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Comment by narcraft | Hacker News Reader

"These tech companies used lobbies to destroy the enterprise structure of our civilization from taxi cab medallions to hotels to brick-and-mortar businesses."

Taxi cab medallions are a very poor example to cite. I'm empathetic to the story of terrible customer service and share sentiments about the overall erosion of user experience with many tech-adjacent, so-called disruptive services, but the second anyone suggests we were better off with the taxi cab than Uber or Lyft, they lose all credibility in my eyes. I think the biggest benefit that many fail to mention is that you can actually get rides when and where you need to. For example, people have far fewer excuses to drunk drive from bars in my hometown now than they did 15 years ago. I've had my skin saved by several rides that would be impossible without ride-sharing services.

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My issue with taxi has always been the scams, not even the long detours.

The local law requires that the taxi must take credit card and/or debit cards. If the machine is broken, they can’t take customers till it’s fixed.

30% of the time they tell me that the machine is broken and they want cash. When I say I don’t have cash they offer to drive to the ATM so I can take out some cash, while still on the meter of course. When I asked them to turn off the meter to take me to the ATM, they say it’s illegal.

I realised that as a socially anxious person who wants to be more confident, an LLM might come useful in summarising the local law to this effect quickly and especially the right steps to take.

why would you feel confident repeating words you didn't write citing laws you dont know to a person youre afraid of?

yeah i refuse to take taxis on principle because they are so scammy.

i’m a pretty pushy person and they give up but it is draining nonetheless

There’s an interesting middle ground also. I live in a city where you still need to be a licensed taxi driver to drive for Uber and the cars must be marked (in the UK; it doesn’t seem to be that uncommon here). I don’t in all honesty know how much regulation that actually involves, but certainly more than “some random person with a car”. So there is a least a little bit of accountability.

From idle chit chat with the drivers that used to drive for a traditional firm, many have told me they prefer it. They’re very keen on their ability to vet passengers first via ratings, and that people can’t hop out and run away without paying, which apparently is/was not uncommon on Friday and Saturday nights. As a passenger, I like that I can’t be fobbed off with “he’s just round the corner mate” for 30+ minutes and I don’t have to worry about getting cash.

It can be a mutually beneficial thing, it just can’t be an unregulated free-for-all which it sounds like many implementations are.

nah, still sounds protectionist to me.

there are broad based wage gains and better prices for consumers when anyone is allowed to be a driver

Always with the prices.

There is more to a functioning society than the cost of goods and services.

Regulating market is reasonable thing to do.

Sensible limiting of service providers ensures that prices are not driven through the floor. Like setting minimum wage.

Also regulation could allow capping of the prices.

And there is nothing that says that such licenses must be transferable or sellable.

Taxis are great if you're in Manhattan (or JFK) and not going too far uptown.

It's been a while since I was at JFK but when I frequented it I always took the subway. Same for Heathrow, CDG, etc. I generally have much better experiences with general public transport than I do with any sort of taxi "service" but maybe I'm the odd one out?

You have to deal with the AirTrain (which isn't free) at JFK. The Tube actually has a Heathrow station, and the RER goes directly to CDG. It's even easier to get to Gatwick than JFK.

what's the problem with the airtran? it's rare to get to lower Manhattan faster with a taxi than via subway even with congestion pricing. and the cost will be at least 10x.

And for the record, I've also had comically bad experiences with Lyft and Uber including drivers ranting about other customers in smelly unkempt cars (while on a date!) and my ride being significantly delayed because the driver wanted to stop for gas and also got themselves dinner while they were there. And I still love this crap!

Did you rate those drivers appropriately, and not tip them?

In general I try to avoid giving any less than 5 stars for anything but a safety issue, because a low-4.x rating can get a driver deactivated. But stopping for gas and getting food? Nope, that's gonna get you a low rating.

The ranting about other customers thing is something I'm torn on. Everyone has a bad day sometimes, and that shouldn't affect their livelihood. But still...

Genuinely don't know why you think Uber / Lyft are so much better than taxis? They cost slightly less now (used to be tons left till they needed to turn a profit), but it's still basically the same drivers driving them. They give the same type of service and do the same stuff. Only thing they don't do anymore is drive excessively long routes to run up the meter.

Where do you normally take taxis? Hailing them can be hard, they might not want to go where you're going, the credit card reader might be broken, and they might take a worse route.

taxis were awful. they’ve upped their game recently but they would just refuse to take you places, scam you, etc etc.

I guess it depends on where you live. Where I live, pre-Uber, I could never get a taxi in the first place. There were never any driving around to hail, and calling a cab company meant waiting 30-60 minutes, and more than half the time the taxi wouldn't show up at all. Drivers can and would take longer routes to run up the meter if they thought you weren't a savvy passenger. They'd also love to claim the credit card reader is broken, even when that was a violation of local law. If you had a complaint about a driver, you could call the taxi company, and they would assure you they care, but nothing would actually happen.

