PPA Impounds UberX Vehicles in Undercover Sting Operation

If side X tries to bring new service wildly popular with customers, universally voluntarily chosen by providers, providing better prices and better service, and side Y tries to prevent them from doing this citing arbitrary laws and interests of entrenched lobbying rent-seekers, having nothing to do with actual service-providers and mostly relying on FUD and denying choice to the customers - is that big of a stretch to paint side X as "good" and side Y as "evil"?

If somebody tells me "you can not buy service from X because I compete with X and I want to charge you more while providing crappy service and I know you won't ever choose me voluntarily, so I'll buy a politician and make him take your choice away" - why would not I tell such a person "you are evil, go away!"?

    Medallions are largely a red herring.

Agreed. Here in Seattle, the biggest issues have been:

1. It's almost impossible to find a taxi outside of a couple specific areas of town (downtown, and the commercial cores of Capitol Hill and Fremont on weekend nights), which means you're going to have to call a dispatcher.

2. The unbelievable ineptitude and rudeness of the Yellow Cab dispatchers in Seattle.

3. The historical unwillingness of Seattle taxi drivers to accept credit cards, which bears some additional unpacking. Seattle is a very credit card-friendly city. I can go weeks without visiting an ATM and not change a thing about my daily routine. However, taxi drivers used to be very hostile to accepting credit cards. I've had a couple who refused to take plastic, and actually drove me to an ATM (on my dime) to make me get cash to pay them. To their credit, on the few occasions I've had to use a taxi since UberX launched, I've found them more than happy to accept credit cards through Square.

My use of Uber is almost entirely driven by my loathing for Seattle's Yellow Cab.

You do not need to own a medallion, and given current medallion prices, you probably can't since if you can afford a medallion you are a millionaire and millionaires rarely drive taxis. You have to rent one though. And to pay for it. And that creates an artificial limit to the market and artificial rent extracted by medallion owner - now you pay for taxi service proper and also pay the rent to medallion owner, who produces absolutely nothing and charges just for being there. Real estate is physically limited, but even then you can build your store in different places and people still can come there. Medallion means either you rent it or you are out of business. It's like all NY real estate would be build in 70s and after that, nobody would be allowed to build anything, despite growing population and expanding business. Can you imagine what that would do to a city?

The unpredictability of driver arrival time is starting to turn me off as well. I'm finding it highly inconsistent, in multiple countries.

The common driver also seems rather clueless lately. It used to be that you were getting guys who had a day job as a limo driver and they did Uber to make some extra cash. So, they basically knew their way around and how to handle things. Recently I get more drivers that are nice/helpful, but ultimately clueless about how to navigate the area they drive in effectively.

I wonder if DC is just "special" somehow. In SF, driver arrival time is very predictable, and it's rarely more than 2-3 minutes longer than the original estimate.

My only gripe is the slew of drivers who don't know their way around the city and end up taking sub-optimal routes (because they e.g. don't know where heavy traffic tends to congregate, and they're using a dumb GPS rather than something like Waze). It's also a little annoying to get in the car and wait a minute or two while they fiddle with their GPS. The recent feature that lets you enter your destination in pre-pickup has made this a little better, but not perfect.

The technology doesn't offer a good replacement for an old fashioned line of sight hail

For SF, it's completely the opposite. Trying to hail a cab, even in a heavily-trafficked area, is abysmally painful.

First Keystone Risk Retention Group Inc. It's in grandparent's reference link (emphasis mine):

"The taxi owners contend their existing insurance continues to provide coverage for 30 days, despite the insolvency of First Keystone Risk Retention Group Inc. ... The insurance company was ordered liquidated Tuesday by a South Carolina judge at the request of the state insurance director"

Totally agree. I guess what I had in mind was an agency that constantly re-evaluates other agencies and writes the legislation to wind down and then shut down needlessly bureaucratic agencies that preserve the problems to which they are the solution. At the end of the day, an act of law needs to be passed to shut down agencies which came into existence via acts of law.

The more I see how government is run, the more I see that lawmakers are commit generators that never take the time to re-factor all the code they've committed to production. Think of this agency as the ones that sit down and get their hands dirty refactoring the code and handing it off to the lawmakers for code review before being committed to the code base.

I appreciate that many laws are passed to solve genuine problems. I don't appreciate the fact that they are never checked to make sure they were effective or continue to be effective.

Regarding the specific military tank example, I'm certain that there must be a way to set things up so that stupid stuff like that can't pass. I honestly don't see how purchase orders for military equipment could ever be a law issue. The fact that the military can't make purchases according to their own needs and budgets is insane. The money spent on those tanks would be better off being spend on all the veteran's affairs programs that are often underfunded.

