In a taxi your ride was insured if the driver got in an accident. Your cabbie is certified, and less likely to be crazy. Also half your lyft/uber ride is paid by a VC.
Having taken many cabs and many rides via Uber, Lyft, and Juno, I'm not sure why you'd claim this. The drivers for ride-sharing services are far safer, saner, and more careful than cab drivers. The reason is not hard to ascertain: at the end of almost every trip drivers and riders rate each other.
Personally, I see a lot of people happy killing all of the problems with taxis (particularly in Chicago) but I fear that we are "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". Taxis in Chicago have a ton of problems, but I still have concerns about ride-sharing too.
My personal favorite is how hazard lights have morphed into "I can do whatever I want, just go around me by veering a car / this 60' bus into oncoming traffic."
One of these days I'm going to start spending one of my days off just standing at a random major intersection and emailing SDOT/SPD and posting on Twitter the license plate numbers of every Uber/Lyft driver behaving badly.
What people don't realize is that once the taxi companies are dead, the ride sharing apps will be able to raise prices and lower quality. Not to mention the issues already seen with Uber and Lyft, whether at a corporate level or on a driver/passenger level.
Really, things seem less corrupt now than they did with Daley so maybe there aren't big payoffs by taxis, just laziness from them and the police.
The rideshare companies are still in competition with each other. The market will stabilize at a price necessarily lower than taxi price, which was artificially inflated by local governments. This doesn't seem like a valid concern.
> whether at a corporate level
Sounds like you're imply that Uber's corporate problems are fundamental to rideshare. Care to elaborate on that?
> or on a driver/passenger level.
Why should I be more afraid of scary driver/passenger stuff with rideshare than with taxis? Do you have some information to suggest that rideshare is actually more dangerous? This seems like fear mongering...
Having $B of investment for an idea that is only a few degrees from "yo" (exaggeration) creates a hated company like Uber. What has Travis done to deserve money like that that a college student making a location aware app with a backend and insurance/financial pool couldn't do? It looks like a black mark on the tech investment engine to me. Only difference might be he's an ahole and they've been selling some moonshot idea.
I can tell you how bad the excessive funding situation is - my bank, Chase, has sent me offers through my credit card for free rides. A gigantic financial institution is providing millions of people with free rides. That is not an advantage that either a homebrew developer or a traditional taxi company have.
In terms of fear mongering, there have obviously been complaints from drivers and passengers alike. You need to consider those as well as true stories and urban legends of cab experiences. If you haven't heard anything bad ever, then you should be skeptical.
In Chicagoland, the number one complaint I have ever heard about cab rides is the price, and that is not an equal comparison to ride sharing apps (because of incredible subsidies, no licenses, taxes, regulations or fees).
When one company or field of companies eliminates another due to fair competition that can be healthy for the market, but when eliminations happen from unfair competition, that is harmful to the market. I never said taxis were great. I just think their extinction would be bad.
qed.
3. I don't doubt there are bad rideshare stories. This doesn't mean ride share is somehow less safe than taxis, hence fear mongering.
5. Drivers seem to love ride share as far as I can tell, so the McDonalds/Walmart comparisons aren't apt, even if I was certain that Walmart and McDonalds are unethical companies.