations are allowed to maintain de-facto monopolies. Every other part of the developed world has laws which limit monopoly suppliers. The laws aren't perfect but they have an effect.
Oddly enough the only real exception to this is the digital advertising duopoly owned by two large US companies and which operates on a, pretty much, global scale. So far, the rest of the developed world hasn't worked out how to address that.
In Finland we got a law couple of years ago that forces public transportation companies to open up ticketing APIs for ”transportation as a service” providers. I think this is a step to right direction.
> Now I'm in NY and I use taxis almost as often as rideshares.
That’s because New York is corrupt and artificially limits both ride shares and taxis. But they’re heavily biased towards taxis and their outrageous medallion system.
Taxi’s have definitely been forced to improve thanks to competition from Uber/Lyft. But don’t be fooled into thinking scarcity and high price of ride share in NYC is a naturally occurring phenomena.
> That’s because New York is corrupt and artificially limits both ride shares and taxis.
It is both desirable and definitely within the purview of government to control the number of vehicles on the road. Congestion/traffic is a perfect example of an externality. Go to a megacity in a developing country like Delhi and experience traffic that causes what would be a 20 minute trip with 0 traffic to become a 4 hour trip in traffic.
Given the traffic/congestion externality, taxing/charging vehicles to enter downtowns, creating a cap on the number of taxis via medallions, etc are all the economically optimal solutions according to economics.
We want to substitute individual vehicle transport to mass transit wherein there is a dramatically reduced externality (e.g. adding a person to a subway train or a bus only has an effect if that train hits capacity -- in contrast to adding an additional vehicle to the road).
Ideally, the pricing model for ridesharing and taxis should be dynamic but account for the congestion impacts (i.e. internalize the traffic externality). The fixed pricing of taxis doesn't do this (though medallions partly do from a more traditional cap and trade scheme) and the surge pricing of Uber and Lyft is only to clear their internal market and not to resolve the traffic impacts of all those additional vehicles on the road. As such, there have been numerous peer reviewed papers that have demonstrated that traffic is actually increased by ridesharing due to a substitution away from mass transit.
Probably the key is to move to a Fastpass system now that the technology is more feasible where congestion impacts are actually what gets priced into the convenience of personal transit in a big city.
Often times you didn’t. I missed at least one flight waiting for taxis that never arrived. Had to wait 30m and take a bus then walk in the rain a few times, etc.
You walked to a busy street and hailed one. I remember trying to phone in a cab from Nob Hill pre-lyft, they said one would be there in 45 min and we should be waiting outside because they will not call you.
Also when uber first implemented the uber-taxi option before uber-x, I tried it and would regularly have multiple cabs cancel en-route to me because they just picked up a closer fare.
I don't live in SF, but I live in the area. I used to always feel trapped in SF; parking is hard to find and very expensive, car break-ins are common, buses are full of homeless and never on time, subway stations are rare and in awkward places, taxis need to be summoned by phone unless you're in a few really popular spots (even most tourist hotspots don't see taxis passing by on a regular basis) and like they say, good luck actually seeing a taxi show up after you call.
Yeah everybody remembers the worst situations and not the average, but Uber totally changed the game. Little electric scooters are also pretty amazing there, since it's so compact.
> I don't live in SF, but I live in the area. I used to always feel trapped in SF
I have the exact same experience. It's to the point where I think SF literally hates anyone from outside the city. You have to live there to understand any of the public transit as it doesn't seem to work like that of anywhere else.
Despite being only an hour away I hate going there as driving and parking is a pain at best and downright dangerous at worst. Taking CalTrain or BART into the city isn't much better thanks to the inscrutable public transit.
tbf, google maps does a great job with using the bus out there. Muni still sucks to be on, it's never on time etc., but at least you can get your route on google maps now. Been that way since at least 2012
You can take SF Muni anywhere you want to go... as long as you want to go to the financial district/Market St. corridor. Seemingly more than other cities, the transit system is built around that particular commute which makes it frustrating if you're an out-of-towner trying to get to shopping/nightlife areas or to a friend's apartment. (And then there's BART which although it has the look and feel of a metro, has a network map more akin to commuter rail.)
Wow really? I grew up in the midwest and when we first moved to SF I was amazed by all the public transit, never having access to anything before. It was definitely intimidating at first, and we somehow managed to take a bus to the port where the driver made us get out b/c he was going on break.
After that mistake it seemed pretty easy, and this was before iPhones
I live just over the bridge in Oakland and basically never go to SF for these exact reasons. I've tried a few times and its just too frustrating. BART+bike can work ok.
Had multiple experiences back in the day of walking miles at night to get home while trying to get a cab, on a Friday or Saturday it was very difficult.
In smaller cities, getting a cab was a huge issue prior to Uber/Lyft. When I was younger and went out to bars a lot, my friends and I had the personal number of a local cab driver because it was often the only way to find a ride home at the end of the night.
Late at night, you walked home if you live there - there was one bus that went across the Bay if BART had stopped running. SF isn't that big but definitely has weird sketchy parts and whatever people say, it was much sketchier in the 80s and 90s. SF has never been a 24 city except for certain clubs in certain places. I think taxis would wait outside those clubs if you were lucky.
Interestingly all my worst Uber experiences are in SF. Drivers abandoning rides and peeling out in front of me, parking on the wrong side of the street for pickup etc. I generally try to make Uber drivers' lives as easy as possible too, requesting pickups in spots where they can park, being ready to go, etc., so it's not like I was being a difficult passenger.
I've also had the worst experiences with uber in SF. I usually stay with a buddy in Oakland and I don't come to SF enough to feel totally comfortable with transit. More than 5 times I've had someone come, and then immediately kick me out because they don't want to "go across the bridge"(?) and one guy picked me up, and then dropped me off at a transit station and told me to take the train the rest of the way.... O.o
IMO that's a problem with Uber's pricing model. If the destination doesn't have enough people requesting new rides, the price to that destination should be higher.
If the price accurately represented the drivers' costs, they wouldn't refuse the rides.
If I had to guess, to get driver to favour uber over lyft etc, so when you open the uber and lyft app and compare, there is always an uber closer. That's just a guess.
London was pretty terrible for my wife & I when we vacationed in 2015. In addition to what you experienced their english & communication skills were pretty bad.
We tried uber a few times then just said the black cabs were worth the extra. None of the cabs needed GPS and always knew where we needed to go and told us about areas.
I know, kinda touristy and not needed for people living their day to day, but after uber they made the rest of our trip better (is this a black cab ad?)
> The Curb app makes it easy to find a taxi and the prices are almost always lower.
I used to work at Curb years and years ago (and its predecessor TaxiMagic). It's always fun to still hear someone uses it and makes me wonder if any code I wrote could still be running somewhere for it.
My first programming job was at an insurance broker where 15-20 years ago I wrote a maybe 20 line VB exe to transfer a file to our systems that was invoked by a comparative rater.
It was still out there being distributed to client PCs for over a decade.
Those old VB apps really had staying power. I built one that was in use fro 2000 until the owner of the business passed away in 2017. If he were still alive I’m sure that app would be running today.
We have a VB Desktop App still being used at my current job. It works, we technically support it but have never had to do any support and would struggle to setup the tool chain.
It's at least 15 years old and just keeps plugging alone. The author retired last year.
I actually started using Uber when it was Uber Black only (might have had a different name) for that exact reason. if you worked or lived in a rough part of town, you COULD NOT get cab service - period. So I happily paid far MORE than cab service to get there or back. The uber I used was all TCP drivers only so was expensive.
My female roommate once had to walk from the marina to edge of outer mission to get home late at night because on weekends you could not get cabs and/or they wouldn't take you places that they didn't like. It was that or stay at some ultra sketch guys house or hang in a park till buses started again.
Just ridiculous - they wouldn't even do weekend only medallions to lighten load - so some commission was def. bought by the taxi cartel type folks.
Was so glad when uber came along. you could get rid of your car, no if (or if not) you'd be picked up etc.
And yes - the "broken" CC machine - the Taxi commission was busy making sure there were too few medallions and no gypsy cabs, but did diddly squat to enforce any other rules (ie, discrimination in pickups, CC machines working, lost property handling). The statistical chance that every other business seems to be able to operate CC machine, and these guys, in a regulated and licensed business could not, was just ridiculous.
That was it. It was also all fully licensed chauffer type drivers (all the vehicles were pretty much town cars with TCP numbers etc) so service initially was so ridiculously better than cabs it wasn't even close.
