Uber.gov – It’s Time to Let the Government Drive
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I'm mostly denied access to banking (except for some legacy accounts) due explicitly to regulation.
This also happens in private markets without a company marketplace. For example:
http://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/moral-panics-an...
[1] She's normally asked for 2x if I'm not around. If I'm with a woman of the same race as me, the price goes back to 2x.
Uh, that sounds like it's due to nonregulation. In my city that simply couldn't happen - licensed taxis all have to use the same meters (and display their license number prominently, making it easy to report one that's violating the rules).
In theory a perfectly enforced set of perfect regulations might fix these issues. In practice the industries that regulators are deeply involved in controlling still seem to have these issues.
In practice regulation as it's actually practised in e.g. Germany manages perfectly well. Sounds like your regulatory system has issues. Doesn't mean all regulation is fundamentally broken.
The people that visit Las Vegas don't vote in Las Vegas, so what incentive is there AT ALL for the government to protect the customer? This is basically the worst edge case for a regulation: the regulators only receive votes from one side of the arrangement, so who do you think they'll bias? Unless taxi abuse got so bad that it actually affected tourism, then I assure you it will always slip between the cracks. On the other hand, a business that cares about solely this problem will actually figure out a way to solve it.
No: it is just that regulated (I prefer the name public but anyway) markets offer the possibility of legal defense by definition. Thus, the customer is not left defenseless.
However, this applies possibly much more to Roman-law derivative States than to the US.
It's cold comfort to have legal recourse technically available, if it's never worth the time and money to pursue it. If you have to seek recourse at all you've already "lost" --- the recourse never really makes you whole, given your broken expectations, time to pursue, etc.
I don't know about the US but in Germany and Austria this could not be more wrong. Your ability to object through legal procedures is highly dependent on the regulatory field you are working in.
Is is most awful in fields with state monopolies like work permits or licensing.
We could just as easily simplify, streamline, and reform the civil tort system to allow people to file and address legitimate issues quickly through organic, judicial means. But instead, people, for god knows why, believe it is easier and more effective to have politicians appoint a bunch of crony farts to pass hundreds of thousands of pages of regulation that make the 95% case of good business operation harder, while most often failing to catch/fix the 5% of time things go wrong.
Le sigh, I digress.
You're right that the tourism industry is probably the worst case for democracy to ensure accountability of regulators to the people. But at least all punishments imposed by the government are subject to the court system; the government does not take away your license to make an income without evidence that you actually violated a law. Furthermore, government is subject to other mechanisms to be accountable to the people e.g. FOIA requests (vs Uber, who keeps their data exclusively for themselves). I worry that industries will be controlled by companies that care only about the aggregate revenues and are not accountable to the people,
You talk about a wonderful land of regulated bliss, but in reality, this sort of crap is most common result: http://reason.com/reasontv/2014/08/18/locked-out-melony-arms...
"But at least all punishments imposed by the government are subject to the court system" - Guess what? There's this nifty thing called civil court, and if we just made filing legitimate small claims easier, faster, and more effective, people could use this outlet to organically push back on bad behavior without the need for centralized regulation.
It doesn't always work, certainly. Then again, it would be foolish to say the State-owned alternatives always do. Or that "justice" is what motivates public administration. They're just people, no more or less self-interested than private actors.
Does their preponderance in the marketplace make it more difficult to avoid? No doubt. But have you ever tried to appeal a procedure of a calcified administration?
I.e., Facebook doesn't have to care that you send emails and make phone calls instead of Facebook messages, because your individual contribution to their income is negligible, and, I suppose, you don't represent a pervasive or effective force in their target demographics.
What parent's effect change? You were the first to use that expression in this thread.
will not damage the market position of the service they were banned from or left.
We weren't talking about their market position, but whether customers had recourse, and I said they have in the form of competing services.
But if we're going to discuss the effects that an individual can have in changing overall practices of an organization, I'm not sure if public institutions will come out very well in the picture.
I'm sure that's what MySpace thought during their heyday.
If your real estate business is heavily built around advertising in a local newspaper, and you get kicked off that by a competitor locking up an exclusivity deal, or the newspaper goes out of business - then what? Then you have to change your business.
There's absolutely nothing unique or new to Google Adwords when it comes to resting your fate with a platform. There is no such thing as a world without platforms, such that you can never be dependent on one; the only choice you have is what platform you're going to depend on.
I don't think consumer ratings are that great a plan. I can see from the article that all of those ideas are pretty awful. But making a cabbie display ratings from consumers rather than a ratings agency is open to all sorts of abuse.
