I will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east a half hour late. Missed a flight because of it once. I don’t even like uber, but it is objectively a better service most of the time.
Yeah, anyone who uses taxi drivers as an example of destruction either don't know what they're talking about (because they never experienced it) or they're crying crocodile tears.
I had cab drivers nearly drive off with me hanging off the car in San Francisco, because they were far more concerned with screening my destination than, say, not killing me. If Uber destroyed that industry, it was only a net benefit to society. They created immense value, and the "destruction" was only to eliminate a layer of corrupt parasites who made money by preventing a free market (in this case, the medallion owners, but the entire industry was corrupt from top to bottom).
Not all places have corrupt taxi industries. I think they were always more expensive than Uber (but there's a reason for that, Uber's pricing is not sustainable) but in most places a taxi is just a taxi.
Don't entirely agree that a local Taxi service is necessarily costlier than Uber. In my indian city, Uber and Ola cannot compete (and have been nearly wiped out) because a local Taxi service (that now dominates the market) is very competitively priced and professionally run. They charge their drivers a fixed percentage (unlike Uber or Ola, and lower fees than them) and release their payments timely in a transparent manner. The price per km, and all extra charges (late night fees, overtime driver charges etc., permit fees in case of long distance travel, toll fees etc.) are transparently conveyed to the customer too. And there is no bullshit practice of price gauging through "surge pricing" or "convenience fees" or "platform fees" etc.
Reminds me of Empower in the US, it charges drivers a fix fee, not even a percentage, and then the drivers take all the upside from their rides.
It's about efficiency not just corruption. When you call taxi dispatch a human answers and coordinates with other humans. Takes longer and they sometimes drop the ball.
So basically, you’re saying that “most places” had uncorrupt, put-upon taxi industries who simply cannot survive against Uber because Uber is anti-competitive, and it has nothing at all to do with delivering a better product?
Yeah, I don’t believe you. It sounds like you’re making a just-so rationalization for why taxis are good and Uber is bad.
In pretty much any mature taxi market Uber is as expensive (if not more expensive!) than the conventional alternative. And yet Uber survives.
Have you ever met an Uber driver who makes decent money? Honest jobs should be compensated with honest money, not starvation wages.
Black drivers used to make pretty good money many years ago, but Uber + market externalities redesigned their systems to "fix" that (mostly through decreasing payouts and high car rental costs)
Most of the drivers providing that service split their time between Uber, Lyft and traditional corporate black car service.
Lots of posts on this topic in the UberDrivers subreddit.
You see that whenever there is value, above starvation wages, flowing to laborers, capitalists see that as a problem and reduce it. Does this seem sustainable?
It’s really interesting how you’ve couched the concept of price discovery.
Somehow only laborers get price discovered. Amazon hasn't got price discovered, not has Google, in decades. Weird. It's almost like Econ 101 isn't the whole story.
You mean, maybe selling shitty cheap chinese plastic to the lowest bidder has fucked with price discovery? I agree!
Yes, many, in fact. But more importantly, nobody is making drivers take these jobs.
The restated version of your comment is simply “I think drivers should get paid more,” which is fine, but not an argument. Everyone who has ever had a job thinks the same thing.
it's still evil. The billionaires running this scheme are evil.
Well, at least you’re not trying to pretend you have a well-founded argument.
Yes, many in fact.
I don’t know a single place in Europe where taxis aren’t scamming tourists.
The Uber drivers created that value and should get those billions, not Travis Kalanick.
The driver makes more than Uber does on (almost?) every ride. So they did.
Uber doesn't pay the driver for their time, nor wear or insurance on their car. Uber doesn't even consider drivers employees unless legally required to. I should hope Uber's cut is a tiny fraction since all they provide is a bit of software while taking control of markets and pricing for themselves.
Counterpoint: I scheduled an Uber once to take me to the airport. They arrived earlier than the requested time and left when I met them at the time I requested because they waited too long. This was on Uber Black, their professional driver level service.
Counterpoint: It is increasingly impossible to get to a human at Uber when you need support, as most of their support channels are gated by LLMs and self-service support workflows.
Yes, Uber did something enormously creative. But it also did something destructive and we're guilty of an accounting sleight of hand if we focus on one while pretending the other doesn't exist.
We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
Destroying inefficient monopoly rents? By all means, let us not pretend that doesn't exist.
You're forgetting the workers, who were the important part of this analysis.
Why are the taxi workers more important than, say, the taxi customers? If the companies are providing garbage service, why do I have to care about protecting their workers?
When you lose your job to AI, you will understand.
Technology has always displaced workers. And then the society adjusts. Plenty of people will lose their jobs to AI, but most workers will be redeployed elsewhere.
The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class.
Change is tough, but we will all be fine.
Yeah and it took about 150 years until industrial revolution started to actually benefit the common people and the workers started to have their working conditions improved.
What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.
Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.
It took a literal civil war, which you don't read about in history books so much because it's not beneficial for the owners of those publishing houses to have more people hear about it. Lots of people died on both sides.
> which you don't read about in history books so much
Just to clarify, are we referring to the American Civil War? The reason I ask is that the idea that it is not a topic that is broadly covered in history books and discussed at depth all throughout schooling is simply false.
Last time inequality cooked up it took a lifetime to go back down. It did so very painfully through capital incineration on a monumental scale: a great depression, where the incineration was metaphorical, and two world wars, where it was very literal. In both cases it was economical and in both cases it fixed the problem but at enormous cost. We should aim to do better.
Plus all the union violence. The ones where owners used guns to break strikes so striking workers also started bringing guns and using them. I don't think we want that, do you?
Easy to say it all worked out fine when you aren't one of the people who was displaced. They might feel differently.
It may have worked out fine for humanity as a whole, but it ignores the suffering of a lot of people.
I mentioned in my other comments that I did support welfare programs as safety nets.
Progress will result in better standards of living for many, and then we take care of the people left behind.
I’m in software - in all likelihood, I will be displaced at some point. But I’ll figure it out (I hope). When I started out, I was writing Perl. Then I had to learn Python.
How about we set up that safety net first for once then?
You don't put on your seat belt during an accident, you don't start driving until it is on.
Who is “we?”
This is taking a weird tone where it sounds like you’re asking me to change society for you, and blaming me for not doing it fast enough when I haven’t heard you mention a thing you’ve done either.
Like I said man, I voted for people who support sensible welfare programs. That’s my contribution.
Stop taking this out on me - if you’re so fired up about it, go get involved and start knocking on doors.
That doesn't answer the question.
In a world where AI has not yet taken all the jobs, when a company provides lousy service, why do its employees deserve to keep their jobs more than the customers deserve good service?
I honestly don't know how uber drivers can even make a living with the price of gas and upkeep for the car [being as hight as it is]. How many hours a day do they work? I know there is a 12 hour limit at Uber but you could continue to Lift until the next day. Then what?
So they drivers spend their life Ubering, not learning new skills or anything and next thing you know - AI takes their jobs.
Then what? That's how you get revolutions.
It created another monopoly to collect more rent, and some would say it's a worse one to boot.
Uber also forced taxi services to have apps and always accept CCs.
Competition is good. Which is why having only two taxi apps is bad.
I mean I agree...What I was pointing out is that the existing taxi market did nothing to improve until Uber and then Lyft came along. It was completely broken, and would have remained that way.
Up front pricing -- even if higher -- is welcome.