The drivers they had (initially) were used to talking rich execs around - so everything was leather and usually pretty dressed up.
Then SF started in on "rider / consumer protection" and weirdly the drivers became just random / unlicensed folks! Literally, uberCab was amazing, then San Francisco started fighting Uber and before you know it the cars were random / drivers random etc.
For Manhattan only travel, I think the yellow cabs are a superior solution to Uber/Lyft. It is non-trivial sometimes to track down your particular car. So, Manhattan is the exception where I don't use rideshare. One exception is when it rains... then, finding a free taxi is pretty rough .. so ridesharing wins that one.
I was visiting DC for a wedding and in busy nightlife areas it was way easier to flag down a cab then figure out which of 10 cars pulled over is your uber.
Imagine being a Prius drives who isn't even a rideshare driver who has to contend with drunk, often entitled a-holes (not saying you were one) assuming their car is an Uber.
I’m guessing the gas savings add up pretty fast when you’re driving 8+ hours per day. They are also reasonably space efficient, so you can comfortably seat most rides.
That's an interesting point. Ubers are generally interchangeable, so why shouldn't you be able to just hop into any of them in a situation like that?
Leaving the implementation aside (a number of different ideas come to mind), all that would be needed is for it to verify before you get in the car that it's the same type you ordered (e.g. UberX) and then detect and handle the fact that you've started a ride with that particular driver.
Ideally this would be something that could be opted in or out of on the rider's end, as well as on the driver's end.
I mean interchangeable as in fundamentally the same kind of thing (car that takes you from here to somewhere else), of course not that you can already hop into someone else's ride and expect it to work.
What I'm suggesting is that they could potentially add a feature that enables hopping into any of a set of cars (probably whichever arrives first or is closest) and matches the rider with the driver after the fact.
Drivers are (supposedly) independent though, and it’s that particular one that accepted your fare. The replacement in your scenario might not want to do the same ride.
Agreed. The way ride-hailing works at airports is super dumb.
Yellow cabs? They form a line. The passengers form a line. Passengers get into cabs, in order. Very simple and efficient.
Ride hailing? Everyone's playing some idiot game of matching-riders-to-cars, and it's totally unnecessary. At any busy airport, it's a complete shitshow.
Uber/Lyft drivers should have the option to accept rides from pickup stations, riders should be able to do the same (or it should be automatic based on GPS), there should be a convention for how it's organized, and, at a really busy place like an airport, there should even be a person who is paid to organize the process. It'd be worth it to everyone.
My experience in NYC over the last decade has been the opposite where drivers were doing things like pissing in a bottle while I was in the car with them, or similar to you having the meter broken, which starts miraculously working when I tell them I guess I have to call this number here and report it.
I won't use anything but rideshare apps because they seem to have higher standards for the cars and the drivers.
I spent the first 20+ years of my life in NYC, taking cabs near-constantly, and I never experienced anything like that. Very, very rarely there'd be a "broken meter".
It's possible things have gotten worse, I haven't lived there in 6 years, and that was basically pre-uber there. But yeah, can't reconcile my (likely thousands of) rides with that.
edit: BTW, with the broken meter (the one time I recall this happening), I just told the guy I knew how much it cost every day - 7 bucks including tip - and that that's what I'd pay. He agreed, he took me where I was going, and I paid. Easy. I know some people will get out of the cab, I kinda remember that once when I was really young and my mother was like 'nah' and we got in another cab.
One thing to keep in mind is that these experiences are not randomly distributed. If the drivers assessed you as someone who they thought was likely to complain or know the rules, they probably wouldn't attempt to scam you.
Agreed, I was a kid for much of that time, and drivers were usually very nice to me, or at least would know that I was local and not some tourist to scam. But still, thousands of rides with virtually no incidents, I think that's gotta count for something.
In decades of taking NYC cabs I have never once seen a cabbie pissing in a bottle. Nor have I ever even heard a story of one doing so. I have also never had a cabbie not turn the meter on. In fact it doesn't even make sense because if a cabbie really wanted to scam you they would simply take an inefficient route and run the meter up. I'm sorry but those things are actually hard to believe. They're certainly not common occurrences.
Taxi drivers in NYC have an informal network of places where they can use a proper bathroom. They're actually easy to spot if you know where to look. So there would be no reason to do what you claim. Also any taxi driver knows the TLC could revoke their hack license for a meter violation like what you mentioned so none of them are going to jeopardize their livelihood with such foolishness. Again this is very hard to believe and would indeed be very freak occurrences if they happened.
Yes you will have the occasional dirty car or bad driver but getting scammed is not something you ever really need to worry about with yellow cabs in NYC. Even if you're a tourist. Yellow cab drivers are some of the hardest working salt of the earth folks and you're making them out to be something they're not.
To be fair, they were two distinct times years apart but they were enough to put me off from yellow cabs.
I'm Queens born, grew up in NJ and spent a lot of time in the city growing up and now I've lived here for the last decade or so and those experiences were enough to put me off of yellow cabs entirely.
You're right in that they're probably freak occurrences but I don't owe them benefit of the doubt as a consumer when I have what is in my opinion the superior solution of rideshares.
> I was a longtime SF resident and remember very well how truly awful the taxi service was in SF before the rideshare apps.
this is because of the legal bribes paid to the government... aka lobbying. The free market would have solved that. What Uber did was illegal in many places, yet the Gov. let them do it (maybe they were scared of repercussions).
Uber had a good strategy, subsidize prices super low to get enough customers and fans quickly enough before the government could act on it. Also blackballing government agents so they had more difficulty regulating it(how that never got them shut down in countries they did that I'll never know)
I don't see how that applies to government. A corrupt person in DHS spoils all the other people there? And spoils people in the the Dept of the Interior, and in Congress?
To be fair, before Uber, Taxis were crap everywhere in the US except NYC (edit: I should say, Manhattan), where they were somewhat expensive but a viable alternative to buses and subways (and driving was/is hellish).
Cabs in Manhattan sucked if you let them know of your intention to leave Manhattan before you entered the cab.
An experienced transiter would know that when the cabbie asks, “where are you going?” the correct answer is to get in the cab and say “I’m doing great. How are you my friend?”.
Only then would you inform them of your destination.
SF annoys me in an engineering sense because they chose a non standard gauge that has needlessly increased the cost of the whole thing. But yeah, carpeted cars is also insane (I see they finally removed that).
To be fair NYC system is maybe the best in the U.S. but they are all flawed enough I wouldn't praise any. My personal favorite that I have ridden is Tokyo's.
It depended on the cab company in some cities. For example, the airport taxis in St Louis used to suck and refused to take credit card, but I never had a bad experience with County Cab in the same city. That said, I took cabs maybe 5 times a year.
I would guess there are lots of potential reasons. More creative charging, not reporting taxes, better income sharing for the driver, and not having to pay service fees.
>Hail a taxi downtown (if you can find one) and ask to go to the Richmond district only to have the driver tell you to get out of the car because they don't want to go that far.
Now you get the joy of having an Uber show up then refuse to take you from SF to San Jose, and then they try to make YOU cancel so it actually costs you money, unlike a taxi.
SF to San Jose is a pretty big jump from downtown to the Richmond. The latter is ~5 miles and maybe a 30 minute drive in traffic and the former is 50 miles and takes an hour even with clear roads.
The other annoyance with SF taxis is that there are (well used to be) a half dozen competing taxi companies, all with their own dispatch system. So often you'd call a cab from one company and watch cars from the other companies drive by, and you had to decide whether to abandon the one you called to take the one that's driving down your street. And supposedly you'd get blacklisted if you had too many no-shows.
I lived in DC when I first heard about Uber in 2012. Up to that point the DC taxi cartel flat out refused to accept credit cards. It was simply impossible, they claimed, despite the fact that most other major cities had been able to do this for years.
A couple months after Uber started, DC taxis started accepting credit cards.
If taxis can now offer lower prices than Uber, great! That's how competition is supposed to work.
> And of course the credit card machines were always "broken" so you had to pay with cash.
I never understood this line, but maybe it is local taxi regulations differences. Where I live the taxis cannot refuse credit payment, so if their machine is really out, they do an old school carbon copy. If they refuse that then they've basically given a free ride, so they didn't tend to put up a fight.
Used to happen with black cabs in a London a lot too. A cynic might suggest they wanted you to pay in cash so that there was no paper trail and no need to declare all the income…
They’re more barefaced where I used to live: if near the end of the month they’d beg for cash because they said they have bills to pay and don’t have time for the card payment to arrive in their account.