Here in the UK a restaurant has to display its food hygiene rating on the door. This is a the result of a real assessment by an expert and as such is useful information. Unlike, say, a tripadvisor rating, which is more or less useless (5 stars! So much fun! I really enjoyed the baked rat and whatever that crunchy brown thing was in my lasagne!)
If it's left up to customers, it's completely subjective, all the time. It's not that customers are idiots, it's that the wisdom of the crowds is often wrong.
I'm not really sure how this maps on to cabs, mind.
Well it was your analogy, so I think we can both agree it was a poor one.
The article is talking about objective measures too - the problem it's trying to address is naive customers being taken the long way round. I don't think satisfaction ratings will actually help there.
Secret riders and driver bans might though.
We already observe the cases where teacher unions sponsor political candidates who will negotiate with teacher unions, police unions approving or disapproving of mayoral candidates who will sit on the opposite side of negotiating table when police contract is being discussed, insurance companies (ahem, industry) supporting (or not) state insurance commissioner candidates, or financial companies paying a bonus to a manager who departs for a government job.
How do you prevent corruption and align incentives properly in a government-run marketplace?
He said that he needed the $55 fare in cash because he needs to take some money home and it is midnight. I told him that I didn't feel comfortable, he was apologetic, explained he needed the money and so, to save trouble, I went into the hotel and got out the cash for him because I just got off a few hours plane ride, I didn't want to deal with this nonsense at this time of night.
I told the man behind the desk at the hotel and he explained that it happens all of the time. He said a lot of the drivers pocket the cash for themselves which is why they demand cash. He then advised us not to hire taxis and to use a hotel recommended private driver service that is the same cost (no doubt a nice referral fee for them). An ulterior motive there, but I don't doubt that this happens all of the time.
This experience, other experiences from colleagues and friends as well as online paints a picture of a pretty broken and corrupt taxi system in Los Angeles especially. While I am not a big fan of Uber (ethically) I do like the idea of ridesharing and the rating system. If Lyft, Uber and other companies were operating here, perhaps things would be different.
Uh. No. Where else would the money go? Cabbies pay everything upfront. They keep all earnings.
The problem here is that both cabbies and customers are in a bad deal. The bulk of the profits go to taxi medallion holders which are typically investors.
Also, cabbies don't pocket the income, the medallion owner pockets the income. If that happens to be the cabbie, great, but frequently, cabbies simply lease the medallion from an investment company. If you're a non-medallion-owning driver, you can increase your hourly rate by requesting and not-reporting cash transactions.
Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8229081
Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622003
Uber rival accuses car service of dirty tactics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7115177
https://www.mccarran.com/Go/Shuttles.aspx
They are the cheapest option (usually <$15 round-trip) to get from LAS to your hotel but, like any shared-ride setup, it's gonna be a wait for the bus to arrive and a longer wait while you drop others off. Las Vegas is a unique situation where people try to scramble as fast as they can from airplane seat to casino seat and they tend to miss this option and sprint straight for the cab line.
Perhaps the laws should change - certainly Uber wants them to. But flouting the law isn't often the best way to make that happen. They're not protesting injustice, they're jamming a foot in the door of a multi-billion dollar industry with technology that is still very new to regulators. The "we're just an app that connects people who want a ride with willing drivers" dodge is disingenuous, and the alternation between wounded and scoffing attitudes is grating. I don't like Uber as a company, and personally I hope it fails and the next guy picks up the torch and does these things with a bit of tact. Neither driver nor user will care.
>>> technology that is still very new to regulators.
So the natural reaction of course to ban it. Just in case.
>>> I don't like Uber as a company
You understand you liking or not liking them has nothing to do with their rights to do business, moreover - their rights should not depend on them being likable in any state that wants to call itself the state governed by laws and not by whims?
That doesn't mean the law shouldn't be upheld, and they fined if necessary. But that's the government's job, not Uber's.
Even though taxis seem to be regulated pretty much everywhere, the reason for regulation, the way things are done, and its effects can vary a lot.
Doesn't matter, Uber still feels the need (at least according to their PR) to crush the evil taxi monopoly in Germany. Even though there is no monopolist. If anything, Uber is the best match for that (international company with deep pockets vs local companies with typically 5 cars or less)
Some people have an authoritarian worldview--laws are handed down to us by our betters, and we'd better follow them no matter what. I prefer a democratic worldview--laws are an artifact created by the people for the benefit of the people, and once they hinder that purpose rather than promote it, there's nothing sacred about continuing to follow it to our own detriment.
