Hacker News Reader

Comment by green_lunch | Hacker News Reader

They are adding jobs.

However, we now having more people making less money for essentially the same job. It's a win for consumers, because it's more convenient and in some cases, cheaper.

But it's a lose for the people that actually made a decent living driving who now are competing with college kids that are doing the same thing in their spare time without having any of the same startup costs.

Uber and Lyft removed the barrier to entry by breaking the law and the monopoly the Taxi unions had over the entire industry. But the result is lower wages and benefits.

View on HN

Why should the incumbents have security in their position, when as you pointed out college kids can do the same work at lower cost? It is unfair to the unemployed and to consumers to provide special protection to incumbents based solely on their position and earlier entry to the market. That is a classic case of rent seeking with governmental protection.

Good for Uber and Lyft for breaking the law and pushing us out of that local minima. Sometimes you have to harm a few privileged rent seekers to remove coercive monopolies and reduce regulatory capture.

It isn't just regulatory capture though - permits for taxis carry all sorts of protections for consumers. Those protections are guaranteed by law and I see no replacement for those protections from either Uber or Lyft.

We used to have the free for all we're building towards and we regulated to stop it. Why won't history repeat itself?

As a consumer, I strongly prefer the protections I get from Uber/Lyft/Olacab to those that I get from the regulated taxis.

For instance, some months back I got in an Ola to Delhi Airport. The guy took some crazy long route while pretending he didn't understand my broken Hindi (with very clear street names and pointed directions), and very nearly caused me to miss my flight. I took out the app and made a complaint while waiting for my flight. When I landed I got an email about my money being refunded.

How effective do you think it'll be to try and make use of my government provided consumer protections? http://www.delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/doit_transport/Trans...

Another wonderful thing we are getting from the regulators - protection against drivers of the wrong ethnic group. Imagine how terrible it would be to be driven by a Bihari? http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-shiv-sena-defends-marat...

(Similarly, in the US, try to flag a taxi while black. Uber solved this problem, have the US regulators?)

We stopped the "free for all" because the incumbent taxi monopoly captured the regulatory bodies. That's all. Rather than ideologically defending all regulation, why not focus on having good regulation?

First, I'm speaking of the US. I have no experience in India.

I'm certainly not defending all regulation, but unregulated taxis caused all sorts of problems in the past, which is why we regulated them. Background checks, improved guarantees of vehicle safety, minimum competency in English, etc. Why not have both? Break the monopoly, but create realistic and working regulations for all players.

Something rather big has changed since the regulations were put into place (sometimes fairly recently, my city didn't cap taxi plates until the mid-90s). It used to be most taxis were gotten by hailing, and some by phoning. Neither allowed you to verify anything about the cab that eventually picked you up. Apps change this greatly, and now when I ask for an Uber I have reason more reason to trust that the person picking me up is an Uber driver, and has met the standards they established and I can verify in some way, than I ever did that the cabbie who picked me up is the one I called, or that they're a legally sanctioned taxi if I hailed it.

This change is glossed over in this discussion a lot, but it is the single most important distinction between the old and new systems, and it definitely should reduce the barrier to entry when it comes to regulatory reasons.

I'm absolutely in favour of maintaining extremely strict controls over vehicles that can pick people up off the street with no prior arrangement. Loosening that is a bad idea, and it's not really at issue in the current debate.

Certainly, but Uber has Uber-controlled protections (however they're determined). It certainly appears as "vehicles that can pick people up off the street with no prior arrangement". I'm not advocating for a return to what was, I'm advocating for a reasonable set of protections in this brave new world that aren't controlled by the company. The company has no compulsion to maintain any protections beyond the minimum required to maintain profitability.

Profitability in their case does include a requirement of an expectation of safety (one that in my experience exceeds the expectation of safety I can expect with city-approved taxi services, incidentally). I am not, in general, a fan of appeals to the invisible hand (I fit somewhere on the socialist end of things, to be honest), but the truth is that the capitalism of uber is an improvement on the quasifeudalism of taxi oligopolies.

And no, it does not appear as that at all. The prior arrangement may only be minutes before, but it includes knowing the name, license plate, and location of the person who's picking you up, all of which can be verified before getting in the car. This is categorically different from a taxi hail. It baffles me that someone could assert they're the same.

The US is no better. Suppose a Vegas or Austin taxi cab takes the scenic route to the airport. What do you think the odds are of me getting my money back?

http://taxi.nv.gov/Complaints/Complaints/ (Yep, they require the form to be notarized. So consumer friendly.)

If I'm a tall black man, what do you think my odds are of successfully hailing a cab? (Hint: my black male friends in the US often ask me to hail them a cab.)

With Uber, I have full confidence that my complaints will be resolved to my full satisfaction. What regulatory regime do you propose to give me Uber levels of consumer protection if I take a yellow cab?

The fact is that technology + capitalism has solved the market failures that your proposed regulations theoretically address. Uber already does background checks. Uber inspects your car to make sure it's safe and comfortable. Perhaps taxi regulations were once necessary.

But with 2016 technology levels and current market environs, what is the specific problem that you think these regulations will solve, in either NYC or Mumbai?

I believe that Ubur and similar services are providing a more transparent review and protection process by bringing this in to a peer to peer social review layer.

Drivers are rated by passengers, passengers are rated by drivers. More data is collected and correlated, leading to stronger statistical correlations about bad actors on both sides of the system.

It isn't clear that the permits systems provided better protection than UBER's system, and there's at least theoretical reasons to think UBER's data rich system could become better than permits, especially if combined with stuff like background checks,etc.

Agreed, but Uber has no reason to support background checks, etc. Any move towards regulation would make their business model fall apart.

Does Uber support wheelchairs and disability accessibility?

Protections for consumers that apparently comes at a much higher price point, which some consumers may not wish to pay. How is that protection for them?

As a consumer, you don't get to opt out of regulation "because you want to". You then create a race to the bottom, negatively affecting your fellow citizens.

You don't want to pay for safe airlines? Non-rancid meat? Agriculture runoff regulation? Too bad.

Your comment isn't an argument that the level of regulation (and subsequent regulatory capture) for the taxi industry in most U.S. cities is appropriate and on the whole beneficial.

It's a much less controversial argument that some regulation is for the common good. Sure.

Isn't it obvious that some level of regulation is too costly for consumers to justify the benefits they receive? To me, that's the charitable reading of bsbechtel's comment.

> Isn't it obvious that some level of regulation is too costly for consumers to justify the benefits they receive? To me, that's the charitable reading of bsbechtel's comment.

I don't dispute this. If you want the regulation changed, vote on it. If you simply ignore it because you think it doesn't apply to you, I hope to see you go out of business.

ftfy

> As a consumer, in $my_economic_model, you don't get to opt out of regulation "because you want to".

Just calling it how it is in countries with a real working government.

Not sure why you're getting downvotes, this is completely accurate (except that the competitors aren't necessarily college kids, as a demographic they are closer to taxi drivers).

But I would add that on net this is a good thing, and the beneficiaries are not just consumers, but the new drivers.

The logic of the free market is fairly simple and intuitive. One reason people shy away from it is that they are subconsciously afraid of organized labor. The left have drummed it into people's heads that these people mean business, and if they beat you to a pulp it will be your own fault for threatening their livelihood [0].

[0] e.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7L_cuQJ1pQ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com