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Comment by kaa2102 | Hacker News Reader

This actually does present a dilemma for working class folks. The article indicates that taxi drivers have experienced a loss in income of 30-40%. I don't imagine French taxi drivers earn a whole lot of money. Moreover, an idea could be that the French taxi drivers could just switch over to Uber. The tax driver may be stuck if they have already paid a certain amount of a car, registration, etc.

Also, they may not be able to make as much with Uber. Buzz Feed News estimated that US Uber drivers can make $34,164 per year. French laws may also include benefits for driving a taxi vs. being an independent contractor with no benefits with Uber.

Services like AirBnB and Uber can be great for entrepreneurs, investors, part-time workers, and consumers. We should be reminded that disrupting industries sometimes creates losers in the working and middle class that don't have an easy way to switch jobs in some countries or economies.

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The main problem is that taxi medallions cost a lot (€200-250K in Paris, up to €300K in some southern cities). Independent taxi drivers got indebted to buy them, and generally expected to resell them at a profit to finance their retirement.

Another thing that isn't much discussed in medias, is that a few companies, most notably G7, own most medallions and lease them to (poor) drivers, often together with the car and the radio reservation service. Those companies typically have received those medallions for free from the state, decades ago, before reselling them became legalized. Those companies obviously pull some strings, both stirring up drivers and talking in minister cabinets.

Anyway eventually they're fucked, Uber or no Uber: autonomous cars will make taxis obsolete at warping speed. Taxi drivers are fucked that much harder than Uber's, because they'll be left with a worthless medallion and its 20 years mortgage. (It's also likely to make private car ownership marginal, something akin to owning your own horse in the XXth century, thus hitting car manufacturing pretty badly once enough autonomous cars have been produced, but that's another quagmire).

There is very little proof that the techno-utopian version of autonomous vehicles is going to play out the way people like you want it to.

Sure, on the surface Taxi's are dead, but I would wager that it will be a lot slower than people on here think, not least for the difficulty of cleaning autonomous cabs.

Cab drives to cleaners; some dude cleans cab. A few minutes work per day per cab. Maybe the other factors will be of more importance, but I don't see huge labour costs here.

Oh, and bonus: hiring an autonomous account will likely involve disclosing your identity in advance. If you're the sort of customer who makes a habit of fouling cabs, maybe you'll have to pay more to hire one.

We already have car sharing services like Autolib where you can pick up an electric car at a station, use it, and park it at another station.

I imagine cleaning autonomous cabs will be exactly the same effort than cleaning shared cars. Probably less if the car can drive itself to the depot.

Yes, as long as you know who used a vehicle, chances of getting it thrashed are easily manageable.

There are even investors and syndicates inserting themselves into the medallion markets now [1]. When you see even these market participants pulling out altogether, then I can easily believe the autonomous passenger vehicle is within 5-20 years of obliterating the taxi industry (though I doubt that will happen). I'm not aware of a way to short medallions, so I can't tell if that is going on. So far as I can tell, these people are still participating in the medallion market and various secondary markets, despite the recent downward tick of medallion prices. I'm guessing they and the industry in general have a lot of political pull, and are counting on that influence to wring another few decades out of conventional taxis before autonomous options mutate them into a different-looking industry.

Unless there is a really broad-based public backlash that makes it political suicide to continue licensing however, even if autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous I can't see municipalities and various institutions and agencies in general giving up the affiliated revenue stream. Even if we end up with something like Johnny Cabs [2] and no humans drive taxis any longer, I expect some form of government-imposed licensing to still exist.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/21/add-taxi-medallion-investo...

[2] http://www.empireonline.com/features/helpful-movie-robots-th...

The thing is, autonomous vehicles don't need to take the taxi niche frontally. Here's how it goes, if legislation is too slow:

1. families buy one autonomous car instead of several driven ones: when dad's arrived at work, the car goes back to become mom's car for the day. With a nice twist: when the car goes and fetch kids from soccer, mom doesn't have to be in it.

