Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

I'm not a fan of companies like Uber or AirBnB who attempt a violent takeover of a market. However, as a consumer who needs to get from A to B, or stay at some random city, I find those services invaluable. The black cabs in London are expensive, never around when you need them, and until recently might have refused card payments (now they just seem unhappy about it). At the very least I was hoping Uber would make that industry wake up and join the modern world, but instead they chose to protest and block roads. With Uber, I always have a car available within minutes and the prices are reasonable. I just hope that the competition will take their place (and driver mass) if they do end up leaving.

Yep. I'm always amazed at how quickly people crap on Uber. In hindsight it's not a particularly revolutionary service. But does everyone remember how much the Taxi system sucked?

London it's really not bad in my somewhat limited experience. (Usually take transit.) Yes it's more expensive than VC-subsidized rides but is better than taxis in most places.

The black cabs in London were excellent but ridiculously expensive, which is why I’ve only caught one, like, once. Most people have to rely on minicabs, which were sketchy and unreliable. Uber was a huge boon to London.

Black cabs only work in the center, even in Zone 2 there are plenty places where you won't find one and where they won't be willing to go.

Car hire can work but it's often more expensive, needs to be booked ahead of time and they also refuse trips that aren't profitable for them.

Uber openen up travel for many people in London, especially at night. It's quite easy to find a lot of places in London that aren't serviced by Night Buses, there are plenty of places that are 15-30 min walk from a tube station, and the Night Tube is only available on select lines and only during the weekend.

> Black cabs only work in the center

They're bad in the center too. I live in London bridge / SE1 and black cabs still illegally refuse to take me home from say, Shoreditch because they can't be bothered crossing the river.

Black cabs in the city are excellent, try hailing a black cab from anywhere not within 5-10 min walking from a major transportation hub like Pad, KingsX, Victoria, Euston and outside of the City's financial bubble.

The alternative is a different app, not Black Cabs. Uber doesn’t provide a unique service beyond a network effect, drivers and customers can almost immediately switch to other apps.

> who attempt a violent takeover of a market

What is a "violent" takeover? What would a nonviolent takeover be?

I'm all for new companies providing better services to consumers. If they take over a market, isn't that because the existing market wasn't meeting consumer needs? A new company taking over a market is generally a good thing, the creative force of capitalism itself.

(Provided it's not done by ignoring legitimate standards for safety, environment, externalities, etc.)

There are also minicabs everywhere, some of which have app-based booking, and Uber certainly isn't the only rideshare app Londoners can use.

Agreed. Black cabbies have had it good for such a long time, cash in hand, monopolising the taxi business in London . I got in a cab booked using a taxi version app and the driver complained about paying % fee to the app and only getting paid once a month. Welcome to the rest of the world where people pay taxes and only get paid at the end of every month.

> At the very least I was hoping Uber would make that industry wake up and join the modern world.

Even with Uber never getting a real foothold in Germany, they still did just that. It start with the myTaxi (nor for some inexplicable reason rebranded to FREE NOW) app that allowed you to book a cab, see where it is, get a price estimate and pay with your credit card. It wasn’t as smooth, but still better than before.

Now last weekend when I came back from a party at night, I called out "Anyone taking card payments?" and two drivers out of 10 raised their hands, they used SumUp [0] which is also what my favorite cocktail bar uses :)

[0]: https://sumup.com/

Why do people have the need to take over a market in the first place? There is room in such a big market for many players. Big and small. This obsession with growth is not healthy. I don't care if Uber takes me or Lyft, or Kapten. No brand loyalty here. I do care that SOMEONE takes me safely and at a reasonable price.

> Welcome to the rest of the world where people [...] only get paid at the end of every month.

Wait, what? You get paid once a month? Is this a UK thing? Every single job I've had over here (Canada) was either once every two weeks, or two times a month.

I remember calling my local minicab company and usually getting a ride in 10 or 15 minutes. Or grabbing a black cab. Never used Uber.

On the German city where I live, they are pretty alright.

London has had 10,000's of mini-cabs for decades that served a big chunk of this non-Black cab market. They weren't perfect but they were cheap, pretty ubiquitous and served most (if not all) of the spaces left in the market by black cabs.

So Uber as a service hasn't been that revolutionary in London, the things they HAVE done is improve the ordering UX and making CC's ubiquitous.

In Sweden, and I think in most of EU, once a month is the standard. I know of no-one with in Sweden with a full time job which is once a month.

nm

We're not that lucky in the UK. They came, they might go, and the traditionals will stay the same.

I mostly lived in London just before Uber.

