Well, things should be equal. Why should a taxi service have to perform a regular vehicle inspection and a an uber driver be exempt from it?
Either make the Uber driver go through regular inspections or cancel the regulation for the cabbies.
Either make the Uber driver go through regular inspections or cancel the regulation for the cabbies.
For example, and I'm going offtopic here, but in USA they have lobbying, which is basically legalized bribe. Then people wonder why they chose to do the taxation weirdness from the article. Somebody probably got paid to shave % off Uber income, and I'd bet it won't stop here too.
When the system if flawed from the bottom up, you really can't be wondering why some parts of it are illogical. Especially when money are allowed to directly and openly influence people in power.
All cars in MA have yearly inspections.
Any extra inspection for taxi is total nonsense, probably invented by the taxi companies themself as a barrier to entry by others.
Taxis drive a LOT more km/miles than regular cars - more driving, and particularly more city driving === more wear and tear on the cars systems.
Yet again it seems to me that the fandom around uber in the USA is because your taxi regulations are just stupid. I've never heard of "the card machine was broken so I was forced to pay cash".
I have always had much better cars riding in Uber, much better service, and felt safer, too.
There is nothing good about cabs. I have a list of cab horror stories long as my arm.
Why are Americans so uniquely able to have terrible implementations of things and just treat the idea in general as the fault, not the implementation.
The U.S. is alone in the way it does a lot of things, which they claim are impossible/impractical, while a large percentage of the rest of the developed world, just does them.
- Gun Control
- Health Care
- The Metric system
- A political system that isn't completely corrupted and driven by money. A couple of million (dollars/pounds) is sort of average spending for a political party to spend on TV adverts for an election in Australia/UK. The US parties/candidates are expected to spend 4.4 BILLION dollars on adverts for this year's election. [1] [2] [3]
1: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-24/election-campaign-adve...
2: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35687956
3: http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/19/432759...
This is using government authority to take money from one business and give it to another.
If the taxi regulations had any benefit, then there would be something better about taking a taxi than taking an Uber. But in the real world (especially in Massachusetts) taxis completely suck. From the user experience point of view, Uber has done a great job of regulating itself.
So the government has decided not to make things worse by putting the regulations on Uber. The taxi owners complain that this is unfair. The government says "you're right, have some money."