Uber isn’t the problem; taxi regulations are

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/06/22/uber-isn-problem-taxi-regulations-are/5tBvAe8rcnGFcDYDT0jx3N/story.html

by heelhook • 12 years ago

74 115 12 years ago

Argorak3• 12 years ago

The article concentrates on aspects that are certainly archaic - the expectancy that a taxi driver knows every street in a city. On the other hand, it totally ignores the benefits of the regulation: the client can have normalized expectations over all businesses.

E.g. in germany, your insurance status if an Uber car crashes is unknown - it depends whether the driver is insured. On the other hand, it is clearly regulated what happens when a registered taxi crashes down to what fees you have (or do not have) to pay.

I do agree that the regulation is probably outdated, but many of the aspects make sense if you see a Taxi network as an important piece of infrastructure.

lukasm4• 12 years ago

Is that really a problem? If he's not insured you're just gonna sue him or Uber.

codingbeer• 12 years ago

And who should pay for that lawsuit?

gambiting7• 12 years ago

Suing takes time, and even if you succeed the person/company might not be able to pay. Insurance companies pay out immediately if there are medical bills to pay.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

You can't sue Uber if a driver crashes, because drivers are independent contractors. You can sue the driver, but he has no money and can just dodge the judgment in bankruptcy.

Argorak3• 12 years ago

That's a common misconception. If I loose a leg, the driver will probably never be able to pay the sum, go through personal bankruptcy and leave me with a nice sum I sued for, but no actual money.

blcknight• 12 years ago

At least in Berlin, with an app that I can also use to pay like Uber (mytaxi), I can have a pristine regulated taxi (usually a newish Mercedes) to my door in five minutes. And it costs 30% less than Uber.

But in the US, you have idiotic cities where taxis are expensive and some even charge per person, are dirty, dilapidated cars with rude drivers. Uber is nice there..

arethuza• 12 years ago

I have a similar view of the taxis here in Edinburgh - I use the same taxi company both for work and personal trips and they are great, can use an app or IVR to book really easily.

The taxis are always spotless and the drivers very pleasant.

Aardwolf• 12 years ago

In cities such as Bangkok or New Delhi, taxi's are very plenty, and not very expensive, so extremely useful important piece of infrastructure (except the traffic jams).

However, in cities in Europe, the price of a taxi is simply way too high. Whether you can afford it or not, paying 20 Euros to be transported a few KM or 70 Euros if it's a few 10 KM's is just too insanely high. It is more something for abnormal occasions only.

Grue3• 12 years ago

Taxis in Bangkok are really something. There is so many of them and they are constantly driving around the city, most of them empty (red light). The economics of this must be really strange. Don't they have to pay for gas? How much fuel is burned by keeping all these cars in motion (not that there's anywhere to park them anyway).

CaptainZapp• 12 years ago

In Bangkok Taxis are dirt cheap.

What I noticed, though, are more and more cabs with doctored meters. That can be rather small time. For example: manipulating the kilometers driven in order to get a higher fare at the destination, or it can be very, very blatant.

I once took a cab from the airport to Silom. The initial fare was correct (35bt), but then the meter immediately went into cardiac arrest mode and just went ape shit.

This shouldn't be the case. The 35bt entry fee (about $1) gets you about a mile (depending on wait times), before it slowly goes up in 2 bt intervals. That meter must have been doctored by a factor of 10 - 15 (which I thought stupid as hell, because instantly noticeable).

A trip to my hotel at that meter rate would easily have been 3000 - 5000 baht. Instead of the normal 300 - 400 bt.

However, this being Thailand, what you should never, ever do is directly accusing the driver. There's that face saving thing, that Thais take very, very seriously.

Accusing him may get you into one of the less touristy areas in town, where you meet a number of the driver's friends wielding crow bars and baseball bats. And I'm not exaggerating here.

