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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

This is a good outcome! Uber and Lyft have dragged taxi companies into the 21st century, with apps like Flywheel making the process of getting a traditional taxi not the horrifying experience it used to be (call a dispatcher, get told 20 minutes, wait an hour, cab never shows).

I frankly don't care what service takes me home. I just want it to be safe, reliable, clean, and reasonably priced, and I want the driver to be accountable for any issues. If a taxi now fits that bill, great. Competition and choice are good things.

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I'm not sure. I think if we look at the net of what's happened: Uber execs and investors made (m/b)illions, taxi drivers got absolutley hosed - most now essentially are just extracting against the equity in their cars, and riders have got a marginally more reliable service.

So to put this in terms - the rich got much richer, and the middle class benefitted by exploiting the working class. That's doesn't seem like a good outcome to me (not least because the billionaires that benefit literally spunk their profits into outer space befroe thinking about paying tax).

If only the taxi drivers would have fixed their broken credit card machines.

Pre-Uber, driving a taxi was a survival job for most and they could (and often did) switch to Uber. The only drivers who made significant money drove 24-7 and had a relationship with their customers. I doubt they were hurt either.

The group that I assume got screwed were owners of local taxi companies and they were just corrupt cronies of the local government and screw them.

So the quality of service of a product is secondary to the wage dynamics of those who provide it? The point of the person you responded to is that for the consumer this was an unambiguous win, the industry is better for riders in nearly every way. Marginally does not even begin to approach it, it is a giant leap forward in quality of service that further extends to many things (reducing drinking and driving for instance).

I’d say the real problem with the outcomes here may be venture capital. That is what made the rich richer and allowed them to explode on a model that didn’t require them to be profitable. It’s possible this business model can’t succeed without that support, it’s also possible it could with higher prices, better wages and more time.

Yes the rich provided the middle class a new way to exploit the poor. The reason taxis were expensive is because taxi drivers have to pay rent and buy food. The incredible innovation of Uber is that drivers are pushed into poverty wages. In a functioning democracy that would be prevented by regulations like the minimum wage and union protections.

The problem with taxis has nothing to do with their prices. Look through this thread at various folks mentioning problems with the old systems and see how often price is among them. I’ll happily pay more, and various studies in the past have shown that ridesharing services charge much less than they could (in the name of growth and stamping out competition powered by venture money).

How many Uber/Lyft drivers were taxi drivers before you think? I’d say not a hugely large percentage. In other words, the “exploited” here are also apparently compelled to flock to such a job in previously untold numbers. This in turn drives down prices, and the reverse trend since the pandemic is the reason they’re back on the rise. The convenience provided here is not just for riders but for drivers.

All this to say your perspective reeks of political oversimplification that forces you to ignore various factors at play, many of them good, to churn out rhetoric. This ironically prevents seeing actual solutions to the problem you claim to care about.

Slightly off topic, but every cent that was spent "on space", was also spent "on earth". If you pay someone to build a rocket, that human lives on earth, not in space. Where the rocket goes is not the same place as where the money goes. This extremely basic economic misunderstanding undermines any other point you were trying to make.

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