2. People pool cars privately: one car for a couple of families if they're light users, X/Y cars for X families for more intensive users. It's shared property, neither a taxi activity nor even a company providing a service.

2bis. Some AirBnB of autonomous cars facilitates mutual lending of cars, in parallel with the development of privately organized pools

3. Cars are leased instead of bought upfront, from companies embedded with the AirBnB-of-autonomous-cars. What you have now is effectively an autonomous taxi company.

The economic pressure to get rid of drivers will be enormous. Sure, car makers and drivers won't like it, but all of the money that won't go there will be up for grab by other sectors. Think of trucks: not only autonomous trucks will drive 23h a day, but everyone who sells anything moved by truck will have their margin augmented by skipping drivers' salaries.

Excellent observations. For trucks, there are other big downstream effects. The big diesel engines preferentially run continuously, and with autonomous driving we'll see run times between engine shutdowns increase pretty steeply. Manufacturers can tune engine development accordingly so continuous running is the norm. Diesel consumption per unit mass will enjoy a marginal improvement; diesel repair shops will see a marginal decline. If we see concurrent automation of refueling, truck stops will experience a dramatic decline.

If medium and light truck bodies are aligned to a standardized set of chassis, then some of the fleets of delivery trucks that lay idle half the day or longer today can run around the clock, swapping bodies and switching duties when needed.

If we can automate quiet garbage pickup, then a garbage truck that usually only runs during the day can run around the clock.

If we can automate safe delivery of liquid fuels, then entire fleets of various fuel delivery trucks will lay off a lot of drivers.

The pattern I'm seeing is the actual driving might get automated, but the endpoint activities might not be subject to automation just yet, but that might only be a matter of time and possibly standardization.

One problem is that replacing truck drivers with self-driving trucks could save lots of money. However, truck driving is one of the most popular professions in America.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/truck-driving-may-be-america-s...

"It's a corrupt industry."

A detroit taxi driver told me that if he pissed anyone off the dispatcher would stop sending him fares.

> taxi medallions cost a lot (€200-250K in Paris, up to €300K in some southern cities)

My understanding is that they're actually free. But it can take years before you actually get one, which is why people buy them on the black market.

I don't know how I feel about those taxi drivers. It seems they've just made a very bad investment.

In any case, it would be great if taxis were more affordable and available in France. Maybe the gvt could work with uber and negotiate some sort of compensation for the taxi drivers?

The "bad investment" is worrisome in a capitalist society. Smart investors are supposed to make wise decisions but regulation from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission determine how much capital and experience is required to become a registered investor. However, someone seeking an occupation is not a sophisticated investor. Nor would a factory worker be expected to be able to predict major changes. Yet, working and middle class folks must invest and take risks on education, certification, and career-paths lest they suffer the consequences.

I oppose any usage of my taxes to compensate the rackeetering taxi drivers. Never ever have I taken a taxi in France (I'm French) that didn't charge an exorbitant price while imposing me to listen to their racist and self-important rants. Their profession should die and make room for something better.

License are free when delivered by the state ("préfecture"); but taxis effectively lobby against creating new ones, in order to preserve the value of existing ones and to prevent competition, so extremely few are ever distributed. In practice, the only way to get one is to buy one from a retiring driver.

The vacuum that attracted Uber has been created by their resistance against license creation, they dug their own grave. The two big problems in Paris are that you can't find a taxi when you need one, and when you have one, he often doesn't have a credit card reader (those pesky snitches which prevent tax evasion).

Most taxi drivers don't own their licence, they rent it from a taxi company.

Anyway, Parisian taxi drivers are responsible for Uber's very existence(). Now they're making Uber look even more compelling by behaving like dicks to maintain the status-quo.

() https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_(company)#History

I do feel bad for employees in industries entrenched behind heavy monopoly-protection. Promises were made to these employees, typically by politicians somewhere on the stupid/corrupt spectrum, that the monopoly could protect them in perpetuity.