I resolved the dilemma, by pretending to consult my watch, making a shocked face and mumbling something around the line of "oh, Friday; traffic very, very bad in Bangkok, please bring me to Skytrain station").

The interesting thing was he knew that I knew, but didn't make any problems and brought me there.

While this example was extreme I experienced multiple rides that where slightly more expensive than they should have been in Bangkok.

So: beware!

yeureka• 12 years ago

I am not a fan of the medallion system, but Uber does seem to impact the businesses of traditional, local cab drivers while raking in profits on a global scale.

It looks like a perfect middle-class job destroying operation that centralizes profits in one multinational company.

As someone put it, those with the more powerful computers will win the economic spoils.

thret• 12 years ago

As someone who regularly uses taxis in Melbourne, I don't care if it destroys the lives of taxi drivers. That's just another perk of switching to uber in my opinion.

girvo• 12 years ago

And as someone who uses them on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane, I'm right there with you. A corrupt industry, where the drivers are being completely screwed over as-is, and a few people at the top rake in all the money... basically, the same as Uber, only Uber is cheaper and has nicer cars.

Cakez0r• 12 years ago

Are the taxi drivers allowed to use both Uber and the medallion system?

ende• 12 years ago

Many do.

theklub• 12 years ago

You make it sound like the Wal-Mart of Taxi operations, not saying you're wrong.

hershel• 12 years ago

I think there should be an UBER competitor ,that really helps cities build their own clone effectively.

If that's possible politically , it would be interesting : the cities would have regulatory power to win over UBER, this very critical business that's might just be the future of transport will be in public hands and hopefully will be guided to the good of the community, and drivers will be compensated fairly.

But getting the politics right is very difficult.

AndrewDucker• 12 years ago

I have no problem with regulation. I object to artificial limitation.

If you want to set minimum standards for taxi drivers, to ensure the safety of drivers, I am absolutely fine with that.

But anyone who wants to take the test should be able to, and there should be no artificial limit on the numbers.

_delirium• 12 years ago

One interesting aspect of limiting taxi numbers is that, as far as I understand the history, the first instance of doing so was imposed on taxi drivers by the public, rather than imposed by taxi drivers for guild-type reasons. London passed (one of?) the first taxi-regulation laws in the mid 17th century in response to popular outcry about the rapidly multiplying and unregulated hackney carriage operators; the law tried to bring order to the sector by both regulating the equipment & drivers, and putting a limit on the number that could enter the city.

001sky3• 12 years ago

This is a fascinating piece of historical context. Regulation has a demand side, nut just a supply side.

Worth keeping in mind.

Likewise, the public tends to demand regulation when the cognitive overhead is prohibitive for an individual,[1] bur more economic at scale by a neutral party. The latter is especially efficient ex ante as opposed to ad hoc.

Again, there are multiple views on what is rational, light and efficient depending only on abstraction and completeness.

[1] Eg, when faced with too much choice, under too small a timeframe, with opaque or imperfect information, and costly information processing techniques.

SilasX• 12 years ago

That might make sense for hailed taxis, in which there is a congestion risk, as drivers have to maintain visibility on dense roads.

It has much less relevance for a purely call-and-wait service, which is why application to services like Uber is questionable.

gambiting7• 12 years ago

>Most notoriously, attaining “The Knowledge” required for a taxi license involves memorizing hundreds of routes, business locations, and places of interest throughout the city. Charming, but expensive — and quite unnecessary in the age of smartphones.

Says a person who has never been to London and doesn't understand the enormous benefit of intimate knowledge of all the streets of London and how to navigate them quickly. No smartphone is going to help you there, even the best sat nav is not as good as simply knowing that if there is a match in the city some streets are best to be avoided hours before the event. I, for one, support wholeheartedly the requirement for London drivers to pass this difficult test.

vertex-four7• 12 years ago

Last time I was in London, I mentioned the name of a grotty backpackers hostel, not even remembering what road it was on, and the driver immediately started off towards it.

