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Comment by kungito | Hacker News Reader

Yeah because in many "regulated" markets the market was fixed so that taxis can have limited supply and hence insane prices. In Croatia they changed the law after Uber came to deregulate taxis and it's way better now than it was before while other countries protected the insane taxi mafias

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That the laws/regulations were (effectively? intentionally?) rigged to ensure high prices, doesn't at all invalidate the claim that Uber ignored laws/regulations. They are also accused of ignoring more general laws/regulations around worker pay/benefits/health that are not related to regulations specific to taxi services.

The laws were intentionally created to restrict supply of services. Restricted supply = higher prices.

Uber should not have been buying cars for their drivers... but if Uber is to be forced to have employee/employer relationships - then Uber's value of freedom to choose working hours goes out the window, as they now can mandate working hours... and surge capacity is literally annihilated.

But that also does not invalidate the claim that Uber ignored laws/regulations, which is what was questioned earlier in the thread.

I'm not (in these posts, I may elsewhere) passing judgement on why they did it and if it were right, only stating that it is what they did.

The same is mostly true in the US.

The US taxi system in most cities was an abusive cartel holding on to a market solely through a government protection racket, and that's the nice description of it. Uber and Lyft destroyed the cartels, delivering a far superior service.

This narrative is funny for a couple of reasons. The first being that Taxi companies were never super-profitable nor, generally, did they span multiple metropolitan centres. Uber/Lyft radically centralized Taxi service replacing a supposed "cartel" with a much better capitalized and politically powerful duopoly.

As for the superior service, I'm not sure that will last once the VC funding runs out and these companies have to actually turn a profit. Uber/Lyft is MoviePass writ large.

Taxis and food delivery are rather low margin businesses. I really wonder how much profit they can reasonably extract even if the markets are big.

Are we forgetting that taxis often refused to serve minorities and minority neighborhoods?

Yeah, that worked out great. The Taxis are all out of business and Uber’s magical robot taxis didn’t appear.

So now I pay 3x more to have an experience often shittier than cabs.

Uber is never shittier than a cab.

My Uber ride in the cigarette-stained car driven by a woman watching Netflix begs to disagree.

Got out after 2 blocks (a few seconds after she hit “unpause”)

Depends on the city. I still hold high regard for London's cabbies, NY's ones not so much.

Well in Croatia the taxis aren't out of business. They just lowered prices, introduced an app for requesting rides and introduced rating of employees. They also service smaller cities where the volume is too low for Uber to operate so they can keep the higher prices due to low volume.

"The law was bad, so we did crimes until they changed it."

When you phrase it like that, it actually sounds like a noble protest. Perhaps a tad generous for Uber.

What is civil disobedience.

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