Wow, so the crown of the "fintech" movement is just as bad as the banks, and the two biggest Silicon Valley successes of the last decade, Uber and AirBnB, are really just cases of massively successful regulatory arbitrage. Nice innovation!
[1]:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avinash-tharoor/banks-cartel-m...
Ubers are consistently safer than taxis, provide better customer service, don't intentionally take long routes to scam you, actually take credit card instead of pretending their credit card reader is broken, don't refuse to drive you because you have luggage or are going a short distance or are living in a bad part of town, etc etc.
It turns out that Uber's rating system is much better for people's protection than whatever laws and background checks taxis are subject to.
After you've arrived at your destination, have you really found any taxi driver who would rather take _no payment_ than a credit card? If all you have is plastic--and if the driver is required to accept that form of payment--then I guess I don't see the problem (for riders). I've had drivers take my credit card # on a carbon copy physical swipe. I've had drivers admit that the card reader actually _did_ work. Unfortunately for them, I've even had drivers accept underpayment in cash because they were legitimately unprepared.
- You are using "scamming" as a binary yes/no behavior, when in fact there is a huge difference between lying about a faulty machine and committing credit card fraud. The most likely reason for the lie (not "scam", that's too strong of a word here) is to avoid the credit processing fee. And that's _if_ they are lying in the first place. There simply isn't much (risk-adjusted) benefit for the driver to escalate that situation into credit fraud.
- The information on a hard-copy swipe is identical to a magnetic swipe and also the information provided to any online merchant (i.e. CC#, name, expiration; not CVV). Why should I be any more worried about this information on a piece of paper vs. the risk of a card skimmer at a gas station? Or a security breach of any one of the multitude of online retails who I have _ever_ shopped with?
- As you stated, the risk goes to the bank, as I am not liable for fraudulent transactions on my card. In fact, there's actually risk going to the driver as well: without an immediate approval, they don't know if I'm handing them a worthless card!
- The implication from your statement seems to be that... you wouldn't pay the driver, who has already rendered services and is capable of accepting valid payment from you. Is that what you mean? If so, that is not OK.
They're different experiences and certainly innovating. Just because they had to overcome legislation to grow does not mean that regulatory subversion is their only benefit.
Regulatory subversion is what gives them the margins to operate, and if a few people get hurt or discriminated against, I'm pretty sure Uber and AirBnB are okay with that trade-off.
Name those precautions and how exactly they relate to safety.
> AirBnB customers have reported heavy amounts of racism and bigotry
Millions of people stay in AirBnBs and the vast majority of them have positive experiences. There's no evidence of rampant racism or bigotry and any host who acted that way would be kicked off the platform.
This continued insistence that Uber and AirBnB are categorically inferior to legacy companies and only profit by skirting (useful) regulations is ridiculous. If taxis were better than Uber, why would anyone ever use Uber?
Furthermore, what kind of precedent does flaunting legitimate laws set? Thankfully Austin was able to have some balls and not allow that shit to fly.
Phoenix & SLC are also not cities in which people are likely to rely on on-demand ride sharing. Most people own their own car especially if they care about being able to determine exactly when they engage in transiting.
Further, in all of the non-mega / non-already-has-developed-rapid-transit-system cities I've been in, apart from one single city (San Francisco), the wait time for Uber is on the order of the wait time for a taxi. The difference between needing to call or book ahead to avoid a 30 minute wait vs. a 15 minute wait is utterly irrelevant.
The real reason why Uber succeeds in these markets is that they currently subsidize the rate paid to the drivers and thus compete on price. They also have way better marketing and do a good job of making people think the market for Uber rides is more liquid than the market for taxi rides (though in truth it's not more liquid except in dense areas).
Uber is not profitable in these areas, and is just hoping it can subsidize the losses on most decentralized transit regions long enough to defeat regulatory issues, outlast competitors, and put pressure on taxi services. It's still quite a significant gamble.
I'm already pretty strapped for cash, hence why I don't have a car but I utilize Uber & Lyft when I'm unable to get to my destination in a timely manner.
I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't know the number to call, I don't know when they'll arrive at my house, and simply the entire taxi experience is just horrible.
> I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't know the number to call, I don't know when they'll arrive at my house, and simply the entire taxi experience is just horrible.
You don't know the number? Really? If you have a mobile device from which to use Lyft, then getting the number is completely and entirely trivial.
While there is some variability in taxi arrival time (just as there is with Lyft or Uber arrival time), taxis typically are no later or more difficult to estimate. You just tell them when the taxi should arrive and that's when it will be there. There are even many apps for tracking taxis on a map interface. Those apps mostly only work in large cities, but it's easy to see they will expand to many other cities, certainly a city of the size of SLC.
