That said, Taxi drivers have something Uber drivers don’t- a union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Taxi_Workers'_Alliance
That said, Taxi drivers have something Uber drivers don’t- a union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Taxi_Workers'_Alliance
Uber was always intended to be taxis that ignore the laws and regulations of taxis and put all of the vehicle maintenance on the drivers who are paid through tips instead of Uber.
Not sure why anyone didn’t see that from the very beginning.
And relieve corporate from all sorts of other liabilities, placing those on the individual drivers, too.
Workers’ Comp claims? Malfeasance (driver or passenger)? Health insurance? Paid time off? Vehicle insurance? All fall to the driver.
And they had thousands if not millions of drivers (worldwide) who didn’t give a shit about any of those things either.
So they had a ready made work force waiting to be just as shitty people as the taxi companies by not giving a fuck about those things either.
And that’s where opportunity is often found. Covered in shit
The only thing it has “over” taxis is an app instead of a phone call to dispatch.
Originally it was also cheaper for the customer because it was subsidized by venture capital.
I can do that with my local taxi company anyway so they don’t even have that to differentiate themselves.
You can now… Because uber and lyft finally forced them to change
That’s cool. Where at? I mean, I haven’t seen any taxi in a place I’ve ever visited with an app.
And then there’s the issue of knowing what app before you get there, or just trusting the sign on the side of the taxi, and subsequently the app to not farm your data.
Wait, you trust cab companies less them uber?
When Uber first arrived, fuck yeah. Taxis would take stupid routes to run the meter up to overcharge you. Often the drivers were extremely belligerent or ornery for no same reason. Using taxis has been a terrible experience for many.
the other issue that Uber helped with in the beginning was mess with Mob controlled taxi cartels that used regulation as a shield that’s why service was so poor. By skating those laws it put some market presure to improve slightly. but now that they got so big it’s back to being cappy again and the mob has moved into that market as well now.
Hack the Planet! Hack the planet!
Sorry I have zero cool
Do you have a source for that?
Is it some niche thing or widespread?
maybe a niche thing to New York and is completely anecdotal from people i know but it’s more those same cab companies moving into the ride share market.
where do you think the drivers who don’t even speak the language and look nothing like the face on the licence are getting the cars?
it is just that instead of exploiting them working in construction industry, they now exploit them behind the wheel.
You mean the mob has moved into the Uber market?
yeah as in the same taxi companies and their drivers use the app as drivers on top of taxi rides.
Fuck yea, fuck Taxis
An entire industry that’s playing the victim. People around here are romanticizing taxis, but the shit they pulled was just as bad, if not worse than what Uber does.
Biggest difference is their drivers were complicit in the shenanigans and primarily targeted their customers. Taking LONG routes because their customer “wasn’t local”, saying a route will “probably be 10$” and then it’s 50 and “the meter says what it says man”.
They literally used strict regulations as a shield to hold local monopolies for decades which resulted in terrible downright scammy service, cash only for an unacceptable amount of time, 0 innovations, dirty ancient barely running cars, a dispatch who would constantly say a car “was just around the corner” for 2 hours
The taxi industry doesn’t give a fuck about you, they’re just mad because they didn’t think to do what Uber is doing and now they’re dying.
Fuck Uber AND Taxis, they both can rot in hell, but I don’t mind seeing taxis get there first.
I don’t trust Uber either.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ridecharge.android.taximagic&hl=en_US
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/curb-request-pay-for-taxis/id299226386
I mean that actually was one of the things that made them so great. Tracking, arrival timer and an easy app.
Literally those being things that the taxi companies had to push to replicate is a good thing it’s a shame we had to give up the idea of properly funded labor and job protection to get it.
The fact that they would actually show up.
Where I live, before Uber you needed to call the cab company at least an hour before you wanted to get anywhere (in a city that you can get pretty much anywhere in 15 minutes). The dispatcher would tell you someone will be there in 20 minutes and, if you were lucky, somebody might show up in 45. Before Uber, there was more than one occasion where I ended up stranded downtown until 4 or 5am after the bars had closed at 3:00.
Being able to request a ride, having someone reliably show up, and show up reasonably close to when they said they would was an absolute game changer at the time.
unless you see the uber car circling around you on the map, then canceling the ride and cashing in the “cancelation fee”
yeah, but this is not an invention of uber. it is just that we got the to point where technology allowed what was not possible before. yes, uber was faster to adapt it than traditional taxi industry, but they are not doing it for your blue eyes, they are doing it for profit and they do lot of shady stuff to achieve it.