Now I get a car arriving in a predictable amount of time, at a pre-set price, paid outside the flow of the ride. If I have a problem with the driver or car I can report it with a low rating and a comment, and Uber and Lyft are notorious about deactivating drivers with even a rating in the low 4.x range. I can also give a lower or no tip if there's a problem, without feeling socially awkward about it.

Uber and Lyft are way better than taxis.

Taxis are a perfect example— as long as you tar the existing system as the enemy, you can get people to tolerate your bad behavior. “Those guys suck, we’re on your side!” Works for presidents, too.

Taxi cab medallions are a very poor example to cite.

"Things are bad where I am, and therefore it's OK for the tech bros to eviscerate an entire industry all around the planet, no matter what the local conditions were elsewhere."

Your experience is not the only experience. It does not justify what has been done. Your post only provides an yet another random angry anecdote, of which the internet is already flooded.

Municipalities were free to drop the regulation hammer on Uber and Lyft. If they chose not to, that's their fault.

They got eviscerated specifically because taxi companies were horrible to begin with in a lot of these places. In other countries like Japan or Singapore where taxi drivers are ethical and honest, I’d happily take a taxi any day.

There's nothing wrong with eviscerating entire industries worldwide. That has been the way that disruptive innovations worked since the start of the industrial age. Adapt or perish.

> but the second anyone suggests we were better off with the taxi cab than Uber or Lyft

Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer, but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.

That's the thing about BigTech: nobody says that the product was not more convenient (at least before enshittification), but the problem is that BigTech abuses their dominant position, over and over again.

> Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer

Gross understatement!

1) You can find a cab wherever (almost) and whenever (24x7) - you don't have to hail a cab for minutes/hours (even worse was not knowing when/if the cab would even arrive).

2) Much safer. Emergency support + seeing the route on GPS (can see the path on the driver's uber app) + rating system.

3) Better behaviour, enforced by rating system. Yes, it's not perfect, but much much better than cabs. Cab drivers were regularly abusive, knowing there were no repurcussions. Unfortunately, humans only behave when there's consequences.

4) No scamming vulnerable un-informed people. Cabs were known for scamming foreigners or un-informed people. I can point out a few more things. Calling it `more convenient` is a massive understatement.

> but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.

This can be fixed by regulation. Just because a new technology brought a new problem, that doesn't mean we should discard the technology and go to its worse predecessor. Remember : there is a reason the new technology took over its predecessor.

I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation for drivers to ensure they can maintain their livelihood.

PS : that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...

> I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation

Not in the US, who don't believe in regulations. But yeah, my point was that the best would be the convenience of those apps without the abuse. It seems possible outside the US, though: I believe Greece had banned Uber from the beginning on, and Taxis ended up building a similar app.

> that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...

Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?

> Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?

Just because CEOs have been hyping this tech up to raise valuations doesn't mean it will never happen. They said the same about landing rockets - now, it's a regular thing.

It's pretty clear that driverless is coming - exact timeline is unclear. Whether in 3 years, 5 years, or a decade, but it's coming.

> the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft.

I still don't get this one. You don't have to sign a long-term contract to drive for these companies. They don't own you. If you try it and it sucks more than working somewhere else then stop doing it. Your leverage is your ability to say no. But if it's better than your other alternatives then why isn't the complaint about the alternatives which are somehow even worse?

Vehicle depreciation is one big example. Any commercial vehicle operator knows that driving a car around causes its value to decrease substantially, 29 cents per mile on average as of 2018, and will (must!) account for that when running the numbers on their business. But most individual drivers don't have the expertise to intuit this, and Uber and Lyft don't tell them. So all but the most financially savvy drivers have an effective income significantly lower than they believe.

> Any commercial vehicle operator knows that driving a car around causes its value to decrease substantially, 29 cents per mile on average as of 2018, and will (must!) account for that when running the numbers on their business.

People are always saying this and then you go to KBB. The average car is >12 years old, so let's suppose you're going to get rid of your Prius when it's 12 years old instead of allowing it to become older than average. Typical mileage at that age might be around 150,000 miles. Trade in value in good condition for a 12 year old Prius with 150,000 is ~$4300. Double the mileage to 300,000 miles, it drops to ~$2600. That's $1700 for an extra 150,000 miles, or around $0.01/mile.

$0.29/mile is from new or nearly-new cars which are then resold as nearly new. If you buy a new car and immediately roll the odometer past six digits its value is going to fall off a cliff. But if you start with a ten year old car which has already lost most of its value to depreciation, and then put a lot more miles on it over a couple more years -- which is what most of the people driving for Uber would actually be doing -- the cost is dramatically lower.

Presuming that the people choosing to do this as a profession can't figure this out is kind of patronizing, but, in the common case, not even that much of a difference.

Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 10 years old and in good condition as well as pass an inspection from a licensed mechanic. You can’t just go ahead and grab a 12 year old clunker and run it into the ground unless you’re only planning to do food deliveries (which have no restrictions on vehicle quality).

> Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 10 years old and in good condition as well as pass an inspection from a licensed mechanic.

Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 16 years old:

https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/requirements/vehicle-requir...

Plenty of 10-16 year old vehicles are in good condition and will pass an inspection.

You can keep a vehicle in good condition indefinitely because vehicles are made of modular parts and parts can be replaced as they wear out. Whether this is worth doing depends on the expected frequency of future repairs, which in turn depends on the specific make and model (there's a reason the most common ride sharing car is a Prius), how well the car is maintained and how stupid you drive it, but most cars continue to be worth maintaining rather than scrapping until they're 20-25 years old. Which is why the average age of vehicles on the road is just over 12 years, implying that they last approximately twice that long.

I’m in Canada. Uber has different rules for vehicles here. Though now that I check the 10 year requirement has changed since I wrote that comment.

Perhaps someone from Uber saw my comment and updated the requirements. If so, they must’ve been working on the weekend!

It does appear to be 10 years in Canada:

https://www.uber.com/ca/en/drive/requirements/vehicle-requir...

This is presumably some kind of regulatory requirement since it's jurisdiction specific. But even selling the car at 10 years old under similar conditions still causes the depreciation to be less than $0.02/mile.

On the other hand, that's around an extra $1000 over the life of the car, and who is to blame for that increase in costs on the driver? It's not as if 10 year old cars are meaningfully safer than 12 year old cars, nor would non-trivial numbers of people be using significantly older cars than that to begin with. Is this really just the Canadian government screwing the drivers for want of something to do?

It might just be a weather thing. 10 year old cars in Canada can be almost completely rusted out unless the owner has been diligent about rustproofing and washing the car frequently during winter. It’s all that road salt slush that splashes all over the car underbody and sticks to it, causing horrible galvanic corrosion.

But then why have an age limit instead of a rust inspection?

> If you try it and it sucks more than working somewhere else then stop doing it.

People like you deserve to end up in a situation where they don't have a choice but to accept an abusive job. Just to learn empathy.

Using "empathy" as the reason to diminish the options of someone who has few to begin with is the oblivious cruelty of the political functionary.

If A and B are both bad but B is worse, and then you prohibit A because A is bad, what result do you expect? B is still worse than A and B is now their only option.

This is the age distribution of Uber drivers:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/828981/ride-hailing-serv...

More than 70% are over the age of 50. Only 1.5% are 30 or under. Approximately 90% of Uber drivers are doing it part-time. These are not naive kids being taken advantage of, they're older people who want a little extra income and to get out of the house.

The people claiming that this is abuse are the people who want to sustain a taxi medallion cartel. Competition from bored retirees interferes with that, so they demonize it. This is how we get bad laws, regulatory capture and cost disease.

You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.

> You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.

By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?

With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.

> By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?

Who is making them work there? Is there any place in the world where Uber is the only source of employment?

> With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.

The incumbents define opportunities for competing drivers as abuse and then want to prohibit the competition from doing that. This is straightforwardly taking away those opportunities from others to benefit the incumbents.

If it was actually abuse, the people nevertheless choosing it as the best of their available alternatives would have to be in a position where all of their other alternatives are also abusive. This typically happens when there is some kind of serious monopolization or regulatory capture in the local economy. In that case you can forget about the original company for a minute and redirect all your efforts to addressing that, because then you're on a sinking ship and if you don't stop taking on water it's not going to matter how you position the deck chairs.

Whereas if there are non-abusive alternatives and people are willfully choosing the "abusive" one, something doesn't add up and you shouldn't assume that it's them rather than you who doesn't understand their situation.

Regulate how much Uber/Lyft can take from the drivers for merely providing a matching app.

That isn't what most of the proposals or actual laws to "regulate Uber" do.

But let's consider your proposal. The first question to ask about any proposed rule is, what are people going to do in response to it? If you limit how much they can take for providing a matching app, they'll add some other feature to their service and charge for that. Or just break out the existing charge on the customer's statement to list something else they're already providing. Your purpose wasn't to prohibit anyone from offering services other than matching to livery drivers and customers, right?

The next question to ask is, what problem are you trying to solve? Are their margins too high? Uber's net margin for 2024 was ~10%, and that was the first year it was even a positive number.

number of causal inference studies have shown that uber/lyft lead to broad based wage gains for the poorest segment of the working population. the cartel approach is only better for the select few who get to be drivers

Ok, based wage gains for the poorest segment. What about those who lose? Because Uber makes a ton of money while it's still cheaper to take an Uber than a taxi. Someone, somewhere has to lose, right?

Now imagine they did not abuse the drivers... it would possibly be even better for the poorest segment!

The philosophical decision would have been (back in the day):

build an app that supports/enhances municipal cab systems, i.e. hailing, payment, licensing etc, breaking the monopolies of medallion aggregators etc

vs.

build an entirely different system without legislative safeguards that destroys the livelihoods of existing cabbies

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