I don't know if they still do, but many nightclubs would have some arrangement where there was someone from a minicab company in the lobby or just outside. You'd say "W3", he'd say "That'll be £20, in 10 minutes time" and you could wait in the warm until the car arrived. (Of course, if you knew a number for a different company, you could phone them yourself.)

The drivers were pretty clueless -- even a fairly large inner-London station name like "Ealing Broadway" would frequently be misunderstood, and they'd want to slowly type a postcode into a satnav -- but otherwise they were OK.

Same in the UK. Traditionally here the lowest skilled jobs were paid weekly and higher skilled monthly but I think that's rapidly disappearing, if not completely gone, now.

Spaniard here. They also work quite well in Spain.

Uber is cheap because they are subsidizing your fare with investment dollars at an unsustainable level. They are selling $2 for the price of $1. The ride sharing economy is convenient, but I can't see it lasting for much longer. At least not without losing some of what makes it so convenient, like low prices.

I still take yellow cabs home from JFK & LGA airports. The process of getting a Lyft or Uber is miserable, while I can virtually get straight into a yellow cab, even when there’s a line at the taxi stand.

Just recently I took a bus at LGA that takes you from the tetminal to the taxi stand due to construction. Even this was easier than getting a Lyft or Uber. I was in the cab way faster (including bus ride) much faster than if I trek to the designated ride hailing pickup areas and negotiate the sea of traffic to find my driver (even in less busy hours).

To boot, the cab trip started further from the airport due to the bus ride, so we were out of airport’s immediate dropoff traffic right away.

Ride was ~$10 cheaper than Lyft as well. The only downside was the annoying TV embedded in the cab. I muted it but could not power off the display.

The Taxi system still sucks often. I take cabs when I'm in downtown Chicago once in a while because they are faster than waiting for an uber. Recently I was wearing a tie-dye shirt and joggers (leaving the climbing gym) and it took me 5 minutes to flag down a cab even though plenty of empty ones passed me. I've never had an issue in the past with being picked up and it was clearly related to my state of dress. Cabs suck.

What makes them convenient is availability and driver mass. Prices are an added bonus but not the main USP. Not to me anyway.

That's quite an amusing story! Perhaps cabs are the new fashion police?

Many jobs in construction pay weekly, regardless of skill level. Nobody wants to lose a month's money when the subcontractor goes bust.

The usual Uber/Lyft booking/pickup system doesn't scale well at airports where personal car pickup/dropoff is already a real mess in many cases. Some airports are trying to deal with this by moving ride-share to a different area (e.g. Central Parking in Boston) which is less convenient for passengers, especially those that don't know the airport well.

Usually I just take a taxi from the airport if there isn't a good transit option available. (Or book a car service in advance at my home airport.)

>Prices are an added bonus but not the main USP. Not to me anyway.

But it's all related. There is more availability because both drivers and customers are being subsidized.

At the end of the day, a car costs so much to operate and maintain, and a person requires so much economic profit to make driving around worth their while. No "hacks" around that fact.

That's a questionable dichotomy considering there's ample research showing Uber is cannibalizing public transit and regulations on Taxis have historically been put in place for a variety of reasons that one should at least consider.

Nobody denies that people like Uber for reasons but what does it even mean for a Taxi system to suck when compared to a super exploitative, unregulated enterprise such as this? As a driver, this is not only about compensation. It's about a critical lack of security in all aspects of your life. And if, as a passenger, you can't really afford decent service and working conditions maybe you are trying to live beyond your means and you should really be boarding a train or bus instead. And if you can't, that, to me, seems like a political problem that shouldn't be solved on the backs of some of the most vulnerable sectors of society.

Kapten and Bolt already exist, and give you access to substantially the same pool of drivers. Maybe some drivers are on Uber but not one of the others; that will change very quickly if Uber are banned. There's also Addison Lee, who have their own drivers, but offer a similar experience.

This tunnel vision of only seeing one provider of a new but fundamentally commodity service is interesting. It reminds me a lot of how Git and MySQL took off - people encountered them, thought, "oh, that's great, i'll use that", and never stopped to think if there might be better alternatives.

You're not a fan of them but you'll gladly pay them your money? Sounds like righteous hypocrisy to me.

I'm not a fan of them and I've never paid them any money, neither one. They are scum bags.

How will the world improve if you reward what you don't like?

Prices are ridiculous, though, compared to England (except London)!

"nah mate, don't go sarf of the river, me"

Once a month is standard for salaried work in the US.

Certainly not standard. I've never encountered anything but every two weeks or twice a month. I have little doubt monthly exists but anecdotally it's not super common.

