Hacker News Reader

Comment by badass | Hacker News Reader

People love Uber because it's disruptive and it's better than taxis. But, the future is not Uber. The future is any car owner becoming a taxi. I have a ride; you need a ride. Why shouldn't this be? There can be services that track reputations of both drivers and passengers and travel arrangements can be taken care of through a central service as well. Taxi monopolies are archaic and need to die. Uber is a transitional service but it is certainly not the final answer to the current way of things.

View on HN

That can be both good and bad. Good because you get a ride very quickly. It's bad because you have no idea...

  * Who your driver is
  * How long h/she's been driving
  * If there's a camera in the taxi (for your own protection)
  * Whether that's being monitored or just disconnected
  * How well the car is being maintained
  * Whether the driver has insurance and actually knows how to get to your destination
  * Whether h/she's from New Jersey (I kid, I kid... mostly).

Taxis are regulated, ideally, for this reason. I think drivers should have the right to apply to become a taxi driver, but then they have to maintain certain standards -- especially safety, competence and fee structure -- or what we end up would be an order of magnitude worse than what we have.

The future is actually externally-verified personally signed data systems, which could cover most of these fairly easily.

This already exists. It's called a taxi company.

This is hilarious. Good hilarious. I live in small time small city China. Usually I'd take a taxi to work, and sometimes there are no taxis. So I'd hail down a chap and persuade him to drive to my workplace. This is not disruptive, the future is the past, it is normal life.

It's funny, this is the way it used to work in Ukraine back in the day. You would step out, wave down a car, basically any car. They would stop for a second. You say where you are going, if its on the way, they would tell you a price. You get in and you are on your way. Maybe it's different time and society, but that system used to work well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com