You say "the entire taxi experience is just horrible" but your two biggest complaints are that you don't know the number (and apparently can't be bothered to look it up one time and add it to your contacts) and you don't know when they'll arrive (even though you tell them when to arrive, that's when they arrive, and their variability is not significantly different than Uber or Lyft variability).
I'm not able to make any sense of this if it's intended to be a criticism of the taxi experience in SLC.
Having used taxis in multiple countries for most of my life until Uber/Lyft...
... HAH!
If this was the case then there wouldn't be so much of a problem. The number of cab companies that say they'll show up and don't (or show up late as hell) is massive.
Uber at least lets you know if it's running late (ie - an ETA). Taxi companies should have been on this way before they were.
These days, when I visit SV (or almost any other city), this problem is solved. Uber, bam, done.
https://www.yelp.com.au/search?cflt=taxis&find_loc=Mountain+...
I don't see what you're getting at. This looks like exactly what I'd use to quickly find a cab company and their contact info.
> While there is some variability in taxi arrival time (just as there is with Lyft or Uber arrival time), taxis typically are no later or more difficult to estimate. You just tell them when the taxi should arrive and that's when it will be there.
A charitable interpretation of this is that you must live a charmed life. The only people I know who say things like this are people who have cars and don't tend to use much else or live in and exclusively travel in very large cities.
I have literally waited two hours for a taxi, on a normal friday night. Multiple times. My average wait for a taxi in the city I live in has usually been on the order of 30+ minutes, peak hours or off. Other cities have not been much better, unless they were cities like New York where normal hailing actually works.
Also, smaller cities don't get these wonderful taxi apps you're talking about until Uber comes into town and forces them to compete. Hell, in many cities reliably being able to pay with a credit card only becomes possible when a rideshare company comes to town, before that "the machine is broken!"
I've experienced none of the problems you describe, and I've used taxis in small (less than 30,000 people), medium (100,000 - 300,000 people) and large (Boston (where I lived for a long time), Chicago (nearest large city to me now), New York (visited friends there many times), Austin (work travel), Paris (worked there in 2010), and various other places I traveled) cities and towns.
If you call with a bit of advanced notice, it's rarely an issue. If you call at the last minute, of course there's a problem. But the exact same problems happen with Uber/Lyft.
If I do it, who the hell knows. I've called the night before and still waited almost an hour for a taxi beyond when it was supposed to come. The difference between taxi and uber/lyft variance is night and day, in my experience.
Your experience seems to be exceptional to me.
I now use Lyft (for pricing and the drivers), then Uber (if Lyft is unavailable).
http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-profitable-in-hundreds-o...
I openly acknowledge I could be wrong. But vague quotes like this effectively do not mean anything, one way or the other, to me. Companies say this kind of thing all the time when it's not actually true by accepted accounting standards.
As a data point to the contrary, in Chicago we stopped calling taxi dispatchers to our apartment because they would arrive up to 30 minutes late. Even if we scheduled ahead of time, it didn't seem to matter; as if the dispatchers were holding our request until the last minute and then dispatching into the general queue (so why call ahead?)
With the Uber app, whenever we call a car (even a taxi) we get an ETA based on GPS coordinates of the driver, which is both accurate and updates live. There's a level of accountability that was never available with the existing taxi dispatch.
Uber isn't as brilliant as they want us to believe they are.
So Singapore is one of a few cities where that's the case (NYC also -- Uber doesn't really work there. I was there for 8 days and requesting an Uber as a 10-15 minute wait. You can get into one of a million cabs that go by in that time. I gave up).
edit: which is exactly why the city rolled out the green cab system, which has inverted limitations on where they can accept street hails
And let's not even talk about the number of times a cab driver straight up refused to take me to Brooklyn, both during the day and late at night. Totally illegal, but it happens all the time.
In contrast, Uber took less time and required no negotiation.
Props to Uber for execution, but all the pieces were there.
[1]-edit: some in the smartphone, but most in the old "makes calls" cell phones
A zillion people had the same basic idea for Uber. They made it a reality, and made it Not Suck(tm).
The user experience prior to Uber for ordering a car via phone was absolutely horrific.
Much innovation looks very easy from an ex-post perspective. Putting wheels on a suitcase etc.
Taxis.
etc.
Ford Motor Co produced cars without such a license and eventually a case went to court. Ford initially lost but then the ruling was overturned.