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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

So ultimately we gained nothing other than now having worse worker protections than before [1] and better regular taxis. We could have reached the same result by just overhauling how taxies worked without exploiting the ones that already have barely anything and making a few rich.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQzw8MVlQlo

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> We could have reached the same result by just overhauling how taxies worked without exploiting the ones that already have barely anything and making a few rich.

"overhauling how taxis worked" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I have a hard time seeing how that would've ever happened in the absence of something like a Lyft or Uber. That's an extraordinarily difficult task.

You must live in a place that already had good taxi services. There's no comparison in the level of service between Uber and every taxi service I ever took outside of those in Japan / Korea. The popularity of Uber given the horrific regulated taxi services made banning Uber politically dangerous in many cities.

add Singapore to your list of places that didn't need Uber

OTOH Kuala Lumpur is so much more accessible with Grab than before

> overhauling how taxies work

Why would taxi services invest if there is no competition which makes them provide a better service?

Not everything is price. It would be interesting to see the outcome if ridesharing apps would exactly match the price of taxis.

Yes. But unfortunately, the taxi companies didn't realize this until it was much, much too late. They got their lunches eaten by tech companies who liked to move fast and break things, such as decades of worker protections, well supplied with money and not overburdened with ethics.

There is a parallel universe where some tech worker came along and created apps and sold them to the taxi companies. That would have led to much better taxi service -- though still a monopolist keeping the number of cabs small to protect their own profits.

This implies taxi drivers had worker protections, which isn't true.

Most of them at least had jobs. Taxi driving wasn't great but they are at least employees. Some even have a union.

Are they even employees? I think some of them were independent contractors, possibly fake ones. Employees wouldn't be quite as motivated to pretend their card readers were broken.

Employees are even more motivated to just pocket the money.

taxis could never compete with Uber and Lyft because they as actually own the cabs. Uber and Lyft can respond to surges. Taxis can't. they'd lose money owning enough vehicles to support surge times and have them idle during non surge.

The couldn't have tried to be Uber either because the law didn't allow non medallion drivers

This period of more expensive ubers has been only a few months.

Uber and Lyft have been operating for 10ish years.

Cherry picking.

When Uber went public, they lost their sugar daddy. Softbank/the Saudi sovereign wealth fund was willing to put in money to subsidize losses to gain market share. The stock market doesn't work that way.

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