This isn't empty scolding. As "software eats the world" and tech companies start trying to compete in "meat space" industries, it will be imperative for them to understand why things are done the way they are, and how fruitful progress can be made without creating unnecessary friction by simply ignoring settled expectations. People won't react well to someone just plucking the onion out of the varnish unless he can demonstrate that he understands why the onion was in there to begin with, and articulate convincingly why it no longer needs to be in there.
I totally agree that the structural compromise that led to taxi monopolies need to be revisited. But not because Uber and Lyft change the market dynamics in any relevant way. These monopolies need to be revisited because highly regulated markets like that have proven to become a liability over time, and the deregulation experiment in the U.S. over the last few decades has shown that lightly-regulated markets function better.
In the context of cabs, a "lightly regulated" regime might require background checks, minimum insurance, and some sort of mechanism for verifying driver identity and reporting problems. Variables like rates, capacity, coverage area, etc, could be left to the market.
Deregulation does work in many industries, regulation should never be a barrier to entry into an industry but that is what it has evolved into. It is not there to keep the public safe, to ensure pricing, or even to maintain consistency of service, it is there to protect established interest and their political backers/beneficiaries.
Has anyone looked at if taxi companies actually hold up their end of the bargain? In Baltimore taxis routinely refuse to make pickups in various parts of town either because they are out of the way or because they are perceived to be "bad".
With something like a taxi that you hail from the street and don't know what you are getting into before you get in some light regulation is reasonable for accident and scam reduction But a brand like Uber that achieves those same goals through different means shouldn't be pushed out of existence and of all laws to pass limiting the number of drivers is just a blatant attempt to protect existing taxi's
And Uber is solving this how? Bad neighbourhoods are bad neighbourhoods.
It sounds like one solution to this problem is to mandate that taxis cannot discriminate. That smells like regulation.
Uber has no such regulation yet people who use it report having an easier time getting a cab in parts of town Taxi's discriminate against.
There are several things Uber does that make it less of a problem for them. Drivers feel safer since the interaction is pre-vetted through Uber. It's cashless so not much to rob. You know the person you are going to meet must have it together enough to have a functioning credit card, smartphone, and cell service.
Uber removes drivers that decline too many fares (good drivers accept like 90%). When a fare is offered to a driver they only have 12 seconds to accept it and they only show the driver a very zoomed in map of the location and the estimated drive time to the location. So even if one driver is discriminating the offer will be quickly routed to the next closest driver until one accepts it.
That's a poor heuristic. Ted Bundy had it together enough to get into law school.
"...the deregulation experiment in the U.S. over the last few decades has shown that lightly-regulated markets function better"
Uh, I'm really not interested in an economics debate, but I think many people would disagree with that blanket assertion. The deregulated electric market in California springs to mind as one counter-example.
Some of the supposedly evil taxi regulations that Uber has been fighting here in DC actually seem pretty reasonable to me. I'm OK with Uber drivers being required to have extra car insurance and the city making sure that the GPS-based meter system is accurate.
The fact that businesses still routinely use that piece of jargon suggests to me that they're completely stuck in the tech bubble.
But we have seen it before, these are just illegal unlicensed cabs. There is literally nothing separating Uber from an illegal cab, except that they've got an app for that.