Edit: actually I meant this tweet from yesterday: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/616683543830339584 which had the other one embbeded
Uber often seems to seek to bypass that regulation because, eh, disruption. I would expect any city to do something when faced with a private corporation attempting to flout their laws for profit. Doing so is in no way correlated with any measure of how corrupt that city is.
Taxi drivers in france is expensive and drivers are uneducated, rude, unpolite. Compare this to drivers in england and japan where they respect the customer and provide a good service and then you will understand why uber disrupting french taxis. because the regulation is only based about how much money you need to put to buy a license while the regulation should be about having a proper formation and learn about customer service.
It is same with amazon and librarians. Librarian assume they just have to sell books. Since amazon they have to provide a service , help the customer , advise him, instruct him, guide him. Those things amazon can't do and those things will save the librarians. it is the same for cab drivers.
Uber is a good for us customers. Obviously it won't be a good thing when they will be on a monopoly situation where they will increase prices after having destroyed concurrents but who cares?
We just returned from Paris, and I can tell you that people in Paris are not happy with cab drivers (overpriced, and often refuse riders based on too many people, too many bags, or too short of a trip).
This smells like a campaign of a greedy and corrupt union hiding behind a law to protect its poorly performing industry.
It's a single data point, but crimes committed by the drivers of unlicensed cabs in London are a big enough problem for there to be awareness campaigns like this one: <https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/be-cabwise>. Example of the kind of criminal activity that regulation is trying to deter: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22998900>.
Most of them drive like complete idiots and break numerous rules even during a simple 10 minute ride.
So my question is what does taxi regulations do exactly? Because it seems like it's not working.
Taxi drivers and politicians in Brazil are fighting Uber because they are losing slices of a pie that is deeply corrupted. A single person (most of them are politicians or friends with city councilmen) hold hundreds of Taxi Plates and "rent" them to ordinary drivers that obviously can't have their own plates because they're not fairly distributed and even if they were, would be prohibitively expensive. So these ordinary drivers start their working days owing R$200 to the plate holders, resulting in a service that has the customer safety, comfort, etc as the last priority.
We do have laws and regulations but it'd be naive to think they benefit the passengers. One of them requires the cars to be inspected every six months, which would be a nice thing, except these inspections are only another way for the abovementioned politicians/government have more money to be diverted - some cars are ridiculously filthy and poor maintained.
When Uber arrived last year it was indeed a disruption: polite drivers, well maintained cars, fair service. The so called inspections happen in real time through in app reviews by the people who are supposed to be protected after all - the passengers.
As the only city councillor to vote in favor of Uber in Sao Paulo well said: "it was a massacre", corruption is so evidently high that not even a discussion took place about how the things Uber does right could be incorporated into the existing Taxi ecosystem. And pg's statement fits right in: politicians fought so ferociously to ban Uber (faster than many other agendas that are crucial to Brazil) that it becomes a picture of how corrupt they are.
To complete, I think that services that try to disrupt existing services are good to take us to the opposite side of a sine wave - they come to draw our attention of to things we were probably overlooking. Honest cities and politicians will take the opportunity to bring the good things into discussion, corrupt ones will ferociously try to suppress it.
Although a disproportional comparison, I remember when I visited one of the post offices in my city as a kindergarten student in the late 90s - the manager that was taking us through the guided visit was very anxious of how emails were driving the telegram usage down.
You can't just leave us hanging, what reason is it? Why does the taxi driver cartel deserve economic rents at the expense of everyone else?
* increased levels of insurance to cover passengers and their belongings
* rigid maintenance requirements on the vehicles that do get more wear & tear through commercial usage
* background checks on drivers, not as much as molester/criminal type that the press likes to sensationalize, but just driving record - obviously someone who keeps running red lights, gets speeding tickets, gets into road rage and runs over people should spend less time on the road, not more
* once you've figured those requirements out, a third party needs to enforce the rules and be able to shut off the offending drivers
Most likely candidate for a third party is a government agency. Most likely process for approving/forbidding someone from entering the field of commercial transportation is licensing.
