All the prices are artificially kept low as Uber and Lyft seek market share to bankrupt traditional taxi service. I expect within five years you will see dramatically higher costs.
Taxi Cab industry is a heavily regulated industry which was screwing only one group of people, i.e. the consumers. This is why there is little love for the cab industry in America. For more economic analysis on this, check out the lecture by Murray Rothbard given in 1989 at NY Polytechnic [2].
1. https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/2-taxi-medalli...
2. https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Government%20Cartels%2... [Part about taxi cab medallions start from 29:21]
As a tech person I'm not against smaller independent businesses. I actually support them as much as I can. However, I also support convenience. Smaller businesses should strive for convenience, and tech businesses should consider supporting and enable those smaller mom-and-pop shops to flourish. Lyft and Uber are, in fact, doing exactly this, by solving a transportation problem for a lot of smaller guys. Like me. I save a lot of personal money because I can get around on-demand and don't need to own a car. (I rent for longer trips, and the amount I spend on Uber+Lyft+Enterprise+Zipcar is much less than the cost of car ownership.)
Taxis are very, very far from your innocent mom-and-pop shop. I'd be quite glad if they die. For the following reasons.
- Taxis regularly rip you off when they drive by meter (I say this from experience). Uber drivers don't. Seeing the car on a map with your destination and route gives me peace of mind.
- Being able to set the destination on your "taxi"'s GPS navigation system using your own phone is amazing. You can just click on addresses in your calendar events and get a car without having to spell out street names for taxi drivers. It also helps a LOT when you are in a foreign country to be able to just click on stuff and physically get there, no questions asked.
- Taxis don't have a carpooling system. As a customer, I want lower fares and lower carbon emissions. In fact I bike most of the time and seldom drive a car because I don't believe in 1 person per car as a sustainable form of transportation. Taxis don't solve that problem. UberPool and Lyft Line are taking a step forward here. It's a step toward Public Transportation 2.0, the way I see it.
- Not all taxi drivers take credit cards. Especially outside the US. Uber solves the payment problem in a lot of parts of the world.
- In about 95% of places where I use Uber/Lyft, taxis don't really run around on a regular basis. You have to find their weird phone numbers, find a phone, and call them. And sometimes they don't show up for 45 minutes. Having a system that tells drivers where people want rides is a lot more fuel- and time-efficient than taxi drivers trolling around looking for business. (Guess why taxis are more expensive!)
- ONE app to get you a car on-demand, in any country, anywhere. How cool is that?
I am sure there are regions where taxi companies don’t completely suck. My very limited experiences w/ cabs in the South of France was markedly better than with taxis in Texas and San Francisco, for example.
Creating an app like uber is cheap enough that competitors will pop up whenever uber feels like making money.
You might be asked to extract rent but you can't extract too much (just my conjecture, no clue how much is too much)
So I might be the last person to realize this but you're right! If I don't mind being ten or twenty minutes late, then how about taking this a step further with a bus? You enter where you want to go and the closest bus gets rerouted based on where its existing passengers are going (or if you're going somewhere weird it won't trigger the bus but rather a small Toyota Corolla I am not completely opposed to small cars). It doesn't even need to be self-driving. The main thing is there needs to be enough of them (and it would be nice if they had access to bus lanes but the amazing Uber legal time I am sure can figure this one out). This is brilliant because if we can reroute bus traffic based on who is travelling and where (and we know live traffic information thanks to Google and Waze) we can make "public transit" a lot more palatable. I'd argue we can realistically make an "unlimited" rides card that allows you to ride any uber pool anywhere for say $200 a month? I mean if you never have to wait for the bus/taxi for more than twenty minutes, it is surely worth it right?
I guess the point is that there is a lot of room for innovation with uber pool and uber has to continue to innovate to stay ahead. If they do, I don't mind if they take a small portion of the money. We as a society will be better off with fewer cars on the road.
anywhere doesn't actually mean anywhere but anywhere within certain areas. Can't uber pool between brisbane and sydney :)
The leading startup in making that vision is Via, they just got $200m investment from Mercedes and a partnership, they are deployed in 3 major cities in the us, also starting in Europe via big partnership and working on dual model of both their own service and licensing their software to others, what could enable rapid takeup.
As for prices, recently I read a story comparing ride services, for 4mile trip , Uber costs ~$20, via $6(although via can sometimes get delayed for long, but I think with scale that could greatly improve, and maybe prices a bit).so this may give a scale for the practicality of $200 free pass.
And btw to run such service you need 8 passenger minibuses , which are commercial vehicles driven by commercial drivers, who hate Ubers guts,and probably won't work with Ubers model, and if Uber changes their model and gives preference to these drivers, they could alienate their own drivers.So maybe that's why they don't fully compete.
And one more thing: the other big possible improvement is in vehicle design, to allow multiple people sharing a vehicle more comfort and privacy. But now that Mercedes is in the picture and they said they will optimize vehicles , maybe this will get solved.
Uber can change price dynamically while you load your app within seconds. Somehow doubt the whole Taxi industry of Medallion et al can reboot in a matter of seconds (or days or months).
The problem currently just is that while Uber could be something like 25% cheaper, they are actually rather 40% cheaper and pay the difference out of their own pocket.
And if one of these companies goes under, expect wages to fall further because they do not need to compete with the other.
When Uber leaves a European market taxis generally profit from it.