In the UK most new cards don't have raised numbers on them anymore, and many banks won't process 'card not present' transactions, unless they're online and go through additional authentication (like SMS or app with, or additional security questions)
In France they must take cards by law, and yet they systematically claim their machine is broken and only accept cash. They know that most customers won’t fight it. They’ll even stop by an ATM if you don’t have the cash.
I’ve even had a taxi prefer to take the 20€ I had on me rather than take the 25€ bill by card. They don’t declare any of that income.
That’s why I always avoid taxis in France, as much as possible.
I quit driving Uber and Lyft during the pandemic. I had a high rating from passengers. I could be coaxed back into driving, but they don't seem to care that I quit. They've not reached out to me, much less offered incentives. It seems weird to me that the press is filled with stories about how they can't find drivers. It seems like something else is going on, like maybe they are not interested in ride share anymore.
I wonder if you've opted out of promotional emails from them in the past? Do you still have the app installed on the same phone you used as a driver?
As a consumer I get push notifications and emails from them every week if I haven't ordered food in a while with new deals, etc. I would strongly suspect they're doing the same thing for drivers these past couple months and maybe they just don't have a way to reach you. If they aren't even doing that it would be truly bizarre, there are billions of dollars on the line and it's their entire business.
We used to communicate by email, which hasn't changed and is still valid. They have reems of personal data about me including my bank routing number, my phone number, my driver's license, etc... I got one email from Lyft offering a $200 bonus for 10 rides in a day, but nothing from Uber. $200 for 10 rides is not exactly incentive to get off my retired butt and do some driving again. I'm now looking at python freelancing for a little extra cash.
Edit: I logged into my Uber driver app. Nothing beyond the usual promos (bonuses for driving in San Francisco.) Nothing like, "Hey, we noticed you haven't been driving. We want you back! How can we help you get started again?"
I see that offer for San Francisco, which is not much incentive because SF is a nightmare to drive. Between potholes, construction, getting trapped in city traffic and terribly rude passengers it's not worth it to me, when I could drive the nice wide boulevards of Palo Alto and Stanford University and possibly have an interesting conversation with a student or professor. I took a guy from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto who was going to do his startup pitch to a Japanese company. I told him I was a retired computer programmer so he asked me if he could practice his pitch on me while I drove. That was interesting. Another time I picked up one of the top VR developers in the world at the San Jose convention center. He reported directly to John Cormack at Oculus. He sold me on buying Oculus Quest glasses. That was also a long ride, so that was fun. Hmmm, maybe I will start driving again...
I don't mind grumpy or depressed passengers. I don't like the wealthy passengers the treat me like the butler or servant. Uber is not that kind of service. I'm a regular person sharing my car with them, not the shoe shine boy. Weirdly, I only got that in San Francisco.
Sure, but it's a question of status in society and how you are treated according to your status. A butler accepts money to be subservient to their employer and attend to their needs. An Uber driver isn't like that. He or she is captain of the ship navigating a vehicle through sometimes difficult circumstances and if the passenger doesn't like it, they are welcome to get out.
Outside of NYC, every taxi experience has been an absolute nightmare. Scams, CC machines never working, unreliable, sketchy, going a longer route to rack up the meter. Sometimes they'd just never show up when you called one and you'd just be stuck.
That's why I went to Uber/Lyft. Not just because of pricing (though that was a bonus).
NYC taxi service has always been great though. And there are enough that like 70% of the time (in Manhattan at least) I can just walk to the street, put my hand up, and have a ride in a minute or two. CC machine always works, etc.
Every article like this, there are comments like yours. Yet, I've taken a taxi many times, and nearly every time it was: call #, request taxi, "okay, 15 minutes", 15 minutes later taxi arrives, we drive to destination, pay by CC.
I've had a problem exactly once: I caught a taxi at the airport in Denver, CO, and like most airports, the pricing plan from the airport is different than to the airport (which is priced like a normal ride). Upon arrival at the destination, the cabbie didn't want to honor that agreement — "how would I make money if I charged that much?" — which, had I not been in shock from hearing about the stupidest remark I'd ever heard, I should have really told him exactly how he should make money.
But that was once, out of probably dozens of experiences. I've had far more trouble with, say, … airlines.
I've taken Lyft/Uber too, and honestly, it just isn't much different? The wait is about the same (relative to location, that is, less in crowded city centers). The difference is the ordering: with Lyft/Uber it is by app instead of by call. Slightly nicer, admittedly (can drop the pin, no need to understand often poor quality audio) but both apps absolutely murder cell batteries.
Uber is the same app anywhere in the world. Lyft is the same all over the US. You don't have to memorize or discover different ways to call a cab in all the places you're traveling to. That's the main advantage I see.
Well since articles more often have comments like mine, maybe you're in the minority of locations that have a decent taxi service?
Last time I took a taxi, it was on the East coast and it took an hour for someone to show up. I called 3 times to the dispatch and each time they said 10min. Then the car showed up and they said the CC machine was broken and I had to pay in cash. I didn't have cash. Then suddenly the CC machine was fine and I finally was able to get my ride.
I was kicked out of a taxi once in Montreal when the driver heard I was going to the airport. Fortunately he did so by a cab stand so I got another quickly but it was jarring.
Had cab machines have “broken” electronic payment terminals more times than I can count.
There is on local taxi company that’s always excellent, Atlas Taxi. But other than them had real lousy experiences in the pre uber days. And very hard to get an invoice for tax purposes even if you paid by card.
Uber/Lyft was also a breeze of fresh air for non-white riders.
Not being refused rides (after waiting the usual half hour for the taxi to show up) and not seeing the driver speed away when hailing from the curb was a great experience.
Yeah, Uber/Lyft could succeed even if they charged more. Outside of the small town cab services (mostly due to poor mapping, where local knowledge has more value), they are far better than the competition.
Hanoi is at the top of my list of places where tourists are treated as walking dollar signs.
Coming off a bus/train, you get swamped by drivers and you absolutely must know exactly where you're going and how to get there or you will be taken wherever the driver is being paid to take you.
Cartagena is a close second.
Interestingly, outside of major ports of call, Hanoi was lovely, some of the best food I've eaten anywhere and $10/night for a beautiful room. You get a lot of ding for your dong as long as you know how to miss the scams.
Even with meters, the usual trick I saw was: "oh sorry sir I took the wrong turn, and now we are stuck in a road with major traffic, I'll try to turn back as soon as I can" - added 10 minutes worth of ride.
The only solution I see for this kind of abuse would be meter + "strictly follow GPS" rule.
When I was in India they were at least honest about this. They said the meter in the rickshaw was only for locals :-) The ride was still only $10 for what would probably be $50 at home so can't complain...
Exactly... I mean tourism is a big part of the economy in some places. As a tourist I don't mind paying a reasonable amount more than locals, but charging $40 for a 2km ride is clearly just taking the p***. Our ride was 45 minutes maybe 20km, so $10 felt like a good deal to me :-)
When I was in Thailand, drivers often simply refused to turn on the meter, insisting on a (higher) lump sum payment, or get out of the car.
One time after I begrudgingly accepted the lump sum, our cab got stuck in bad traffic and the supposedly 20 minute ride turned into a one and a half hour ride. At some point the driver half-jokingly suggested that maybe we should go by the meter after all.
That must be a long time ago, since Grab has already acquired Uber operations in Vietnam. I personally have no problems with traditional taxi in Vietnam, but that's probably because I'm a Vietnamese. I've heard enough horror stories of taxi drivers overcharging foreigners.
For those looking to travel to Vietnam, use Grab or Be. Grab is the most popular choice, while Be is a local competitor.
Uber was fairly flawless when I spent time in Hanoi in 2015. I wonder if Uber dis-invested in Hanoi between my trip and yours, or some other dynamic detrimentally impacted their level of service there?
I paid $80 for an $8 cab ride from HCMC airport. I was tired and confused with all the zeros.
Also, I’m pretty sure the meter didn’t display the same number of zeros as the currency. That is, the last 2 zeros were omitted on the meter. But the driver said there were three omitted. Something like that. Oh well.
Otherwise, I had a wonderful stay. Beautiful country, nice people. I can’t wait to go back.
I'm sorry for the experience you had. The meter should be in thousand VND, so 100 means 100,000 VND which is a bit less than $5 (1 USD = 23,000 VND). But did the driver make you pay in USD or VND?
What I recall is that the meter didn't cut off the last three zeros but rather just two. Maybe it was a faulty meter (or maybe it was me). I was just off the plane, it was middle of the night and I was exhausted.
