I hate calling for cabs, waiting in a queue, answering all sorts of irrelevant questions beyond where I want to be picked up, only to have the cab show up at the wrong place anyway. So Uber is definitely scratching an itch. An itch that the traditional taxi companies can just as easily scratch with an app of their own.
So they'd better clear the road and start hacking, because this strike won't save them in the long run.
I love simply raising my arm to have a driver arrive to take me anywhere, having a conversation in a way that two only two total strangers can, & arriving at my destination for the equivalent of one hours work on minimum wage (Sydney).
Cabs.
I love that this is profitable, and is a job that lots of folk can get. One cabbie I talked to once used to program VAX machines.
So, because you live and travel around populated places, you don't see the problem. Therefore, it must not exist.
In SF, it's great if you life in the mission, bad if you live in the Richmond. (Actually, there's a good app that works with the cabs there, but before that...)
In Boston, don't live in Dorchester or JP. Calling a cab here is unreliable.
Living in a more sparse city, the only way to get a cab is dispatch. It's terrible.
> In Boston, don't live in Dorchester or JP. Calling a cab here is unreliable.
I one time opened the Uber app in Dorchester. A driver accepted me. I watched him drive around the fens in circles for the next half hour (literally, Park Drive to Fenway to Park Drive to Fenway). So I cancelled the fare. And Uber then charged me a $10 fee because I cancelled more than 5 minutes after the driver accepted.
Don't know what the fuck that was all about, but the one time I tried in Dorchester, Uber was horrid.
good that you enjoy it, but this is about France, most socialistic country in western Europe with crippling national strikes all the time (not condemning, just observing since I am rarely affected). People there generally often have the perception that their own job security should be held above everybody's convenience, rights and so on (it's also heavily unionized, which kind of makes sense with whole picture of the country and mentality). It's just not a very competitive job market
In Bratislava (at least), there is a taxi service operating over multiple companies and independent drivers. I've never used it, but it's apparently pretty good. You rate drivers and all. Still under all the TAXI regulation. I think that's the right way to do things.
A step in the right direction, at least. Problem is, if I come to a new town I probably won't be checking the app store. So it would have to be something that spans the whole EU. Also, EU needs to be a single data roaming zone, it's completely ridiculous the way it is now. It's often the same damn cell provider, but because it's a different country there's a completely unreasonable extra charge and an insulting data cap.
Edit: looking at the reviews, apparently they charge for the trip to your location before they even pick you up, which is just stupid. Wouldn't they actually want to encourage using the app so people aren't clogging the call centres?
The local taxi company I usually use in Amsterdam had an app before Uber was even a thing.
That's a lame excuse. The only itch Uber is scratching is the libertarian itch to circumvent consumer protection, environmental protection and labour laws.
> The only itch Uber is scratching is the libertarian itch to circumvent consumer protection, environmental protection and labour laws.
A coworker of mine has an amusing tale to illustrate how well consumer-protection laws protected him when his NYC taxi driver, driving on an illegally-borrowed medallion, demanded cash (instead of credit) to keep the transaction off the books, briefly holding him hostage and threatening to steal his luggage.
Yes, because theft and extortion are covered by consumer protection laws.
Oh, wait...
You do realize that the only difference Uber here makes is that it makes it easier for the criminal in question, since doesn't even have to bother stealing a medallion or have car that looks like a taxi?
why not take significant portion of the country (ie those commuting daily by trains to work, school etc) as your hostages? how can they defend? pathetic cowardly behavior in my book...
I took my wife to Paris last year. When I turned up a taxi tout (I assume for an un-licensed taxi) offered to get us to our hotel (about 6 km away) for 100 euro. When I demurred he kindly lowered the price to 60 euro. I ordered an uber, which picked us up in ~10 mins and the total cost was 20 euro.
So while I sympathize with taxi drivers, they really can't expect consumers to not prefer something that's manifestly better for them.
BTW in London, before uber a black cab might cost me £60-70 to get home if I'd missed a train. An uber now can be as little as £25, which is low enough that I can just not worry about the terribly unreliable and sparse trains and plan my trip home that way.
You get what you pay for. If you're happy to entrust your life into a random untrained uninsured stranger, then go ahead and get the cheaper unregulated taxi.
I'm pretty sure that the taxi that was being touted for the first time was also unregulated, so it's extremely unclear here what 3x my money was going to get me.
Quality of black cabs and mini-cabs in London in also wildly variable. At least with uber you can actually leave a bad review (I'm not sure what comes of those) but I get a response on bad reviews at least.
Almost every black cab ride I've ever had has been great - and they most certainly know how to get round London better than a newly minted uber driver with google maps. However if you've never had a black cab with the driver spouting racist/misogynist/anti immigration rhetoric they whole journey, then you haven't lived ;-)
A lot of taxi drivers grew up when London was part of England, before it became a "global city". It's unsurprising that they miss those days when it was still culturally part of England.
Regulations didn't save John Nash from dying in a traditional taxi. If you're happy to entrust your life to a random stranger that's shielded from market conditions/feedback, then go ahead and get the regulated taxi.
You think market conditions will make taxis safer? Why do you think we have OSHA? Why do you think selling products with lead paint in them is illegal?
Market conditions have made transportation safer. Two way rating systems, accessible GPS, drivers #, drivers picture, driers location, arrival time etc.
These qualities are present because they were superior to the previous market provider, in order to compete in a free market your product or service has to be superior in some manner. Competitive market forces like safety, efficieny (both price and liquidity) are what makes Uber successful.
No laws dictated these qualities, no legislation demanded this level of safety. These practices were conceived via market forces, and safety was a by product.
Safety precautions are in fact codified by law. Uber is in the business of breaking the law and ignoring all regulations. The fact that they have a substitute that follows the spirit of the regulations if not the letter and provides safety is the only reason governments have chosen to allow Uber to exist. The safety precautions Uber has ARE required by regulation, though implicitly; they act as a substitute which makes Uber's lawbreaking far less egregious.
The entire point of Uber is that the taxi industry is not a free market, therefore the things necessary to compete in a theoretical "free market" are not relevant and can't be assumed to be why Uber is successful.
Uber uses roads that were designed to comply with government safety regulations and their drivers drive cars designed to comply with a different set of government safety regulations. Those regulations exist because experience has shown that they need to.
Unless I'm wrong you're arguing that Uber is safe and efficient because market forces made it so. It's efficient because of technological advances and it's safe literally to the extent required by law.
Because they've opted out of the regulations their competitors are subject to Uber could offer a a more dangerous and less efficient service than current taxi companies and still "compete".
In general I agree with what you're saying. I also use Uber and enjoy Uber a great deal. But I think it's important to understand that a) There's a very good chance that your fare is subsidized by venture capital and does not reflect a "true" fare and that b) this subsidization, like any subsidization, will drive non subsidized competitors from your marketplace which can result in c) Uber deciding to no longer subsidize the true cost of a fare and you having a marketplace with far less competition.
It's called "predatory pricing," but I think you must usually prove that the intent is specifically to eliminate your competition - simply selling below cost isn't illegal, AFAIK (IANAL).
You're right - all of these things are of concern.
The incumbents never really seem to make an argument beyond shrieking that their protected racket is being disrupted though. I remember one hilarious picture on the news of a cabbie f-ing and blinding to a reporter out of his window at a protest against uber. Just behind him in his cab was a sign saying "cash only".
When an innovation comes along and starts stealing your lunch, screaming that you were here first isn't really going to help you much!
When someone comes to you to offer you a "taxi" service in France, it's pretty certainly a scam (especially with a price like that). A licensed taxi has a sign on the roof, doesn't randomly offer you its service, and its price is regulated. It never would have cost you even 60€ for 6 km. It would have been roughly the same as with the Uber, maybe a bit cheaper.
The question of whether you would prefer a licensed taxi or an Uber is a different one which I won't get into for now :)
The problem is that I now have to know, for every country I visit, what their taxi regulation laws are and how they enforce them. With Uber, I know the brand, and I can just expect not to get scammed.
For international travelers it's the franchising aspect that is most appealing.
Uber operates in countries where their services are not in compliance with the local legislation (or operate in a gray area), and are operating until they get to a court case that will decide whether it is legal or not.
So if you don't know the local taxi regulation, your Uber might get pulled over by the cops who take the driver and you're left in the middle of nowhere. This has happened in Helsinki, for example (where the local taxi service is very reliable, albeit somewhat expensive and may be busy at certain hours).