Compare this to having to mess about on Google Maps for five minutes to figure out where we're going and potentially end up on the wrong side of the city anyway, which has happened to me in other cities. There's definitely something in having your driver have knowledge of the city.

aianus2• 12 years ago

I think the vast majority of people would rather look it up on Google Maps for five minutes and save $5.

jedc• 12 years ago

I got into a black taxi once, and read off the text that my wife had sent telling me where to meet her. She didn't know the name of the restaurant and got the name of the street wrong.

The taxi driver just said, "Do you mean [restaurant name] on [name of correct street]?" And sure enough, he was right.

lukasm4• 12 years ago

Absolutely, and the best kind of learning is learning by doing.

jmckib6• 12 years ago

I understand that it's useful for a taxi driver to have this knowledge, but do we really need the government to impose it as a strict requirement? One could imagine multiple taxi services that compete on different axes. One service, competing on price, could have less knowledgeable drivers equipped with GPS devices. Another service, competing on its drivers' knowledge, would be more useful for taking you to obscure locations or navigating the streets quickly.

It's like any other industry, really. Can you imagine if short order cooks were required to have the same encyclopedic knowledge as the chefs in a high end restaurant? You'd just end up with some very expensive diners.

jsmeaton3• 12 years ago

We have several companies operating in Melbourne and they are all awful. We don't have any (decent) requirements as far as road knowledge goes. I've also been to London, and the experience with cabs there was wonderful. The requirement to pass a substantial test is a fantastic one, and should be adopted in more places.

vertex-four7• 12 years ago

For people who want to get around cheaply, London has an excellent mass public transport system, between the tube, buses, and intra-city train services.

PinguTS4• 12 years ago

There is a thing called: customer protection. This applies for all sorts of products and services. One of those services is taxi as part of transportation. Part of this is, that drivers are educated, trust worthy and the vehicles are in good shape as well as having a minimum insurance in protection of the customer.

Also if you have 2 or more companies competing over who has the best service, that is good. But all of them have to provide a minimum quality service. Especially, for foreigners who don't know anything. For that reason regulation is required.

That regulation also can go wrong, is a different story. Then, of course, it has to be fixed.

But Uber (and some others) try to undermine any kind of regulation and so cutting costs to enable cheaper service.

That is like Food safety regulations. Like there is a new startup, which has provides a service like Amazon Fresh. It is cheaper by using just peoples cars, which may have no cooling possibility in their vehicles. Then blaming the food safety regulations are wrong because they require cooling facilities for fresh food not putting peoples life at risk.

jsmeaton3• 12 years ago

This is the first thing that jumped out at me. Taxi drivers in London are brilliant.

Try using a Taxi in Melbourne. Most of the drivers don't know the most basic of knowledge. Main roads in the city? No idea. The casino? "Could you direct me?". Getting into a bloody Taxi in the city for a fare less than 20kms is a lesson in patience. You often have to lie about where you're going until you get into the cab.

Regulations aren't the problem. Most regulations exist for good reason, and there should be more of the better ones (and less of the worse..).

I've used Uber and really like the service when I'm going a fare (sorry) distance. But they are just as bad, if not worse, than cabs when it's only a short trip around the city.

I believe both services could co-exist, but something drastic needs to happen to shake up the Taxi business. Perhaps charge a higher flag-fall and a smaller per km rate. Try to increase the rate of owner-drivers rather than a lease out to drivers. There has been a lot of discussion in Melbourne about how to improve the service, but so far it seems to be getting worse.

warfangle• 12 years ago

Even in NYC, if you need to take a cab from Manhattan to one of the other boroughs, you often have to give them directions.

It's frustrating because there's usually a small language barrier, and they know Manhattan just fine. Some have satnav/smart phones, but usually they do not - and end up relying on my smartphone for turn by turn directions.

jmckib6• 12 years ago

I've used Uber and really like the service when I'm going a fare (sorry) distance. But they are just as bad, if not worse, than cabs when it's only a short trip around the city.