I should note that it was me who suggested the wrong amount, and he just accepted. I don't think he set out to swindle me.
Overall I found the country to be mostly free of people trying to take advantage of foreigners - Unlike Thailand and (especially) Cambodia. I also felt very safe there.
Exactly. Even though the uber/lyft experience is not always perfect, it is almost always much better than taxis, and I will pay a premium for it. The people who only care about price can have the cabs, and the discount airlines while they're at it.
In Dublin I called a cab company to reserve a taxi the night before a flight, and explicitly asked for a cab with a working credit card machine, which they assured me would happen.
The next morning the cab arrives on time – great – I get in and we drive to the airport, at which point the driver reveals that their credit card machine is conveniently "broken". The driver insists I leave my luggage in the cab as collateral while I go inside the airport to find a cash machine. This ends up taking about 15 minutes, I have to pay $5 in ATM fees, I'm anxious the entire time he's going to leave with my luggage, etc.
In the usa at least, and in many states the cab companies are required to allow you to pay with a card. I've not dealt with this scam in a while but will tell them tough luck and they're not getting paid and proceed to get out. They usually change their mind quickly.
The scam hits a bit differently when you have $500 of luggage in the trunk. I've also done the "No working credit card reader? Sucks for you then" and walked away. But never when there's luggage locked in their trunk.
Eh, NYC taxi service definitely hasn't always been great. During my one visit in 2003, cabbies refused to go anywhere but Manhattan or the airport. And in Manhattan, it was impossible to get a cab.
I'm glad to hear it has improved. Almost as glad as I am that rideshare exists now.
I lived in NYC in the 1990's and early 2000's too... and, IMO, taxi service was fine to great in NYC. Hold up youhr hand and 9 times out of 10, you had a cab within 5 minutes or less. It was better than any other city I travelled to, perhaps with the exception of London.
NYC taxis have their issues, too. Not sure if it is still the case, but when my sister lived in New York (five years ago), Taxis wouldn't even go to her neighborhood in Manhattan (Inwood, the north tip).
I paid $100 for a Uber from Manhattan to JFK the other day, I was absolutely shocked. A taxi is $50. I read on internet it was the same prices, I guess the information I found was outdated.
Uber was trying to charge me something like $50 (before tip, of course) for a ride from the airport to a nearby hotel. It was about 2:15 AM and it said my arrival time would be around 4:30 AM. I found a cab waiting outside and made it there in about 10 minutes for $25.
Uber tried to charge me $90 to go 25 minutes away from LAX -- the Uber lot had almost no people waiting (not a busy time, and the middle of the day), and it had a 25 min wait. I took a cab instead, $50 including tip and 3 mins in line.
I don't see how Uber's going to survive if they can't match cab prices...
I’ve seen this even locally in Denver. Pre-pandemic I could get a ride to a destination a mile or two away for $8-$12. Now those trips recently have cost me anywhere from $20-$35 if I elected to take them.
I have to image the loss of uberpool/lyft line has had a major impact on both the overall supply of available cars and also the perception of a larger increase in how much a ride costs.
I’m sure it’s reduced supply, but prices are much higher. I’ve never used pool/line and I’ve still got sticker shock.
I think the bigger issues are that most drivers found new jobs given demand was so low for so long.
And unemployment payments are still pretty high in many states. You probably lose money driving an Uber if you qualify for unemployment insurance right.
So ultimately we gained nothing other than now having worse worker protections than before [1] and better regular taxis. We could have reached the same result by just overhauling how taxies worked without exploiting the ones that already have barely anything and making a few rich.
> We could have reached the same result by just overhauling how taxies worked without exploiting the ones that already have barely anything and making a few rich.
"overhauling how taxis worked" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I have a hard time seeing how that would've ever happened in the absence of something like a Lyft or Uber. That's an extraordinarily difficult task.
Yes. But unfortunately, the taxi companies didn't realize this until it was much, much too late. They got their lunches eaten by tech companies who liked to move fast and break things, such as decades of worker protections, well supplied with money and not overburdened with ethics.
There is a parallel universe where some tech worker came along and created apps and sold them to the taxi companies. That would have led to much better taxi service -- though still a monopolist keeping the number of cabs small to protect their own profits.
Are they even employees? I think some of them were independent contractors, possibly fake ones. Employees wouldn't be quite as motivated to pretend their card readers were broken.
taxis could never compete with Uber and Lyft because they as actually own the cabs. Uber and Lyft can respond to surges. Taxis can't. they'd lose money owning enough vehicles to support surge times and have them idle during non surge.
The couldn't have tried to be Uber either because the law didn't allow non medallion drivers
You must live in a place that already had good taxi services. There's no comparison in the level of service between Uber and every taxi service I ever took outside of those in Japan / Korea.
The popularity of Uber given the horrific regulated taxi services made banning Uber politically dangerous in many cities.
When Uber went public, they lost their sugar daddy. Softbank/the Saudi sovereign wealth fund was willing to put in money to subsidize losses to gain market share. The stock market doesn't work that way.
This is happening in NYC too. I almost always use yellow cabs from JFK->Manhattan/BK because they are considerably cheaper. If I can hail a yellow cab anywhere, I would prefer it to Uber/Lyft.
Funny I’m back to using taxis in Orlando. Had way too many terrible drivers on Lyft and Uber that I’m not sure we’re even legally driving. My faith in both companies “inspecting” cars completely lost. Plus they have a bad problem over there of people hiring other people to drive for them.
I just opened flywheel in downtown Seattle, no cars available. Unfortunate. At least Uber/Lyft are operational.
This seems a symptom of the massive drop in demand causing a lot of drivers to leave the system. Hopefully this will self-adjust over a period of time, because I admit right now its pretty ridiculous the prices in Seattle. It is 1.5-2x more for essentially any ride, and surges are even more ridiculous.
Am I only one who is against regulation? Seems that in few of these big cities we are back to where we were 10 years ago. I remember when I was student in Toronto, taxi cab was so expensive that taking one was completely out of reach for student. If you miss a bus at night, sometimes it was better to wait until next morning or just walk. At the same time you would see lines of taxis in the Front street ideal and not working because prices were so much higher that what people could pay. Combination of price fixing, super expensive taxi license, different insurance that legally drivers had to buy made it completely impossible to move a taxi with lower price. I think at the end both drivers and customers are hurt by this.
Toronto taxi medallion prices peaked at $360k CAD prior to Uber entering the market [0]. That seems like pretty strong evidence of the system being coopted to serve the interests of medallion holders rather than consumers.
Market forces lead to consumers being hurt all the time due to externalities, information asymmetry, monopolistic / monopsonistic / platform owner powers, etc.
The number quoted in the article said there are only 500 taxi's in SF right now? That seems super low and not significant - since all the estimates I can find for SF ubers in the area are in the tens of thousands.
I'm sure once more people will become drivers if surge continues - and people will be looking for work again
Or, they're like me and still pissed about Prop 22.
Anyone fancy starting a delivery startup? I would absolutely pay a premium to anyone that can deliver groceries while alleviating the feeling of being complicit in the abuse of employees that I currently get from Instacart.
And to preempt the inevitable; I'm not opposed to prop 22 itself. It's a position that's not completely devoid of reason. My aggravation with all of them is the shear amount of money they all spent lobbying for it. I received a half dozen phone calls or texts from people introducing themselves dishonestly. Only for them to go on to misrepresent the reality of prop 22. Which I could forgive if not for the clause preventing anyone from trying to alter, correct, or modify the laws they paid to enact.
Uber bet the house on self-driving cars, that's what was supposed to make all of this sustainable.
Seems all these efforts have failed, and I'd be curious how many short positions are out there against them.
I've been at the receiving end of these Uber & Lyft shortages. Can't get a ridershare below $80 at SFO after 9pm even if you've pre-scheduled one. The drivers also keep cancelling in an attempt to pump rates higher. Its incredibly frustrating.
I've pretty much given up and now rent a car when I would have taken an Uber when I'm out of town.
Others in this thread? Beating a dead horse? Am I missing something? I'm the only comment in response to yours, which is a top level comment. I see no other conversation on the topic.
Anyway, my point is that self driving is clearly not in a "well, it didn't work" state - it's ongoing, and seems to be making good progress. I have no timeline for you.
I think it's relative. The technology is progressing, but as you said no one has a timeline. So if you're a company betting billions (and billions) of dollars on getting self-driving out the door in 5 years, and now it's year 5 and you have no timeline... "well, it didn't work"
Cruise operates in a very few markets for which their specialized self-driving cars have been designed for live testing. They have received special attention and care to have extremely up-to-date local information and are closely managed by operators. It is indeed very encouraging that Cruise is operating this local taxi and soon a local shuttle with almost completely driverless capabilities..