In general, when visiting a country, you are expected to roughly know what the local legislation is.
So getting pulled over for using a trusted brand with a reputation at stake instead of the local tourist-preying cabs is supposed to be proof of the value of taxi regulation?
There are no tourist predator cabs in Helsinki because the cops stop anyone suspected of running an illegal cab service, including Uber rides. Many of the horror stories of getting ripped off in this thread have indeed been pirate cabs with no regulation behind them.
There might be some reasonable middle ground but I'm quite happy paying for a reliable, regulated service despite it's flaws rather than a wild west situation.
Just a simple advice: When someone comes to you to offer you a "taxi" service everywhere in the world, be careful, it might be a scam. (One time, I've been robbed of all of my money in Vietnam accepting an offer like that)
The best thing to do is to go to a taxi terminal or stop a car with TAXI written on it.
A while back in at Nice airport I was trying to get a cab into town. The licensed taxis with taxi signs on them were quoting us about twice the metered fare to get in. I actually wandered over to tourist info and asked if the cabs were not supposed to work at the official fares and they just kind of shrugged as if to say what can we do. You can see why consumers would not be too keen on the situation.
Are you really comparing Uber to conmen trying to trick tourists into expensive rides? Of course it's better than that. I'll also add that Uber is better than being mugged, assaulted, or pickpocketed. So what?
I had the same experience. Uber was routinely cheaper than taxis in France. And hailing with an app is astoundingly better than waving at cars in the rain.
You can't hail a taxi in France. Either you wait at a designated spot that bears a Taxi sign, or you need to call for them.
There are a few apps that work great in Paris like 'Taxis Bleus' and are more convenient than Uber since you can get a taxi to pick you up in a few minutes (they are usually more taxis around you than Uber cars).
Having said that, I'm all for competing cab services. The French taxi system has been games to protect a the taxi drivers at the expense of the users, resulting in high prices and an less convenience (can't hail a taxi).
What? You can definitely hail a taxi in France. It can sometimes be very hard to find one that is free, but there's no law that says you have to either call for them or go to a taxi stop.
I stand corrected. I don't remember what persuaded me to the contrary. It's nevertheless a daunting task compared to the experience you get as a user in many other countries.
Well, sure, that's true. But let's augment that discovery: Illegal, unregulated services preferred by customers on both price and quality, despite substantial disadvantages (street hails, airport pickup nonsense, etc).
That should kind of leave you asking: exactly who are those regulations supposed to be protecting, anyway?
Google plans to make their self-driving car available to the public by 2020 [0]. Perhaps they aren't going to hit that deadline but I doubt they'll miss it by 80 years.
Self driving cars are essentially a software project (and more) and I've never heard of a software project having an estimate that far out and ever being even close to making its deadline.
My personal opinion is that self-driving cars that are reliable enough to literally not have a steering wheel will be perpetually a "few years away", similar to how we're always saying nuclear fusion or true AI is just a few decades off. It's like the 80/20 rule but more like 99/1... That last 1% of capabilities required to make cars truly driverless are going to take 99% of the effort.
Making them available in California isn't the same as making them available in a). Countries that have weather, and b). Countries that have curved roads.
As another poster comments, it's as close as several other science fiction things that are always "A few years away!".
Great, they're saying that, but, on the other hand, they only operate them in a small area in Mountain View because the level of detail the things need to operate is just not there anywhere in the US. In addition, the driverless cars have trouble dealing with temporary road closures and the like -- the kind of stuff human drivers have to deal with regularly. It's not at all clear that this is going to be a practical technology anytime soon, despite all the hype.
> Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn’t drive itself in 99 percent of the country? Or that knew nearly nothing about parking, couldn’t be taken out in snow or heavy rain, and would drive straight over a gaping pothole?
> If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car, model year 2014.
Is there any basis for thinking this is 100 years away when we have working prototypes now? Compare other technologies which had working prototypes; did any take 100 years to get to operation? (The longest/closest I can think of is 'flying cars', which first ran in '47 and don't have a clear road to success today. There are many counter-examples.)
There's a lot of examples. Just watch Back To The Future Part II for some obvious examples.
When they landed on the moon, do you think they thought we'd still be faffing about doing not much in space 50 years later? I'm betting they thought we'd be colonising mars by now.
Uber is going to be one of the biggest proponents and purchasers of self-driving cars. This whole rideshare thing was just to get their foot in the door. I'm sure the drivers will be pissed though.
Uber is an unlawful business that tries to by-pass Labour law. If Uber model is imposed workers will be working for big companies without proper rights or protections. I want cheaper and better services but never at the cost of other people's rights.
With time driverless cars will be the norm. Until then I want that the people that drive me home have as many rights as them deserve.
(What will happen when machines are able to do all manual work is another more complex discussion)
Don't forget that Uber are congesting the road, polluting, and going around without adequate insurance, all issues that affect even people who never use the service.
So are taxis. So is every other form of transport that uses a road. I never ride the bus but in Avignon, I get to wait behind long congested lines of buses clogging the ring road when I just want to get my daughter from her little school. I never ride those buses. Also your logical fallacy is a little silly: how does going around 'without insurance' harm people that don't use the service? That statement is just untrue. ALL drivers in France must have insurance.
Actually, the insurance problem is more complex: Normal drivers insurance does not pay if you were transporting a stranger for-profit. That’s why you need a special insurance for that, which most uber X drivers do not have
All cars do that, but most cars are driven like 2 hours a day. The insurance coverage Uber has is rather skimpy despite Uber's success in changing regulations to get it to be considered adequate.
I have no sympathy for taxi drivers. They can scream about how cars are destroying their horse and buggy business but I don't care. They want to destroy competition not by lowering their own costs, but by artificially raising someone else's. Why not eliminate the taxi license fee? Why not protest that? Who gets that license fee and for what purpose? Make licenses free and thus eliminate that cost. If insurance is the problem, require it. With more people in the insurance pool, rates should go down. Mais no; it's better to flatten tires rather than speed up the horse.
Many taxi drivers also don't accept credit cards. Many also don't have GPS so I've wasted plenty of money while the driver wanders around looking for my address. Modernize or die. The taxi business is a business, not a social welfare agency.
> I want cheaper and better services but never at the cost of other people's rights.
I hear that quite a bit.
The evidence seems to be the opposite though. So long as the deprivation of someone else's rights and conditions is external to your experience, hidden from view... then people tend to be very accepting of any compromise of another person so long as the price goes down (quality isn't even important if the price is low enough).
When people tend to try and argue this, I usually proffer Primark in the UK as an example. People have got to the point that they think a £4 T-shirt costly, without any regard as to how it came to be that a T-shirt is even valued at £4.
We only have some issue with taxis because we speak to the people involved. Even then we're hardly sympathetic.
You've very eloquently argued why voting with your wallet to provide a market-solution to stop abuse and exploitation of workers will never work and why we need government regulations if there is any hope to live in anything but a capitalist dystopia with a tiny sliver of ultra-wealthy owning class, and the rest de-facto slaves.
This actually does present a dilemma for working class folks. The article indicates that taxi drivers have experienced a loss in income of 30-40%. I don't imagine French taxi drivers earn a whole lot of money. Moreover, an idea could be that the French taxi drivers could just switch over to Uber. The tax driver may be stuck if they have already paid a certain amount of a car, registration, etc.
Also, they may not be able to make as much with Uber. Buzz Feed News estimated that US Uber drivers can make $34,164 per year. French laws may also include benefits for driving a taxi vs. being an independent contractor with no benefits with Uber.
Services like AirBnB and Uber can be great for entrepreneurs, investors, part-time workers, and consumers. We should be reminded that disrupting industries sometimes creates losers in the working and middle class that don't have an easy way to switch jobs in some countries or economies.
I mean, seriously. It's hard enough to come up with an innovative technological idea that people actually embrace and to turn it into a viable, sustainable, profitable business. In fact, that's SUPER hard, it's one of the hardest things there are, that's why there are so few people who successfully manage to pull it off. It's also why we reward them so seemingly disproportionately.
Through all of this, an entrepreneur is responsible for all sorts of things - industry regulations, business regulations, local regulations, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, investor satisfaction, life/work balance, keeping the environment clean, etc, etc, etc, in addition to the actual product or service and the long-term success of the business.