I'm not driven by ideology. And yes. I'm not a fan and I'll pay them if they provide me a service I need at a time I need it. I'm also not a fan of the government but I pay my taxes. I'm upset with Netflix for cancelling great shows but i pay my subscription fee. I despise my regular commute train line. Hate it to levels you cannot imagine - but guess from where I'm typing this? Google is scum, Facebook is scum, Twitter is scum. it's all crap. Yet still I'll use it until a credible alternative rises up. You want to call it hypocrisy - by all means do. I wouldn't care less.

I've now got Kapten installed and will give them a try tomorrow. Hopefully there are Kapten drivers where I'd need it.

>There is room in such a big market for many players. Big and small.

there is no real room for big players which is why Uber's business model is burning investment money and dodging regulations.

Have you ever seen a taxi monopoly? There is no scale effect to this business because adding more drivers and more taxis just drives your costs up linearly, and given the diseases big business suffers from and all the tech overhead of Uber it's probably worse than that.

That's why transportation like trucking or the cab industry is dominated by small business.

Somehow here in Brazil there was a startup (recently sold) that had cheaper fares, paid more to drivers, and was still lucrative.

I imagine Uber is incredibly badly managed.

TfL mandated black cabs must - as a condition of license - take card payments, almost certainly in reaction to Uber's claim that they were serving a cashless society that other options weren't.

Black cab drivers also got into Halo and other apps for ride hailing, and there are now a few other third party private hire apps for non-Uber drivers. I also think it made Addison Lee - the largest private hire company in London pre-Uber - shake their game up a little.

A few people will complain, but genuinely, London will be a better place without the fleet of thousands of Toyota Priuses circling all day, every day being driven by people who TfL suspect are not fit to hold a private hire vehicle license.

I agree, some results were great, but the long term philosophy is bad.

I wonder if it will trigger some social structure / device to avoid too much stagnation without requiring a shark-like company to try wiping the traditional market with infinite pockets.

Credit card payments are sort of scammy: they pay you 1% so they can charge vendors 3%

The OP literally said it was excellent. But expensive. What is your point?

You call it a violent takeover, but then go on to describe them as simply providing a better service than existing competiors. ??!?

And this seems to just be the commonly accepted narrative among upper middle class progressives, so much so that nobody even bats an eye at the extraordinary contradiction.

I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality lately. All tech is evil, that's just a fact, but it has improved our lives so much that we all continue to use it all day every day.

I don't get this. Supplying a ride sharing app, especially just supporting one, should have very minimal overhead. If Uber didn't have other interests like self driving research, they could be distilled down to a small startup's worth of support devs and one manager and just let the app make money. A revenue of 3 billion would be way more than sustainable being split among a company size of 10 or even 30. If anything, if forced by circumstances they could just cut all the fat and massively, massively downsize while staying the same from the consumer's perspective. VC's know this so growing for now and investing in R&D is fine when at a moment's notice a company could be reduced to 30 people and just keep supporting an app.

That's very surprising to me. In case I wasn't clear, I'm referring specifically to salaried pay and not hourly pay, where more frequent payouts are the norm.

Admittedly, I only have my own anecdotal evidence among my own experiences, friends, and family, but I can't think of anyone I've had the salary conversation with that mentioned getting paid other than monthly and would be curious to see what the actual breakdown is in the US.

Edit: This [1] article states that 59% of the US workforce is hourly, so it's accurate to say that bi-weekly is the most common frequency among all jobs in the US, but I can't find any resources that focus on the breakdown specifically among salaried workers.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-are-hourly-worke...

This BLS breakdown [1] doesn't break down salaried vs. hourly. However, it does say that "A look at the chart reveals that semimonthly is the pay period in which businesses pay the highest average hourly earnings, followed closely by monthly." (And biweekly after that.) Hourly earnings are probably a reasonable proxy for salaried vs. hourly.

So the data suggests that being paid every two weeks is somewhat more common than monthly. (And, for larger businesses, biweekly is overwhelmingly the norm.)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-3/how-frequently-do-priv...

Thanks for the followup, this puts a lot in perspective. The article notes:

> In March 2013, 94.8 percent of private businesses were single-pay-period businesses

meaning that most companies pay all workers on the same schedule. Therefore, if a company has any hourly workers that get paid more frequently than monthly, everyone salaried in the company is going to get put in the same pay schedule as well. All the orgs I've worked at either paid monthly uniformly or were part of that rare 5.2% that had different pay schedules, so I admit that my experience is an outlier here.