Monopoly invariably breeds indifference and high prices and that cost fall almost entirely on the taxi user, which is (generally) the wider middle class (and let's not pretend working class people never need a cab too, so they are also hurt) and it's unsustainable to force regular people to subsidise the indifference of a pretty random group of employees (and medallion owners and cab company owners - it's not an exclusive blue collar affair on the receiving end).

So instead of being gently pressured to improve by competition over time, change is dramatic and discontinuous -and that is painful, and that elicits sympathy. The only thing anyone could really have done was to have gradually liberalised the taxi industry over maybe a decade or two to soften the blow, but that requires a time machine.

I'd feel less bad if monopoly protections for billionaire patent holders and land owners (who collect rents from these very taxi drivers) weren't simultaneously getting much, much stronger.

Sadly, some people only seem to care about liberalizing industries that the little people derive just enough income to get by on.

I'm happy that somebody has raised this point. David Harvey gives a particularly good analysis of the concept of monopoly as it relates to rent here:http://www.socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/...

To usefully understand the struggles taking place around Uber's "disruption" of traditional taxis we need a more nuanced perspective than regulation=monopoly=bad/free market=competition=good

"Services like AirBnB and Uber can be great for entrepreneurs, investors, part-time workers, and consumers. We should be reminded that disrupting industries sometimes creates losers in the working and middle class that don't have an easy way to switch jobs in some countries or economies."

This is absolutely true, but it has always been so, for countless professions across the centuries.

Industrialization, automatization, globalization have caused many people to lose their livelihood due to the obsolescence of their industry and profession, but the net result has always been a richer, more modern society (whether if 'happier' or 'better', it's hard to say).

Taxi drivers happen to be a much more vocal, compact and uniform community, and that's why they appear more in the news, but there are countless other people being affected by technical progress on a daily basis (from journalist to shoe repairers to travel agents).

While it might not be a zero-sum game, to reference a famous pg essay, it's a bit naive thinking that entrepreneurs can create value out of nothing, without affecting the existing status-quo in other ways than positive ones.

Instead of fighting it by enforcing ad-hoc laws, governments and unions should work towards creating the conditions so that the affected workers are able to find other occupations, IMHO.

The prime difference between Uber and, say, factory automatization is that it's not certain that Uber is strictly better.

All things considered, full-time drivers make less with Uber, have less benefits, and are generally worse off. There's huge amounts of literature concerning the effects of, say, not having health insurance on general job performance (spoilers: it doesn't make them better at their jobs).

So in the end we get lower quality rides, even if they're cheaper (which they aren't always due to surge pricing!)

Obsession with lower costs inevitably bring about generally lower quality goods, empirically (already happened with food and consumer goods, compare a French supermarket with an American one).

It is certain that Uber is the superior alternative. People are not stupid, they wouldn't drive or ride if it wasn't their best option. Anecdotally Uber is 300% cheaper and arrives in 5mins as opposed to 55 in my city.

You've referenced literature and empirical evidence, citations please.

> The prime difference between Uber and, say, factory automatization is that it's not certain that Uber is strictly better.

In practice, though, as a quasi-frequent user of taxi service in a variety of cities (NYC, Atlanta, Chicago) who doesn't even care much about the price (as I get to expense most of those rides)... I'd opine that Uber is strictly better, even though the taxis a variety of huge advantages (like a straightforward airport pickup procedure).

I think there are at least two ways in which Uber is intrinsically better: One, Uber Pool, which uses network effects and a computerized super-dispatcher to let riders share cabs. Two, the concentration of capital in Uber compared to taxi companies allows investment and research in driverless cars. These result purely from Uber's size and the infrastructure which enables and is enabled by that size.

Uber does give you the ability to choose higher quality if you'd like. An UberX is a low quality ride by a likely inexperienced driver with the benefit that it is cheap. An Uber Black gives you a nicer car with a very likely (but not necessarily, but in my experience they are professional private limo drivers) experienced driver.

