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Comment by wintermutestwin | Hacker News Reader

The old school taxi business has built up a massive reserve of consumer dissatisfaction to the point of blind hatred. Uber/etc disruption generated so much consumer goodwill because they demonstrated clearly superior features/advantages/benefits.

When someone pops your bully in the nose, you don't care if it was a cheap shot.

Of course that is short sighted and today's hero can easily become tomorrow's bully.

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At least for me - This is pretty spot on.

Is Uber horrible? Probably. But at least they provide the service they claim to.

The taxi companies in my area before Uber (and frankly still, after Uber) are literally rage inducing. You can call them and confirm that a cab has been dispatched - and it will NEVER show up. Call them back and confirm again? Same thing.

Need to schedule a ride to the airport? Cab won't show.

Need someone to take you home after a house party? Cab won't show.

Literally flag down a cab on the side of the road? They will hassle you over card usage, intentionally drive out of the way (like - seriously, bitch I've lived in ATL for 33 years, I know this is the long route you fucker), and have terrible safety standards (oh, none of the seat belts in the back of your cab work? fun!).

So Uber might be horrible, and I would really, really love to see cities increase spending on public transit.

But I FUCKING HATE the cab companies. They can fucking rot for all I care. If Uber puts them all into chapter 11, I will cheer them on.

Would I still prefer to see investment in public transit instead of dealing with Uber? Of course. But we weren't seeing that with cabs, and at least Uber will god-damned show up when called.

and in my experience, uber is the same. cabs just don't show up, drivers ask where you want to go before coming and if they don't wanna go that way, they just don't move. and i have to cancel the trip (chargeable btw) and book another, but same story. insane waiting times for booking a cab, prices that fluctuate more than crypto, and I've had better luck asking random taxi drivers for rides on the street (sure, not as safe, but standing in the Delhi heat for fifteen minutes waiting for a swift desire does a number on your consideration of safety) Ola has always delivered a better experience for me and the drivers I've talked to seem happier using Ola. I'm too young to remember "the old way" of getting a cab, but that seems worse somehow.

At least with uber you have a remedy in the form of the rating system

I have only experienced that with ride hailing companies in India. Use Uber/Lyft in the US and always have had a great experience. Not sure how the platform does not penalize drivers if they keep cancelling rides or they hold customers at ransom. That would not work in the US. Makes me think that they have either figured out a way to circumvent the system or they just don't care that their ratings are getting dinged.

they didn't have to circumvent it, its a design flaw.

Uber USA != Uber Germany.

Taxi business here is quite different.

We easily claim the opposite for other companies (Apple, Facebook, Google) and other countries (mostly Asian fabrication centers). Why do we have such a strong belief that Uber USA != Uber Germany?

(Edit: I'm Croatian and fairly well aware of how taxis work in Europe)

Taxi in Europe is hugely dependent on country. Take Sweden, anyone can start a taxi company as long as you have a capital reserve of €5000 per vehicle, some requirements on equipment and insurance and a taxi drivers license for anyone who is driving, nothing hard to get. There haven't been anything similar to medallion systems and what not since it was deregulated in 1990.

Uber Pop got kicked out in a couple of months with Uber having to pay the social security costs of the employees. Now it's just an aggregator of Taxi companies, same with Bolt. The possible margin is minuscule since the drivers change apps depending on which pays the best. Often having both open.

For the companies themselves it's an extremely cutthroat business. From what I have heard the only chance to make any money is to own about 50 cars and have all maintenance in house. Otherwise it's just a fools attempt at being independent.

Taxi services in Germany pre-Uber weren't perfect but they weren't the disfunctional rackets you see in the States. Uber "succeded" in Europe by undercutting existing farily decent service providers with subsidised fares. Those subsidise seem to have dissapeared and at least in London Uber is now in my experience no cheaper and significantly less reliable that the older firms which have survived.

I didn’t ride in cabs that much (US) but I never had the dysfunctional racket experiences described in this thread. They didn’t show up once, but that has happened with Uber too.

edit: And Uber charged me a fee to cancel the no-show ride and I had to call and argue with them to take the charge off.

I suspect taxi regulation is strong on every developed country and different.

I'm skeptical. I've only briefly visited Germany, but my very first experience upon arriving was being scammed by a taxi.

In what sense? Not choosing the shortest path for example?

Oh, had that happen in Canada! Drive was supposed to take 10 minutes, 12 minutes in it doesn't look like we're close, "where are we going?", "Oh, didn't you say you wanted the scenic route?" Of course I never said that, ride ended up almost triple what it should have been :/

The taxi that picked me up at the Munich train station didn't start the meter. When we arrived at the hotel, the driver demanded a fee which seemed quite high for the short distance we travelled.

I don't speak German and had been in Germany for only a few hours at that point, so I didn't know for certain that I was being scammed. In fact, I still don't. As far as I gather, taxis are supposed to use their meters to calculate the cost of the trip, but perhaps there are exceptions I am unaware of.

There's a lot of things I find questionable about Uber and its business practices, but the fact that they tell you the price up front is definitely a positive contribution.

Reminds me of the time when I was in Leipzig in late 2018 (at CCC) and I tried to sign up for CleverShuttle. Turns out they had a bug where they could not register using an American number. The app just silently fails and I was left stranded late at night. I tried to use their support line to get help...turns out its an email address and they responded to my inquiry with generic steps to try again....two days later. Luckily a friend was kind enough to give me a ride home. I don't know how Germany manages to write such a garbage app but its their prerogative to chose a lower standard of service compared to the US. I always dread some things about visiting friends in Europe and the quality of service is always one of those things.

It is not unlikely that the "taxi mafia" was created by a similar mix or lobbying and corruption. Basically, it looks like a mafia replacing another mafia.

> When someone pops your bully in the nose, you don't care if it was a cheap shot.

I don’t understand this analogy in this context. In the case of Uber, uber is also a bully, arguably a worse one. In this case you want both of them to be arrested. Even when their fighting each other, it is still disturbing everyone and you just want them to stop.

Uber is not a hero of today, nor was it the hero of yesterday. It was always a bully,

Also not having a great cab service is nothing compared to the exploitation of workers occurring.

No one has a god given right to have cheap taxis in their city at any cost.

The people complaining in this thread sound like the people complaining that they can't run a restaurant without paying their workers poverty wages.

People have rights, businesses don't.

Its not just cheap, in fact it seems like cheapness is the least discussed aspect in this thread. You seemed to have missed all these stores of a minimum Quality of Service. The professional white collar people here can probably continue to pay the increasing Uber fees. But its the general quality of service that keeps them coming back. I don't think you can go back now that the genie is out of the bottle.

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