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Comment by rzz3 | Hacker News Reader

Despite all of the negatives, many of which I agree with, the legacy taxi industry really sucked for riders. Riding in a taxi feels dirty to me, to be honest. Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained, having to actually call someone on a phone and tell them where to pick you up, often not accepting Apple Pay, Android Pay, credit cards. Rude drivers with no rating system to disincentivize it…

It’s sad that Uber seemingly made such bad business decisions and ultimately has not been successful as a business. However, the “disruption” was widely successful. Hell, they even became a verb.

Personally, even as a customer, I strongly prefer Lyft (but I’d never take a Taxi unless I was somehow forced to).

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In most places I've been to, traditional taxis has a captive market and no effective competition due to limited licenses. Drivers were frequently rude, dangerous, and bitterly resentful if you weren't the exact type of ride they happened to look for. Cars were poorly maintained from outside to inside. Calling them would give you a "we'll be there between 5 and 45 minutes, please stay outside in the rain and wait for them" (actual situation that happened frequently in Ottawa or Toronto). They refused to take credit cards, and would cancel the meter after starting so they wouldn't be tracked. Experience was awful from start to finish.

So my sympathy toward old model is negative.

And then there's the whole medallion business in many parts of North America, which is crazy to explain to outsiders - basically, licensed which nominally cost $150 - $1500 (depending on the city), would go for upwards of 450k on secondary market. People would buy loans and invest in them as primary retirement. When city decided to open up the market, people who invested all their money in an extremely speculative irrational market took to streets... And hired thugs to trash uber hq.

So my sympathy toward previous model is negative.

That being said, I agree that exploitation of gig economy is bad. I just feel people have a lot more choice to be or not to be an uber driver for me to fully understand their plight.

Legacy taxis were and still are a more expensive and inefficient business. Outside of airports and maybe cities like New York, hailing a taxi was a terrible experience.

The scale of Uber despite their shitty business model, allows them to have a lot more drivers constantly on the road than traditional companies. This allows for an quicker availability of a cab at a moment’s notice. Anyone remember leaving a party before Uber, calling a cab and then awkwardly sitting around at the host’s place for another half hour?

This also means a generational behavior change where more people use Uber, which in turn allows more continuous business for the driver and a cheaper ride for the consumer.

Uber can charge more (which they are doing now), fix their driver pay and still provide a cheaper and more convenient experience for the users.

Even in NYC hailing a taxi was a terrible experience if you were a minority or were traveling outside of Manhattan or North of 125th.

Or during special events.

I remember one Super Bowl weekend trying to get home via cab from Tribeca after the game was over.

Looking down West Broadway, you could see multiple groups of people at each intersection with their arms up trying to get the first cab to go by.

Or during just times in general. When I first moved to NYC, I was my normal polite self when people would say "I hailed it first" and let them take the cab. After the fourth or fifth time this happened with cabs I was 90% I had hailed first, I realized you had to pretend to be some alpha male and shout "Get the F away from my cab!" in order to guarantee you got in the cab.

I don't know if anyone keeps stats on this but I would bet money that the number of fights in NYC due to the above must have gone down once Uber became common.

Not in NYC, but I've seen cab drivers auctioning rides by asking "who will pay more" after some events. At airports I've definitely had my share of drivers asking multiple passengers where they're going so they could go to the most advantageous location. Both were obviously illegal in the cities I was.

Remembering those, I can definitely see why everyone started using Uber.

You also have to discard the "customer is always right" mindset when using taxis in NYC.

It is notoriously difficult to convince a taxi to take you cross-town. The few times I succeeded... it was a mistake, a miserable experience and it would have been faster to walk.

Conceptually it would be nice to just be able to get a taxi from point A to point B, no questions asked, and sometimes when a driver doesn't want to do it it comes down to racism or profit, but other times it's because you're asking to do something that isn't actually a good idea.

The big taxi company I drove for was at the top of the food chain in the Phoenix, Arizona area because the cars were clean, cabs usually showed up promptly, and if there was a problem you could deal with the company and they'd look into your complaint.

The company started switching out to the Prius a few years before I started driving for them in 2012. My first few leases were for old Crown Victorias, because I couldn't show up early enough to get in line for a prius (some drivers refused to drive the Crown Victorias, for various reasons).

The company had economy of scale in their fleet operations that was hard to beat: mechanics who knew the Prius like the back of their hand, boneyards (for parts), connections in the automotive industry.

They couldn't compete with people willing to wear out their personal cars giving 'rides' for peanuts. The company eventually sold off their fleet of priuses and their taxi yards, and refocused on the other businesses (app-dispatched medical transportation, etc). The Company tried to build their own dispatch phone app. But it didn't work especially well - I think they eventually decided to cut their losses.

VIP Taxi and Yellowcab are still doing okay, but I hardly ever see the green prius taxis anymore.

The ease of the Uber app is and was key above everything else - which might be enough to keep them operating when they finally have to raise prices to where they should be.

Or they just switch to a SaaS model. Much leaner operations and solves at least some of the friction issues that traditional taxi service has.

