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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

What could be better oversight than the people actually riding in the cabs rating the quality of the service provided?

Serious question. That's a level of feedback that simply can't be provided by a government agency.

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Because stuff like technical checks and insurance can't be postponed until the accidents happen, generally speaking. In the EU (at least all countries I know) third party car insurance is generally mandatory and it's details depend on how you use the car, be it commercial or private. You can of course always claim that it's a subject to "market forces" and people might opt out from insurance, but this is really not how we roll in Europe.

Actually, vehicle insurance can (and in many countries, is about to be) checked and enforced automatically, for all vehicles. At least here the police cars are getting register-plate recognition cameras that automatically check the annual inspection and insurance status of vehicles it sees, so there will be not that many uninsured cars around, Uber or not.

I'm not sure about the state of automatic license plate scans in Germany but it's a huge privacy issue and there was a big uproar when they were first introduced on some motorways for enforcing tolls for large transport vehicles. Germany is generally very anti-surveillance.

Even so, vehicle insurance doesn't come from signing the right documents. In Germany you don't get the seal on your license plate without passing mandatory regular inspections.

Car insurance does not cover paying passengers. There is a special, more expensive, kind of insurance for this generally referred to as commercial transport insurance.

Yeah, let's health department inspections and DOT/MOT/TÜV inspections while we're at it. Because a "democratic" private rating system is inherently unquestioningly reliable and sufficient no matter the education of the participants or their means of inspection.

I think the general answer to this question is deceptively simple, and has two parts: 1) many of the most important regulations are preventative and relate to issues that are invisible to the average passenger (driver qualifications and training, insurance, vehicle maintenance, etc.). 2) The harm that many taxi regulations seek to prevent is disproportionate to the disciplining effect on operators of a single poor review. A serious accident, for example, will typically only affect a single rider (or group of riders) who can, at most give a zero-star review. I cannot see how the possibility of a single zero-star review out of hundreds would give a driver any incentive to do anything that costs a significant amount of money -- after all, many Uber drivers probably are used to getting the occasional bad review for no reason at all.

Edit: Bonus reason #3 -- Situations may arise where the government wants to prevent driver behavior that many riders will approve of, for example, to protect other drivers and pedestrians. For example, the government might want to use licensing to impose an extra stiff penalty on taxi drivers who violate traffic laws (i.e., license revocation or suspension). Passengers may approve of this sort of behavior if it was intended to get them to their destination faster.

It's not about feedback, it's about prerequisites.

The very minimum standards that players need to obey.

Customer feedback can come later, on top. But that's qualitatively very different.

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