"In the last half decade, two trends conspired to end the taxi medallion regime. First, people are more comfortable with trusting strangers."

This isn't true. When I was growing up, hitch hiking was still very common.

I'd argue that people used to trust strangers to a radically higher degree before the prohibition based crime wave (the one that makes swaths of every city in the US more dangerous than Afghanistan) that began in the 1960s.