That’s a relatively new phenomenon as people have learned how to game the system. The reliability of Uber when they first launched was complete night and day.
I never said otherwise. I was merely providing an example of why Uber gained adoption early on. The service was materially better than what taxi companies were delivering at the time in many places. I experienced that first hand.
that’s definitely going on for at least 5 years
ok, from that point of view it definitely makes sense
Keyword: relatively.
Uber’s been around 15 years.
Which is both a good point and quite a different scenario from what’s being illustrated here which is just Uber’s version of a taxi stand, and literally the final brick in them going around taxi regulations.
The problem was never when Uber provided something that wasn’t being provided, it was when they provided a regulation-free version (early on their drivers were wholly unvetted and many would be driving people around in cars with no commercial insurance and hence the Insurer could deny paying compensation to the passenger in the case of accident) of what was already in the Market by using the laws for Rental Cars With Drivers to avoid the laws for Taxis.
Their business model from the start was just gaining an advantage against established players using Regulatory Avoidance, even if in some situations they did provide a better service rather than just an unregulated version (and hence cheaper because all kinds of costly rules done for the safety of customers weren’t obbeyed) of the same thing.
We didn’t have to, and we can always take it back.
And a transparent price up front.
It’s annoying enough to get in a vehicle and not know how much it’ll cost by the end of the trip (would you do this on a bus? Would you let an airline change the price of a ticket mid-flight?), but there’s something viscerally galling about watching some asshole take a longer route just to pad out the fare. Last I checked, when Lyft or Uber gives you a price, that’s the price.
The only reason I even started using Uber is because of taxi’s shitty dispatch system. All they had to do was write an app (or really some third party could have written it and then sold it to local cab companies) and they never would have been whining and complaining for years on end about how Uber turk der jerb.
had
In Chicago all the big taxi companies have apps
Thinking about this… I wonder if the fediverse could be used for an “open source” app, to then hail and track a taxi in whatever area you’re in…
Of course adoption would be the hardest part, but any taxi service could host their own server (even single driver operations) and anyone with an app that interfaces with the system could hail a taxi.
Privacy would be difficult, as, inherently you need to somehow inform the taxi where you are and possibly who to expect. And anyone in the system could potentially monitor anyone else.
I’d say that payments should be outright blocked from the system. Taxi should have to do that separately.
Not incorporating payments into the system makes fraud prevention a lot harder, though.
I mean, enough countries did see that and those are the countries were Uber didn’t manage to push away taxis.
Once cabbies got their own apps, the only market advantage Uber had was lower costs because of not obbeying regulations, which wasn’t there in those contries which forced Uber to obbey the same regulations as cabbies.
Not entirely true.
In some countries (UK, NZ) Uber has to give you the price of the journey up front. Whereas taxis are metered and do not.
Uber UK has competition in thin regard with Minicabs, but the minicab apps are still shit.
Capped costs for consumers is a competitive advantage over taxis, and Uber has managed to find the sweet spot between hailing a taxi, and booking a minicab.
Up front pricing is almost always going to be more attractive than metered pricing.
If you offer me metered pricing, I’m going to assume you’ll charge 20% extra.
I think a lot of people also forget that taxis in San Francisco, which was basically the impetus forUber’s creation, were fucking horrible at the time. Things have changed a lot since then. But the one thing I will credit Uber with is making taxis functional again.
One thing I distinctly remember from the times I was working out there was how terrified I was to be in their cars. There was absolutely no vetting of drivers, and Uber distinguished itself by doing that at the time (also pretty sure it required a higher level license, UberX came later which allowed basically anyone to drive).
Let me be crystal clear here since I know folks are going to skim my comment and think I am an apologist for Uber and just go off: fuck Uber. They are a terrible company. If you really need to ride in a car, take a taxi.
People saw it, but if you remember Taxis before Uber it wasn’t exactly great either.
No-shows, demanding flat rates double what the meter would charge/refusing service, various forms of harassment, etc.
Turns out when there is very little competition, businesses treat their customers like shit.
Uber definitely does some things better than traditional taxis. Things like work flexibility are great, but workers still need better protections and pay (aka, a union).
We did see it. Everyone saw it, and it worked anyway.
Most of the people I know in person that spoke highly of it when it first started up referred to it as an alternate to cabs because it was totally different. The fact that people still refer to it as ‘ride sharing’ is a sign that people do think it is something different than taxis.
A lot of us saw it, but I don’t think the majority of people saw it.
I think a lot of people saw it and let it happen because taxis suck