Now you want to also make me responsible for the social norms that I'm disrupting? Thanks, but no, thanks. This is NOT my responsibility. That's what governments are for. Governments are by definition socialist structures responsible for the well-being of the "working class". I am the opposite of socialist. I'm here to disrupt - don't ask me to step on my own toes.
I mean, soon you'll be asking me to compensate the bankers that my fintech startup is disrupting...
Outside of extremist hyper-libertarian hiveminds like you find on certain threads on HN, saying "I'm here to disrupt" aka destroy lives and take as much money for yourself as possible or "the government is by definition socialist" (a silly and false claim -- government in the United States is generally wholly owned by wealthy capitalists who provide no value to society other than 'currently having money' and is in the business of socializing risk and privatizing rewards) and demanding that noone ever hold you responsible for the consequences of your actions because "thinking about how my actions effect people isn't in my personal self-interest"... well, it won't endear you or your position to anyone and it isn't convincing, it's just childish and entitled (a rather succinct description of general Libertarian political philosophy in fact). Sure you might not be legally required to be a good person, but if you choose not to be, then you're a bad person, but you've chosen to be so don't whine when people call you on it.
Technological innovation CREATES value, doesn't destroy it. It necessarily disrupts the status quo and pisses people off, and that takes courage, but does not make the innovator a bad person. It makes them a very courageous person, worthy of all admiration.
On the other hand, you might call a bad person someone who expects that everyone else is obliged to feed him. One who throws "responsibilities" at those who refuse to work for him. One who morally manipulates people into doing what pleases him. I'd call this a bad person, although I personally don't believe that evil exists, so I am more likely to call that person plain stupid.
What you seem to mean by this is that I haven't taken Ayn Rand's teen fantasy novels as a central religious text upon which all knowledge, thought, and discourse are based.
Sometimes the status quo is better than what replaces it. Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly. Is that good or bad? It's reasonable to argue both sides. In the present time, it looks like it's good for almost everyone. But the consequences of rewriting laws for a particular company so it can gain total control of a socially necessary transportation infrastructure are far-reaching. Technology does not 'necessarily' do anything good or bad. It is a tool and all it 'necessarily' does is create new options for people who happen to have access to it (generally wealthy people). Sometimes those options, if chosen by the wealthy, make life worse for people without access to that same technology (the non-wealthy). Not always of course, but it's something that should be considered.
'Disrupts' is just a weasel-word to spin the accurate description of what is happening, 'destroys', into something that is axiomatically good. In fact it's dishonest to use this terminology; you need to show the particular change is actually good and describe what you mean by good (good for everyone? Good for rich white yuppies with smartphones?) before you are allowed to describe it as good, something many people in tech seem to forget.
And in your previous post you rejected the notion that you should ever consider the consequences your actions have on other people in society; now you seem to be trying to weasel your way out of it with some pseudo-religious tripe about how innovators are gods and everyone who destroys is courageous and worthy of "all admiration". I am at this point reconsidering the value of continuing this discussion since when blind religion meets thoughtful consideration, blind religion invariably wins; especially when it's religion fueled by narcissism and a visceral need to justify one's own selfish childishness. But I've written it already so I'll leave it here.
"Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly"
This sums up the uber situation very well.
I think that, regarding the HN libertarian "wealth creator's" topic,(to try and be as sympathetic as I can be) there is a tendency to see societies flaw as a lack of wealth, rather than an unequal distribution of wealth. Quite often, married for allegedly fixing the first problem (within the framework of entrepreneurialism) exacerbate the latter.
"Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly"
This sums up the uber situation very well.
I think that, regarding the HN libertarian "wealth creator's" topic,(to try and be as sympathetic as I can be) there is a tendency to see societies flaw as a lack of wealth, rather than an unequal distribution of wealth. Quite often, married for allegedly fixing the first problem (within the framework of entrepreneurialism) exacerbate the latter.
Ok, so you're not stupid, you're actually a very thoughtful guy. You just really irritate me by throwing all these labels at me.
First of all, I have never read Ayn Rand and am not familiar with her work (perhaps I should, you're not the first person to throw me into that bucket).
Second, I don't subscribe to any mainstream religion, so don't call my arguments religious. Every position that I hold has come from my experience. I am a very pragmatic person and consciously choose what to believe based solely on the utility that each belief provides to me. In that sense I am selfish and narcissistic, yes - I don't take these as offences.
One of the beliefs I have (and I think everyone should have, especially entrepreneurs) is that my wellbeing and my happiness is more important than anyone else's. Does that make me an asshole? May be it does. But it also makes me productive and valuable to the very society that you are so concerned about. Much more so than if I did the mistake of putting society's widely diverse needs before my own.
So do I care about my fellow human beings? Yes, very much so.
Am I going to do something that hurst my self interest in order to please anyone else? No, never. That would be irresponsible.
This is why the over regulated environment you probably loathe exists. Businesses are simply not able to self-regulate due to their greed and lack of social empathy and therefore the will of the people (government) have to regulate them - possibly into non-existence.
You will be the victim of your own hubris when the populist majority brings the pitchforks and sucks you dry. And you should know better - the government mainly exists to subsidize outsized risks and ventures by those with influence - the wealthy.
With that - you are trying to destory the existing banking structure so more power to you.
I agree with this sentiment, but I do think that there's validity in the claim that the disruptive nature of startups can have negative consequences for uninvolved parties. I don't think it's a matter of "blame," though, so much as a matter of responsibility -- it is the responsibility of those pushing these disruptive technologies to simultaneously incubate and encourage the social reform necessary to prevent such situations.
You don't say! New rules for entrepreneurs: sit down and consider the disruptive consequences of your new startup. Next, take on the responsibility of simultaneously incubating and encouraging the social reform necessary to prevent such situations. Oh, and don't forget to spare some time for the startup. If you're a journalist or someone benefiting from the new startup, you're 'pushing it' so you have a job to do as well.
I didn't think Uber is a "technological" advancement, so much as a company gambling that it can get away with disrupting the legal quagmire. Same for AirBnB.
Be fair, lots of folks had the same idea and didn't execute so well. The devil is in the details; thus, technology. Even the marketing/lobbying is a technical issue of sorts.
The details might be sales and marketing. The details might be raising a lot more money than your competitors, using a flashy technological demo, but spending the money running at a loss and starving your competition that is trying to grow organically. Or like the gun lobby, the details might be backroom dealings that get laws passed in your favour.
Not all details are "untie this technological knot." Not all companies that fail do so because they didn't get the technology right.
Uber isn't a technological advancement. Its core competence is lobbying and business development, not android and ios development.
It probably wouldn't be a bad thing if most cities just banned uber and created their own apps (or hired a company to do it for them). The network effects in the taxi market are so strong that one company will inevitably end up being a monopoly.
Once the monopoly is locked in the winning company will just milk it for all its worth, simultaneously raising prices and crushing wages. That's bad for everybody (except them).
1. Maybe Uber doesn't look like a technological advancement compared to Google, but Uber is an enormous technological advancement over the status quo in the industry.
2. Uber is breaking the very foundations of the monopolization of the taxi industry. The only monopoly they will maintain moving forward is through customer loyalty based upon perceived value. If Uber falters, there is very little protecting them from a competitor gobbling up their market share.
>If Uber falters, there is very little protecting them from a competitor gobbling up their market share.
Which taxi company's app are you going to use as a passenger? The one with 5 drivers within a 5 minutes' drive, or the one with 1 driver, 25 minutes away?
Which taxi company will you sign up with as a driver? The one which has customers everywhere or the one which doesn't?
Why pretend that network effects do not exist in this industry?
Sure would be nice if it were just about customer service and value, but it isn't. It's about network dominance.
Circa 2006: Whose social networking web site are you going to use, the one where nobody goes to it like Facebook, or the dominant one, Myspace?
Things change quickly when only network effects are stopping competition in a fluid market where all you need to do is download an app to become a user or go through a short process as a driver.
Uber has eliminated many of the tools used by the monopolists. Have they eliminated the value of reputation and high availability? No, but nobody said they had.
The fun part is that a taxi licence is delivered for free by the city, provided you fit the criterias. But taxis don't want too many licences to be around of course, so they lobbied for a low limit to be delivered (which may or may not be revisionned when a city increase in size/population). They built this bubble themselves and now they're crying about it. Since last year you can't resell your licence anymore, obviously it only works for the new ones delivered, otherwise the country would get sued and loose instantly. But the "bought" licences are probably going to stick around forever.