We have GPS, we can estimate costs before the trip. If we do so, the only incentive for the cabbie is to get your service completed as efficiently as possible.
And it's weird that it's one of the only services where we can estimate the cost in advance fairly accurately in 99% of cases, but there's no price transparency. Cabs and medical services, maybe. There's no reason cab drivers should need a "billable hours" system of payment (at least not since gps mapping technology was invented).
I'd settle for that much. But my more controversial rider is that costs shouldn't vary by the time of the trip.
The risk of traffic flows should be borne by the party that will experience all the variations enough to be able to average it out. In consumer goods, if you buy a the one out of ten thousand products that are broken off the shelf, (or explodes in your hand), the merchants accept the loss, because they can even out this loss across all of their sales. In cabs, if there's suddenly an accident a mile ahead of you, and you're just stopped in a parking lot doubling your cost, that's your fault.
On an individual level, maybe just underpay if you've been jerked around. If the cabbie complains, tell them to bring the cops so you can both talk about the route and they can decide what's fair. If that behavior became widespread, taxis would lose the incentive to cheat in this way. (Though you'd probably get a few people shot in the street. I strongly prefer the "pre-calculated fares.")
Technology could solve some of these issues but I don't see it happening in the near future.
It seems like that should be doable with current tech, without even affecting the price of many transactions (except the ones where drivers are going intentionally slowly).
The inputs for Uber's pricing are time, distance, and the demand multiplier. Google maps does a pretty good job at giving an expected time and distance for a driver taking the ideal route. The driver / Uber can toss in a demand multiplier. If we agree that the Google Maps (or some other mapping service) time estimate is "close enough," then we should be able to calculate the fee before I sit down.
The driver can then feel free to take a scenic route, but it comes out of their pocket, not mine, so they probably won't.
Or we can do nothing. I'm just really tired of cabs missing my exit "accidentally." Three of the last four times I came back from the airport. The last trip I directed every lane change from the backseat. I feel like I shouldn't have to do that.
That said, this article completely ignored the very significant failures in Uber's rating system: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/14/what-ar...
Fundamentally, a five-star rating is far too simple. In my opinion, an example of this done well is Ebay's reputation system.
Say I pick up an uber, and everything goes exactly as planned. No weird side streets, no funky smell in the car, and an amicable driver. Not the best uber experience - I've had uber drivers free water bottles and nightlife recommendations at the ready in the past - but we got exactly where we wanted to go.
The service was satisfactory, but not above average. What do I rate this driver?
The answer to this question varies depending on who you are. The problem is that there is no standard for riders to objectively rate uber drivers. It's the equivalent of the easy-A teacher in high school versus the strict grading-on-a-curve teacher.
People have their own biases and experiences that affect the scale they rate on. The differences in my own personal grading syllabus versus another persons can get people on uber fired for the exact same ride experience.
score[i,j] = a[i]z[j]+b[i] + noise
So if I consistently rate drivers between 2 and 4, while you consistently rate drivers between 4 and 5, then a[me] = 3, b[me] = 2 while for you a[you]=4 and b[you]=5. If you rate a driver as 4 (i.e. z[j] = 0), then Uber will tell me the driver is rated a[me]0 + b[me] = 2.
Uber can then rate their drivers internally based on z[driver], not the individual ratings.
It is of course possible that Uber is completely statistically incompetent, but I doubt that.
1. Many people, like the writer, only give our 5 stars. (Simple: their votes don't really count much.)
2. People have different scales. (These can easily be rescaled.)
[1] Uber is willing to pay Lyft for the privilege of having their recruiter sit in the car with the driver.
I'd much rather give my feedback/rating in private once I'm out of the cab, and for the driver to do the same with me. I really don't need/want to know how they rated me. The "I gave you 5 stars, now you rate me" conversation is always awkward.
No one's stopped me from leaving the car, and the rides were all okay so I'm not complaining about any drivers. But the implication I got was of reciprocal 5 stars.
There is no criteria for a five-star rating. Did he get me where I needed to go at the expected price? Pretty much - that seems at best to rate average.
I don't even know what a five-star rating would be.
I gave him one because I really didn't feel the need to spend the time figuring out exactly what I should give him.
However, the problem I have, in retrospect, is this:
DON'T FRICKIN' ASK FOR A FIVE-STAR RATING WITHOUT A GOOD REASON.
In terms of stars, drivers get dropped if they are below around 4.5 on average, so 5 stars basically means "keep this driver" and anything less means "fire this driver".
