Uber is opposed in principle to even the most minimal safety legislation.
Taxi regulations typically limit supply (raising costs for consumers), protect drivers over passengers (in Vegas a complaint against drivers must be notarized), and protect favored ethnic groups (c.f. Shiv Sena's taxi law in Maharashtra). Can you name any contemporary real life problem that taxi regulators solve better than Uber's own regulators?
I'm aware that historically, taxi regulation purports to solve real problems. But I claim that in the modern economy, Uber has solved every single one of those problems better than regulators can.
Of all the cities I'm familiar with (NYC, Vegas, Chicago, Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Kuala Lumpur), I can't think of a single instance where a regulated taxi gave me better consumer protections than Uber/Lift/Ola.
So again, the simple question: what problems that currently exist would regulation solve?
Edit: why am I down voted to max? The government limits supply but the medallions are still sold on the market.
(The claimed rationale for limiting the number of taxis is to reduce traffic. I would suspect the actual rationale is to favor the existing taxi businesses that already have licenses and don't want competition.)
So I searched, and found this document extremely enlightening. Note that it's from 1995, long before Uber, and gives many pros and cons and reasoning behind different types of legislation:
Living in Québec I've never had a bad experience with taxi drivers the way people seem to have in NYC, etc. Uber was still far better, if anything just for how proud some drivers were of being part of it. The lower barrier of entry seemed like a positive thing overall.
A nice woman drove me once, offered me starburst candy and a bottle of water, both of which were in a basket in the back seat. Made my day extra nice.
Trust Quebec to do everything they can to legislate innovation and improved quality out of existence in favour of preserving the status quo (and their tax dollars).
This is what a free market looks like. Don't like that? Take a look at Venezuela, and tell me you'd prefer to be dumpster diving for your next meal. Capitalism and Democracy are aweful aweful systems, but everything else is worse.
However, maybe it's encouraging taxi drivers to step it up a bit. In my ride to the airport in Chicago yesterday, the driver offered me a bottle of water, which I think was the first time I've experienced that in a taxi.
No permits, no insurance, any driver can participate. Faster and more frequent service than anything I've experienced back home in North America.
Similar systems exist throughout the Third World. God forbid we ever allow something like that in our "developed" countries.
In Cochabamba you could also flag a taxi and either trust them to charge you the normal rate, or negotiate a fare. Stressful to do at first, but once you got the hang of it no big deal.
Quick story: We never needed a car while living there, but rented one once to take a road trip. Just outside the city a cholita (Quechua speaking indigenous woman) with a huge bag flagged us down along the main road, got into the back seat without a word, then asked to "bajar" a dozen km later. On the way out she handed us a peso (~15 cents), again without a word.
The real fear for cab drivers seem to be self driving cars even more than Uber.
If you want to see mob involvement related to cars you want to look at the towing industry, but generally they stick to the money, which is construction.
There are also companies going after Uber's model but with strong ethics, such as Teo, which seems to be widely praised (good app, fully electric cars, good conditions for drivers, wifi inside the cabs).
My main annoyance against the taxi industry is its lobby, which is always against any sort of change in the transportation industry, such as new train lines (airport train or bus line), bike/bixi ride-share, etc. Taxis and Uber-type systems offer more transport solutions that reduce the requirement of having a car. I would love to get rid of my car, but it's not viable in Montreal (I bike to work, use the car mostly on weekends and Communauto requires me to do too much planning).
Not quite organized crime, but not far from it!
https://www.vice.com/read/of-course-there-is-a-snow-removal-...
It's Montreal. They couldn't organize crime if they tried.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/uber-quebec-deal-1.36...
In my opinion, the government and the ride hailing companies should have bought back a share of the taxi permit pool value, then cancelled them. It would have been costly, but by taxing the ride themselves (at a fixed rate) then letting competition drive the ride price down while increasing the ride volume. The government could have had their money back, eventually. Uber technically owe "theoretical tax money" since they operated without permit in a regulated industry. They had said at some point they didn't care about paying that back, so it would have been a better solution. After that, the regulations could have been lifted/relaxed.
The current deal isn't very good, but at least there is one. Technically, with self driving and automation (including apps), a lot of people will lose their job, so obviously they will resist changes, any changes. We can complain all we want as developers, but from the taxi driver point of view, change suck. Then again, in my opinion, so does regulation. One positive point, at least, is that this saga allowed time for discussions and consideration. A abrupt disruption would maybe have destabilized the industry too fast, while the time it took for this law to be passed allowed for the creation of a "middle market" where new taxis companies managed to enter the industry with hybrid solutions (including one Tesla/Leaf + app company) and the "dinosaurs" had time to [try to] adapt [and fail]. In the end, this did create more competition instead of players being pushed out and replaced by less players. There will be a market consolidation eventually anyway, but until that, the users will be the real winners.
Time will tell. I am still not convinced this law was the right call, but appreciated the debate.
Accident are stuffs that cannot be predicted. A bug is something that can be avoided.
As far as I am concerned, 99% of the software industry is not able to write critical software that is able to handle with a correct costs the case of failures and/or "abnormal" behaviors.
Software will fail. It will eventually fail dramatically. And with software it can fail in a reproducible way. Nowadays all experiments are made far from worst case (congestion, interferences, extreme conditions....)