Also the current protest is not about Uber but UberPop, which is kinda illegal at the moment and rightly so. I don't mind the taxis getting fucked over by their own greed, but I'd prefer if it was done lawfully.
Except that people who own the licenses are going to lobby against that (and probably with greater effect considering they're able to afford the licenses in the first place) since that would be a huge loss in equity for them.
It's the same with liquor licenses in Boston (maybe all of Mass., but I'm not sure about that). There's a limited number of them, but they can be resold, usually fetching more than a million dollars. This is a huge startup cost for new restauranteurs, but they have held their value, such that when you decide (or are forced) to sell or close the business, you can recoup that initial investment. Issuing more licenses or trying to reduce the cost of them in other ways would just destroy that value for the owners, most of which have taken out loans against them that would still need to be repaid.
I do feel bad for employees in industries entrenched behind heavy monopoly-protection. Promises were made to these employees, typically by politicians somewhere on the stupid/corrupt spectrum, that the monopoly could protect them in perpetuity.
Monopoly invariably breeds indifference and high prices and that cost fall almost entirely on the taxi user, which is (generally) the wider middle class (and let's not pretend working class people never need a cab too, so they are also hurt) and it's unsustainable to force regular people to subsidise the indifference of a pretty random group of employees (and medallion owners and cab company owners - it's not an exclusive blue collar affair on the receiving end).
So instead of being gently pressured to improve by competition over time, change is dramatic and discontinuous -and that is painful, and that elicits sympathy. The only thing anyone could really have done was to have gradually liberalised the taxi industry over maybe a decade or two to soften the blow, but that requires a time machine.
I'd feel less bad if monopoly protections for billionaire patent holders and land owners (who collect rents from these very taxi drivers) weren't simultaneously getting much, much stronger.
Sadly, some people only seem to care about liberalizing industries that the little people derive just enough income to get by on.
To usefully understand the struggles taking place around Uber's "disruption" of traditional taxis we need a more nuanced perspective than regulation=monopoly=bad/free market=competition=good
The main problem is that taxi medallions cost a lot (€200-250K in Paris, up to €300K in some southern cities). Independent taxi drivers got indebted to buy them, and generally expected to resell them at a profit to finance their retirement.
Another thing that isn't much discussed in medias, is that a few companies, most notably G7, own most medallions and lease them to (poor) drivers, often together with the car and the radio reservation service. Those companies typically have received those medallions for free from the state, decades ago, before reselling them became legalized. Those companies obviously pull some strings, both stirring up drivers and talking in minister cabinets.
Anyway eventually they're fucked, Uber or no Uber: autonomous cars will make taxis obsolete at warping speed. Taxi drivers are fucked that much harder than Uber's, because they'll be left with a worthless medallion and its 20 years mortgage. (It's also likely to make private car ownership marginal, something akin to owning your own horse in the XXth century, thus hitting car manufacturing pretty badly once enough autonomous cars have been produced, but that's another quagmire).
There is very little proof that the techno-utopian version of autonomous vehicles is going to play out the way people like you want it to.
Sure, on the surface Taxi's are dead, but I would wager that it will be a lot slower than people on here think, not least for the difficulty of cleaning autonomous cabs.
Cab drives to cleaners; some dude cleans cab. A few minutes work per day per cab. Maybe the other factors will be of more importance, but I don't see huge labour costs here.
Oh, and bonus: hiring an autonomous account will likely involve disclosing your identity in advance. If you're the sort of customer who makes a habit of fouling cabs, maybe you'll have to pay more to hire one.
There are even investors and syndicates inserting themselves into the medallion markets now [1]. When you see even these market participants pulling out altogether, then I can easily believe the autonomous passenger vehicle is within 5-20 years of obliterating the taxi industry (though I doubt that will happen). I'm not aware of a way to short medallions, so I can't tell if that is going on. So far as I can tell, these people are still participating in the medallion market and various secondary markets, despite the recent downward tick of medallion prices. I'm guessing they and the industry in general have a lot of political pull, and are counting on that influence to wring another few decades out of conventional taxis before autonomous options mutate them into a different-looking industry.
Unless there is a really broad-based public backlash that makes it political suicide to continue licensing however, even if autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous I can't see municipalities and various institutions and agencies in general giving up the affiliated revenue stream. Even if we end up with something like Johnny Cabs [2] and no humans drive taxis any longer, I expect some form of government-imposed licensing to still exist.
The thing is, autonomous vehicles don't need to take the taxi niche frontally. Here's how it goes, if legislation is too slow:
1. families buy one autonomous car instead of several driven ones: when dad's arrived at work, the car goes back to become mom's car for the day. With a nice twist: when the car goes and fetch kids from soccer, mom doesn't have to be in it.
2. People pool cars privately: one car for a couple of families if they're light users, X/Y cars for X families for more intensive users. It's shared property, neither a taxi activity nor even a company providing a service.
2bis. Some AirBnB of autonomous cars facilitates mutual lending of cars, in parallel with the development of privately organized pools
3. Cars are leased instead of bought upfront, from companies embedded with the AirBnB-of-autonomous-cars. What you have now is effectively an autonomous taxi company.
The economic pressure to get rid of drivers will be enormous. Sure, car makers and drivers won't like it, but all of the money that won't go there will be up for grab by other sectors. Think of trucks: not only autonomous trucks will drive 23h a day, but everyone who sells anything moved by truck will have their margin augmented by skipping drivers' salaries.
Excellent observations. For trucks, there are other big downstream effects. The big diesel engines preferentially run continuously, and with autonomous driving we'll see run times between engine shutdowns increase pretty steeply. Manufacturers can tune engine development accordingly so continuous running is the norm. Diesel consumption per unit mass will enjoy a marginal improvement; diesel repair shops will see a marginal decline. If we see concurrent automation of refueling, truck stops will experience a dramatic decline.
If medium and light truck bodies are aligned to a standardized set of chassis, then some of the fleets of delivery trucks that lay idle half the day or longer today can run around the clock, swapping bodies and switching duties when needed.
If we can automate quiet garbage pickup, then a garbage truck that usually only runs during the day can run around the clock.
If we can automate safe delivery of liquid fuels, then entire fleets of various fuel delivery trucks will lay off a lot of drivers.
The pattern I'm seeing is the actual driving might get automated, but the endpoint activities might not be subject to automation just yet, but that might only be a matter of time and possibly standardization.
One problem is that replacing truck drivers with self-driving trucks could save lots of money. However, truck driving is one of the most popular professions in America.
> taxi medallions cost a lot (€200-250K in Paris, up to €300K in some southern cities)
My understanding is that they're actually free. But it can take years before you actually get one, which is why people buy them on the black market.
I don't know how I feel about those taxi drivers. It seems they've just made a very bad investment.
In any case, it would be great if taxis were more affordable and available in France. Maybe the gvt could work with uber and negotiate some sort of compensation for the taxi drivers?
The "bad investment" is worrisome in a capitalist society. Smart investors are supposed to make wise decisions but regulation from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission determine how much capital and experience is required to become a registered investor. However, someone seeking an occupation is not a sophisticated investor. Nor would a factory worker be expected to be able to predict major changes. Yet, working and middle class folks must invest and take risks on education, certification, and career-paths lest they suffer the consequences.
I oppose any usage of my taxes to compensate the rackeetering taxi drivers. Never ever have I taken a taxi in France (I'm French) that didn't charge an exorbitant price while imposing me to listen to their racist and self-important rants. Their profession should die and make room for something better.
License are free when delivered by the state ("préfecture"); but taxis effectively lobby against creating new ones, in order to preserve the value of existing ones and to prevent competition, so extremely few are ever distributed. In practice, the only way to get one is to buy one from a retiring driver.
The vacuum that attracted Uber has been created by their resistance against license creation, they dug their own grave. The two big problems in Paris are that you can't find a taxi when you need one, and when you have one, he often doesn't have a credit card reader (those pesky snitches which prevent tax evasion).
Most taxi drivers don't own their licence, they rent it from a taxi company.
Anyway, Parisian taxi drivers are responsible for Uber's very existence(). Now they're making Uber look even more compelling by behaving like dicks to maintain the status-quo.
Think about these poor postmen every time you send an e-mail.
As long as we are moving forward jobs market will keep changing. Those workers are also consumers. They have cheap electronics at home made in China (which caused some local factory workers to lose their jobs), they use roads built by machines in places where humans used to do the work. They eat food from automated farms that are more efficient.