I agree on our societies approach to "value" only relating to cost at the expense of quality - but that's a different topic all together.

If losing primarily means losing one's job, then it is social organization and culture that should be blamed not technological advancement. IMHO.

I agree with this sentiment, but I do think that there's validity in the claim that the disruptive nature of startups can have negative consequences for uninvolved parties. I don't think it's a matter of "blame," though, so much as a matter of responsibility -- it is the responsibility of those pushing these disruptive technologies to simultaneously incubate and encourage the social reform necessary to prevent such situations.

You don't say! New rules for entrepreneurs: sit down and consider the disruptive consequences of your new startup. Next, take on the responsibility of simultaneously incubating and encouraging the social reform necessary to prevent such situations. Oh, and don't forget to spare some time for the startup. If you're a journalist or someone benefiting from the new startup, you're 'pushing it' so you have a job to do as well.

It seems like cheating to demand that the rules be changed so Uber can operate, the claim that the makeup of society is to blame for the consequences.

I didn't think Uber is a "technological" advancement, so much as a company gambling that it can get away with disrupting the legal quagmire. Same for AirBnB.

Be fair, lots of folks had the same idea and didn't execute so well. The devil is in the details; thus, technology. Even the marketing/lobbying is a technical issue of sorts.

I don't think technology has some dark magical power where we can put our scruples into. Those scurple coming from that absurd job struggle.

Are we so bored with the struggle for life? Is that game really fun?

The details might be sales and marketing. The details might be raising a lot more money than your competitors, using a flashy technological demo, but spending the money running at a loss and starving your competition that is trying to grow organically. Or like the gun lobby, the details might be backroom dealings that get laws passed in your favour.

Not all details are "untie this technological knot." Not all companies that fail do so because they didn't get the technology right.

Uber isn't a technological advancement. Its core competence is lobbying and business development, not android and ios development.

It probably wouldn't be a bad thing if most cities just banned uber and created their own apps (or hired a company to do it for them). The network effects in the taxi market are so strong that one company will inevitably end up being a monopoly.

Once the monopoly is locked in the winning company will just milk it for all its worth, simultaneously raising prices and crushing wages. That's bad for everybody (except them).

Well said.

Not even that. It's core competence is to publicly break the law on an unprecedented scale for mainstream company and get away with it.

1. Maybe Uber doesn't look like a technological advancement compared to Google, but Uber is an enormous technological advancement over the status quo in the industry.

2. Uber is breaking the very foundations of the monopolization of the taxi industry. The only monopoly they will maintain moving forward is through customer loyalty based upon perceived value. If Uber falters, there is very little protecting them from a competitor gobbling up their market share.

>If Uber falters, there is very little protecting them from a competitor gobbling up their market share.

Which taxi company's app are you going to use as a passenger? The one with 5 drivers within a 5 minutes' drive, or the one with 1 driver, 25 minutes away?

Which taxi company will you sign up with as a driver? The one which has customers everywhere or the one which doesn't?

Why pretend that network effects do not exist in this industry?

Sure would be nice if it were just about customer service and value, but it isn't. It's about network dominance.

Circa 2006: Whose social networking web site are you going to use, the one where nobody goes to it like Facebook, or the dominant one, Myspace?

Things change quickly when only network effects are stopping competition in a fluid market where all you need to do is download an app to become a user or go through a short process as a driver.

Uber has eliminated many of the tools used by the monopolists. Have they eliminated the value of reputation and high availability? No, but nobody said they had.

Or they could lobby so that a taxi license doesn't cost $250k, eating up a large chunk of their income.

The fun part is that a taxi licence is delivered for free by the city, provided you fit the criterias. But taxis don't want too many licences to be around of course, so they lobbied for a low limit to be delivered (which may or may not be revisionned when a city increase in size/population). They built this bubble themselves and now they're crying about it. Since last year you can't resell your licence anymore, obviously it only works for the new ones delivered, otherwise the country would get sued and loose instantly. But the "bought" licences are probably going to stick around forever.