Who is gonna pay for the predictable accidents? And will self driving cars will be better at avoiding accidents than humman given a same operating cost on the long term?
My guess, is : hell no.
Car insurance companies do this on a daily basis and make consistent and reliable profits betting on the outcomes.
And, also, I would point out that their prediction are based on opacity and it is hard to audit their reasoning. I talked with some of them, and their mathematical reasoning are flawed towards using linear equations to predict non linear phenomenon. And when I ask them how it can work, they had no explanations, just "recipies everyone use". So well, I do not trust them.
What you cannot explain simply you do not understand.
The jobs with high turnover rates are usually known as "shitty jobs".
(Fun fact: I don't know about Uber, but I know Ola does exactly this. They use "how would you handle this exact problem" as a warmup question on their interviews.)
It's good for them to keep drivers who committed (e.g. those who took Uber's help in getting a new car) on edge. It's not that they have shortage of candidates, or that they actually care about them.
The alternative to an unregulated workforce who's livelihoods are subject to the whims of an opaque organisation is not dumpster diving in Venezuela.
Sensible regulation with sensible market forces at a happy equilibrium is best.
It's never going to be perfect but arguments like yours make finding a reasonable compromise possible.
And then to "prove" your point you completely ignore the case I discussed, presumably because it doesn't fit your pre-canned rant which would look more at home, frankly, on /r/hailcorporate.
> So again, the simple question: what problems that currently exist would regulation solve?
The one where I'd like to have a commercial driver held to the standard of passing a police background check, a heightened demonstration of driving competence, and a properly maintained vehicle, none of which I see any evidence of Uber particularly caring about.
Or the one where they appear to be criminal fraudsters? http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/06/uber-hired-inve...
http://auckland.ubermovement.com/uberx/
http://auckland.ubermovement.com/required-documents/
It looks as if your proposed regulation is not solving a real problem. Personal attacks don't change this.
I'm all in favor of regulation where it makes sense. If there's a problem that can demonstrably solved by regulation, I'm all in favor of it. But this hardly seems to be one of those situations.
Around here (metro Boston), I can be virtually certain that the cab will have at least warning light on the dash, have wheel bearings that audibly rattle, and the driver doesn't strike me as someone who has gone to extensive training nor seem to have a superior awareness of the traffic laws nor common traffic courtesies.
http://www.idrivewithuber.com/uber-driver-requirements/ https://help.lyft.com/hc/en-us/articles/213585758-Requiremen...
In India, Uber now imposes a background check that drastically exceeds the regulatory minimum (police-issued "character certificate", approx an 8k bribe).
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-09/uber-drive...
Sounds like criminals driving cars isn't currently a problem in the US. In India, it's a problem that regulators don't solve but Uber does.
So again, what problems that currently exist would regulation solve?
One of the MAJOR positive spillover effects from government regulation is that companies self-police themselves more effectively, as part of their attempt to make sure they remain officially unregulated.
Uber, Ola and others are desperately in need of more good drivers. They are growing rapidly, and literally will pay their competitors in order to attempt to recruit their drivers.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/05/30/how-uber-an...
http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6067663/this-is-ubers-play...
"Uber has been aggressively poaching Lyft drivers for months, offering them huge bonuses just to do a few rides on Uber. This week, Lyft started fighting back with similar bonuses..."
There are two ways to have an extra driver next week. One is expensive recruiting methods. The other is not kicking them off the service. Remember, growth = new acquisitions - churn.
Lets think now about the costs. Handling the base rate of bad ratings would cost a data scientist a month or two of time - approx $20-60k. Assuming those huge bonuses are $500/driver, you'd need to retain 120 drivers for that python script to be worthwhile.
So if Uber has no incentive to solve this problem, it's only because it's a tiny problem (affecting < 0.1% of their workforce).
Are you really claiming that Uber hires hundreds of data scientists, but doesn't actually have them answer questions like "which drivers should be fired"? What do you think they do with them?
Not that this is any better, but people talk as if there's One Way taxi regulations work all over and there's quite a wide range on these things.
Also, the nominal reason for limiting plates is usually (as far as I've ever seen) to ensure a living wage for taxi drivers. I don't think it really works out that way, instead creating a class system where some people extract rent from other people.
When Uber started operating in Quebec the price of a plate in Montreal dropper to around 160K. That was the major point of dispute, since taxi drivers usually get loans to buy these plates knowing that they can re-sell then anytime. Uber changed that.
So fundamentally their complaint is: "My investment carried a risk"
The ratio of vehicles per person in Singapore is 0.18 (compare to about ~0.5 most places in the US). It's very easy to get a Taxi to any place not accessible by public transport. I would be astounded if there is any verifiable scientific study backing this claim.
[0] https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/dam/ltaweb/corp/PublicationsR... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_vehicle...
If you're in the downtown area anytime close to rush hour it's practically impossible to get a cab without reserving one in advance (which costs extra), or waiting in line at a designated "taxi stand" for an unacceptably long time.
Personally I think that part of the reason the government no longer allows street hails downtown (even for cabs) is an acknowledgment of this problem.
More importantly, the high market price of a transferrable license indicates there is a shortage of taxis relative to demand for taxi service, which has a cost for the economy.