It's all connected. I wouldn't say it creates losers in any class. Their/our living standard would be much much lower at this point without these kind of changes.
It's up up up up DOWN up up up. (DOWN being when it hits your sector and you are not prepared for the change, and up when it hits other industries)
"Services like AirBnB and Uber can be great for entrepreneurs, investors, part-time workers, and consumers. We should be reminded that disrupting industries sometimes creates losers in the working and middle class that don't have an easy way to switch jobs in some countries or economies."
This is absolutely true, but it has always been so, for countless professions across the centuries.
Industrialization, automatization, globalization have caused many people to lose their livelihood due to the obsolescence of their industry and profession, but the net result has always been a richer, more modern society (whether if 'happier' or 'better', it's hard to say).
Taxi drivers happen to be a much more vocal, compact and uniform community, and that's why they appear more in the news, but there are countless other people being affected by technical progress on a daily basis (from journalist to shoe repairers to travel agents).
While it might not be a zero-sum game, to reference a famous pg essay, it's a bit naive thinking that entrepreneurs can create value out of nothing, without affecting the existing status-quo in other ways than positive ones.
Instead of fighting it by enforcing ad-hoc laws, governments and unions should work towards creating the conditions so that the affected workers are able to find other occupations, IMHO.
The prime difference between Uber and, say, factory automatization is that it's not certain that Uber is strictly better.
All things considered, full-time drivers make less with Uber, have less benefits, and are generally worse off. There's huge amounts of literature concerning the effects of, say, not having health insurance on general job performance (spoilers: it doesn't make them better at their jobs).
So in the end we get lower quality rides, even if they're cheaper (which they aren't always due to surge pricing!)
Obsession with lower costs inevitably bring about generally lower quality goods, empirically (already happened with food and consumer goods, compare a French supermarket with an American one).
It is certain that Uber is the superior alternative. People are not stupid, they wouldn't drive or ride if it wasn't their best option. Anecdotally Uber is 300% cheaper and arrives in 5mins as opposed to 55 in my city.
You've referenced literature and empirical evidence, citations please.
> The prime difference between Uber and, say, factory automatization is that it's not certain that Uber is strictly better.
In practice, though, as a quasi-frequent user of taxi service in a variety of cities (NYC, Atlanta, Chicago) who doesn't even care much about the price (as I get to expense most of those rides)... I'd opine that Uber is strictly better, even though the taxis a variety of huge advantages (like a straightforward airport pickup procedure).
I think there are at least two ways in which Uber is intrinsically better: One, Uber Pool, which uses network effects and a computerized super-dispatcher to let riders share cabs. Two, the concentration of capital in Uber compared to taxi companies allows investment and research in driverless cars. These result purely from Uber's size and the infrastructure which enables and is enabled by that size.
Uber does give you the ability to choose higher quality if you'd like. An UberX is a low quality ride by a likely inexperienced driver with the benefit that it is cheap. An Uber Black gives you a nicer car with a very likely (but not necessarily, but in my experience they are professional private limo drivers) experienced driver.
I agree on our societies approach to "value" only relating to cost at the expense of quality - but that's a different topic all together.
It's actually more of a legal question. Uber only manages to work through lots of questionable tactics of which many are illegal:
- Most of the uber drivers don't actually pay taxes
- Most of the uber drivers only work for uber which makes the self-employment fictitious. This allows to disregard things like minimum wage and payments for social security.
- Most of uber drivers don't have a permission for transporting people. This puts customers at risk.
- Most of uber drivers don't have an insurance that covers transporting people commercially.
All these apply even in the case where private taxi companies are allowed. Uber's business model is based on exploiting the drivers, disregarding safety regulations and dodging taxes.
French Taxi drivers are knowned to be unfriendly and not quite honest, and lazy. They're trying to keep their business protected instead of trying to get better. Now, they even use violence against Uber-drivers & Uber-customers. BTW, they don't give a shit of their own customers...
At the beginning, when Uber opened in France, I could understand their problem. But now, they just went to far: instead of being better to keep their business, they just want to keep their business by being the only players, leaving no choice to customers but to use them. And that's plain wrong for me...
In fact, I think that I would support an action from Uber against Taxi syndicates & French government support, either in the street or in the European Court of Justice
Disclosure: I'm a french parisian and never used Uber (yet) but used Taxi from time to time... ;)
It's a typical aggressive reaction when an old system is under threat. Easier to attack than to evolve. In time Uber will probably have to submit to adapted laws, while Taxis will trim fat, improve their service and behavior, and things will balance out.
yes but... as stated, current taxi drivers won't sweat a bit to actually improve their services, which are generally deemed as sub par to be polite. but they will go great lengths to hurt any sign of competition, even users who show interest in it.
how much more rotten their behaviour must be for you to start caring about customers more than them? of course it's not black & white, but this industry is in grave need of disruption, and one is coming. i don't care about them any more than they do care about me, fair deal.
I .. empathize with Taxis anyway, even though it's hard to justify violence of that kind (beatings, fires). They do suck a lot more than they should, like many many old businesses[1]. Don't forget the burden of being a legitimate business too, it's risky and costly.
How would you feel if all of a sudden anybody can play in your field for free while you paid 100K, and have to comply to a lot of legislations for the same rights.
[1] reminds me of Air France, it's easy to think RyanAir is better, but in reality AirFrance offer you a lot more. I believe Uber falls under the same issues, sure they're cheap, but they don't give any insurances. They did benefit from a nice technological mastery that made the service interface far better than the old system.
In fact, Taxis GAVE their businesses to Uber by despising their own customers... If they has been good enough, Uber wouldn't have had so much momentum here.
I'm really sad for the few taxis working hard to be better because they're thrown now in the same bag as the average bad taxis. Hopefully, most of the time, good taxis have loyal customers (and no problem with UberPOP for that same reason).
BTW, I'm working in computer science so... disruption is at the heart of my field!!! :D
I'm into CS too, and was all about progress but I've tamed my ideas.
Do you really think that bad Taxis drove customers away or was it the system bottleneck (waiting so long, difficulty in finding a cab when you need one) and seemingly lower prices. Again, Uber give you less, AFAIK you're not insured if something happens, you dont even know if the guy has an insurance for himself, there's no check of any kind (as a CS guy you should be afraid of that), so prices can appear lower.
> I .. empathize with Taxis anyway, even though it's hard to justify violence of that kind (beatings, fires).
Welcome to French leftism! It's a bit of a unique brand, as France has been culturally skeptical of movements like international communism (to say nothing of the globalization economy), and it has a distinctive nationalistic style. This sort of protest is, beyond its immediate targets, an exercise in patriotism, and par for the course - if I recall correctly, some strikes a while back were even taking management hostage (Goodyear, 3M, etc).
Fortunately France moved on from guillotines quite some time ago. :P
I'm being honest. I've felt that working in a company hiring people under interim contracts (better paid) making historical employees work twice (your job, teaching others that don't care, correcting their mistake down the pipe just before they leave with a lot of unfinished things) for lower salaries, and it felt wrong. You want equality.
Uber isn't a surprise, it's a known model of disruption, spread faster than the law can react and when you have momentum, newcomer and authorities find a compromise.
They did bring something to the table, a nice kick in the butt, and a newer and far better user interface. That said they (and others) are still operating illegally through the pressure of times (people are busy and low on money, an illegal driver is better than no driver at all)
> instead of being better to keep their business, they just want to keep their business by being the only players, leaving no choice to customers but to use them.
At least in the states it's impossible for traditional taxis to compete with Uber because they're so heavily regulated and Uber just like transportation laws don't apply to them.
> french Taxi drivers are knowned to be unfriendly and not quite honest, and lazy
Both the french government and the taxi drivers are responsible for this situation. So both need to come up with a "fair" solution. Medallion selling shouldn't be a business, I can't sell my driving license to somebody else so the gvt shouldn't have allowed it at first place.
I'm not a fan of Uber. Never used it and neve will. But the medallion system is just wrong. And right now, like on many many issues in France the government refuses to take responsibility for its mistakes.
I was in Paris in April and we used Uber twice. Both drivers were super friendly, attentive, and helpful. Neither spoke English, but we got by just fine. I was disappointed that there was no Uber in Rome as well.
A while back I found a grievous bug in CERNLIB, one that withoubt a doubt resulted in erroneous results in the physics journals.
