```When Uber entered the taxi market without securing taxi licenses or extending the workforce protections required under law, it said the move didn’t count because it did it with an app.```
It's so weird to see the first half of this article written as an ode to the virtues of competition and then see the sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions. Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes. It's not even like the anti-consumer hostility of the taxi experience translated into better rights for workers, the high price of a medallion meant in practice your typical cab driver was in a situation damned close to indentured servitude to a medallion company.
And to top it all off, taxis demonstrate the fallacy of thinking that hundreds of market participants provides meaningful benefits from competition. In a market with a suitably large number of cab drivers and passengers, the odds of repeat business between any pair of driver and passenger is low enough that neither party is incentivized to treat each other well. It's not like anyone was pulling out a Yelp-like site or review book to pick the best-reviewed cab drivers, or like you went out of your way to stick with a cab driver you'd had a good experience with. Meaningful competition requires that people can make _informed_ choices, and without repeat business you don't get participants informed enough to make meaningful choices between market participants. It also requires leverage. It doesn't matter if you threaten to take your business elsewhere next time if you and they both know _you were going to anyway_.
I'm not saying that Uber is perfect, or even that Uber couldn't be productively regulated better by the government. I'm saying that taxis were a terrible experience, and I don't trust Doctorow to have a good lay of the land when he focuses more on his ideology than the evidence. If subscribing to Doctorow's beliefs requires services to look more like taxis than Ubers, you can count me out.
> sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions.
This is a deflection. Cory is not coming out in defense of taxi medallions so much as it is a re-iteration of the current laws in place and how tech uses apps to get around the laws. Yes taxis suck, but also so does uber in their own way - This is all beside the point. These tech companies are using 'gig'ified models to get around laws set by the city officials elected by the people.
The opening of the article is laying out the case that the laws are good -- they make the market legible to participants. As he says:
``` To navigate all of these technical minefields, you need the help of a third party. In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems.
To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise, in which all affected parties submit evidence about what the best rule should be and then get a chance to read what everyone else wrote and rebut their claims. Sometimes, there are in-person hearings, or successive rounds of comment and counter-comment, but that’s the basic shape of things.
Once all the evidence is in, the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based. This whole system is backstopped by courts, which can order the process to begin anew if the new rule isn’t supported by the evidence created while the regulator was developing the record.
This kind of adversarial process—something between a court case and scientific peer review—has a good track record of producing high-quality regulations. You can thank a process like this for the fact that you weren’t killed today by critters in your tap water or a high-voltage shock from one of your home’s electrical outlets. ```
And this is central to Doctorow's point, right? The narrow question of the legality of Uber's current service offerings is actually pretty well litigated, and if Uber was as flagrantly illegal as he claims, "we're an app" wouldn't have kept them in business. Doctorow argues that this is happening through regulatory capture -- the case isn't primarily that Uber is violating the currently existing set of laws, regulations, court precedents, etc. It's that Uber is violating what the regulations _would be_ in a world where they had less market power with which to influence regulations.
And so it's not enough to argue about how the apps get around _current_ laws. By Doctorow's own arguments, we're debating the merits of a counterfactual set of different regulations that we would have if you changed current conditions. And at that point, it is absolutely fair game to ask if this counterfactual set of different regulations is actually better for market participants.
(depends on jurisdiction) there was already concept of pre-booked transport that was distinct from taxi and does not require taxi medaillon to operate. Uber just made pre-booked transport as convenient to use as taxi.
So it is not that Uber avoided taxi licencing 'because of app', but it avoided taxi licencing by providing slightly different service that do not fit into legal definition of regulated taxi services. And one could argue that these slight differences are in fact important, because the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber.
The Doctorow school argument, as best I can tell, would go 'the regulations on black car service were meant for things like limo services that don't compete directly with taxis, and once Uber started competing directly with taxis, regulators and authorities should have moved more aggressively to write new regulations/laws that regulated Uber the same way taxis are regulated.' They would not agree with "the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber."
And this is exactly why I think the question of "what is the correct way to regulate car ride services" shouldn't hinge on incumbency bias towards taxis, but actually ask the question of what is best for participants in the market (which doesn't just include taxis and Ubers but also includes public transportation and its users, for instance). But that doesn't fit neatly into Doctorow's enshitification narrative.
These claims of incumbency bias, based on a fragment of a sentence, seem unnecessarily presumptive.
I've read a bit of his work, seen a couple of his speeches, and don't have the same conclusions about his opinions. You could probably ask for clarification.
I want to gently push back on this from my perch in NYC. Pre-Uber, taxis had their monopolistic issues but were: - available at most times on major thoroughfares with a raise of the hand. - reliable - I was never once jerked around or overcharged by an NYC yellow cab, which I can not say about private cab companies I've seen in other cities.
