Oh I'm sure we can make money with all these users. I mean there are so many of them. We just have to wait until the incumbent starts collapsing, and burn money until we start collapsing, and someone else figures all those users must be worth something, so they start burning money, and...
They all look like Ponzi schemes at the moment.
Is there a particular reason you are restricting scope to only the US? Taxis and "ride sharing" organizations are an international phenomenon: I'd say the majority of jurisdictions do not have medallions. And the upstream point remains - most taxis can now be hailed via mobile apps.
Public transport exist, and for people that actually need a car on a daily basis, cars exist.
Taxis are luxury service and not subsidized ( as that word is defined in the dictionary) by money offsets. We can derail this into whether medallions/insurance regulation should be there, but the hard cold argument here is : Money. Lots and lots of money.
Uber/luft are subsidized by hard cash just to exist.
I drive, so from the outside, this looks as if somebody was subsidizing Android watches, because they'll overtake real watches.
It's a business gamble, but many are mistakenly taking it as a fact.
So, correspondingly, expect either prices to keep rising on Uber/luft/etc, or them to go out of business.
Whether Uber's billions in losses can be amortized over that time so those losses aren't on the books so they can be competitive with a new entrant solely using self-driving cars, remains to be seen.
In any case, the door-to-door 100% driverless tech that Uber/Lyft/etc. require to eliminate drivers is almost certainly many decades away. It seems unlikely they can sustain massive losses for a fraction of that time even if they did have some sort of competitive advantage once that future arrives.
If you don't like a company that you're invested in through an index fund, you can always offset that part of your portfolio with a call/put option or a short (depending on your horizon).