The day I blasted this news throughout every corner of the physics community, a CERN staffmember sent me a patch. "Here's what you need, but the guy who maintains that part of CERNLIB wont accept it because Im british and hes french."
Look there needs to be a French Uber for this to work. Simple as that. We can't take global revenue forever. It's not fair to these countries. Lucky for them, we're helping them innovate
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadSo they'd better clear the road and start hacking, because this strike won't save them in the long run.
Cabs.
I love that this is profitable, and is a job that lots of folk can get. One cabbie I talked to once used to program VAX machines.
In SF, it's great if you life in the mission, bad if you live in the Richmond. (Actually, there's a good app that works with the cabs there, but before that...)
In Boston, don't live in Dorchester or JP. Calling a cab here is unreliable.
Living in a more sparse city, the only way to get a cab is dispatch. It's terrible.
I one time opened the Uber app in Dorchester. A driver accepted me. I watched him drive around the fens in circles for the next half hour (literally, Park Drive to Fenway to Park Drive to Fenway). So I cancelled the fare. And Uber then charged me a $10 fee because I cancelled more than 5 minutes after the driver accepted.
Don't know what the fuck that was all about, but the one time I tried in Dorchester, Uber was horrid.
Isn't Uber basically dispatch? Or are there extra fees involved? Serious question
Then add the benefit of Uber also working a bit away from those busy downtown streets where just raising your arm is actually enough to get a cab.
The strike is just to raise public awareness of multinational companies coming in and not following regulations to make more profit.
Edit: looking at the reviews, apparently they charge for the trip to your location before they even pick you up, which is just stupid. Wouldn't they actually want to encourage using the app so people aren't clogging the call centres?
That's a lame excuse. The only itch Uber is scratching is the libertarian itch to circumvent consumer protection, environmental protection and labour laws.
A coworker of mine has an amusing tale to illustrate how well consumer-protection laws protected him when his NYC taxi driver, driving on an illegally-borrowed medallion, demanded cash (instead of credit) to keep the transaction off the books, briefly holding him hostage and threatening to steal his luggage.
Oh, wait...
You do realize that the only difference Uber here makes is that it makes it easier for the criminal in question, since doesn't even have to bother stealing a medallion or have car that looks like a taxi?
Restricting choice won't solve issues with cabs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9776613
So while I sympathize with taxi drivers, they really can't expect consumers to not prefer something that's manifestly better for them.
BTW in London, before uber a black cab might cost me £60-70 to get home if I'd missed a train. An uber now can be as little as £25, which is low enough that I can just not worry about the terribly unreliable and sparse trains and plan my trip home that way.
Quality of black cabs and mini-cabs in London in also wildly variable. At least with uber you can actually leave a bad review (I'm not sure what comes of those) but I get a response on bad reviews at least.
No laws dictated these qualities, no legislation demanded this level of safety. These practices were conceived via market forces, and safety was a by product.
> ...in order to compete in a free market...
The entire point of Uber is that the taxi industry is not a free market, therefore the things necessary to compete in a theoretical "free market" are not relevant and can't be assumed to be why Uber is successful.
Uber uses roads that were designed to comply with government safety regulations and their drivers drive cars designed to comply with a different set of government safety regulations. Those regulations exist because experience has shown that they need to.
Unless I'm wrong you're arguing that Uber is safe and efficient because market forces made it so. It's efficient because of technological advances and it's safe literally to the extent required by law.
Because they've opted out of the regulations their competitors are subject to Uber could offer a a more dangerous and less efficient service than current taxi companies and still "compete".
Restricting markets, so you can only use politician approved services is the exact opposite of helping the consumer.
Too expensive? Well I don't really have a choice....
Except the whole point is that taxi license owners want to prevent me from doing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
The incumbents never really seem to make an argument beyond shrieking that their protected racket is being disrupted though. I remember one hilarious picture on the news of a cabbie f-ing and blinding to a reporter out of his window at a protest against uber. Just behind him in his cab was a sign saying "cash only".
When an innovation comes along and starts stealing your lunch, screaming that you were here first isn't really going to help you much!
I guess my point was that using the same app I use in London and knowing that I'm not going to get ripped off in a strange* city was quite nice
* that's strange as in unfamiliar ;-)
The question of whether you would prefer a licensed taxi or an Uber is a different one which I won't get into for now :)
For international travelers it's the franchising aspect that is most appealing.
So if you don't know the local taxi regulation, your Uber might get pulled over by the cops who take the driver and you're left in the middle of nowhere. This has happened in Helsinki, for example (where the local taxi service is very reliable, albeit somewhat expensive and may be busy at certain hours).
In general, when visiting a country, you are expected to roughly know what the local legislation is.
There might be some reasonable middle ground but I'm quite happy paying for a reliable, regulated service despite it's flaws rather than a wild west situation.
Legal != no rip-off
And I know there is a regulated dispute resolution procedure. But so far Uber/Lyft seem to be a much better process for that too.
There are a few apps that work great in Paris like 'Taxis Bleus' and are more convenient than Uber since you can get a taxi to pick you up in a few minutes (they are usually more taxis around you than Uber cars).
Having said that, I'm all for competing cab services. The French taxi system has been games to protect a the taxi drivers at the expense of the users, resulting in high prices and an less convenience (can't hail a taxi).
What a groundbreaking discovery.
That should kind of leave you asking: exactly who are those regulations supposed to be protecting, anyway?
[0] http://www.ibtimes.com/google-inc-says-self-driving-car-will...
My personal opinion is that self-driving cars that are reliable enough to literally not have a steering wheel will be perpetually a "few years away", similar to how we're always saying nuclear fusion or true AI is just a few decades off. It's like the 80/20 rule but more like 99/1... That last 1% of capabilities required to make cars truly driverless are going to take 99% of the effort.
As another poster comments, it's as close as several other science fiction things that are always "A few years away!".
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles...
> Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn’t drive itself in 99 percent of the country? Or that knew nearly nothing about parking, couldn’t be taken out in snow or heavy rain, and would drive straight over a gaping pothole?
> If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car, model year 2014.
When they landed on the moon, do you think they thought we'd still be faffing about doing not much in space 50 years later? I'm betting they thought we'd be colonising mars by now.
With time driverless cars will be the norm. Until then I want that the people that drive me home have as many rights as them deserve.
(What will happen when machines are able to do all manual work is another more complex discussion)
all cars do that. In fact, Uber should do it less because they don't have to drive around looking for a fare.
> without adequate insurance
I don't know about other countries, but in the US they definitely require adequate insurance. All of your points are wrong.
Many taxi drivers also don't accept credit cards. Many also don't have GPS so I've wasted plenty of money while the driver wanders around looking for my address. Modernize or die. The taxi business is a business, not a social welfare agency.
I hear that quite a bit.
The evidence seems to be the opposite though. So long as the deprivation of someone else's rights and conditions is external to your experience, hidden from view... then people tend to be very accepting of any compromise of another person so long as the price goes down (quality isn't even important if the price is low enough).
When people tend to try and argue this, I usually proffer Primark in the UK as an example. People have got to the point that they think a £4 T-shirt costly, without any regard as to how it came to be that a T-shirt is even valued at £4.
We only have some issue with taxis because we speak to the people involved. Even then we're hardly sympathetic.
Also, they may not be able to make as much with Uber. Buzz Feed News estimated that US Uber drivers can make $34,164 per year. French laws may also include benefits for driving a taxi vs. being an independent contractor with no benefits with Uber.
Services like AirBnB and Uber can be great for entrepreneurs, investors, part-time workers, and consumers. We should be reminded that disrupting industries sometimes creates losers in the working and middle class that don't have an easy way to switch jobs in some countries or economies.
Through all of this, an entrepreneur is responsible for all sorts of things - industry regulations, business regulations, local regulations, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, investor satisfaction, life/work balance, keeping the environment clean, etc, etc, etc, in addition to the actual product or service and the long-term success of the business.
Now you want to also make me responsible for the social norms that I'm disrupting? Thanks, but no, thanks. This is NOT my responsibility. That's what governments are for. Governments are by definition socialist structures responsible for the well-being of the "working class". I am the opposite of socialist. I'm here to disrupt - don't ask me to step on my own toes.
I mean, soon you'll be asking me to compensate the bankers that my fintech startup is disrupting...
Technological innovation CREATES value, doesn't destroy it. It necessarily disrupts the status quo and pisses people off, and that takes courage, but does not make the innovator a bad person. It makes them a very courageous person, worthy of all admiration.
