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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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...)

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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.

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