Also the current protest is not about Uber but UberPop, which is kinda illegal at the moment and rightly so. I don't mind the taxis getting fucked over by their own greed, but I'd prefer if it was done lawfully.

it doesn't work this way. Taxi license are free. A finite number of them were issued by the state.

Taxi drivers are willing to pay $250k to get a license from other taxi drivers! It's a token that get passed around.

The day these license are worth $0, the last owners will be screwed. Ponzi ?

Except that people who own the licenses are going to lobby against that (and probably with greater effect considering they're able to afford the licenses in the first place) since that would be a huge loss in equity for them.

It's the same with liquor licenses in Boston (maybe all of Mass., but I'm not sure about that). There's a limited number of them, but they can be resold, usually fetching more than a million dollars. This is a huge startup cost for new restauranteurs, but they have held their value, such that when you decide (or are forced) to sell or close the business, you can recoup that initial investment. Issuing more licenses or trying to reduce the cost of them in other ways would just destroy that value for the owners, most of which have taken out loans against them that would still need to be repaid.

Think about these poor postmen every time you send an e-mail.

As long as we are moving forward jobs market will keep changing. Those workers are also consumers. They have cheap electronics at home made in China (which caused some local factory workers to lose their jobs), they use roads built by machines in places where humans used to do the work. They eat food from automated farms that are more efficient.

It's all connected. I wouldn't say it creates losers in any class. Their/our living standard would be much much lower at this point without these kind of changes.

It's up up up up DOWN up up up. (DOWN being when it hits your sector and you are not prepared for the change, and up when it hits other industries)

It's actually more of a legal question. Uber only manages to work through lots of questionable tactics of which many are illegal:

- Most of the uber drivers don't actually pay taxes

- Most of the uber drivers only work for uber which makes the self-employment fictitious. This allows to disregard things like minimum wage and payments for social security.

- Most of uber drivers don't have a permission for transporting people. This puts customers at risk.

- Most of uber drivers don't have an insurance that covers transporting people commercially.

All these apply even in the case where private taxi companies are allowed. Uber's business model is based on exploiting the drivers, disregarding safety regulations and dodging taxes.

Who should be reminded? Why? If you mean "we entrepreneurs" - what exactly do you expect us to do about it? Again, why?

Was the downvote because you don't like my questions, or because you don't have a good answer?

I mean, seriously. It's hard enough to come up with an innovative technological idea that people actually embrace and to turn it into a viable, sustainable, profitable business. In fact, that's SUPER hard, it's one of the hardest things there are, that's why there are so few people who successfully manage to pull it off. It's also why we reward them so seemingly disproportionately.

Through all of this, an entrepreneur is responsible for all sorts of things - industry regulations, business regulations, local regulations, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, investor satisfaction, life/work balance, keeping the environment clean, etc, etc, etc, in addition to the actual product or service and the long-term success of the business.

Now you want to also make me responsible for the social norms that I'm disrupting? Thanks, but no, thanks. This is NOT my responsibility. That's what governments are for. Governments are by definition socialist structures responsible for the well-being of the "working class". I am the opposite of socialist. I'm here to disrupt - don't ask me to step on my own toes.

I mean, soon you'll be asking me to compensate the bankers that my fintech startup is disrupting...

Outside of extremist hyper-libertarian hiveminds like you find on certain threads on HN, saying "I'm here to disrupt" aka destroy lives and take as much money for yourself as possible or "the government is by definition socialist" (a silly and false claim -- government in the United States is generally wholly owned by wealthy capitalists who provide no value to society other than 'currently having money' and is in the business of socializing risk and privatizing rewards) and demanding that noone ever hold you responsible for the consequences of your actions because "thinking about how my actions effect people isn't in my personal self-interest"... well, it won't endear you or your position to anyone and it isn't convincing, it's just childish and entitled (a rather succinct description of general Libertarian political philosophy in fact). Sure you might not be legally required to be a good person, but if you choose not to be, then you're a bad person, but you've chosen to be so don't whine when people call you on it.