On the other hand, you might call a bad person someone who expects that everyone else is obliged to feed him. One who throws "responsibilities" at those who refuse to work for him. One who morally manipulates people into doing what pleases him. I'd call this a bad person, although I personally don't believe that evil exists, so I am more likely to call that person plain stupid.
What you seem to mean by this is that I haven't taken Ayn Rand's teen fantasy novels as a central religious text upon which all knowledge, thought, and discourse are based.
Sometimes the status quo is better than what replaces it. Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly. Is that good or bad? It's reasonable to argue both sides. In the present time, it looks like it's good for almost everyone. But the consequences of rewriting laws for a particular company so it can gain total control of a socially necessary transportation infrastructure are far-reaching. Technology does not 'necessarily' do anything good or bad. It is a tool and all it 'necessarily' does is create new options for people who happen to have access to it (generally wealthy people). Sometimes those options, if chosen by the wealthy, make life worse for people without access to that same technology (the non-wealthy). Not always of course, but it's something that should be considered.
'Disrupts' is just a weasel-word to spin the accurate description of what is happening, 'destroys', into something that is axiomatically good. In fact it's dishonest to use this terminology; you need to show the particular change is actually good and describe what you mean by good (good for everyone? Good for rich white yuppies with smartphones?) before you are allowed to describe it as good, something many people in tech seem to forget.
And in your previous post you rejected the notion that you should ever consider the consequences your actions have on other people in society; now you seem to be trying to weasel your way out of it with some pseudo-religious tripe about how innovators are gods and everyone who destroys is courageous and worthy of "all admiration". I am at this point reconsidering the value of continuing this discussion since when blind religion meets thoughtful consideration, blind religion invariably wins; especially when it's religion fueled by narcissism and a visceral need to justify one's own selfish childishness. But I've written it already so I'll leave it here.
I think that, regarding the HN libertarian "wealth creator's" topic,(to try and be as sympathetic as I can be) there is a tendency to see societies flaw as a lack of wealth, rather than an unequal distribution of wealth. Quite often, married for allegedly fixing the first problem (within the framework of entrepreneurialism) exacerbate the latter.
I think that, regarding the HN libertarian "wealth creator's" topic,(to try and be as sympathetic as I can be) there is a tendency to see societies flaw as a lack of wealth, rather than an unequal distribution of wealth. Quite often, married for allegedly fixing the first problem (within the framework of entrepreneurialism) exacerbate the latter.
First of all, I have never read Ayn Rand and am not familiar with her work (perhaps I should, you're not the first person to throw me into that bucket).
Second, I don't subscribe to any mainstream religion, so don't call my arguments religious. Every position that I hold has come from my experience. I am a very pragmatic person and consciously choose what to believe based solely on the utility that each belief provides to me. In that sense I am selfish and narcissistic, yes - I don't take these as offences.
One of the beliefs I have (and I think everyone should have, especially entrepreneurs) is that my wellbeing and my happiness is more important than anyone else's. Does that make me an asshole? May be it does. But it also makes me productive and valuable to the very society that you are so concerned about. Much more so than if I did the mistake of putting society's widely diverse needs before my own.
So do I care about my fellow human beings? Yes, very much so.
Am I going to do something that hurst my self interest in order to please anyone else? No, never. That would be irresponsible.
You will be the victim of your own hubris when the populist majority brings the pitchforks and sucks you dry. And you should know better - the government mainly exists to subsidize outsized risks and ventures by those with influence - the wealthy.
With that - you are trying to destory the existing banking structure so more power to you.
I didn't get where you're going with all of this, though.
Are we so bored with the struggle for life? Is that game really fun?
Not all details are "untie this technological knot." Not all companies that fail do so because they didn't get the technology right.
It probably wouldn't be a bad thing if most cities just banned uber and created their own apps (or hired a company to do it for them). The network effects in the taxi market are so strong that one company will inevitably end up being a monopoly.
Once the monopoly is locked in the winning company will just milk it for all its worth, simultaneously raising prices and crushing wages. That's bad for everybody (except them).
2. Uber is breaking the very foundations of the monopolization of the taxi industry. The only monopoly they will maintain moving forward is through customer loyalty based upon perceived value. If Uber falters, there is very little protecting them from a competitor gobbling up their market share.
Which taxi company's app are you going to use as a passenger? The one with 5 drivers within a 5 minutes' drive, or the one with 1 driver, 25 minutes away?
Which taxi company will you sign up with as a driver? The one which has customers everywhere or the one which doesn't?
Why pretend that network effects do not exist in this industry?
Sure would be nice if it were just about customer service and value, but it isn't. It's about network dominance.
Things change quickly when only network effects are stopping competition in a fluid market where all you need to do is download an app to become a user or go through a short process as a driver.
Uber has eliminated many of the tools used by the monopolists. Have they eliminated the value of reputation and high availability? No, but nobody said they had.
Also the current protest is not about Uber but UberPop, which is kinda illegal at the moment and rightly so. I don't mind the taxis getting fucked over by their own greed, but I'd prefer if it was done lawfully.
Taxi drivers are willing to pay $250k to get a license from other taxi drivers! It's a token that get passed around.
The day these license are worth $0, the last owners will be screwed. Ponzi ?
It's the same with liquor licenses in Boston (maybe all of Mass., but I'm not sure about that). There's a limited number of them, but they can be resold, usually fetching more than a million dollars. This is a huge startup cost for new restauranteurs, but they have held their value, such that when you decide (or are forced) to sell or close the business, you can recoup that initial investment. Issuing more licenses or trying to reduce the cost of them in other ways would just destroy that value for the owners, most of which have taken out loans against them that would still need to be repaid.
Monopoly invariably breeds indifference and high prices and that cost fall almost entirely on the taxi user, which is (generally) the wider middle class (and let's not pretend working class people never need a cab too, so they are also hurt) and it's unsustainable to force regular people to subsidise the indifference of a pretty random group of employees (and medallion owners and cab company owners - it's not an exclusive blue collar affair on the receiving end).
So instead of being gently pressured to improve by competition over time, change is dramatic and discontinuous -and that is painful, and that elicits sympathy. The only thing anyone could really have done was to have gradually liberalised the taxi industry over maybe a decade or two to soften the blow, but that requires a time machine.
Sadly, some people only seem to care about liberalizing industries that the little people derive just enough income to get by on.
To usefully understand the struggles taking place around Uber's "disruption" of traditional taxis we need a more nuanced perspective than regulation=monopoly=bad/free market=competition=good
Another thing that isn't much discussed in medias, is that a few companies, most notably G7, own most medallions and lease them to (poor) drivers, often together with the car and the radio reservation service. Those companies typically have received those medallions for free from the state, decades ago, before reselling them became legalized. Those companies obviously pull some strings, both stirring up drivers and talking in minister cabinets.
Anyway eventually they're fucked, Uber or no Uber: autonomous cars will make taxis obsolete at warping speed. Taxi drivers are fucked that much harder than Uber's, because they'll be left with a worthless medallion and its 20 years mortgage. (It's also likely to make private car ownership marginal, something akin to owning your own horse in the XXth century, thus hitting car manufacturing pretty badly once enough autonomous cars have been produced, but that's another quagmire).
Sure, on the surface Taxi's are dead, but I would wager that it will be a lot slower than people on here think, not least for the difficulty of cleaning autonomous cabs.
Oh, and bonus: hiring an autonomous account will likely involve disclosing your identity in advance. If you're the sort of customer who makes a habit of fouling cabs, maybe you'll have to pay more to hire one.
I imagine cleaning autonomous cabs will be exactly the same effort than cleaning shared cars. Probably less if the car can drive itself to the depot.
Unless there is a really broad-based public backlash that makes it political suicide to continue licensing however, even if autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous I can't see municipalities and various institutions and agencies in general giving up the affiliated revenue stream. Even if we end up with something like Johnny Cabs [2] and no humans drive taxis any longer, I expect some form of government-imposed licensing to still exist.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/21/add-taxi-medallion-investo...
[2] http://www.empireonline.com/features/helpful-movie-robots-th...
1. families buy one autonomous car instead of several driven ones: when dad's arrived at work, the car goes back to become mom's car for the day. With a nice twist: when the car goes and fetch kids from soccer, mom doesn't have to be in it.
2. People pool cars privately: one car for a couple of families if they're light users, X/Y cars for X families for more intensive users. It's shared property, neither a taxi activity nor even a company providing a service.
