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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants.

Uber (and Lyft) simply took over as the established rent seeker. At least with medallions, there were caps to prevent overcapacity in the system and your urban cores flooded with rideshare drivers. There is no such restriction with Uber and Lyft, so their revenue comes on the back of the externalities of underpaid drivers and unregulated congestion.

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> At least with medallions, there were caps to prevent overcapacity

That's a really interesting way of describing an artificial monopoly specifically designed to increase earnings for a specific group of rent-seeking, wealthy medallion owners.

It's sort of like describing the De Beers corporation as ensuring the world is not littered with relatively-abundant diamonds. I suppose it might be true, but it certainly is not the point of the arrangement.

Besides medallions or a similar registration program, how would you balance vehicle capacity with limited street capacity? The "artificial monopoly" is a physical system, as two vehicles cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

I don't support medallions, by any means, but I do support a fair quota system to balance transportation availability with congestion management.

Offering higher pay at times of high capacity requirements, and lower pay at times when there is a surplus of drivers seems like a great solution to balance out when drivers should take shifts, while still letting people choose their own schedules and priorities. Which is exactly what the rideshare companies do

I thought Uber already did this with surge pricing? Or does it not take supply into account, only demand? Or is the extra money not going to the drivers?

> but I do support a fair quota system to balance transportation availability with congestion management.

The alternative is people using their cars and having to park it. Or taking their business elsewhere in more parking-friendly locations.

Toll roads.

A nice reform would be to make medallions non transferable, and have them expire if you don't prove certain amounts of rides over time

There is already an incentive to provide rides - the payment you get for giving the ride.

What does your system improve about the incentives?

It adds more regulation and low level bureaucracy.

Completely naive view of the situation, or you are just too young.

You don't need be 500k in debt to get started for uber as you needed to get a yellow cab medallion

Once you made that decsion (to mortgage you house to get a yellow cab medallion), you are bound to that job as a serf.... Modern day serfdom, that's what the yellow cab medallion system became to the large cities.

the only way out, was bankruptcy, or hope another person will pay just as much for that medallion. Often local mafiosi types were entangled with the system, and you had to deal with them as well.

Please, lets not glorify the pervious system, as it was much worse.

We can work and make this new system better, and force the large corps to provide more (benefits wise), but returning to the old medallion system is two steps back.

> and force the large corps to provide more (benefits wise)

They would need to make more money for that, and I'm not sure the consumer is ready to pay. Taxi fares in many cities used to be way higher with the medallions and ridership was abysmal.

This is the moral hazard of free-market economies without basic benefits. In an economy with real choice for labor, labor would walk when they're being abused with low pay and a minimum standard of living for labor would be priced into consumer prices. When there's no benefits, labor is always desperate to hold onto a job and put into situations where they accept jobs that they would rather not to not become homeless and benefit-less.

Not really. Drivers have the choice if they want to drive or not. If it is busy at certain times and rates are lower than don't drive at that time. If you don't want to have urban cores flooded with rideshare drivers find a way to improve busing or other competition in that space.

has overcapacity ever been a significant problem? I know drivers want more money but that doesn't mean customers would be willing to pay for it.

https://news.mit.edu/2021/ride-sharing-intensifies-urban-roa...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756945/uber-lyft-tnc-vmt...

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/uber-lyft-traffic-congest...

Uber and Lyft hare both non-profitable organizations. Even if rides were matched by some zero cost magic oracle, drivers would be making almost the same amount of profit, because that number’s defined by the next best alternative.

Really, what you find objectionable is not the presence of Uber or Lyft, but the fact that people are running independent businesses, competing with each other.

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