But keep in mind, this doesn't mean they work anywhere else in the country or world. What will happen to them in bad weather or some damage to the vehicle or a flat tire or navigating a scene cordoned off by police, or a parade? What happens when they do not have the meticulously groomed information? Likely, Cruise will manually tell the vehicle to avoid the area, shut the vehicle down, or take over control remotely.
Self-Driving cars are designated into technology levels 0 through 5[0], from no capabilities, to "simple" lane-keeping and/or cruise control, to autonomous with caveats
I don't know exactly which technologies Cruise is using to achieve their mostly autonomous taxi, as that information is worth the billions invested in the company, however from what I have been able to gather, they still use a remote safety operator in some instances. The safety operator can take control of the car if a safety problem presents.
The cruise cars in SF are essentially bespoke for their market. If you take it to Wichita or Maryland, these things will likely not be able to manage the environment. The self-driving capabilities are still unable to reach SAE level 5, fully autonomous driving in all conditions.
Its easy to look at Cruise and conclude, "We've arrived!" but I would still caution restraint, as it has been possible to operate autonomous vehicles with extensive constraints for many years, such as autonomous rail.
Cruise is a different company. Uber was developing their own self-driving cars, and gave up last year [0]. That's the failure they're talking about, Uber was betting on their self-driving cars saving costs in the long run since they'd not need to pay drivers anymore.
As for selling off their self-driving division, I don't get how that's a failure or giving up, given that the article lists an explicit 400M investment. The article (rightly) points out that Uber doesn't need to own self driving to benefit from it, and given that it's a hard problem, they spun it out into its own company that can receive independent funding.
Sure, that would be reasonable, though the two posts citing failure seem to be talking much more explicitly about the attempts - "all these efforts have failed", "gave up".
If it's "people expected this to already be done and it isn't" yeah sure, of course.
> I'd be curious how many short positions are out there against them.
As of 6/15, about 5% of the UBER float was sold short, and the put/call ratio is .439 according to thinkorswim. Short interest will be reported again on 7/15. For comparison, 10% of ABNB and LYFT are sold short, with a similar p/c ratio.
What? It's still actively advancing every year. This is like saying manned missions to Mars have failed. We're not there yet but the steps we're taking aren't "failure"
Uber & Lyft have missed such a golden opportunity for brining cab drivers onto their platform.
GoJek and Grab (SEA Ridesharing alternatives and "super-apps") both have a "Taxi" option when selecting the type of car you want. I'm assuming it's similar to just merging this "FlyWheel" app that the US has into their own.
Curious what happens as business travel bounces back. Never using ride share at home, i only have Uber for when traveling and don’t foresee downloading any taxi apps or searching one out for each city.
Yeah, rideshare in SF is getting pretty expensive. I only ever use it when I'm doing drugs and stuff and can't drive.
But SF public transit is totally shit. I recall the only reason we'd ever use it is that a bunch of us were going there together and we get to hang out.
My time is way too precious to wait for the 38 or the 44 to stop 15 times a mile. I can beat them in my car, even with transit lanes.
Uber is a great service for the customer. It made getting places within cities convenient and reliable. I don't think there's anyone who misses calling cab companies late at night.
However their pricing was never real. They took billions of VC dollars to make it seem like Uber could be better AND cheaper which drove every tradition cab company out of business. It also meant that all of the benefits of Uber accrued to the rider and the shareholders, the driver's didn't do so well.
Now they have to raise prices to a rate that's actually profitable. Meanwhile the taxi companies got their act together a bit. They have apps now, they take credit cards. So things will end up better across the board, just maybe not cheaper.
Consumer benefit aside. Ubers pricing strategy should probably have been illegal. You should not be able to flood a market like that. In international trade this is called dumping [0]. I wish we had a similar law for tech companies that want to destroy incumbents with VC money.
I don't understand how this practice of using VC money to offer services below cost to undercut competition isn't illegal. In Ireland loss leading (offering certain goods below cost to entice customers who will then spend on other goods/services) is illegal. Not sure about other countries but doing what Uber did is straight up theft with huge negative externalities for society.
Dumping for anti-competitive purposes is unlawful in many places uber operates, including California. But when has breaking the law ever really concerned uber? At this juncture if they were threatened with it they'd just override the legislature via an amendment, again.
> Uber is a great service for the customer. It made getting places within cities convenient and reliable. I don't think there's anyone who misses calling cab companies late at night.
The ubiquitous smartphone equipped with GPS did this. Once the technology existed it was an inevitability, just like it was for boarding passes and restaurant reservations and everything else.
The predatory anti-competitive lawless aspect of the transition to smartphone driven can hailing however was probably optional.
This is an "invisible hand" argument that ignores the fact that markets consist of people and some business needs to actually do the work.
Someone still had to create a popular service to compete with taxis, which wasn't all that easy when it wasn't even clear how to do it legally. It's only with hindsight that it might seem obvious.
Yes, maybe some other company would have eventually figured out how to do it a different way, but "eventually" can be a long time and reasoning about counterfactual events isn't as easy as invisible hand arguments make it seem.
Maybe the American taxicab market was especially dysfunctional (the stuff I read about NY taxi medallions suggests that somehow), but in other countries, this "inevitability" came about, largely without Uber's involvement.
In Germany for example we can easily hail taxis (actual ones, not private cars) with at least two or three different apps, and this has been a thing for almost a decade now, even though Uber never really got its private-car-based service on track here due to legal problems. I've used Lyft in the US a few times, and the experience with those taxi apps in Germany is very much comparable.
What do you mean some other company would have eventually figured it out? Literally dozens of companies were working on the concept in parallel, not just Lyft, whose existence already undercuts your argument. My friend Christian who eventually got into YC with a different startup entirely had one called CloudCar in Boston, and he was far from the only one.
This same argument comes up literally every time obvious anti-competitive practices are mentioned and it’s bullshit. It’s completely and totally reasonable to demand innovation AND ethical business practices coexist and anyone telling you otherwise has an agenda.
Uber and Lyft take a commission, but most of the money goes to the driver. Surge pricing happens when there is high demand and supply can not keep up, or supply (drivers) choose not accept offers based on price and whatever other factors that driver chooses when they make a decision on who to give rides to and how far to drive.
I am not sure Uber and Lyft work like you think they work. Drivers can take anyone they want. They often take the most profitable offers, because they want to make the time they spend in their car more worthwhile. The drivers can offer rides all day long and accept any proposal offered, if they choose to do that.
Drivers can also hold out within a metro, collectively, and drive the price up by artificially shortening supply. People need rides, so they will offer to pay more in order to entice a driver to pick them up. And, if prices get too high, taxis are usually an option where artificial supply limitation is happening.
VC money goes to kick-starting infrastructure and software and employees that run the business.
Uber hasn't raised their base rates in my city for years now. I drive for Uber, and it's more profitable than ever.
This is because of surge pricing and higher volume. Even when there is no surge profitability is quite good as long as it's busy enough for back to back rides.
If you're patient and ride during slower times you pay a similar amount to what the price was years ago.
When I first moved to NYC Uber wasn't really a thing so had to take cabs at times. Even in Manhattan it sucked in so many ways. Examples include:
- The stupid in-car advertising you had to turn off
- Cab card readers seemed to be a common method of skimming
- Getting a cab around shift changes
- Tricks to get a cab to go to somewhere they didn't want to go (ie anywhere that isn't Manhattan below 96th).
- Language barrier. The number of times I've had 14th mistaken for 40th was unbelievable.
- Just the general friction of the interaction and payment.
- Cab cleanliness.
- Inability to call for a cab or schedule one. I came from Australia and was honestly perplexed by this at first.
Years ago I took a few cabs in SF and used to joke with people that the interaction went something like:
"Take me to the end of the street"
"That'll be $30"
I once caught a cab from SFO to Mountain View, which is outside their normal range so there was a 50% surcharge. The guy made many mistakes in just getting off 101 onto 85. Missing exits, going around, that sort of thing. I had to give directions from my phone. The thing turned into $130 since he was running the meter the whole time. I ended up giving him no tip for this on principle even though it was being expensed and he yelled at me. As a cab drive if you can't handle "101 South to 85 South to El Camino North" then you have a problem.
I'm still skeptical about surge pricing in general. I'm not convinced it has much if anything to do with demand vs supply or that drivers see any of it.