Then there's one aspect of their business model that the article missed (Maybe it will be covered in part 2 or 3) which is self-driving. Apart from monopoly power, this seemed like the other exit to profitability. I'm just not sure if those efforts were little more than lip service to placate investors or an honest attempt (probably a bit of both) it seems like the rapid progress of a few years ago has plateaued and that exit has mostly closed.

At risk of sounding like Margaret Thatcher I'd say that the Taxi industry was politically organized to get a good deal for itself but that the riders were not organized and had no voice.

Uber bypassed that and certainly got lower prices and better service for riders; however the old business was sustainable and the new one isn't.

Between growing up in the suburbs in a family that thought it was poor, living on a farm where a car is necessary, and having a public transport habit it's been rare for me to ride an Taxi or Uber. (in Montreal I would ride the 747 bus to/from the Trudeau airport unless it was crazy late or early, I'd take the express bus from LAX to downtown LA and then the subway to Hollywood, etc.) Often I haven't had a cell phone so I usually wind up flagging a taxi or ordering a taxi on the web or over Skype and I don't complain about the service or price.

Taxis at least were so terrible that a complete disaster of a business could disrupt them by just being marginally less awful. I don’t know if they have improved.

what's crazy is in this day and age, you'd think uber/lyft are available in most markets but last week, I had to go to Baton Rouge (LSU with 50k students is based there) and I was relegated to a beat up, cigarette smelling, local taxi because no uber/lyft's were available at the airport (due to storms and delayed flights).

I flew to Hartfort, CT (BDL, actually in the rather distant suburb of Windsor Locks CT) last year, and my flight was delayed to about 10:30pm; I almost didn't get an Uber because the market simply doesn't for the drivers to stick around that late. There were other delayed flights coming in after mine, closer to midnight; my driver said quite plainly that those folks would have to figure something else out, because all the rideshare drivers in the parking lot were heading home for the night.

All this to say, I should have prepared better and I don't know what I expected. We take the "always on" nature of these services for granted, but that's not how the world works outside of the major metros.

>I almost didn't get an Uber because the market simply doesn't for the drivers to stick around that late.

The market does, but it is bad PR for Uber to offer sufficiently high surge pricing to attract drivers. So Uber makes the choice to simply not offer a driver $400 for what would normally be a $40 car ride, even though $400 would get someone on the road to drive you somewhere.

It makes no sense that people complain about surge pricing.

And in well regulated market there would be supply even at that time. Maybe not sufficient, but still guaranteed supply. But oh well people didn't want that... Too bad for them for getting what they wanted.

> Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained

maybe in US or UK but in europe taxis are kept to a high standard, albeit way more expensive

Given how large the US is, and how large Europe is, I doubt your statement. I can certainly find plenty of well maintained taxis in the US, I bet I can find plenty of beat up taxis in Europe.

Not to mention the rent seeking behavior of the industry.

You forgot safety. I can’t recall how many times I’ve come close to an accident by Taxi drivers.

Fuck them. These people are the most unsafe drivers on the road.

I live in lower Manhattan now, and my unconscious mental model for navigating the streets as a ped/biker includes a pretty large coefficient on is_yellowcab. They're complete menaces.

Yep, I think this is universal. I was in China a few years ago and the dude was playing tetris with one hand on his cell phone and driving in the emergency lane at the same time.

Uber/Lyft/Didi/Ola is amazing. I really don't give a shit about these asshole taxi drivers and their union/monopoly grip. Glad it is wiped out.

My experience has been the opposite, with Uber drivers displaying -- on average -- poorer driving skills than taxi drivers.

(Probably location-specific.)

>having to actually call someone on a phone

The horror!

You'd think it's a joke but it's like a 2nd or 3rd time that my brother ordered a pizza by phone and got a wrong one. Sure the girl who takes order is absent-minded or hard of hearing. And similarly sounding pizza names don't help. We like their pizzas and try to cut out the middle-man, but our colleagues who order from there suggested we just use Pyszne.pl (i.e. Takeaway.com).

Also, many times we tried to order food to office at work, we just got a busy line.

Doing transactional stuff by phone has horrible UX.

I ordered from a local bagel shop and also got missing items multiple times.

I finally went in and spoke to a manager who said: "Yeah, you order via Seamless/Grubhub, it shows up on a screen and then someone hand writes down your order."

This conversation happened a few weeks ago. It blew my mind that they didn't have a printer etc for this kind of thing.

Goes to show that the "future is here, just not evenly distributed" is 100% true.

That's valid but also hear this out: the local app in my country, called Rappi, gets things wrong so often I wonder how they do it. I mean, it's written, yet restaurants often send you whatever. And let's not talk about the times the delivery person is completely clueless about my location, and you can just see them circling cluelessly on the map while you desperately send them messages trying to orient them.

My point is: mishaps happen whether by phone or app.

The issue isn't social anxiety or anything like that, it's the taxi company dispatch systems are typically run by people who are both bad at their job and hate you for making them pick up the phone.

So you think it is better to have to call someone and then figure out your location in a strange system than clicking on a button, your phone knowing where you and the driver are?

"Can you say that again?" "How do you spell that?" "Is that B for book or P for penny?" "Sorry can you repeat the line is bad"

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