The other interesting thing about the numbers is that biweekly becomes much more prevalent relative to semimonthly as the businesses get larger.

I assume this is because small businesses (and many employees) prefer a pay schedule that's aligned with their (often monthly ) bills for cash flow reasons. Whereas larger businesses prefer to keep payroll expenses from fluctuating a bit depending upon how many days are in a given month.

> But does everyone remember how much the Taxi system sucked?

In London? The suckage level was zero. Black cabs were fine. Reputable minicabs (Addison Lee etc.) were fine. Uber does not provide anything like enough improvement to justify the level of illegality it's riddled with.

It's not ideology.It's Pavlovian science. If you reward behavior, you get more of it.

Nearly 40 years in the US workforce, many, many jobs, not a single one was once a month.

First, as someone who strives for balance, I can't sit idle when you say "All tech is evil". That is just not true. We are all tech. all of us here. Very few people on this planet are "evil". However, many actions are perceived as evil by some and good by others. Google is not evil - they might do some things wrong, or badly but I don't believe they are inherently "evil". Neither is Uber or Facebook or any other tech company (Spam farms not included). And yes, the tech has improved our life tremendously. And it has done so at an accelerated rate over the last decade+. So fast that I really think we failed to adjust in time and are swinging from extremes at the moment. We were given "Social Media" and are now learning how to navigate both "social" and "media" together. We got tech giants and now learning what they can/cannot do. Give humans time. We're not as clever as we'd like to believe - we take time to adjust.

And yes, I think Uber's attempt to squash all competition is bad. But because they are managing to do it, the smaller firms lack driver mass and when i need to get from A to B, I'm stuck with Uber. Tomorrow I will try Kapten, and if that works fine, I'll just use it. If it doesn't deliver, I'll stick with uber while it's around. Between standing in the rain and using Uber - my choice is already made up. Still doesn't mean i need to like them.

And if I stand in the rain because i'm waiting for a black cab or the other app don't have driver's in my area, I get more wet.

The other child thread helps to explain where my discrepancy came from. Most companies prefer to have a unified pay schedule, so if there are workers in the company that you'd expect to pay bi-weekly/semimonthly (such as hourly wages), the entire company will be put on that schedule.

My own personal experience has been in the post financial crisis tech industry, and I wonder if tech pays monthly more often compared to others (and if funding plays any role in that).

According to what I witness in the current comments, a first step for taxis would be to mandate a working credit card machine, under penalties.

However, it seems so many many taxis were frauding their taxes, that it became cultural and enforced.

Which means taxis, which are already known as the top thief job in the world, also steal the citizen on a third level after the ride itself and after choosing the night rate at noon: taxes.

I dare to say Uber, as bad as they can ever be with wages under the legal minimum, can still be a better behaved citizen.

That they service only a minuscule part of London and refuse to take rides that take them outside of it.

Even in the center good luck hailing one at 2am on a Saturday night.

I’ve been refused rides form the Shard, Bank, and Canary Wharf plto Lancaster gate, both of which are in Zone 1.

If I want to hail a cab from my home I have to walk 10 min to Paddington and I live essentially across from Hyde Park which makes me considerably more central than most people in London.

For my friends who live in Hammersmith, Fulham, Acton and Chiswick they might as well be living in Belgium as far as black cabs are concerned they don’t go there and they won’t take you there.

`So Uber as a service hasn't been that revolutionary in London, the things they HAVE done is improve the ordering UX and making CC's ubiquitous.` - the daily trip volumes tell a different story and clearly show there's an impact.

Do Kapten and Bolt have comparable safety features such as facial recognition for drivers? How are they satisfying the TfL's requirements to be "fit and proper"?

I'm not claiming all tech is evil, just pointing out that I see this more and more as just being the accepted viewpoint these days. I also find it a pretty absurd claim, that's what I'm saying.

I think having a system that prevents drivers from pretending they can't take credit cards, and automates the process of picking people up is extremely valuable. But I wish the capital subsidy would go away so that the market could become more rational and sustainable. And the last few times I've taken an Uber or a Lyft (to/from picking up my car for repairs) the driver has...not kept a hand on the wheel at all times. So, I'm all for regulation, but the app(s) themselves are a kind of regulation that was sorely needed.

Taxes aren't theft. Taxes is when we as a society pool together resources to invest into the projects we as a society agreed to implement by means of the democratic process. If you don't like it you can organize and pick different projects or fewer of them or create a system that doesn't have taxes. Taxi drivers have nothing to do with it.

fair enough. apology for misreading your comment

I believe that GP is saying that not paying taxes is theft from society.

Oooh...