I'm interested in hearing more about your Uber experiences. In my experience (and that of everyone I know), Uber has been great for short and longer distances. The Uber drivers don't even know where you want them to go until you're already in the car, so there's no way for them to discriminate.

rmc• 12 years ago

> quite unnecessary in the age of smartphones.

Maybe in the USA, which always gets first class treatment from US tech companies when it comes to maps. In the rest of the world, which doesn't have as good as policy of open government data, or consitant addressing schemes, smartphones aren't always a wonder tool.

yason• 12 years ago

This would simply translate to the choice between a) using Uber with the driver relying on a navigator unit and possibly driving slow and/or unoptimal routes but with a cheaper price vs. b) traditional taxis that cost more but really know the city. (Or try to get an Uber driver with good ratings for local knowledge, if Uber supports that sort of rankings.)

In a city that has mostly bad taxis, I'd choose Uber. I London I might just not.

azunds• 12 years ago

If knowing the city gives someone an advantage there probably is a traffic organization problem

the_mitsuhiko• 12 years ago

To be honest. I find "The Knowledge" vastly overrated. Uber drivers have given me a much better and consistent experience than black cabs to the point where I stopped using black cabs altogether.

dia802• 12 years ago

I have a spinal cord injury (snowboarding) and use a wheelchair as a result of having no sensation/movement below my chest. One of the most annoying consequences is being unable to move around London quickly. The tube is inaccessible, buses are slow and you often have to have a pitched battle with pushchairs.

Black cabs provided a relatively quick/convenient method of transport since they all have a ramp - not without issue but possible to get in one in less that a minute. I've not tried uber yet as I'm apprehensive about the hassle of getting in and out and getting the driver to help stow my chair. People are usually pretty keen to be helpful but it's a bit tricky and their default idea of helping is often counter productive. Also if they don't stop near the kerb you have to get them to move and the passenger side of a car is harder to get in and out due to the height of the kerb.

Black cab resides effectively subsidise my ability to get around so I am somewhat concerned to think they might be 'disrupted' wholesale.

mcv2• 12 years ago

This is easily the best (and possibly only good) argument I've seen in favour of traditional cabs. The right kind of regulation can dramatically improve accessibility to people who are otherwise at risk of becoming marginalised.

Unregulated competition always has the risk of marginalising minorities because they might be too small to be an attractive market.

gsuubvjhsb5• 12 years ago

Then choose a different taxi from Uber/Lyft. Why impose these rules if mutually consenting adults want to engage in a transaction between each other?

psaintla2• 12 years ago

Agreed, that isn't just London, in NYC it is the same way. There are seasonal changes in traffic that can completely alter the route you should take to different parts of the city that seem illogical. Navigation systems don't currently take that into account.

streptomycin• 12 years ago

Why don't they? Google normally seems pretty good about recognizing changes in traffic patterns and selecting alternate routes.

001sky3• 12 years ago

Taxi cabs are just one of the professions suffering from the problem of competition being in conflict with professional standards (ie, self-regulation). The only option that will be fully serviceable remains government regulation, but it will need to take on a new format.

Schwoisser2• 12 years ago

How do you know? Is there a study that shows cabs need government regulation.

001sky3• 12 years ago

If you're imagination needs broadening... se, eg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948931

or the many parallels to

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7935819

splynch• 12 years ago

While i agree with the premise that many taxi regulations are outdated, this article seems to be either poorly informed, or so selective in its representation that it borders on PR, not independent journalism or OP-ED.

Using london as an example of how things are broken is a terrible choice, and great example of how terrible this article is. London routinely ranks number one in the world in customer and tourist satisfaction for taxis. As someone who lives here, i think Uber has its place, but the taxi system is akin to a public good that needs regulation. The barriers to entry and designed to prevent abuse to the privileges that come with being licensed taxi. As a rider, the most important privileges to me are the ability to use bus lanes, and that i can hail a cab anywhere, anytime, knowing that the vehicle and driver will be safe. Without regulation, its impossible to obtain that standard.