But a more interesting story might be how surge pricing has changed in SF over time. For example: does it occur more often? Why? Are less drivers driving? Why?
Recently I tried to use Uber Eats in Miami and it was literally impossible. Why? "No drivers available". Basically no one drove for Uber Eats. They all drove for DoorDash, Seamless/Grubhub or Postmates instead.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadI frankly don't care what service takes me home. I just want it to be safe, reliable, clean, and reasonably priced, and I want the driver to be accountable for any issues. If a taxi now fits that bill, great. Competition and choice are good things.
So to put this in terms - the rich got much richer, and the middle class benefitted by exploiting the working class. That's doesn't seem like a good outcome to me (not least because the billionaires that benefit literally spunk their profits into outer space befroe thinking about paying tax).
The group that I assume got screwed were owners of local taxi companies and they were just corrupt cronies of the local government and screw them.
I’d say the real problem with the outcomes here may be venture capital. That is what made the rich richer and allowed them to explode on a model that didn’t require them to be profitable. It’s possible this business model can’t succeed without that support, it’s also possible it could with higher prices, better wages and more time.
How many Uber/Lyft drivers were taxi drivers before you think? I’d say not a hugely large percentage. In other words, the “exploited” here are also apparently compelled to flock to such a job in previously untold numbers. This in turn drives down prices, and the reverse trend since the pandemic is the reason they’re back on the rise. The convenience provided here is not just for riders but for drivers.
All this to say your perspective reeks of political oversimplification that forces you to ignore various factors at play, many of them good, to churn out rhetoric. This ironically prevents seeing actual solutions to the problem you claim to care about.
So perhaps it's not just competition, and we should give some credit to the regulation too.
Or we could accept that "competition" doesn't just have to occur within a free market, and that a regulated market can be efficient while also accounting for externalities that a free market cannot.
EDIT: to clarify, I am agreeing with you overall. I didn't mean my tone to come across as agressive, which re-reading it, I feel it does.
What was weird is that all of the "taxis" were regular cars with magnetic "taxi" labels on them, and at the end of the ride, my driver charged me on a square terminal, with no option / chance to tip. I honestly don't know if it was just some enterprising person that showed up at the airport, or what the heck happened.
Now I'm in NY and I use taxis almost as often as rideshares. The Curb app makes it easy to find a taxi and the prices are almost always lower. But half the time I can't get a taxi through the app at all and have to wander the streets or use Lyft/Uber.
In the US that would mean allowing the same bureaucratic organization that manages Medicare/Medicaid to manage a transportation app. And then you'd deal with the Intuits of transportation that would legally hobble any meaningful development in favor of their bespoke (and expensive) ride-hailing service...
And so on. Maybe I'm just a cynic about these things.
We could instead regulate a distributed ride-sharing communications system that companies could build apps for and drivers could hook in to. Well regulated industries tend to thrive (look at internet/cellphone providers in Japan).
Why are you keeping your public companies in such a bad shape?
Every large organization is bureaucratic. The US federal government does pretty well, IME: Parks, highways, air travel, food safety, drug safety, medical and scientific research, public universities, NASA, military, etc etc. It's not perfect, but nothing is.
I'm hesistant to say this because I don't live in the USA and so it's not really my business but ....
You know you really don't have to live in this society where large organisations are allowed to maintain de-facto monopolies. Every other part of the developed world has laws which limit monopoly suppliers. The laws aren't perfect but they have an effect.
Oddly enough the only real exception to this is the digital advertising duopoly owned by two large US companies and which operates on a, pretty much, global scale. So far, the rest of the developed world hasn't worked out how to address that.
That’s because New York is corrupt and artificially limits both ride shares and taxis. But they’re heavily biased towards taxis and their outrageous medallion system.
Taxi’s have definitely been forced to improve thanks to competition from Uber/Lyft. But don’t be fooled into thinking scarcity and high price of ride share in NYC is a naturally occurring phenomena.
It is both desirable and definitely within the purview of government to control the number of vehicles on the road. Congestion/traffic is a perfect example of an externality. Go to a megacity in a developing country like Delhi and experience traffic that causes what would be a 20 minute trip with 0 traffic to become a 4 hour trip in traffic.
Given the traffic/congestion externality, taxing/charging vehicles to enter downtowns, creating a cap on the number of taxis via medallions, etc are all the economically optimal solutions according to economics.
We want to substitute individual vehicle transport to mass transit wherein there is a dramatically reduced externality (e.g. adding a person to a subway train or a bus only has an effect if that train hits capacity -- in contrast to adding an additional vehicle to the road).
Ideally, the pricing model for ridesharing and taxis should be dynamic but account for the congestion impacts (i.e. internalize the traffic externality). The fixed pricing of taxis doesn't do this (though medallions partly do from a more traditional cap and trade scheme) and the surge pricing of Uber and Lyft is only to clear their internal market and not to resolve the traffic impacts of all those additional vehicles on the road. As such, there have been numerous peer reviewed papers that have demonstrated that traffic is actually increased by ridesharing due to a substitution away from mass transit.
Also when uber first implemented the uber-taxi option before uber-x, I tried it and would regularly have multiple cabs cancel en-route to me because they just picked up a closer fare.
Yeah everybody remembers the worst situations and not the average, but Uber totally changed the game. Little electric scooters are also pretty amazing there, since it's so compact.
I have the exact same experience. It's to the point where I think SF literally hates anyone from outside the city. You have to live there to understand any of the public transit as it doesn't seem to work like that of anywhere else.
Despite being only an hour away I hate going there as driving and parking is a pain at best and downright dangerous at worst. Taking CalTrain or BART into the city isn't much better thanks to the inscrutable public transit.
After that mistake it seemed pretty easy, and this was before iPhones
But pre-Uber, calling a cab was a waste of time.
If the price accurately represented the drivers' costs, they wouldn't refuse the rides.
We tried uber a few times then just said the black cabs were worth the extra. None of the cabs needed GPS and always knew where we needed to go and told us about areas.
I know, kinda touristy and not needed for people living their day to day, but after uber they made the rest of our trip better (is this a black cab ad?)
I used to work at Curb years and years ago (and its predecessor TaxiMagic). It's always fun to still hear someone uses it and makes me wonder if any code I wrote could still be running somewhere for it.
My first programming job was at an insurance broker where 15-20 years ago I wrote a maybe 20 line VB exe to transfer a file to our systems that was invoked by a comparative rater.
It was still out there being distributed to client PCs for over a decade.
It's at least 15 years old and just keeps plugging alone. The author retired last year.
My female roommate once had to walk from the marina to edge of outer mission to get home late at night because on weekends you could not get cabs and/or they wouldn't take you places that they didn't like. It was that or stay at some ultra sketch guys house or hang in a park till buses started again.
Just ridiculous - they wouldn't even do weekend only medallions to lighten load - so some commission was def. bought by the taxi cartel type folks.
Was so glad when uber came along. you could get rid of your car, no if (or if not) you'd be picked up etc.
And yes - the "broken" CC machine - the Taxi commission was busy making sure there were too few medallions and no gypsy cabs, but did diddly squat to enforce any other rules (ie, discrimination in pickups, CC machines working, lost property handling). The statistical chance that every other business seems to be able to operate CC machine, and these guys, in a regulated and licensed business could not, was just ridiculous.
Corrupt through and through.
Think it was UberCab.
https://thenextweb.com/news/ubers-first-ever-blog-posts-are-...
The drivers they had (initially) were used to talking rich execs around - so everything was leather and usually pretty dressed up.
Then SF started in on "rider / consumer protection" and weirdly the drivers became just random / unlicensed folks! Literally, uberCab was amazing, then San Francisco started fighting Uber and before you know it the cars were random / drivers random etc.
Leaving the implementation aside (a number of different ideas come to mind), all that would be needed is for it to verify before you get in the car that it's the same type you ordered (e.g. UberX) and then detect and handle the fact that you've started a ride with that particular driver.
Ideally this would be something that could be opted in or out of on the rider's end, as well as on the driver's end.
They're even asking for a PIN in some circumstances https://www.uber.com/blog/pin-verification-drivers/
What I'm suggesting is that they could potentially add a feature that enables hopping into any of a set of cars (probably whichever arrives first or is closest) and matches the rider with the driver after the fact.
Yellow cabs? They form a line. The passengers form a line. Passengers get into cabs, in order. Very simple and efficient.
Ride hailing? Everyone's playing some idiot game of matching-riders-to-cars, and it's totally unnecessary. At any busy airport, it's a complete shitshow.