You seem to have all of your values backwards.

Technological innovation CREATES value, doesn't destroy it. It necessarily disrupts the status quo and pisses people off, and that takes courage, but does not make the innovator a bad person. It makes them a very courageous person, worthy of all admiration.

On the other hand, you might call a bad person someone who expects that everyone else is obliged to feed him. One who throws "responsibilities" at those who refuse to work for him. One who morally manipulates people into doing what pleases him. I'd call this a bad person, although I personally don't believe that evil exists, so I am more likely to call that person plain stupid.

>You seem to have all of your values backwards.

What you seem to mean by this is that I haven't taken Ayn Rand's teen fantasy novels as a central religious text upon which all knowledge, thought, and discourse are based.

Sometimes the status quo is better than what replaces it. Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly. Is that good or bad? It's reasonable to argue both sides. In the present time, it looks like it's good for almost everyone. But the consequences of rewriting laws for a particular company so it can gain total control of a socially necessary transportation infrastructure are far-reaching. Technology does not 'necessarily' do anything good or bad. It is a tool and all it 'necessarily' does is create new options for people who happen to have access to it (generally wealthy people). Sometimes those options, if chosen by the wealthy, make life worse for people without access to that same technology (the non-wealthy). Not always of course, but it's something that should be considered.

'Disrupts' is just a weasel-word to spin the accurate description of what is happening, 'destroys', into something that is axiomatically good. In fact it's dishonest to use this terminology; you need to show the particular change is actually good and describe what you mean by good (good for everyone? Good for rich white yuppies with smartphones?) before you are allowed to describe it as good, something many people in tech seem to forget.

And in your previous post you rejected the notion that you should ever consider the consequences your actions have on other people in society; now you seem to be trying to weasel your way out of it with some pseudo-religious tripe about how innovators are gods and everyone who destroys is courageous and worthy of "all admiration". I am at this point reconsidering the value of continuing this discussion since when blind religion meets thoughtful consideration, blind religion invariably wins; especially when it's religion fueled by narcissism and a visceral need to justify one's own selfish childishness. But I've written it already so I'll leave it here.

"Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly" This sums up the uber situation very well.

I think that, regarding the HN libertarian "wealth creator's" topic,(to try and be as sympathetic as I can be) there is a tendency to see societies flaw as a lack of wealth, rather than an unequal distribution of wealth. Quite often, married for allegedly fixing the first problem (within the framework of entrepreneurialism) exacerbate the latter.

Ok, so you're not stupid, you're actually a very thoughtful guy. You just really irritate me by throwing all these labels at me.

First of all, I have never read Ayn Rand and am not familiar with her work (perhaps I should, you're not the first person to throw me into that bucket).

Second, I don't subscribe to any mainstream religion, so don't call my arguments religious. Every position that I hold has come from my experience. I am a very pragmatic person and consciously choose what to believe based solely on the utility that each belief provides to me. In that sense I am selfish and narcissistic, yes - I don't take these as offences.

One of the beliefs I have (and I think everyone should have, especially entrepreneurs) is that my wellbeing and my happiness is more important than anyone else's. Does that make me an asshole? May be it does. But it also makes me productive and valuable to the very society that you are so concerned about. Much more so than if I did the mistake of putting society's widely diverse needs before my own.

So do I care about my fellow human beings? Yes, very much so.

Am I going to do something that hurst my self interest in order to please anyone else? No, never. That would be irresponsible.

This is why the over regulated environment you probably loathe exists. Businesses are simply not able to self-regulate due to their greed and lack of social empathy and therefore the will of the people (government) have to regulate them - possibly into non-existence.

You will be the victim of your own hubris when the populist majority brings the pitchforks and sucks you dry. And you should know better - the government mainly exists to subsidize outsized risks and ventures by those with influence - the wealthy.

With that - you are trying to destory the existing banking structure so more power to you.

You talk funny :)

I didn't get where you're going with all of this, though.

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