The worst problem was finding cabs in the outer boroughs, and that was improved greatly with the "green cab" program (they were restricted to beginning their fares in the outer boroughs).
There's been a lot of time and gradual change since then, but what I see now (Post-Uber): - In most of the city, it is difficult or impossible to hail a cab without an app. - The Uber/app drivers are worse, clearly much less experienced and don't know where they are going. - Price gouging has been outsourced to the app itself, and happens very frequently. - Even once cabs are called on the app they often cancel or fail to show in anywhere near the advertised time.
Personally, I greatly prefer the Pre-Uber situation.
I want to push back against your pushback as someone who’s lived in both NYC and the SF area. I agree with you that Uber barely made sense in Manhattan. I never once used it and taxis were plentiful.
I’ve since realized that in the US, NYC is an exception. When I first came to SF and Seattle for job interview related things, I used taxis, only to find out that the taxis were so terrible I never used them again:
- In the suburbs of Seattle, I was given a taxi chit from the place I was interviewing. I called in for a cab and had to wait over a half an hour for one to pick me up.
- In SF, the airport cab I was using had his GPS unmounted from his dash, and ended up handing me the machine and asking me to help him navigate from the back seat. Then when we got to the hotel, he lamented my choice to pay by credit card as it meant he would get the money much later than if he had cash. After I told him I didn’t have the circa $100 in cash he was charging, he sadly acquiesced, then proceeded to take a literal paper rubbing imprint of the card number before I could leave.
I like to say that the Bay Area made Uber make sense, both in terms of urban planning and in terms of how terrible taxis were.
And I think those may be related: if you can get around well in a place like NYC using public transit or walking, taxis have to be a lot more attractive in order to justify their existence. In SF or Seattle they had much less competition due to the suburban sprawl and worse public transit.
>Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes.
This actually did happen to me. When I was in Hyderabad, I took an Uber from my company's office to the airport, and the driver said his phone died right after picking me up, so I had to pay cash.
Uber is almost always cash in cities I’ve visited in India. Some take UPI too but it’s hard to use that as a foreigner.
Yeah, it's a real thing that happened to me, to. In multiple US cities. And I'm sure we're far from alone.
So breaking the law is ok if you don't agree with it?
Yes? The law is not some absolute arbiter of morality and it does change across time and jurisdictions. It's really only an expression of consequences that may be enforced by a body of power.
In many situations an individual does not feel represented by a certain law and it's equally ok for them to choose to follow their own moral compass as it is for the people who put that law in place to attempt to enforce their ways.
Actually most people agree that legality and morality are overlapping but separate categories. There are legal and immoral things as well as illegal but moral ones. I have no problem with someone breaking a law I see as immoral if the act itself is morally positive or neutral. It is a matter of benefit versus odds of being caught.
For example, do you think it is immoral for marijuana people to consume their drug of choice? It remains federally illegal.
taking into account all the impacts on society, uber is a substantial improvement on what came before. sometimes laws are bad and it is good when you break them
That is how change is made. See also: Civil Rights Act, circa 1964
Whether or not taxi medallions are a good thing I hope we can agree that there's a gulf between Rosa Parks and Travis Kalanick?
There's a difference in terms of their motives and methods and the surrounding context, but, ultimately it's just actions and consequences and a messy collective decision-making process. The collective ruling body has thus far decided that Uber be allowed to continue and the conversations and laws continue to evolve around these things. Nobody is calling Travis a hero but we've [collectively] agreed that there was some value to some of those decisions.
Let's look at that gulf. One's a poor black woman in the 1960's and the other's a rich white guy in the 2010's. It's easy to see which one we've been programmed to be supportive of. But picking someone based on the color of their skin and not the content of their character isn't what we're going for. So we have to be explicit in saying that the documented actions by this particular rich white guy are what people find offensive about him, rather than simply that he is one.
In terms of societal change though, they both had a bad law in front of them, they both broke it. In Rosa Parks' case, the law got changed. In Travis Kalanick's case, new laws got passed specifically regulating his company. But the thing is, the taxi medallion laws haven't actually gone away. This results in Uber having to do things in weird ways to satisfy the letter of the law in order to comply with the various laws that exist in each jurisdiction.
Travis Kalanick got rich off the backs of an army of drivers and a swath of passengers. Rosa Parks did not.
He did some pretty shitty stuff along the way, sure.
One thing about Rosa Parks is that she wasn't the first. It was because she was the woman who wasn't going to fall to ad hominem attacks. We can name the logical fallacy, but unfortunately it works in the unregulated court of public opinion.
Neither was Travis, but they were both the ones that succeeded. She succeeded in changing minds and laws, and he succeeded in making a pile of money.
So there's absolutely a gulf between the two, and that gulf is that the laws about sitting in the back of the bus got struck down. The taxi laws did not. One happens to be a rich white guy and the other happens to be a not-exactly-well-off black woman, and the black woman actually managed to get the laws changed.