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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

At least in San Francisco, the old Taxi system was a deliberately undersupplied crony capitalist disaster.

It served to enrich a few Taxi medallion owners and left most people without any reliable way to get a ride from A to B most of the time.

Now that we have functioning ride sharing systems, people actually can reliably get a ride from A to B. So of course we do that more than before, and there is more traffic. This is a symptom of a better functioning society with a better life for its residents.

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It should still be said that if the availability of taxis matched uber/lyft, the fact that NO cash is involved. Meaning when you reach the drop off the riders can just exit the car, most likely saves an unbelievable amount of time and lane blockage compared to taxis.

And you don't have to explain the driver where you want to go. Other than being an extremely nice feature, I could see that decreasing lane blockage time as well.

Every taxi I've ridden in probably 10 past years had a GPS, that's not Uber/Lyft invention or unique property.

GP was talking about the initial setup of a ride, the app of your uber/lyft driver will already have your destination. The conventional taxi GPS won't. The app backend takes care of the cumbersome rider to driver to GPS dataflow.

Still, as a cyclist, I'd rather have lane blocking than drivers fiddling with their apps while driving.

"the app of your uber/lyft driver will already have your destination."

So does modern taxis. It's strange that when topic comes to taxis vs Uber/Lyft here, it looks like taxis in US are very archaic. I live in Europe and taxis started using apps/GPS/SMS/time and price approximation etc. long before Uber, is it so different in other parts of the world?

I think it existed but just wasn't very good. The tipping culture and cabbie nagging here also kind of defeats most of the value from those estimates.

Which country in Europe had a taxi app before Uber?

My (US) last taxi ride was 3 years ago and it had GPS the driver didn't want to use and no price estimation. The big deal was that it now had a device where I could slide my card instead of the driver doing so.

4 years ago was the last time I called for a taxi. Took 20 minutes to get it (lyft takes 3 min in the same time of day), and the first taxi company didn't service my area (but did cover the opposite side of the street I later discovered).

So yeah, archaic.

The only time I ever had to explain to a taxi driver where to go was in an Uber, where the road was closed and google maps had no idea about it, and the driver clearly didn't know the local roads well enough to just pick a different one.

Also nice for the driver wanting to retire for the day that he can get fares that get him closer to his home.

Is that a feature Uber/Lyft drivers have? I always thought they could not see the destination before picking up the client.

I recently talked with a Uber driver, they cannot see the destination of the client, but he said he can specify the rough area where he wants to (eventually?) go and fares will take him close enough to that direction.

Yep, its fairly recent though.

Concurring with sibling comments, last week I had a Lyft driver who was using that feature because she was ending her shift.

So true. The last few taxi rides I took all involved the driver asking how to get to the destination. Not which way was faster, but how to get there. They used gps as a callback.

So weird. Granted, my 3 taxi rides aren't statisticly significant, but it one of several factors that makes uber/lyft more comfortable.

I would suspect that the negative impact from increasing the number of cars on the road is by far going to outweigh any savings from less lane blockage.

Dynamic pricing helps alleviate that. But also I notice more ride share drivers park and wait for rides in a parking lot, where as taxis seam to just slowly drive around blocks.

During rush hour, that's very likely true, but I want to point out that during times of low traffic, when the roads are underutilized, increased traffic is actually a net positive.

I feel like I see taxis do a better job of getting out of the lane of traffic than a lot of uber/lyft drivers. Ride share drivers will stop and throw on the blinkers absolutely anywhere. Taxis seem to at least use corners and pickup zones for loading and unloading around here (Seattle).

More a symptom of poor public transit! Where are those slidewalks, dammit.

The monopoly on Taxi medallion issuance is held by the state. And it's a proof that centralized economy planning doesn't work.

There are issues with not enough taxis in US, in UK, in Germany, in Romania and everywhere where the state decides how many taxis people need.

Centralized economy planning is an attribute of communism and big gov, not of capitalism.

Uber and Lyft are the fruit of what you call "crony capitalism" and they seem to actually solve the issue of not enough taxis available and try to obtain a hefty profit while doing it.

> The monopoly on Taxi medallion issuance is held by the state. And it's a proof that centralized economy planning doesn't work.

I (heartily) agree with the first statement, but the second seems too sweeping. We can easily find industries where free market capitalism "doesn't work" and plenty of portions of an economy that seem to function well under centralized planning. Governments fall prey to corruption, but companies are notoriously short sighted and eagerly exploit the commons, and both embrace hubris.

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