If there are better ideas that would lead to increase in public safety and decrease in bad guys abusing the system just to turn a quick buck, those are certainly worth discussing.
Uber might offer a better service to people today, but what's the long term (and the really long term) price of allowing this monopolizing corporation into your city? Do you sell out? In portuguese we say "barato sai caro", meaning cheap/easy options may turn out expensive in the long run.
a) many ( not all ) of the regulations that make cabs scarce and expensive are unnecessary
b) it is not fair to people who paid for the licenses to allow a competitor to operate without licenses
c) Uber is good for consumers.
Somehow, a reasonable compromise must be found
Some corporations become too big to fail, like Google or Facebook--they keep buying off other companies and buying laws too. America is a lobby nation. How can you honesly expect anyone else to displace the trillion-dollar company that Uber will eventually become? Unless you actually mean companies will spring up, present a threat, then get acquihired by Uber^. Money talks!
^ If you expect an enterpreneur to face Uber head-on despite multi-billion dollar offers on the one side and immense legal hindrance on the other, you expect a hero. We should expect a democratic society, not american heroes.
"Crime is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it."
This is a country that is doing everything it can to create laws which increase the cost of transportation and reduce the ability to get a ride. It's a law that makes things less safe (there aren't enough taxis to properly service late night bars so people are forced to drive drunk - people die because of the law to protect a monopoly). We can look at the law and the reason for the law and ask if the price for protecting a government granted monopoly is worth the price (lives and money from increased transportation costs) paid.
Jesus christ this is literally the stupidest thing I have heard all day, and I have been following what is going on reddit since early morning.
If anyone ever says they were "forced to drunk drive" by anything they deserve to be slapped and have their licence taken away, forever. If you go drinking, you don't bring your car with you!!!!!!
Which country? The country Blablacar came out of?
More like people die because they (or, quite possibly other people) choose to break the law against drunk driving?
The presence of the law should help deter them from making that choice. But that doesn't establish that laws should always be followed or shouldn't be changed - it just supports the case that that law should be followed and should not be changed, which no one was arguing against.
Other things also help decrease drunk driving. Healthy social norms can have a big impact. Convenient alternatives also has a big impact. What we're discussing here is a particular, especially convenient alternative.
It is wrong to excuse people who put others' lives at risk because doing otherwise is inconvenient. But it is incorrect not to expect that some people will do so, and account for that as a part of the impact of laws.
Using a mobile phone as an automated dispatcher for cabs is a fine idea, and improves the experience for the customer.
Breaking local laws relating to insurance, background checks, surge pricing, provisions for disabled passengers etc. is NOT fine.
True, this law is unnecessary, but it's not hard to see why taxi drivers who paid for their licenses fair and square are upset
At least in Chicago, Uber and cabs seem to coexist pretty well. The main difference is, cab drivers seem to have a bit more clue as to the layout of the city and more efficient at knowing directions etc
Not all laws are in place to mess with Uber or suppress competition, some of them are actually to the benefit of the public. Requiring insurance or having the driver registered as self-employed doesn't seem unreasonable.
How could it possibly be reasonable to leave it up to the person using the app to decide whether the driver requires insurance or not, when an accident may easily lead to a third party having claims against the driver?
Similarly I would like people who accept my money for services to be well do the proper paper work for the tax authorities. If you're self-employed in any other business you need to register that, why should Uber drivers be excepted? I can accept Ubers argument that their drivers are "independent contractors", regardless of how stupid I believe it is, but then they should be registered as such.
I don't disagree that many of the rules around taxi services are obsolete or hinder competition, but I also don't condone Uber just breaking all rules using that argument. "Disruption" can't be an excuse to pick and choose which laws to follow. There's a pretty good business case to be made for breaking the speed limit as well (They could call it UberHyperDrive, for people in a rush), but you wouldn't accept that either.