2bis. Some AirBnB of autonomous cars facilitates mutual lending of cars, in parallel with the development of privately organized pools
3. Cars are leased instead of bought upfront, from companies embedded with the AirBnB-of-autonomous-cars. What you have now is effectively an autonomous taxi company.
The economic pressure to get rid of drivers will be enormous. Sure, car makers and drivers won't like it, but all of the money that won't go there will be up for grab by other sectors. Think of trucks: not only autonomous trucks will drive 23h a day, but everyone who sells anything moved by truck will have their margin augmented by skipping drivers' salaries.
If medium and light truck bodies are aligned to a standardized set of chassis, then some of the fleets of delivery trucks that lay idle half the day or longer today can run around the clock, swapping bodies and switching duties when needed.
If we can automate quiet garbage pickup, then a garbage truck that usually only runs during the day can run around the clock.
If we can automate safe delivery of liquid fuels, then entire fleets of various fuel delivery trucks will lay off a lot of drivers.
The pattern I'm seeing is the actual driving might get automated, but the endpoint activities might not be subject to automation just yet, but that might only be a matter of time and possibly standardization.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/truck-driving-may-be-america-s...
A detroit taxi driver told me that if he pissed anyone off the dispatcher would stop sending him fares.
My understanding is that they're actually free. But it can take years before you actually get one, which is why people buy them on the black market.
I don't know how I feel about those taxi drivers. It seems they've just made a very bad investment.
In any case, it would be great if taxis were more affordable and available in France. Maybe the gvt could work with uber and negotiate some sort of compensation for the taxi drivers?
The vacuum that attracted Uber has been created by their resistance against license creation, they dug their own grave. The two big problems in Paris are that you can't find a taxi when you need one, and when you have one, he often doesn't have a credit card reader (those pesky snitches which prevent tax evasion).
Anyway, Parisian taxi drivers are responsible for Uber's very existence(). Now they're making Uber look even more compelling by behaving like dicks to maintain the status-quo.
() https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_(company)#History
As long as we are moving forward jobs market will keep changing. Those workers are also consumers. They have cheap electronics at home made in China (which caused some local factory workers to lose their jobs), they use roads built by machines in places where humans used to do the work. They eat food from automated farms that are more efficient.
It's all connected. I wouldn't say it creates losers in any class. Their/our living standard would be much much lower at this point without these kind of changes.
It's up up up up DOWN up up up. (DOWN being when it hits your sector and you are not prepared for the change, and up when it hits other industries)
This is absolutely true, but it has always been so, for countless professions across the centuries.
Industrialization, automatization, globalization have caused many people to lose their livelihood due to the obsolescence of their industry and profession, but the net result has always been a richer, more modern society (whether if 'happier' or 'better', it's hard to say).
Taxi drivers happen to be a much more vocal, compact and uniform community, and that's why they appear more in the news, but there are countless other people being affected by technical progress on a daily basis (from journalist to shoe repairers to travel agents).
While it might not be a zero-sum game, to reference a famous pg essay, it's a bit naive thinking that entrepreneurs can create value out of nothing, without affecting the existing status-quo in other ways than positive ones.
Instead of fighting it by enforcing ad-hoc laws, governments and unions should work towards creating the conditions so that the affected workers are able to find other occupations, IMHO.
All things considered, full-time drivers make less with Uber, have less benefits, and are generally worse off. There's huge amounts of literature concerning the effects of, say, not having health insurance on general job performance (spoilers: it doesn't make them better at their jobs).
So in the end we get lower quality rides, even if they're cheaper (which they aren't always due to surge pricing!)
Obsession with lower costs inevitably bring about generally lower quality goods, empirically (already happened with food and consumer goods, compare a French supermarket with an American one).
You've referenced literature and empirical evidence, citations please.
In practice, though, as a quasi-frequent user of taxi service in a variety of cities (NYC, Atlanta, Chicago) who doesn't even care much about the price (as I get to expense most of those rides)... I'd opine that Uber is strictly better, even though the taxis a variety of huge advantages (like a straightforward airport pickup procedure).
I agree on our societies approach to "value" only relating to cost at the expense of quality - but that's a different topic all together.
- Most of the uber drivers don't actually pay taxes
- Most of the uber drivers only work for uber which makes the self-employment fictitious. This allows to disregard things like minimum wage and payments for social security.
- Most of uber drivers don't have a permission for transporting people. This puts customers at risk.
- Most of uber drivers don't have an insurance that covers transporting people commercially.
All these apply even in the case where private taxi companies are allowed. Uber's business model is based on exploiting the drivers, disregarding safety regulations and dodging taxes.
http://www.spi0n.com/greve-taxis-vs-uber-paris/
At the beginning, when Uber opened in France, I could understand their problem. But now, they just went to far: instead of being better to keep their business, they just want to keep their business by being the only players, leaving no choice to customers but to use them. And that's plain wrong for me...
In fact, I think that I would support an action from Uber against Taxi syndicates & French government support, either in the street or in the European Court of Justice
Disclosure: I'm a french parisian and never used Uber (yet) but used Taxi from time to time... ;)
how much more rotten their behaviour must be for you to start caring about customers more than them? of course it's not black & white, but this industry is in grave need of disruption, and one is coming. i don't care about them any more than they do care about me, fair deal.
How would you feel if all of a sudden anybody can play in your field for free while you paid 100K, and have to comply to a lot of legislations for the same rights.
[1] reminds me of Air France, it's easy to think RyanAir is better, but in reality AirFrance offer you a lot more. I believe Uber falls under the same issues, sure they're cheap, but they don't give any insurances. They did benefit from a nice technological mastery that made the service interface far better than the old system.
I'm really sad for the few taxis working hard to be better because they're thrown now in the same bag as the average bad taxis. Hopefully, most of the time, good taxis have loyal customers (and no problem with UberPOP for that same reason).
BTW, I'm working in computer science so... disruption is at the heart of my field!!! :D
Do you really think that bad Taxis drove customers away or was it the system bottleneck (waiting so long, difficulty in finding a cab when you need one) and seemingly lower prices. Again, Uber give you less, AFAIK you're not insured if something happens, you dont even know if the guy has an insurance for himself, there's no check of any kind (as a CS guy you should be afraid of that), so prices can appear lower.
I don't know, I only took a cab twice in my life.
Welcome to French leftism! It's a bit of a unique brand, as France has been culturally skeptical of movements like international communism (to say nothing of the globalization economy), and it has a distinctive nationalistic style. This sort of protest is, beyond its immediate targets, an exercise in patriotism, and par for the course - if I recall correctly, some strikes a while back were even taking management hostage (Goodyear, 3M, etc).
Fortunately France moved on from guillotines quite some time ago. :P
I'm being honest. I've felt that working in a company hiring people under interim contracts (better paid) making historical employees work twice (your job, teaching others that don't care, correcting their mistake down the pipe just before they leave with a lot of unfinished things) for lower salaries, and it felt wrong. You want equality.
Uber isn't a surprise, it's a known model of disruption, spread faster than the law can react and when you have momentum, newcomer and authorities find a compromise.
They did bring something to the table, a nice kick in the butt, and a newer and far better user interface. That said they (and others) are still operating illegally through the pressure of times (people are busy and low on money, an illegal driver is better than no driver at all)
edit: additions.
At least in the states it's impossible for traditional taxis to compete with Uber because they're so heavily regulated and Uber just like transportation laws don't apply to them.
Both the french government and the taxi drivers are responsible for this situation. So both need to come up with a "fair" solution. Medallion selling shouldn't be a business, I can't sell my driving license to somebody else so the gvt shouldn't have allowed it at first place.
I'm not a fan of Uber. Never used it and neve will. But the medallion system is just wrong. And right now, like on many many issues in France the government refuses to take responsibility for its mistakes.
1. They are rude.
2. They don't accept credit cards and often lie to you about their CC machine not working.
3. Cabs Stink.
4. They have annoying little screens with ads in the backseat.
5. Some of them have no air conditioning.
4. Sure, kind of annoying I guess...
I've had far more really enjoyable cab rides with Chicago drivers than I have had ones that are even slightly uncomfortable or rude.
The day I blasted this news throughout every corner of the physics community, a CERN staffmember sent me a patch. "Here's what you need, but the guy who maintains that part of CERNLIB wont accept it because Im british and hes french."
Dont Fuck With The French.
Ueber looks allready historic and they havent even won yet.