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Comment by sdoowpilihp | Hacker News Reader

These kind of actions on the part of existing taxi and limo services are to be expected. When a large and powerful group can't win on merit or the quality of their product, they will attempt to win through any other means, including litigation or politics. This move reeks of desperation, and if I were any of the three companies mentioned, I would see this as a glass half full scenario. Time to lawyer up.

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That's one explanation of the situation (and there is certainly an element of that).

The other element of the situation is that people use litigation and politics to protect existing bargains. Cabs are regulated, for various reasons. Cities use them as an extension of their public transit infrastructure, and impose restrictions like requiring them to service the whole city, instead of just the profitable neighborhoods. In return, the cab companies are given a monopoly.

So if the cities allow Uber to skim off all the premium business, without requiring Uber to serve the sketchy/marginal neighborhoods, then that's the city going back on its side of the bargain. The cabs can't "win on merit" when they're playing with one hand tied behind their back.

The fair thing to do is either enforce the existing monopoly and keep out Uber, or alternatively to get rid of the monopoly and the regulations too.

You're confusing taxi services and car services. Taxis are for street-hail, but that's not what Uber does; Uber is a car service. Their app handles the dispatch and payment processing, but is otherwise the same business that car services have always had. (Car services aren't supposed to be "on demand", however, but find me one car service in the world that won't come get you immediately and we'll talk...)

Uber is deliberately blurring the lines by offering "Uber Taxi" alongside the black car service; they are putting themselves directly into competition with regulated cab services. Uber Taxi isn't intended to be a market substitute for cab service; it's intended as a replacement for cab service.

Incidentally, the "on-demand" nature of taxicabs versus the "call-ahead" nature of car services is not a distinction made in every city or state. Arlington's "taxi cab" definition pretty clearly captures car services as well.

I'm not familiar with these regulations which make a distinction for "street-hail." In every city I've used a taxi in, you can call the taxi company and request a cab to your location. Is this a separate service incidental to the street-hail regulations?

Even accepting your biased wording ("deliberately blurring"), you failed to state what exactly is wrong with Uber competing with taxi companies (in my corner of economics, competition is good).

Is this a Bruce Lee thing, an argument without an argument?

Again: the taxi companies Uber is competing with are bound by regulations that Uber isn't bound by; for instance, Uber's business model is based on a 20% surcharge which taxi companies are forbidden by law to apply.

Doesn't the fact the Uber drivers come to the passenger alleviate that fact? Also, anecdotally, from experience living in bad neighborhoods in my city taxi cabs are generally less likely to visit.

Have you looked into whether your local cab companies are required to service every area of the city? It's illegal for an NYC cab to refuse service within NYC's regulated area; it's also illegal for them to, for instance, drop you off short of your destination --- my wife found this out when her cab to LGA dropped her off halfway there because he had to make an appointment, and an NYC cop immediately stopped and ticketed him.

> an NYC cop immediately stopped and ticketed him.

Did she have to alert the cop to what happened, or is there a system in place that notifies police when this happens?

Neither. The cop just noticed her getting out and immediately trying to flag another cab.

If you have a personal story on how a law was violated and given the fact it was on books for decades, it clearly is ineffectively enforced (taxi drivers apparently prefer to violate the law regularly with a small chance of being ticketed and I can't blame them if that's more profitable for them).

If only there was a system where you could call a cab exactly to where you are, monitor its position while it arrives in real time, and one that would drop you off exactly where you wanted to go. A system where you could comment on the quality of the driver after each ride so that the bad ones are permanently kicked off.

Wait, there is. It's called Uber.

In this case self-regulation and competition work better than government regulations. Uber has self-interest in making sure they work well or else people will move to a better system.

Having government erect and then enforce the laws is a costly externality of the taxi system - police officers are paid with your money too.

I don't follow. I have a personal story involving witnessing a law being enforced, therefore its ineffectively enforced?

The rules for NYC taxis are known to everyone that has lived in their for a non trivial amount of time. Tourists might not be familiar with them but any red blooded New Yorker would definitely remind the cabbie they have to go to the final destination.

A more commonly abused rule is that cabbies cannot refuse a destination but many will do so if it's in the outer boroughs (imagine Manhattan to Queens or Brooklyn) as they're not guaranteed a fare on the return. At night many will ask you where you're going before you get in to weed this out specifically (illegal). Again, anybody who's lived in the city long enough knows to just ignore the driver and get inside before instructing him where you're going.

I've heard stories that there are undercover folks working for the city that test out the cabbies and fine them if they refuse a legit fare.

Also, it says it in the cab. This is how I, as a New Yorker, first learned of these rules.

I know that here in Toronto there are additional restrictions on what cabbies can and cannot do (they must take the most direct route to your destination, are restricted from offering unsolicited hotel and restaurant recommendations, &c) [1]. Not that these sorts of protections are universally enforced (nor is this an excuse for many of the absurdities of licensing), but to pretend that licensing is entirely without benefit is being disingenuous.

[1] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2013/ls/bgrd/backgroundfi...

City taxis are legally required to go where you tell them to. They may not, but you have legal recourse. Uber could quite conceivably say "nah, not interested" and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

And that is the risk you run with a free market.

If people don't like it, then they can just keep using Taxis, and if it's not profitable for Uber, they will go under.

I imagine a lot of these arguments cropped up when UPS and Fedex came about, to compete with the USPS.

Well, no, because then people in bad neighbourhoods get screwed over. There is, I'm sure, more than enough business going to good neighbourhoods to keep Uber afloat. So then taxis would only ever be going to bad neighbourhoods.

There is a reason for things like taxi regulation- it's to ensure that everyone is treated fairly.

But everyone isn't getting treated fairly. Is it fair to the cab company to have to service areas they normally wouldn't? Perhaps some of the cab drivers don't feel safe traveling to certain areas.

I couldn't get cable where I lived in upstate NY because I was in a remote area. Should the cable company have been forced to provide service to my house to make things fair? What you call "fair" only seems to apply to one side of the equation.

I'm also not convinced that poorer people would lose out on service. Can you cite anything for that? It seems like there would still be options, even if the quality weren't as good.

> I couldn't get cable where I lived in upstate NY because I was in a remote area. Should the cable company have been forced to provide service to my house to make things fair?

In fact many municipalities grant cable monopolies for precisely that purpose. Do I think this is a good idea? No, I don't think it's that valuable to service people outside dense urban areas. If they want services, they should move closer to the city. However, I don't think its fair to decry a cable monopoly for invoking the protection it receives as part of such a bargain against a competitor.

It's funny; you say that, but cab drivers are infamous for asking passengers "Where are you going?" and subsequently driving off when they don't like the destination.

I would imagine that behavior precisely why these sorts of regulations arose in the first place.

It seems that they weren't very effective...

I'm not defending the effectiveness of the "regulation in trade for monopoly." I'm pointing out that there is more to the situation than just cab companies trying to unfairly keep competitors out. One way or the other, you have to deal with the fact that cab companies were granted a monopoly (the whole point of which is to keep competitors out) in return for being burdened by certain regulations.

It's one thing to make it illegal for cabbies to do that.

It's another thing to actually stop them.

A "requirement" that taxis service a neighborhood is a sop. Call up and ask for a cab from someplace they don't want to service and they'll say "be there in 30-45 minutes," aka "go away."

Wow. I would actually expect them to arrive in 30-45 minutes. I guess I'm naive?

Unfortunately, the influence of the large and powerful group has already been written into law. Asking the city to ignore its own laws is probably not going to be a solution for these new transportation services.

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