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> We're not talking about the smartest people here. Something that had a stable (and slowly rising) value for 100 years didn't seem like a gamble until the lobbyists came in and convinced the lawmakers to allow unfair competition.

This is not right. It was a bubble. Prices rose from ~$250K in 2001 to over $1.2 million in 2013 [1, 2]. That's a 13% growth rate.

It was obviously a bubble. Yet people were jumping on it, taking out big loans to buy more medallions. It had to burst at some point. Uber was the trigger, but this had to blow up at some point. The sooner the better.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-taxi-medallion-king/

[2] http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/march_2013_medalli...

Exactly, and that's my problem with ride sharing companies like Uber (or rather, with governments letting them operate as unlicenced taxis despite strict regulation of 'real' taxis). The government created an artificial monopoly, sold tickets to operate in that monopoly, and then failed to protect it. Medallions were a stupid idea but that doesn't mean the government should be able to just write them off and screw over the people holding them.

So it should be able to screw people not holding them? Or those who cant get a $1 Million dollar loan or pay 3k to drive a car? Car leases are easy at $150.

Any government policy has winners and losers. Literally any. All that's reasonable is that governments act in.good faith and with proper accounting of, say, time horizons. They should have figured out that medallions were unsustainable, what, in the low 100k's? Once it starts working as a pyramid scheme there are only losers from then on... Except the now retired taxi drivers, who banked 1M.

it sounds like the cities should be forced to buy them back at the price they sold them

Private profits and subsidized losses?

Capitalism requires bankruptcy.

A medallion was never necessary to run a car service. There were tons of other car services operating in New York without medallions prior to Uber.

The medallions were required to be able to pick up street hails. Uber does not and never has accepted street hails. They operate more like the other car services where you request a car from a central dispatcher, and then that car comes and picks you up at a location that you requested.

Yeah, but not really. In the days before mobile phones, street hails were a huge majority of a taxi's fares. Your only other choices were to call from home, find a pay phone, or find a cab rank (or does a cab rank still count as a street hail?)

Apps like Uber let people effectively "street hail" while sidestepping the legalities, which were written before mobile phones became available.

> it was always a stable asset. Because regulation didn't allow non-medallion taxis in the city.

In fact it was not a stable asset. Medallion values had increased dramatically in a relatively short amount of time. They went up in price by four fold in ten years for both corporate and individual. [1]

Is it rational to buy something after an extreme price appreciation like that, with the assumption that it couldn't possibly go back down?

[1] https://i.imgur.com/TeJiCpf.png

They allow non medallion cars aka the black private car service cars but I think you needed a medallion to pick up a person hailing a cab off the side of the road... ie you didn't call the car service to come pick you up.

With uber they're still not picking people up that are physically hailing them. They are relying on technology aka smartphones to get around this.

Personal experience has shown that Ubers will in fact pick up folks who hail them, you just have to then set up the ride via the app afterwards.

Found this out while waiting an hour for an uber driver - three others drove by and responded to my waving them down to see if they were my uber, and offered to take me (looking back, I should have taken them up on the offer).

This, ironically, turned me on to the taxi system in NY. They were just more reliable at the time.

Uber was allowed to operate as a "car service", which was not based on medallions. There were already many non-taxi car services operating in NYC, all Uber did was scale the idea and put it on a smartphone.