That's not meant to make him/her feel dumb, it is an honest question.

It's a strong statement, yes. But will they follow through? They've screwed their drivers over many times in the past.

Perhaps the "deplorable charade" is the argument that PPA regulation isn't necessary in the mobility space? Or overbearing?

I don't much care for Uber's practices, but I agree with the argument that taxi medallions are rent-seeking and all efforts to break down senseless regulation of the taxi industry should take place. Note I said "senseless" regulation. You should still require insurance, background checks/driver's license verification or drivers, and so forth.

It's unclear if it's a criminal case (my guess is no). It is relatively common to indemnify partners against civil penalties.

If you legislate and enforce a law that is harmful to society, does that make you criminally liable?

Nothing important happened before the Internet.

Perhaps I embellished my argument slightly.

Obviously defeating the taxi monopolies is less important than defeating slavery.

Obviously so, it inconveniences young well-off white people.

I think you mentally inserted the word "than" between his words "true" and "when". If he had written it that way, then your indignation would be justified. As it is written, it means that when it comes to ride sharing companies, that quote rings true in a profound way.

The way you misread it, it would indeed seem to say that the situation with ride sharing companies violating the law is exactly what old Thomas Jefferson was talking about. But you misread it, obviously.

You can certainly disobey the taxi monopoly rules in other ways.

I pay friends for "gas" when they come and pick me up drunk at the bar, for example. It's not really much different than hiring out UberX.

"I regret that I have but one scion xb to give to the profits of my company."

If you see Uber driver behaving badly, you can call Uber.

>>> Good luck doing that with some rando driving for Uber, though.

Why? Every driver is identified and known, and Uber has a lot of incentive to weed out bad drivers, especially when they are just starting the service and couple of bad reviews can kill adoption for a whole market. What incentive Uber has to support bad service? I can tell one incentive for city politicians to do it - taxi lobbyists pay into their campaign funds, and you do not (at least not as much, unless you are Zuckerberg, in which case you probably have your own limo anyway), so who has more influence on them?

>>> For similar reasons, I'm also pretty sure the insurance situation is solid.

Because Uber just dreams about uninsured million-dollar lawsuit. Nothing inspires investors to invest into a young business as much as an uninsured risk of a million-dollar lawsuits, right? And Uber doesn't care about investors or risks - unlike city politicians whose very future is linked to the fact whether city would be sued or not, since lawsuit cost comes out of their pockets... Oh wait, I got it in reverse - city politician could not care less if the city is sued since taxpayers would pay it anyway, while Uber guys risk their own money and their investors money. Yet somehow you trust more the guy who uses your money to insure your risks and has zero incentive to preserve it and large incentive to follow lobby interests over guy who uses their own money and has large incentive to preserve it. I wonder how it works out for you.

>>> But in my view, Uber's cure is worse than the disease.

Worse in what? Of course, if you refuse to trust anything that does not say "State Commission" and is not rules by an unaccountable bureaucrat, then every cure would be worse than the disease for you. However, do not be very surprised if you find no cures at all, because you seem to be insisting on having the disease as a precondition to finding the cure.

Oh I agree, if I were the one driving the car I'd like to think I'd have read every bit of local regulation on ridesharing. But if your suppliers were the ones who talked you in to driving your food truck around and their enrollment process ensured you that you were part of the legal future to delicious burrito delivery, their behavior would be at least negligent, if not outright malicious.

Sort of. In my opinion the major difference there is that the change wasn't driven by a particular corporate interest. I expect I'd feel differently about stings on ridesharing if hundreds of people individually decided it would be cool to start organizing rideshare services, and the government started running stings on them.

A similar example is content sharing. Leaving aside the debate on whether or not it should be legal, the community as a whole changed how they interacted with content and the market has begun to shift in response, with more and more content providers realizing that they need to adapt. (I know that's not happening nearly as fast as we'd like, but it is happening).

I am not missing that: I do not believe that to be the case. My apologies for not addressing that directly in my original comment.

Uber isn't fighting against discrimination, they aren't fighting against poverty or famine or some global crisis.

They are a business engaged in political maneuvering as part of their goal of changing the regulations in their favor. Whether we think their end goal is good or not, we shouldn't pretend that they're doing this out of altruism.

Civil disobedience and similar acts are effective tools in protesting against injustices in the government. But in using such acts as tools against any inefficient or obsolete laws, we throw the baby out with the bathwater.