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Comment by 0ld | Hacker News Reader

There's a taxi company in my city (EU, but not Germany) which doesn't go mad or cry for govt help, and instead provides experience very similar to Uber with its app, runs "full scale" licensed taxis and their prices are very close (and frequently lower) than Uber's. So that I prefer using their service, as they can drive on the bus lanes and in the old town.

What do they do wrong?

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"not Germany" may be the keyword: Taxis in Germany are part of the public transportation network and as such part of a regulatory system.

For example, they can't make up their own prices (neither higher nor lower).

There are few taxi companies with more than 20 cars, and most seem to gravitate around 3 cars. Such a company doesn't build "its [own] app".

If your entire operation is controlled by the (county) government, it seems to make sense to ask that government for help. But they didn't even do that: Courts are independent.

As someone who doesn't live in your city, if I were to visit, I'd rather not install another app, create another account, and sort out payment (including capturing receipts for corporate expense claims).

Uber has the advantage of being ubiquitous among a certain class of travellers - this obviously is not an insurmountable advantage, but it does mean I naturally tend towards using Uber when travelling unless there's a particularly compelling local alternative.

Everything else about your taxi service sounds good, and I'd be more than happy to use them, I'm just lazy. (And from other comments, I see that there's taxi company apps like FreeNow which seem to be gaining regional market share?)

For non-visitors (locals), who I assume would be bulk of riders, installing of Uber or another app is same.

Once they become habituated to one app, they would be very sticky.

Locals are probably the majority of riders, but a majority by how much? Taxis are a high volume, low margin business, and losing purely the foreign business traveller market alone to Uber has got to sting.

> Uber has the advantage of being ubiquitous among a certain class of travellers

Which is funny because Uber's shtick is to complain about the evil taxi cartels, while statements like yours indicate that they're really the biggest of them all.

That marketing line was ridiculous. Uber is a multinational corporation fighting lots of small local taxi operations, but somehow they've managed to paint themselves as an underdog fighting a "taxi mafia".

It's weird - the old taxi companies had their localised oligopolies by law, Uber and Lyft and so on have their global oligopoly through a few other means, not the least of which is their ability to spend billions of Saudi petrobucks on customer acquisition.

But the fact that they offer a fairly consistent experience certainly does help them.

>Uber's shtick is to complain about the evil taxi cartels, while statements like yours indicate that they're really the biggest of them all.

By rolling with an approved and expensed option, which eliminates certain amount of ambiguity, does not imply that Uber is part of a cartel; irrespective of it's licensing woes and/or impending banishment from multiple lucrative markets. At present, it does not even enjoy a majority position to form an alliance, let alone collude with locally competitive operators.

Not only this but the fact that if I am in a country with a language I do not speak and with streets I cannot read (or will misread) I prefer to just click twice and wait for a blue car with plate HDGDH56DB. I don't need to speak, just hop in and out, the driver knows everything.

Price is secondary to some extend.

If there are laws that your competitor is clearly violating, then defending your business is not "crying for help". The Taxi companies are just doing what they can given the legal framework that our government created.

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