Occasionally I'll have a driver demand a 5-star rating, which of course earns them an automatic 1.
Downvote me like the other commenter who expressed this, bitches!
//edit: At the time of writing this, sneak's comment was in the downvoted greyed-out font.
Wait, is this serious?
> he was clearly falling short of Uber’s standard... I gave him five stars, of course.
Why? I wonder if the author would continually frequent a deli that regularly served him rotten meat out of some misplaced sense of guilt.
> He wouldn’t let us out of the cab until she promised to [give 5 stars]. Afterward, we agreed: That was a pretty annoying ride, but not so bad it was worth punishing someone financially over it.
Yeah, I always find it annoying when I get quasi-kidnapped too. But who's to blame the kidnappers? Petty corruption and extortion is a totally acceptable part of life in a civilized society! It's not as if there were some sort of completely anonymous, dead-simple mechanism to instantly eliminate this sort of behavior.
> Most regular Uber users have a story like this.
I don't, nor have I heard any such thing from anyone I know. Where's the data to back this statement?
> my sample wasn’t big enough to generate anything I’d call data
Ergo, you have no business writing authoritatively on this subject.
> Why would Uber invite riders to use a scale of one to five unless it wants them to make fine distinctions? But in practice, it means a rating intended by a user as a gesture of approval is in fact a vote to have a driver fired. That’s screwed up.
If it's so screwed up, then why would anyone drive for Uber? Surely, all of their drivers would be getting fired and no one would want to work for them if that were the case. The fact is, it's not, and the reason is clear if you have a basic understanding of statistics, particularly normal distributions.
> Uber likes this system because it enjoys being able to say all of its drivers have near-perfect ratings. But it’s a harsh one for drivers, and also for customers, who find themselves repeatedly forced to choose between guilt, spite and ignorance.
Again, if it's so harsh, why would either group voluntarily participate in the system? Nobody is forcing either side to participate, and yet they both do so in droves.
> Fundamentally, a five-star rating is far too simple.
And yet the article you cite advocates something radically simpler.
While not a good choice, it might still be the best choice. Perhaps driving for Uber sucks, but sucks less than driving for all the other companies.
12 years/mile. So, I see rate (1 mile) and time (12 years). If you want to REwrite this, you can say (1/12)mile/year.
And that's also a speed.
Medicare is on average more efficient than private health care, for example. Health care might be a situation where profit incentives don't create the best outcome. In the case of the Nevada officials, there is no incentive whatsoever to actually fix the problem.
But by that argument wikipedia should be the world's biggest encyclopedia of racist porn.
If I paid a million bucks for a taxi medallion, and then 6 months later medallions aren't necessary--either because the government changes the law or because the government fails to enforce the law--I'm going to want a refund.
This is, ostensibly, what contracts should cover. The medallion issuer should be subject to a series of conditions under which the medallion purchaser is entitled to some sort of recompense if the issuer breaches those conditions. Entering into a purchase contract for an item that is literally the life and death of your career, agreeing to terms in which the other party basically says "trust us, we'll do what we promise so you aren't completely ruined" is a terrible way to do business.
On the flip-side, Uber seems to be reducing racial discrimination against potential riders, as per this piece: https://medium.com/matter/ubering-while-black-146db581b9db.
2) The requirement that road users have insurance is in my opinion completely separate to what those road-users do with their vehicles. Shouldn't it be?
3) People are not "hopeless at assessing risk." That's a ludicrous assertion. Everytime anybody buys anything, goes anywhere, or does anything, they are assessing risk. Buying goods off Ebay = assessing risks. Eating at a restaurant = assessing risks. Walking down the street = assessing risks.
No, you are wrong. People over-estimate the probability of rare events and under estimate the probability of common events. There are a bunch of biases that make people really bad at assessing risk.
The examples you give - all of them needed extensive modification to help people assess the risk or to protect people from the risk. (Ebay introduced reputation systems and gives stern advice about not paying for goods with Western Union cash transfer; retaurants have to comply with hygiene laws backed up by inspection - how many people bother to ask to see the kitchen or the staff loos before eating somewhere?)
All in all, taxicabs suck but Uber should burn in hell.
Are you alleging that all lending to people with poor credit scores is wrong, even in the cases where doing so might be the only way to give that person a job and help them improve their life?