Uber/Lyft drivers should have the option to accept rides from pickup stations, riders should be able to do the same (or it should be automatic based on GPS), there should be a convention for how it's organized, and, at a really busy place like an airport, there should even be a person who is paid to organize the process. It'd be worth it to everyone.
I won't use anything but rideshare apps because they seem to have higher standards for the cars and the drivers.
It's possible things have gotten worse, I haven't lived there in 6 years, and that was basically pre-uber there. But yeah, can't reconcile my (likely thousands of) rides with that.
edit: BTW, with the broken meter (the one time I recall this happening), I just told the guy I knew how much it cost every day - 7 bucks including tip - and that that's what I'd pay. He agreed, he took me where I was going, and I paid. Easy. I know some people will get out of the cab, I kinda remember that once when I was really young and my mother was like 'nah' and we got in another cab.
Taxi drivers in NYC have an informal network of places where they can use a proper bathroom. They're actually easy to spot if you know where to look. So there would be no reason to do what you claim. Also any taxi driver knows the TLC could revoke their hack license for a meter violation like what you mentioned so none of them are going to jeopardize their livelihood with such foolishness. Again this is very hard to believe and would indeed be very freak occurrences if they happened.
Yes you will have the occasional dirty car or bad driver but getting scammed is not something you ever really need to worry about with yellow cabs in NYC. Even if you're a tourist. Yellow cab drivers are some of the hardest working salt of the earth folks and you're making them out to be something they're not.
I'm Queens born, grew up in NJ and spent a lot of time in the city growing up and now I've lived here for the last decade or so and those experiences were enough to put me off of yellow cabs entirely.
You're right in that they're probably freak occurrences but I don't owe them benefit of the doubt as a consumer when I have what is in my opinion the superior solution of rideshares.
this is because of the legal bribes paid to the government... aka lobbying. The free market would have solved that. What Uber did was illegal in many places, yet the Gov. let them do it (maybe they were scared of repercussions).
I don't see how that applies to government. A corrupt person in DHS spoils all the other people there? And spoils people in the the Dept of the Interior, and in Congress?
An experienced transiter would know that when the cabbie asks, “where are you going?” the correct answer is to get in the cab and say “I’m doing great. How are you my friend?”.
Only then would you inform them of your destination.
To be fair NYC system is maybe the best in the U.S. but they are all flawed enough I wouldn't praise any. My personal favorite that I have ridden is Tokyo's.
I'd bet that a given uber ride is 3-4x as expensive, easily, these days.
Not my experience. I used taxis in many cities for many years.
Now you get the joy of having an Uber show up then refuse to take you from SF to San Jose, and then they try to make YOU cancel so it actually costs you money, unlike a taxi.
A couple months after Uber started, DC taxis started accepting credit cards.
If taxis can now offer lower prices than Uber, great! That's how competition is supposed to work.
I never understood this line, but maybe it is local taxi regulations differences. Where I live the taxis cannot refuse credit payment, so if their machine is really out, they do an old school carbon copy. If they refuse that then they've basically given a free ride, so they didn't tend to put up a fight.
I’ve even had a taxi prefer to take the 20€ I had on me rather than take the 25€ bill by card. They don’t declare any of that income.
That’s why I always avoid taxis in France, as much as possible.
So it's a problem on both ends.
As a consumer I get push notifications and emails from them every week if I haven't ordered food in a while with new deals, etc. I would strongly suspect they're doing the same thing for drivers these past couple months and maybe they just don't have a way to reach you. If they aren't even doing that it would be truly bizarre, there are billions of dollars on the line and it's their entire business.
Edit: I logged into my Uber driver app. Nothing beyond the usual promos (bonuses for driving in San Francisco.) Nothing like, "Hey, we noticed you haven't been driving. We want you back! How can we help you get started again?"
That's why I went to Uber/Lyft. Not just because of pricing (though that was a bonus).
NYC taxi service has always been great though. And there are enough that like 70% of the time (in Manhattan at least) I can just walk to the street, put my hand up, and have a ride in a minute or two. CC machine always works, etc.
I've had a problem exactly once: I caught a taxi at the airport in Denver, CO, and like most airports, the pricing plan from the airport is different than to the airport (which is priced like a normal ride). Upon arrival at the destination, the cabbie didn't want to honor that agreement — "how would I make money if I charged that much?" — which, had I not been in shock from hearing about the stupidest remark I'd ever heard, I should have really told him exactly how he should make money.
But that was once, out of probably dozens of experiences. I've had far more trouble with, say, … airlines.
I've taken Lyft/Uber too, and honestly, it just isn't much different? The wait is about the same (relative to location, that is, less in crowded city centers). The difference is the ordering: with Lyft/Uber it is by app instead of by call. Slightly nicer, admittedly (can drop the pin, no need to understand often poor quality audio) but both apps absolutely murder cell batteries.
Last time I took a taxi, it was on the East coast and it took an hour for someone to show up. I called 3 times to the dispatch and each time they said 10min. Then the car showed up and they said the CC machine was broken and I had to pay in cash. I didn't have cash. Then suddenly the CC machine was fine and I finally was able to get my ride.
Had cab machines have “broken” electronic payment terminals more times than I can count.
There is on local taxi company that’s always excellent, Atlas Taxi. But other than them had real lousy experiences in the pre uber days. And very hard to get an invoice for tax purposes even if you paid by card.
Not being refused rides (after waiting the usual half hour for the taxi to show up) and not seeing the driver speed away when hailing from the curb was a great experience.
In Hanoi, Uber didn't work. We had a taxi with a fiddled meter. They tried to charge me $40 US for a 2km journey.
Coming off a bus/train, you get swamped by drivers and you absolutely must know exactly where you're going and how to get there or you will be taken wherever the driver is being paid to take you.
Cartagena is a close second.
Interestingly, outside of major ports of call, Hanoi was lovely, some of the best food I've eaten anywhere and $10/night for a beautiful room. You get a lot of ding for your dong as long as you know how to miss the scams.
Some parts of thailand are pretty much like that too. Being screwed by Taxis if you are a tourist is the norm.
The only solution I see for this kind of abuse would be meter + "strictly follow GPS" rule.
That's some devaluing in the last decade.
One time after I begrudgingly accepted the lump sum, our cab got stuck in bad traffic and the supposedly 20 minute ride turned into a one and a half hour ride. At some point the driver half-jokingly suggested that maybe we should go by the meter after all.
For those looking to travel to Vietnam, use Grab or Be. Grab is the most popular choice, while Be is a local competitor.
Also, I’m pretty sure the meter didn’t display the same number of zeros as the currency. That is, the last 2 zeros were omitted on the meter. But the driver said there were three omitted. Something like that. Oh well.
Otherwise, I had a wonderful stay. Beautiful country, nice people. I can’t wait to go back.
What I recall is that the meter didn't cut off the last three zeros but rather just two. Maybe it was a faulty meter (or maybe it was me). I was just off the plane, it was middle of the night and I was exhausted.
I should note that it was me who suggested the wrong amount, and he just accepted. I don't think he set out to swindle me.
Overall I found the country to be mostly free of people trying to take advantage of foreigners - Unlike Thailand and (especially) Cambodia. I also felt very safe there.
The next morning the cab arrives on time – great – I get in and we drive to the airport, at which point the driver reveals that their credit card machine is conveniently "broken". The driver insists I leave my luggage in the cab as collateral while I go inside the airport to find a cash machine. This ends up taking about 15 minutes, I have to pay $5 in ATM fees, I'm anxious the entire time he's going to leave with my luggage, etc.
Yeah, I don't mind paying more.
"no" usually works here.
It's not on you to deal with the problem of a broken credit card machine.
I'm glad to hear it has improved. Almost as glad as I am that rideshare exists now.
Hell, 2003 was the first time the subway systems stopped taking coins.
as someone on twitter mentioned -- it depended on your skin color and where you were going.
This was in Vegas last weekend, for reference.
I don't see how Uber's going to survive if they can't match cab prices...
I think the bigger issues are that most drivers found new jobs given demand was so low for so long.
And unemployment payments are still pretty high in many states. You probably lose money driving an Uber if you qualify for unemployment insurance right.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQzw8MVlQlo
"overhauling how taxis worked" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I have a hard time seeing how that would've ever happened in the absence of something like a Lyft or Uber. That's an extraordinarily difficult task.
There is a parallel universe where some tech worker came along and created apps and sold them to the taxi companies. That would have led to much better taxi service -- though still a monopolist keeping the number of cabs small to protect their own profits.
