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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Are traditional taxicab services still alive? How did they survive until this time?

They're still alive (albeit damaged) in NYC, and in most large cities I've visited. The answer is simple: they don't have thousands of expensive software engineers doing god-knows-what as overhead.

Or all the servers etc.

They just needed a (usually tiny) little office and 1 person to answer the phone.

>They just needed a (usually tiny) little office and 1 person to answer the phone.

That also makes for terrible ux. One of the things ridesharing apps got right was the ux, ie.

1. being able to hail a cab via app, and see its ETA in real time

2. being able to pay with credit card, without fear that the machine "broke"

3. a rating system to weed out bad drivers

4. after-ride support

All of these things can be (and are) true and it can be true that Uber and Lyft appear to have an order of magnitude more engineers than they need.

In my experience by cutting corners wherever possible but that leaves a bad reputation. Cars that were beat up, sometimes just didn't show up, no GPS or knowledge of streets, cash payments to avoid some taxes, avoiding unprofitable locations or rides, etc. Uber and Lyft aimed for a better brand image but that is at odds with cheap costs.

I've never had a beat up taxi, but NYC might be an outlier in that regard (due to the yellowcab fleet + TLC regulation). The part about avoiding unprofitable locations is certainly true, however.

OTOH, I've taken a decent number of sketchy Lyft and Uber rides: ones where the driver was clearly not the person on the account (possibly a relative?), where the car didn't match, etc. All in medium to large US cities.

NYC has some of the most beat up taxis I've seen, only place I've been that compares is probably Cairo.

The comparison to Uber in NYC isn't yellow cabs but the call taxi companies which were as I described. Yellow taxis were non-existent outside Manhattan and even then couldn't be scheduled conveniently. Even the yellow cabs often refused to pick up people based on appearance/race, refused to drop off outside Manhattan and had conveniently broken credit card readers. That's not even getting into the true "gypsy" cabs (as they were called) which had no TLC licenses.

> refused to drop off outside Manhattan

I recently had a taxi refuse to take me from the Vegas Strip to a friends house on the North side. It’s because they’ll have to drive back to the city center without a ride.

Seems like they need to double their prices. Or have better model for pricing where those who exploit the system to go to unprofitable locations pay more.

That is the benefit of uber/lyft. The apps can calculate all that.

A lot of people pool these services. Uber/lyft/DoorDash/etc.

There’s a ton of hustles. Sometimes they’ll hang a bunch of phones in a tree near a strategic location to get gigs.

It gets to the real problem. If you get in an accident in an Uber and get hurt, there’s a high likelihood that you’re fucked.

In the Boston area, taxi drivers often ask you two things:

1) Where you goin'?

2) How do you get there?

Which is... if you're new to the area or going someplace new, how do you answer that second one?

That’s to scam you. Either you know how to get there, or you don’t and they’ll take the long way to run up the meter.

They win bids for Medicaid car services and airport concessions.

Plus, there’s a 50 year old woman making $19/hour to smoke cigarettes and dispatch cars, a mechanic, and a bookkeeper.

-- in my city the remaining cab companies have contracts with hospitals/the city/companies - can always find a cab outside the dialysis clinic - when I asked why a driver told me the dispatch company accepts a chit from the clinic --

Sometimes they offer a better service. Flew to Honolulu, called Uber. No one grabbed it for 15 minutes. I grabbed a cab that was there at the airport.

Also many cab services have started leveraging apps like zTrip.

zTrip sounds identical to an app I envisioned in 2010 I called "Yo Taxi!" It would take your phone-reported GPS location and send it out to one of the affiliated taxi services (depending on who serves that location, cost, etc.) who would dispatch a cab to that point.

I'm kind of glad "Yo Taxi!" exists in some form now, what with the wheels (figuratively) falling off Uber and Lyft.

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