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Comment by tomblomfield | Hacker News Reader

Uber is 30-40% cheaper than London cabs. Uber has rattled the cab-drivers so much that they're staging a protest next week to try to pressure cab regulators into blocking Uber's expansion.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/30/will-uber-kil...

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The London black cab has a meter that prices the journey. Other taxis in London do not have a price meter.

Uber needs to obey the regulatory rules of the industry. Either they don't have a pricing meter (and thus journey price is agreed before hand) or they do have a price meter and all Uber drivers are regulated like any other black cab driver.

They can't ignore laws just because those laws are inconvenient to them.

"They can't ignore laws just because those laws are inconvenient to them."

I completely agree with you, but at the same time, for whatever reason companies (Uber / Airbnb) have been able to completely ignore rules & laws to the tune of tens of billions of dollars (in valuations).

It's almost "might makes right": ignore rules and grow as fast as possible, with the hope that you'll grow faster than the legal system can take you down. By the time the legal system could do anything, you're big enough to change the rules.

Big enough to change the rules, or big enough to absorb whatever fine they wreck you with. $1 billion in fines for making $10 billion you shouldn't've been able to make in the first place? Good deal!

Yep. The AirBNB folks engaged in flagrant spam, sending out fake unsolicited emails from fake identities, and refusing to remove anybody who wanted to stop receiving them.

But now Chesky is rich, so he gives away money and pretends that he's something other than an enormous fucking asshole.

"They can't ignore laws just because those laws are inconvenient to them."

But that's how you disrupt markets!

Between Uber and AirBnB, and the large valuations they're getting despite being in flagrant violation of various local ordinances, it seems to be a gamble that they'll be able to lobby their way out of the problem, or expand into territories with no such legal framework.

Yes, Uber is cheaper - until it isn't, when it implements surge pricing. It's a very different model, which makes direct comparisons tricky.

The price of a London cab is regulated. Maybe that price is wrong. Uber can take advantage of it, but do you think the London taxi industry is really going to sit back and watch its market disappear without even trying to change price?

And the cab driver protests are more rooted in the fact that they had to spend a very long time learning 'The Knowledge' before being let out on the road, and that Uber has no such requirement. So, either it's necessary and they're letting Uber off the hook, or it isn't necessary and TfL has been lying to drivers.

So, I think it's more complex than just being "threatened by Uber".

"Yes, Uber is cheaper - until it isn't"

Case in point:

https://twitter.com/newyorkcityliz/status/470010209403150336

Edit: Fixed my idiom. Thanks dragonwriter.

> Case and point:

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/case+in+point

Friday night, 9pm.

Yeah, taking uber then would be stupid. There are plenty of yellow cabs within a few minutes walk from the starting location of that trip, and the trip itself would cost about $25 with a tip.

While they may have spent a long time learning 'The Knowledge' that was in the days before Sat Nav.

Like many other things The Knowledge has been superseded by a computer.

Satnav sucks in many cities, though, especially for POIs. When I visit NYC that's one of my bigger complaints about the taxi drivers: they have no idea where anything is, and it takes them forever to try to type things into their gadgets, often with mixed success. And still they always end up in the wrong lanes and end up swerving across traffic at the last minute, because they don't actually know where they're going or how the street layout works. IMO it's shameful that someone could be a taxi driver in a major city and not be able to navigate to prominent landmarks and neighborhoods. That's at least one problem you don't have in London, where the drivers give you confidence that they might have actually been to London before.

It's worth noting that all mini-cabs are 30-40% cheaper than London cabs, but it's a very fragmented industry with poor technology (Addison Lee has done a decent job). I would say 80% of my journeys in London used mini-cabs with the downside being that you had to wait 15-20 min longer (but in same cases much quicker) than black cabs.

Black cabs. Car services were always cheaper. It's just illegal to hail one. Same thing in NYC.

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