Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
Do you believe Rebu could that have managed to draw the same level of venture-capitalist money and unicorn-ness and hype, even sharing the same core technologies, code, and product features?
I don't think it would, and I'm asserting that comes from business-plans, labor relations, legal challenges, government lobbying, investor marketing, etc., which in several cases have been, er, ethically-problematic.
So why would they bother to adopt "Rebu"? It's nothing but downsides: their taxi drivers have to work harder, have to be more polite and drive more safely, have to have cleaner cars, and have to be more accountable in general. Not to mention of course Rebu is going to take a cut of all rides booked on their platform.
There was no way to make regular taxi service better without structural and legal reform that the incumbents did not want. The only way to fix it was to go outside the system and do something sketchy. And it worked! For all their issues and controversies, the ride-hailing app experience is amazing, especially when compared to old-school taxi service. Some legacy taxi services have stepped up and improved a bunch since then, and others have just faded into obscurity.
The taxi market, in the US at least, was a textbook case of regulatory capture to stifle competition. Google "taxi medallion prices nyc" for an example. Uber was clearly the 'good guy' in flouting those laws and later getting them repealed. The cartels that controlled the medallions had no interest in improving the technology until they had competition.
Bob Smith annoyed enough Uber drivers in Milwaukee that now he can't get a ride in Poughkeepsie. Maybe that's valid, maybe it's not. But it is pretty new, and I doubt it was in the slide deck when Uber hit up the VCs.
The social aspect of these sorts of things can't help but get entangled with the politics of social mores. Maybe Bob was giving the Uber drivers wet willies. A lot of people would think he caught that ban fairly. Maybe Bob was too politically incorrect for the Uber drivers. Not quite so sure he deserves to be sentenced to hoof it until the Sun burns out. How do we know the bans are of the fair former and not the latter? We don't. It's a private company, they can be as opaque about this as they want.
Good, bad, who knows, but it certainly makes for a completely different landscape.
The legacy taxi services had this problem too, though, as you note, not on a global level. Pre-Uber, there was one taxi service that stopped taking my calls. I have no idea why. I had no way to appeal this, or to even get in touch with them to find out what was going on.
In the meantime, Bob still probably has public transit or local old-school taxi services to fall back on (which somehow still exist). Many areas even have local ride-hailing apps. Worst-case, Bob will have to rent a car when visiting other cities.
Well, it kinda is a fundamental problem, with regard to the original article's premise that scale is a problem. These services can't operate on VC's terms without scaling up to a national or global level. And this, by its nature, means your Uber problem in California follows you to Georgia, and possibly to Uzbekistan.
What if Uber shares its ban list with Toasttab? Or if Uber buys Toasttab?
Laws may be able to address this, but laws always lag. Sometimes by a lot.
But overall this was pretty bad investment for humanity. Let's just stipulate it's a lot easier to get a ride at a reasonable price and that's a good thing (not a given considering increased traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, plus decreased pressure for cities to move away from car-dependency). Was it worth multiple billions of dollars and software engineering hours? Like, assuredly not. It's a big "LOL" drawn in lipstick on a portrait of the efficient market hypothesis. It turns out the private sector is also great at just setting huge piles of cash on fire.
It got reasonable funding but couldn't get taxi companies to sign up.
Things got a bit better when it became clear that Uber was going to kill taxi companies but too little, too late.
In the US at least, there are two classifications for "car for hire."
One is street-hail - you wave down a car or get into one at a stand. That was heavily regulated and taxi companies had the relevant licenses.
The other is "town car". You call for a town-car and it shows up. town-car was very lightly regulated.
Yes, every taxi company offered town-car services, but there were lots of town car companies that didn't do street-hail.
Uber/lyft are town-car companies. Neither one does street-hail.
What else is there?
- Boeing - Just need to invent a better commercial passenger airplane
- Lockheed - The day of 150 million dollar manned fighter jets is coming to an end.
- Electricity distribution - PG&E or Southern California Edison. Only way to crack this is with decentralized power distribution and batteries
- Waste Management - Trash collection, recycling, and processing
- DeBeers Diamonds - Diamonds can basically be synthesized in the lab at will now.
(Black cabs don't have to be black, but usually are. As to why they're called "Hackney carriages" - the last person to know the reason probably died in 1863.)
Self driving is the only way uber or a taxi can be a large business. The cost of labor is just too high and so most people are forced to learn to drive.
Even with the above I question if self driving is really worth it. If you own a car and have it parked nearby it is ready to go when you want to leave, and better yet you can store your stuff in it. Combine that with rush hour - most people are traveling at about the same time every day, and some people wanting nicer cars than others and it is hard to see how it can work out. (unless you live in density such that parking is hard - but then transit must be your answer not individual cars since self driving cannot solve traffic)
In fact you could easily see car manufacturers offering such services - something like Zipcar but more convenient as the cars can self redistribute.
I find it hard to believe Uber will ever break even ( not on the day to day costs - recouping all that upfront investment ).
Having said that, the likes of Uber have changed the world - so the money wasn't entirely wasted.
Generally shared cars only make sense when someone drives very little anyway. Cars are expensive and so shared cars are either too expensive to be used often, or very hard to get at. Renting a car for a weekend is about half the cost of a monthly payment on the same car, but if you buy the car you have it the rest of the month (and if you buy a car you have used options or keeping the car after it is paid for to bring the total cost down - you will have to pay maintenance costs but those tend to be much less).
It's an indictment of the VC model where essentially you build a company that hogs all the value for investors. If you think this is a good model, i.e. that investors make better decisions than governments, labor, and the market, then I think you have to reckon with the utter wastefulness that is Uber. A better thing here would have been to just build a ride hailing app for existing cab companies.
Possibly. However you could also see the Uber type market as reducing the need for people to buy cars - threatening their core business, as well as reducing the number of their potential customers and again shifting the power away from them.