It would be much more helpful to start with an informed and complete view of the situation (which varies in every city), than build a straw man from which the author argues for a complete reform in governance and regulation in all marketplaces(really? thats the point here?)

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

Uber isn’t the problem; taxi regulations are

Can't it be both? Because I'm pretty sure it's both.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

I love the idea of rating services and customers as each business transaction happens. This allows both sides to quickly weed out bad actors.

The more I see services like Ebay, AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and so forth operate, the more I'm amazed at how much former regulation can be replaced with better information for all concerned.

alkonaut5• 12 years ago

Of course regulation is needed. Insurance, car-standard, driver skill, all of that has to be known by the customer merely by the fact that you are stepping into a taxi.

Can there be too much regulation, too archaic? Sure, but I can't see how that motivates sidestepping it entirely.

In Stockholm, taxis (normal ones) are regulated in terms of insurance etc. but unlike most other cities, taxi prices are not regulated. This hasn't meant lower prices through healthy competition but rather hundreds of scam companies charging 10x the fares of the 2-3 largest companies that have 95% of the market. I miss the days of more regulation, but won't use Uber merely because they don't guarantee union wages etc like the other companies do.

sirsar• 12 years ago

Can there be too much regulation, too archaic? Sure, but I can't see how that motivates sidestepping it entirely.

Sidestepping lots of regulation is the only way to get around the archaic parts. There certainly won't be a referendum on taxis.

alkonaut5• 12 years ago

I think that is very much up to the local political climate, whether there are companies/groups that want to protect the status quo, and so on. Uber is a global thing, it may have started because of local taxi regulation in the US, but all I'm saying is that it isn't necessarily the same thing everywhere.

mhb• 12 years ago

Why do you conclude that the unregulated taxi prices aren't lower than they would be with regulation?

alkonaut5• 12 years ago

Empirical only, of course it isn't a perfect natural experiment as there is no control group. We can't know what the regulated prices would have been.

jmckib6• 12 years ago

I miss the days of more regulation, but won't use Uber merely because they don't guarantee union wages etc like the other companies do.

This raises the question, do you refuse to use any service that doesn't guarantee union wages? If so, picking up an econ textbook will pay for itself in no time.

alkonaut5• 12 years ago

It's hard to trace products through the entire chain of production, but yes, in Sweden it's quite hard to buy products and services produced without the union setting the wages (there are no minimum wages set by law, only unions, and the union negotiates wages also for non-union employees). It might be under the headline "Scandinavian model" of that econ textbook.

jheriko• 12 years ago

its amazing how so many individuals can manage all this bureaucracy just fine... but trendy web startups can not.

srsly. its embarassing.

mrweasel• 12 years ago

Maybe it's just that it's not really an issue where I live, but what problem is Uber trying to solve?

The main issue is getting a taxi in really small towns in the middle of nowhere, but it seems unlikely that Uber would have someone in these places, simply because there isn't really a demand.

I find it really hard to see Uber as anything but a taxi company that tries to underbid the competition by not following the same rules as everyone else.

sharemywin• 12 years ago

"The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car — you're paying for the other dude in the car," Kalanick said. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."

victor27• 12 years ago

I spent a week in Paris.

I felt cheated _every time_ I took a regular cab. The meter could be set to various modes (L1- Day in City, L2- Evening in City / Suburb, L3 - Late nights, etc.) and I was never sure if it was on the correct mode. Also, the drivers were rude and acted as if they were doing me a favor.

Uber although slightly more expensive, was dramatically better. The drivers were polite, helpful and I never got scammed on the charge. Moreover, I didn't have to deal with foreign currency coins and notes.

adultSwim• 12 years ago

Who doesn't love a gypsy cab?

Uber isn’t the problem; taxi regulations are

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