> But that would likely increase prices, decrease demand and cause some drivers to lose jobs.
In California Uber and Lyft rammed through a proposition to enable them to continue their labor abuses. Anecdotally, the prices have gone through the roof and I've never had more trouble getting rides, so I don't believe that. It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
Ballot initiatives are not rammed through. Consumers want Uber/Lyft. Taxi cartels were so God awful to deal with even crappy tech alternatives are better.
Maybe people had different experiences with taxi's but I've taken uber 30x more often than I've taken cabs, and still have had 10x as many bad experiences with taxi drivers. From not turning on the meter, to being rude to my wife, to purposefully taking roundabout routes in order to inflate cost, to being told a taxi would show up at 1am, only to have it show up at 8 am.
plus in places like South America uber is the far safer option. I know my wife and her friends hated taking taxis as they were much more likely to be sexually harassed or deal with some strange person. Uber isn’t perfect but it has significantly reduced this since the people who do it get kicked off the app.
A lot of complaints i see on HN are very first world and don’t see how much some of these companies actually help.
> A lot of complaints i see on HN are very first world and don’t see how much some of these companies actually help.
These companies are not set up as charities. If they happen to help people, that’s a side affect of the primary purpose - generate maximum revenue.
Regulation is required where a businesses incentives do not align with societies (mining is an easy example). As much as C level execs will argue, self regulation has never been an effective mechanism. So Uber is incentivised, naturally, to provide a safe experience for a rider, as to do otherwise would reduce revenue. They are not incentivised to provide their drivers any semblance of a “life worth living”, as it has no positive correlation to revenue. This isn’t out of malice, it’s just economics at work. If we, as a society, want a better standard of living for gig workers, then regulation, flawed as it is, is the only mechanism I know of that has some chance of working.
See Ohio for what happens to an unpopular ballot initiative.
I’d vote against the Ohio initiative and for the Uber one.
I hated taxi cartels. They had horrible customer service, high prices, and I’m a big dude who had to deal with them. I cannot imagine how toxic it was for gals.
> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
or taxis, i mean, they’ve been around since the horse and buggy days and probably even way before that, i don’t know enough about the history, but i’m guessing taxi style travel services were even around during the silk road era. uber didn’t invent travel for hire.
this is going to be a rant, but i mean…
the reason uber and lyft (and countless other “disrupters”) disrupted anything is they pretended the externalities didn’t exist/ignored the very externalities the already existing industry had previously already sorted out and lived through.
and lo and behold, no one even halfway intelligent is shocked that all of these issues arose at scale.
i’ll repeat what i’ve said countless other times: anyone who thinks they have a “disruptive” idea yet hasn’t extensively studied why the already existing industry does things a certain way, is an absolute lightweight and no one should be investing in with them.
we have a major problem in some of our industries of people who have deluded themselves that the people who came before were somehow primitive or less enlightened.
we see this all over the place, from people who want entirely rebuild large software packages from the bottom up, from submarine tourism companies, to “house flippers”, to short-term rental apps, who because their egos refuse to let them explore the history of their project, they just end up in the exact same place. only they took a really long, wasteful, and stupid detour to get there.
if an industry is doing something you think is wrong, explore the history of why it is done this way. don’t pretend like that problem doesn’t exist and then call yourself a disrupter. this is a recipe to have everyone laugh and go “it’s not like you weren’t warned there was giant hole around the corner and then you drove right into it.”
and even worse, if they have explored the history of their project, know very well the problems coming, but try to externalize that to wider society, it’s outright malicious.
> leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling.
again, taxis have been around for pretty much ever.
> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
You can't have a race to the bottom without competitors still in the market.
If competitors like Uber leave the market, Lyft can raise prices.
In the long run, there will be a balance between competitors entering and exiting the market just around the point where the industry is barely viable as a business.
That's also how eg restaurants or cafes work in many big cities; and this explains why so most cafes fail, but why there are also always some cafes around.
In California Uber and Lyft rammed through a proposition to enable them to continue their labor abuses. Anecdotally, the prices have gone through the roof and I've never had more trouble getting rides, so I don't believe that. It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.