The couldn't have tried to be Uber either because the law didn't allow non medallion drivers
Why would taxi services invest if there is no competition which makes them provide a better service?
Not everything is price. It would be interesting to see the outcome if ridesharing apps would exactly match the price of taxis.
OTOH Kuala Lumpur is so much more accessible with Grab than before
Uber and Lyft have been operating for 10ish years.
Cherry picking.
Since the drivers are just contractors, as Uber insists, it stands to reason that they should be able to subcontract. :)
This seems a symptom of the massive drop in demand causing a lot of drivers to leave the system. Hopefully this will self-adjust over a period of time, because I admit right now its pretty ridiculous the prices in Seattle. It is 1.5-2x more for essentially any ride, and surges are even more ridiculous.
[0] - https://globalnews.ca/news/1780260/toronto-taxi-licence-pric...
The number quoted in the article said there are only 500 taxi's in SF right now? That seems super low and not significant - since all the estimates I can find for SF ubers in the area are in the tens of thousands.
I'm sure once more people will become drivers if surge continues - and people will be looking for work again
Anyone fancy starting a delivery startup? I would absolutely pay a premium to anyone that can deliver groceries while alleviating the feeling of being complicit in the abuse of employees that I currently get from Instacart.
Uber; for people suffering from morality.
Seems all these efforts have failed, and I'd be curious how many short positions are out there against them.
I've been at the receiving end of these Uber & Lyft shortages. Can't get a ridershare below $80 at SFO after 9pm even if you've pre-scheduled one. The drivers also keep cancelling in an attempt to pump rates higher. Its incredibly frustrating.
I've pretty much given up and now rent a car when I would have taken an Uber when I'm out of town.
Otherwise you're beating a dead horse.
Anyway, my point is that self driving is clearly not in a "well, it didn't work" state - it's ongoing, and seems to be making good progress. I have no timeline for you.
But keep in mind, this doesn't mean they work anywhere else in the country or world. What will happen to them in bad weather or some damage to the vehicle or a flat tire or navigating a scene cordoned off by police, or a parade? What happens when they do not have the meticulously groomed information? Likely, Cruise will manually tell the vehicle to avoid the area, shut the vehicle down, or take over control remotely.
Self-Driving cars are designated into technology levels 0 through 5[0], from no capabilities, to "simple" lane-keeping and/or cruise control, to autonomous with caveats
I don't know exactly which technologies Cruise is using to achieve their mostly autonomous taxi, as that information is worth the billions invested in the company, however from what I have been able to gather, they still use a remote safety operator in some instances. The safety operator can take control of the car if a safety problem presents.
The cruise cars in SF are essentially bespoke for their market. If you take it to Wichita or Maryland, these things will likely not be able to manage the environment. The self-driving capabilities are still unable to reach SAE level 5, fully autonomous driving in all conditions.
Its easy to look at Cruise and conclude, "We've arrived!" but I would still caution restraint, as it has been possible to operate autonomous vehicles with extensive constraints for many years, such as autonomous rail.
[0] - https://www.sae.org/news/press-room/2018/12/sae-internationa...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving...
As for selling off their self-driving division, I don't get how that's a failure or giving up, given that the article lists an explicit 400M investment. The article (rightly) points out that Uber doesn't need to own self driving to benefit from it, and given that it's a hard problem, they spun it out into its own company that can receive independent funding.
If it's "people expected this to already be done and it isn't" yeah sure, of course.
As of 6/15, about 5% of the UBER float was sold short, and the put/call ratio is .439 according to thinkorswim. Short interest will be reported again on 7/15. For comparison, 10% of ABNB and LYFT are sold short, with a similar p/c ratio.
What? It's still actively advancing every year. This is like saying manned missions to Mars have failed. We're not there yet but the steps we're taking aren't "failure"
GoJek and Grab (SEA Ridesharing alternatives and "super-apps") both have a "Taxi" option when selecting the type of car you want. I'm assuming it's similar to just merging this "FlyWheel" app that the US has into their own.
But SF public transit is totally shit. I recall the only reason we'd ever use it is that a bunch of us were going there together and we get to hang out.
My time is way too precious to wait for the 38 or the 44 to stop 15 times a mile. I can beat them in my car, even with transit lanes.
The good thing uber brought, was that taxi companies finally created an app / apps!
Nonetheless, you pay through the app.. Sooo why would you need the card?
However their pricing was never real. They took billions of VC dollars to make it seem like Uber could be better AND cheaper which drove every tradition cab company out of business. It also meant that all of the benefits of Uber accrued to the rider and the shareholders, the driver's didn't do so well.
Now they have to raise prices to a rate that's actually profitable. Meanwhile the taxi companies got their act together a bit. They have apps now, they take credit cards. So things will end up better across the board, just maybe not cheaper.
Consumer benefit aside. Ubers pricing strategy should probably have been illegal. You should not be able to flood a market like that. In international trade this is called dumping [0]. I wish we had a similar law for tech companies that want to destroy incumbents with VC money.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
New startup, vc money, bankrupt others… run out of money
Then repeat
The ubiquitous smartphone equipped with GPS did this. Once the technology existed it was an inevitability, just like it was for boarding passes and restaurant reservations and everything else.
The predatory anti-competitive lawless aspect of the transition to smartphone driven can hailing however was probably optional.
Someone still had to create a popular service to compete with taxis, which wasn't all that easy when it wasn't even clear how to do it legally. It's only with hindsight that it might seem obvious.
Yes, maybe some other company would have eventually figured out how to do it a different way, but "eventually" can be a long time and reasoning about counterfactual events isn't as easy as invisible hand arguments make it seem.
In Germany for example we can easily hail taxis (actual ones, not private cars) with at least two or three different apps, and this has been a thing for almost a decade now, even though Uber never really got its private-car-based service on track here due to legal problems. I've used Lyft in the US a few times, and the experience with those taxi apps in Germany is very much comparable.
Abstract, universal arguments only go so far.
This same argument comes up literally every time obvious anti-competitive practices are mentioned and it’s bullshit. It’s completely and totally reasonable to demand innovation AND ethical business practices coexist and anyone telling you otherwise has an agenda.
I am not sure Uber and Lyft work like you think they work. Drivers can take anyone they want. They often take the most profitable offers, because they want to make the time they spend in their car more worthwhile. The drivers can offer rides all day long and accept any proposal offered, if they choose to do that.
Drivers can also hold out within a metro, collectively, and drive the price up by artificially shortening supply. People need rides, so they will offer to pay more in order to entice a driver to pick them up. And, if prices get too high, taxis are usually an option where artificial supply limitation is happening.
VC money goes to kick-starting infrastructure and software and employees that run the business.
This is because of surge pricing and higher volume. Even when there is no surge profitability is quite good as long as it's busy enough for back to back rides.
If you're patient and ride during slower times you pay a similar amount to what the price was years ago.
When I first moved to NYC Uber wasn't really a thing so had to take cabs at times. Even in Manhattan it sucked in so many ways. Examples include:
- The stupid in-car advertising you had to turn off
- Cab card readers seemed to be a common method of skimming
- Getting a cab around shift changes
- Tricks to get a cab to go to somewhere they didn't want to go (ie anywhere that isn't Manhattan below 96th).
- Language barrier. The number of times I've had 14th mistaken for 40th was unbelievable.
- Just the general friction of the interaction and payment.
- Cab cleanliness.
- Inability to call for a cab or schedule one. I came from Australia and was honestly perplexed by this at first.
Years ago I took a few cabs in SF and used to joke with people that the interaction went something like:
"Take me to the end of the street"
"That'll be $30"
I once caught a cab from SFO to Mountain View, which is outside their normal range so there was a 50% surcharge. The guy made many mistakes in just getting off 101 onto 85. Missing exits, going around, that sort of thing. I had to give directions from my phone. The thing turned into $130 since he was running the meter the whole time. I ended up giving him no tip for this on principle even though it was being expensed and he yelled at me. As a cab drive if you can't handle "101 South to 85 South to El Camino North" then you have a problem.
I'm still skeptical about surge pricing in general. I'm not convinced it has much if anything to do with demand vs supply or that drivers see any of it.
But a more interesting story might be how surge pricing has changed in SF over time. For example: does it occur more often? Why? Are less drivers driving? Why?
Recently I tried to use Uber Eats in Miami and it was literally impossible. Why? "No drivers available". Basically no one drove for Uber Eats. They all drove for DoorDash, Seamless/Grubhub or Postmates instead.