A Boring Dystopia

Tech bros also just reinvented trains recently, so this is pretty appropriate

Taxi drivers in my city also have something else Uber drivers don't- a licence that was bought decades ago and is limited to a certain number, they never expire and can be bought and sold between private parties and you end up with one asshole who owns a bunch and rents out the licenced car to drivers who pay him a rent. It's a pretty hardcore mafia and predates on immigrants.

They are also fucking maniacs who almost kill people every day with their reckless driving, but Ubers do that too.

Techbro has an app for 5,000 year old thing: "wow this is so novel and innovative!"

Taxis made their bed by being pieces of shit for a long time. No one will have any sympathy for their plight.

A few times as a kid I had to take a taxi alone. I knew the way home, but the driver decided to make a lot of unnecessary turns and go this round about way to run up the fair. I was probably in 3rd grade and knew what he was doing but didn't have the guts to call him out.

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.

This reminds me of uber in several third world countries. Most drivers only take cash or direct epay because it bypasses uber's heavy service cut. Everyone benefits because the app lets you hail drivers, but they charge you a fair fee just like a taxi.

Why would you give a regular taxi driver an Uber PIN? You just walk up to a taxi and get in.

I'm not sure if anyone else here has mentioned this... At least up until Uber/Lyft came out, taxis were suuuuper racist. It was really hard for black men to hail taxis.

The big difference here is that I know the cost. Getting into a cab it was always kind of blind, and a cab driver definitely tried to screw me one time by driving in circles (we were very drunk, and I noticed at some point we hadn't made it very far, so I started paying attention and it was clear pretty quickly that he had circled back almost to where he had picked us up).

Also when I lived out in Queens, cabs rarely came out there. I had to hike all the way to Queens Blvd to have a chance, and even then they would barely stop at night. Would often get told to "get out" when asking for them to take me back to Queens. I've even been able to get a Uber out almost out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

Lyft/Uber definitely has their problems, but cabs weren't some shining beacon on the hill.

Fuck Taxis and Uber

An entire industry that's playing the victim. Stop falling for it and stop romanticizing taxis, 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. When/If Uber/Lyft dies, I guarantee the Taxi industry will resurge for the worst and take pages out of Ubers playbook. It's just going to go back to the wait it was before.

Fuck Uber AND Taxis, they both can rot in hell, but I don't mind seeing taxis get there first.

Uber effectively weaseled their way into the taxi industry by somehow enticing drivers to work for them while also assuming all of the liabilities. Truly, capitalism at its finest.

Tech bros love reinventing old technologies with slapped on some technical jargon.

But now you can't just tell the driver where to go and give him cash, you have to use the app first and you are out of luck if you phone battery is dead. So technology makes the experience activly worse in this case.

A taxi that doesn't play games with the meter, that always takes a credit card, and that has a rating system that harshly punishes drivers with bad attitudes.

The problem with it is Uber's cut.

I am once again asking for widespread public transportation

"Just a taxi" I mean, can a taxi actually regular charge me MORE than a taxi used to cost from the airport to my home PLUS the magic bonus of surge increases in that also higher cost when I'm most vulnerable... I think not - check mate assholes, Uber for the win!"

-a tesla owner while his broken tesla is in the shop waiting months for parts

Except taxis take cash and don't track your trips in an irreovacble database. I'll take anonymous transport whenever it's a reasonable option.

Way back in 2009 or so… my uber/taxi story. So I land in Newark, NJ and try to catch a cab and it’s $50 to go to the hotel on the other side of airport because we traverse 3 zones (and they charged by zone). Uber was $11. See, when Uber came out it was like a gamified systems and almost always cheaper. Drivers were getting crazy perks too, i swear one guy in seattle said he was banking north of 2k a day just back and forth to the airport. This was the only time in Uber’s history where a normal human could grind and make a nice pay with some added personal risk. I was all for it because in cities like Newark, unions control the politics and the average traveler (in this case, me) gets screwed in the name of “fairness”.

Unions are great, but not when they use that same political power to squeeze regular people for profits by controlling the pricing and forcing zones. I understand why they said they put that in place (fair competition), but in this case we all know it’s about profits first, better working for taxi drivers, second. Does that mean i love uber now? Hell no, they need a union (yep, i agree), but uber broke a broken system and made taxi companies be competitive. I can now open up several apps and see which is cheaper and choose accordingly (and these last 2 years it’s been cabs).