The point about indentured servitude seems like hyperbole. Certainly the drivers can decide to just stop driving for Uber (they can't withhold income that doesn't ever come through) and/or allow the car to be repossessed if they really can't afford it. It also looks like Uber is helping buyers get manufacturer discounts (http://uberwest.weebly.com/la-vehicle-financing.html). Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks like a good program for a number of people who can't afford to buy a car but want to become a driver.
Also, if the bar to entry into the profession is simply to have a car and a smartphone, it will quickly become a race to the bottom in terms of wages.
All of this is good for the consumers, they get a lot of power over the drivers, they can threaten to give them a bad rating and so on, but there should probably be a balance.
Then again, it's not like the existing taxi cab unions and medallion systems and regulations are a guarantee of a good environment.
And on the third side, this profession is going to be eradicated by self-driving cars within fifteen years, so who cares?
If that's all that is required to be an effective driver, why should cab drivers be overpaid?
This is why we have labour laws, to shift the balance, to make work suck a little bit less for everyone.
(In principle. In practice in the taxi-cab case, I can't say that the various regulations and systems improve things for anyone, it's mostly captured by the rent-seekers anyway, so everyone gets screwed)
Meanwhile, in the real world, people take jobs for all sorts of reasons, and often do not have the luxury of choosing freely. The whole reason we have labour laws in the first place is because the free market has shown, again and again and again, to be completely inept at guaranteeing fair tratment of workers.
I know that with a purely US perspective it's hard to see the benefits of labour protections, since here jobs are either unionized into stupidity, or completely at-will. There's no middle ground, and then it's fair to come to the conclusion that it's all crap. However, there are plenty of countries outside the US where job markets have a healthier balance between protections for workers and company interests.
One aspect of the government side is securing that drivers and cars are safe and properly insured and making sure that the handicapped and minorities aren't discriminated against. But it's also, in many cities, running a rigidly planned economy, ostensibly for the benefit of drivers, but in reality often more so for medallion holders and unions, and having allow those vested interests to capture the system - and surely against the benefit of consumers.
On the other hand, Uber clearly brings huge benefits to the consumer: better cars that actually show up, politer drivers, better price/choice, easy grievance process etc. But there's also ambiguity about how they threat their drivers, whether insurance is always completely correct (especially in UberPOP) etc. Then of course, there's some questionable ethical dealings.
I'm a big fan of Uber, so obviously biased, but the idea is that benefits and drawbacks exist on a spectrum, and there's no reason we couldn't get the best of both worlds: properly regulated and insured cars, without the planned economy of medallions, and decent labour-protection of drivers without completely screwing over consumers. In London, Ubers are fully regulated under the "Private Hire" scheme which is unlimited in the number of licenses provided, but require commercial insurance and a background check of drivers and I think this strikes the balance very well.
What about the little guy who can't afford the fines he'll have to pay if he operates a cab without a license?
Sure a lot of the regulation is overburdensome, but the solution is to change the law, not encourage companies to break it.
It's a crazy theory that, if you are intelligent and believe that laws and civil arrangements in your society are against logic and moral reason, the best way to change them is to break them, to help raise awareness so that more people realise their perversity.
It helped end British control of India and racial segregation in America. Cool huh?
Uber isn't doing this because of some deeply held belief, they're doing it to make a profit. I don't want corporations breaking regulations they don't agree with and claiming it's "civil disobedience".
Just a side-note: I wouldn't open an article with brazenly insulting the reader.
This is a sarcastic remark, but: the US dollar is, in fact, a stable currency, and inflation is currently very low. Cab fares are regulated. If getting from point A to point B takes $20 in 2014, it will not be difficult to determine how much the fare should be in 2020, and to send some people around with new signs or price stickers.
I'm surprised at how many of these points seem to treat the low-tech methods used by the Nevada state government as patently absurd. I guess it comes from a mindset that technology is the obvious solution to society's problems, which is something I do not find to be obvious. It took me a while to catch on to the sarcasm as a result of that mismatch.
I found the sarcastic writing style a pleasure; it was enjoyable humorous and obvious in intent to me.
As is so often the case, much of the expense and inefficiency of the government regulatory apparatus here stems from an aversion to intervene directly in markets.
If Nevada could put a magic rock for $0.03/unit in cabs that made cabbies stop longhauling, with no extra technology in play, nobody would complain that it wasn't technological enough.
http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2014/04/judge-dfw-airport...
If you add a huge amount of friction before you can offer feedback, the only people to do will either be normal people who had truly horrific experiences, or incredibly entitled and annoying assholes who complain about everything.
In practice, it's really difficult for the government to be as nimble as a private company, but even people who support strong government regulation (like me!) have absolutely no ground to stand on when defending that particular status quo.
