Albeit the taxi companies created the unfair terms. Obviously it is not necessary to have a medallion to drive someone around. HN is generally anti-lobbying to protect corporate interest, but now that Uber is big there is some regret...
> I would love for the taxi industry to be liberalised but just not for the benefit of a few Silicon Valley billionaires
And the consumer...
This myth of the taxi companies lobbying to avoid competition doesn't seem based in reality. Taxis didn't seek out regulation to protect themselves. Cities began regulating fares, service areas, and the business model. Cities put rules on them for the public good. The medallion is there is to balance out the price regulations placed on taxi companies and to ensure that the rules didn't make the taxi business unprofitable.
I've never seen any indication they sought out these regulations.
Really it smells like a smear campaign to make a bunch of immigrants driving cars 12 hours a day the bad guys and to make the 60 billion dollar corporate titan the underdog.
And who can blame them, really. When it costs thousands of dollars to get a medallion, you want to protect your investment and do whatever you can to maximize your profits.
AFAIK, in most places in Europe a taxi license costs tens or hundreds of dollars, not thousands. (There are exceptions, of course, most famously London where the cost is more in time than in direct money, and Paris where licenses are sold second-hand for hundreds of thousands.)
The solution is governments reimbursing the licenses and just letting everyone do whatever they want.
I don't blame them for wanting the government to hold up their end of the bargain. That doesn't make the taxi companies the bad guys.
Shit in cities that allow Uber, if you drive a taxi without a license you STILL get fined.
The popularity of Uber, Lyft and similar show those two statements are in contradiction. I'm sure they weren't aware at the time, but that's what happens when you regulate business models. The status quo is locked in, and things are worse than they could be with perfect invisibility.
The regulations they flout, like surging pricing, aren't very popular.
And Uber is still subsidizing rides with VC money.
The government back then generally viewed competition as a pernicious thing. So they imposed entry requirements to limit competition. That necessitated also bringing prices under government control, to curb monopoly abuses. The Haas Act followed the same basic logic. Limit pernicious competition by limiting licenses, but curb potential abuses by controlling rates.
There were protests by taxi/cab drivers in Budapest (no medallion system) organized by the Taxi Drivers Association.
And Uber was banned, because it lacked a telephone dispatcher center and/or whatever.
There was and is still heavy lobbying.
Uber is not a saint, far from it, but it's not like there was/is no problem with taxi/cab markets.
The taxi industry has been running its own smear campaign for the last 50 years by offering completely terrible service in the majority of the US.
From the consumer perspective, Uber/Lyft are the only real options for reliable taxi service outside of a few really dense urban areas. The status quo before was calling a number, hoping they didn't hang up or scoff at the route, waiting 20-120 minutes, getting scammed by taking an inefficient route, and then getting lied to about the credit card machine not working. Oh, and then your only recourse being a report to a local taxi authority which is completely unreasonable if you are traveling due to the time effort involved.
The pre-rideshare world was awful and full of ripoffs. Disrupting that is the win for all.
I remember the last time I had to use a taxi. It was in Saint Louis - there was no Uber/Lyft at that time at that location. They had no website. So I had to call somewhere - cell service was nearly non-existent for some reason. My flight left in 3 hours. The taxi dispatcher sent someone, but, well, I called the dispatcher after 30 minutes. He's on his way. Great. An hour and 45 minutes before my flight, the guy pulls up. Of course he got lost or something, I don't care. We make our way to the airport. Happily, this time the credit card worked.
A few years before that, I was in Boston. Taxi had a TV playing in the headrest in front of me. Of course it was charging me, but it didn't say that. The driver didn't have a credit card reader - until I told him that I had no cash, so he had to figure it out. Then the reader came out. I asked for a receipt (business trip), and he scribbled something on literally the back of an envelope.
I will never cry about that industry being eaten.
Market forces clearly aren't dictating the number of medallions, it's political. Given that fares are still regulated, there's no benefit to creating a shortage of taxis other than inflating the price of medallions. Who benefits from the inflated cost of medallions and who rents them out to taxi drivers?
Don't tell me it isn't lobbying or bribery.
Regulating supply is about more than fares. Traffic is an externality for the taxi/rideshare company, a 'tragedy of the commons'. I've been in cities where traffic has become much worse due to the large, unregulated influx of rideshare drivers; the cities should auction off slots - which is what medallions are (AFAIK).
The government says "you can't charge 10 bucks a mile when it is raining during rush hour." And note, that is exactly what Uber does when it is raining.
Limiting competition is the compromise for limiting their profitability. The government is ensuring they'll profit, but not too much. It was a common method of regulation in the past.
I never blamed the drivers (nor the non-drivers) as it wasn't them who rigged the system. And most were pretty cool, even in the days when getting one to show up was a real challenge. (For SF folks: I would regularly wait 45 minutes for a cab to 5th and Howard in 2000, and knew better than to call Yellow which would just not show up half the time. Veteran's at least showed up eventually.)
Now that we have Uber and Lift clogging the city I would have expected the taxis to push things like customer service and professionalism... but last time I was there a taxi driver in front of my business hotel refused to take me to my doctor's office because: "You can walk that."
