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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Uber is weird.

On one hand, it destroyed the livelihoods of many people. On the other, it made ordering a taxi so easy that a lot of people stopped driving home from parties drunk.

Uber has also made getting around in a lot of cities much safer. I've gotten into taxi's with drunk drivers before (seriously wtf), not a problem with Uber, or at least not for very long. (When I reported the drunk taxi driver, turns out the medallion owner wasn't working that night and had lent his cab to someone else, there was not trace of my ride or of the driver...)

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I think you can kind of have both. For example in Budapest Uber is banned and I miss it, but Bolt provides the exact same user experience for ordering a regulated city taxi (with fixed pricing as well). I can get one quickly any time of day.

In American cities I often found I had to wait 20 minutes to get an Uber or Lyft, if one even came. Is that because the economics of it fundamentally don't work and no one wants to drive for them any more?

> I think you can kind of have both. For example in Budapest Uber is banned and I miss it, but Bolt provides the exact same user experience for ordering a regulated city taxi (with fixed pricing as well). I can get one quickly any time of day.

The American taxi companies screwed up, tl;dr by maintaining a low supply of taxi medallions cities and cab companies maintained wealth for people who had already acquired one. This meant taxi companies could never fulfill demand during peak hours.

Also city councils had to bow to pressure to not have streets clogged 24/7 with taxis.

> In American cities I often found I had to wait 20 minutes to get an Uber or Lyft, if one even came. Is that because the economics of it fundamentally don't work and no one wants to drive for them any more?

Depends on the time of day, the city, and where you are at. I've not had a problem getting an Uber in Seattle, but the prices in Seattle are extravagant.

And now we just have cities clogged up with Ubers.

> Uber has also made getting around in a lot of cities much safer.

This has been the complete polar opposite of my experience in NYC. The professional taxi drivers are pretty consistent, like 1/4 uber/lyft drivers barely know how to drive at all. I distinctly remember one driver so terrifyingly incompetent I made him pull over and let me out of the car five miles from where I was going...

By safer I meant that by reducing the friction of ordering a driver, more people just go ahead and have someone else drive them home instead of getting behind the wheel while drunk.

Drunk people are stupid. A giant "get me home now" button is more likely to get utilized versus stumbling around trying to wave down a taxi.

Also the cash thing, knowing that a card is 100% going to be accepted is huge, compared with Taxis and "oops the card reader is broken today".

Flagging a cab on a busy road in NYC is always faster than waiting for an Uber, at least in my experience.

I prefer to pay cash, personally. Denying finance parasites their 2% fee is always worth an extra ten seconds of my time.

> Flagging a cab on a busy road in NYC is always faster than waiting for an Uber, at least in my experience.

In Seattle, you can't really flag down a cab.

What you could do in the past (pre-uber) was call their phone number, have the dispatcher on the other end pick up and be annoyed that you are bothering him, and request a cab that may or may not show up.

Also you had to know where you are at, which for a lot of people I know, is a serious challenge. A surprisingly large % of people have serious problems finding what intersection they are at. (To be fair, sometimes you are on a street that, for whatever reason, doesn't have any street signs, or the street sign is not lit up at all and you have to use your phone's flashlight to try and read it... and again, all this while drunk).

The experience sucked.

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