Given that each car heads to its destination without a transit route where passengers are buffered would be good.
Additionally, since the road is shared unlike the subway, it may be more efficient on resources.
Perhaps when the option becomes available, the government of some affording country may be able to pilot such a thing.
Demand is already centralized both geographically and time-wise, with business districts, downtowns, rush/peak hour. Self-driving cars might replace feeder networks but they'll only strengthen the case for high-capacity trunk transit.
In those same five minutes, a Calgary C-Train would have pulled in, loaded, and departed with capacity of about 700 people. Or three Skytrain trains, each with capacity of about 500 people. Or two Victoria Line trains, each with capacity of about 1000 people (non-crush load). Or two double-decker RER trains, capacity over 2000 people each. You'd need a lot of robocar terminals...
"Flying to Vegas? Look to your left. Now look to your right. Statistically speaking, everyone of you is about to get ripped off."
Did this three years back. Within days, the offending cab company called me and issued me a complete refund.
Did this three days back. Within hours, Uber emailed me and issued me a complete refund.
If you drive a cab for 40 years, do 25 fares a day and "reroute" 4-8 extra blocks (~=$1.25) you'll see an extra ~$30/day or even if he/she does every other fair $15/day.
Of course, this requires that you know you're getting ripped off.
* You may be on holidays and may want to avoid arguments with strangers.
* You may be after a long flight, jetlagged and/or simply too tired.
* You may be running late for a plane or train and have no time to wait for the cops.
* You may not speak the local language.
On the other hand, leaving a rating or review is a lot simpler and more commensurate with $10.
The cab driver is exploiting your reluctance to make a fuss to get a small amount of extra money. You can turn right around and exploit the fact that by breaking the law they've removed any recourse they have for getting you to pay. If enough people did it, eventually the scam would not be worth trying anymore.
To be fair: we have signs displaying cost & travel time for bus, car, taxi and train. Train (for once) is the clear winner by being cheapest & fastest.
I mean there are tons of companies/people who "do stuff" to make more money from you...
Uber is making the decision to get rid of drivers that take advantage of their customers, not the government forcing anyone to abide by some law. Its the same as how a restaurant can take action against a waitress if they provide bad service. Personally I think that system is way better than trying to create a series of laws that make it illegal to be a bad waiter.
The Vegas scam is that they are taking tourists with no idea of the traffic layout on a longer trip than an experienced driver would take.
If an Uber driver takes this longer route, the passengers still don't know that this happened. They got to their hotel in one piece and everyone is happy.
The only levelling factor is that the Uber ride is a fixed price, so it's in the driver's best interest to take the shortest route.
If the Vegas cab authority mandated fixed prices for the rides, this would all go away on their end as well.
Biggest difference between Uber and any taxi authority is that Uber is interested in providing good service while taxi authority does not.
This "interaction," or lack thereof, is why I stick to Metro and other transit in Seattle. If I need to go somewhere in a car, I grab a car2Go or a ZipCar. Metro has a set timetable, set routes, set fares, and set stops. I get on, tap my card, and I'm almost certainly guaranteed to follow a route I know in advance and pay a known price. Walking a couple of blocks at the beginning and end of my trip is worth it, to me, to not have to wonder how badly I'm gonna get taken.
(Yes, I can talk to the taxi or Uber driver to go another way if this is the "long way around." Yes, I can complain to the ride provider. But why do I want to put up with that?)
In a competitive market, no, you're right. But that's a self-solving problem because customers will select the option which gets them there the fastest for the least money. The problem is customer-abusive behavior, which is a hallmark of a captive market; when a consumer has no viable alternatives, they basically have to put up with being scammed, shaken down, and otherwise abused to the limit that they can tolerate (see also: regional monopolies in last-mile internet service).
The issue at hand is fundamentally the lack of competition, which is enforced through government action. If you're going to maintain a state-granted monopoly, then you're going to need to be subject to state-imposed restrictions on how you can use that monopoly.
Of course, even making it illegal doesn't seem to be stopping taxis from doing it.
The train costs 4 euro, by taxi it's on average 45-50 euro, but could also easily be 60 euro's.
For a tourist it's not very clear what is the best way of transportation; hence, very easy to get ripped off. When the price differce is 10-15 times the price of a train ticket that is supposed to make you wonder
From McCarran International Airport to the strip you can either go on the highway or via the local streets. The highway is slower and costs $10 more, and yet 1/3rd of cabbies will take you that route.