So I guess I'm prioritizing Lyft next time out. </anecdotal>
Honestly, I'm not convinced Uber's fast-and-loose approach is a bad thing. We view disruption as a good thing when it ousts an exploitative private entity -- why is it any different for the government?
For the record, I don't think the medallion system is good or right or fair - it's not. Just pointing out that there are distinctions here and willfully ignoring them would be foolish.
That's not why people see Uber as evil. It's because they see Uber as brazenly disregarding the laws of their communities, treating their employees badly (including drivers), exploiting people who need rides in bad weather, and competing unfairly.
Sorry, but as a consumer I welcome this. I will gladly pay a few bucks more or wait five minutes more for a taxi than having every industry taken over by the absentee landlord class that is the tech industry. In the case of Uber spying on their employees, having no obligations any other employer has, paying no taxes and misusing the data of their customers and drivers.
From time to time people would do well do understand that everybody is not just consumer but also a worker, or in the end you'll end up in a bad spot yourself.
One just needs to look at the fact that these businesses have customers and drivers rate each other, which is nothing but undignified and gamified surveillance. Don't give up essential freedoms for the sake of convenience.
If the cab industry could develop an app that works like Uber/Lyft I think they'd be competitive again. I use cabs when they're right there and I know the city, otherwise I reluctantly use Lyft or whatever's available.
I welcome as much regulation as necessary to ensure that Uber is safe for consumers but beyond that I say let the tech industry come.
No Uber and barely any taxis. I must've seen 4 taxis in the 10 days I was there. What's with this?
Unfortunately the government has created a situation where they've made owning a taxi medallion a huge investment and simply allowing Uber would destroy that investment overnight. The taxi industry, knowing now that they're at the mercy of the government, have started "donating" much more aggressively. At this point, the government is just trying to avoid dealing with the issue for as long as possible.
I talked once to someone who honestly thought medallion fees went to pay for driver health insurance and benefits. The status quo was just as exploitive.
In Amsterdam, the result was absolute chaos. Ignoring for the moment the unhappy existing taxi drivers and companies (that was complete mess, way beyond what the police were able to control), many new entrants behaved less than professional. I.e., competing aggressively for the lucrative rides, being poorly equipped to actually deliver a taxi services.
The situation got so bad, that the old taxi company that everybody hated, was now suddenly was the most reliable taxi service.
The question then becomes how you view the taxi market. Is it a market where anything goes. Where sometimes, in the middle of the night, there is just no taxi that wants to take you (home) for a price you can afford. Where taxi drivers claim that tourists agreed to pay an insane amount of money per person for a short ride from the airport to a nearby hotel.
Or do you want something that is mostly predictable. Maybe not very efficient, certainly not nice. But with reasonable expectation that if you order a taxi, one will show up and take you where you need to go?
You can debate whether it’s fair that they’ve profited by breaking the rules. But they’ve made a very compelling case that the rules aren’t needed anymore.
All of these are/could be/would have been solved by mandating the use of an app. The City of Amsterdam should have made an app, drivers register, that keeps track of their fares and manages supply-demand surges.
Economically it's a race to the bottom unless there's a constrained supply. Especially when [not if] self driving cars start operating as taxis.
If Amsterdam wants to treat taxis as a public good (to get reliable night transport for example), then it can regulate it as such, pay some money for drivers (or otherwise compensate them) to be available at night if natural demand is (or would be) too low.
Just out of curiosity, what were the requirements that got lifted?
Public transport is the public good that the government pays (in part) for. I doubt that you can randomly pay taxis to be available at night. Then you have to figure out a scheme who gets paid and who doesn't. Otherwise, you may find lots of people who want to get paid for doing nothing at night.
I don't know the details of the old taxi system. There were a limited number of licenses. There was a limit on how much a taxi could charge. But probably there were lots of other requirements as well.
That doesn't happen anymore. Not after Uber.
https://archives.sfmta.com/cms/rtaxi/documents/2005TaxiAvail...
I even remember when the number was lower ...
But, yeah. Things were pretty miserable unless you were somewhere taxis actually wanted to be.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/business/uber-drunk-drivi...
There are some holes that are simply too deep to be dug out of.
I don't think it matters that the justification is after the fact. I think you could actually predict a decrease in drunk driving with better access to transportation that Uber provides before the fact.
> capture even more of the economic pie
I think Uber expands the economic pie more than it takes a share of it. And once there are self-driving cars, services like Uber will become a commodity because there are no network effects on the driver side. Any company with a billion dollars will be able to create a sufficient scale of self-driving cars in a city to compete with the rest of the self-driving car services. The rich people capturing the value will be the ones who own the technology to navigate the car.
But no, some people got rich doing this. And monopolists got hurt (we're really going to feel sorry for them?!). What a crock. Imagine missing out on all this dynamism and sticking to a measly 13,000 taxis in Manhattan (none in the boroughs, not really) because those millionaires who own taxi fleets and multi-million dollar medallions might suffer while some people in SV make billions. The story is the same around the world.
No, I won't feel sorry for the taxi medallion owners, nor the banks that lent to them that lost money when medallion prices crashed.
It is when that's the law..
The fact that these people have been able to profit with high visibility and applause when basically the source of their advantage is breaking the law is mind boggling.
Are taxi regulations ridiculous? yes. But that doesn't mean that rampant illegal behaviour is the answer.