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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

Maybe now they can start complying with New York law.

In Japan, citizens will punish you if you don't respect their law (e.g.: by not using your service). One of the reasons of why Uber had a hard time in there initially.

Hmm, I used uber in japan when I was traveling there and it worked quite well. What kind of problems were they having?

Uber has not been successful in Japan for many reasons. 1) the public transportation system is excellent. 2) the taxis are ubiquitous in the major metro areas. 3) the taxi companies have worked together to compete against Uber Japan successfully (Japan Taxi app, etc.)

Taxis in Japan had already solved the problems that pushed me towards Uber/Lyft in the first place. Credit card readers work properly, virtually every payment method is accepted, the drivers use GPS, availability was good (for my use case), and they are polite.

It's hard to get public support of law breaking when your solution is just incrementally better than the existing system.

When I tried using Uber in Tokyo, I was only able to call a licensed taxi through the app, which was incredibly expensive. The one time I actually needed a taxi (in a tiny town in Tohoku) I had to walk around hoping to physically hail one (getting a SIM card that can make phone calls is apparently very difficult in Japan, so I didn't have one).

A pocket WiFi and Skype-Out resolved the issue for me.

New York doesn't enforce double parking, jaywalking, and other "good neighbor" and safety laws. Why is this one special?

> New York doesn't enforce double parking, jaywalking, and other "good neighbor" and safety laws

I am not disturbed by double parkers or jaywalkers. I was disturbed by unit 4F and 7B's weekly round of "drunk Europeans screaming in the hallway at 3AM".

I've seen people almost die due to double parking clogging up the street. I'm sure accidents do happen from that.

Interesting that the two “good neighbor” laws you picked mainly impact drivers. Perhaps the answer to your question is that almost all New Yorkers (city) are living in multiple dwelling buildings but only a smallish minority are regular drivers.

They also impact pedestrians. I've seen pedestrians almost hit due to double parking in NYC. Sometimes they are also jaywalking, but sometimes there's a crosswalk or intersection and the double parking is hurting visibility.

That’s a good point. I wonder if that’s been considered as part of vision zero.

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