Are we the baddies?

Now, anyone anywhere can get a ride, often quickly. I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.

I had two incidents in the UK recently where my app of choice failed me and I was quickly bailed out cheaper by googling "taxi $TOWN" and having a one minute conversation with an operator.

So which of the laws that uber broke to get big are what prevented these new issues, and which are what made the old way bad?

I don’t mind the old ways.

Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).

The problem probably never was incumbent taxis, it was how they were regulated (or not).

Sure, they’re mandated to not refuse service, but you try getting picked up in Manhattan with a suitcase mid afternoon (when it’s obvious you’ll be taking the fixed fare to JFK in heavy traffic). To this day, the meter being “broken” is a tactic used in taxi strongholds like Las Vegas, even with this regulation.

The sweet spot for taxis was London, but I will go out of my way to avoid taking one lest I get forced to listen to the drivers views on Brexit for the entire ride.

As in most rules on the books, not in actually enforced rules I presume?

The apps did three things that the call services did not do:

1) subsidize drivers with vc money for many years making drivers plentiful and fares cheap

2) use unlicensed cabs so they could saturate areas like Manhattan that had previously limited the amount of cabs that could operate

3) Deprive drivers of info they might use to reject fares they don't want (like destination).

I lived in NYC and other metropolitan US cities for the few years before the Uber and I don’t remember a single car service that had any of that and wasn’t a lottery of if they’ll pick up the phone in time to get me somewhere

This assumes that “most regulated” correlates with less atrocious. Or that the intentions behind regulations are always good. Regulations can indeed makes things less atrocious, but other regulations can just as easily make things more atrocious. I’d argue that many taxi regulations were more the latter than the former. (I.e arbitrary limit on total number of taxi vehicles, while allowing an unlimited number of non-taxi vehicles)

Maybe the fact that they were the most regulated services around was exactly why they were atrocious. Regulation often erects barriers to competition. It's impossible for a regulatory body to spell out every way in which a company can be exploitive and disallow it. The only thing that prevents bad behavior is meaningful competition.

It was this regulatory body that limited the number of cabs that could be on the road at any given time and set "fair" meter pricing. What resulted was that if you lived in a poor isolated neighborhood, there would be no cabs willing to take you there or driving around to pick you up. Uber solved this pretty much overnight.

The main amazing thing about Uber is that you can go most places in the world, not know what you're doing with obscure public transport/payments/etc and just get an Uber to your hotel, no problems. It's so, so much better than what came before.

This is mostly a problem with the people you pay taxes to who would invent systems to restrict the driver numbers.

I think that's what got them banned in London at some point.

Today though, Uber has definitely developed anti-competitive and frankly disgusting traits - they're just different ones to the taxi industry.

I can believe if you were going to/from the suburbs it may have been harder. The cabbies could know your destination and could just ignore the dispatcher if they didn't want to run the trip.

Checking the iOS App Store reviews on the local taxi app I am currently using they go back to 2011, and that's not the oldest one. It has also been available on Android since March 2012. All prior to the dates Uber started operating here.

Not remotely my experience in Chicago, and I lived in a relatively primary service area (Wicker Park). Calling them was basically pointless, you needed to walk to a cab stand and hope there was a cab standing by if you needed to go to the airport at a weird off-peak time.

And my friends all had similar experiences to mine as well. It was a trope that you'd call dispatch and schedule a ride, and then maybe it would show up within 90 minutes of the actual time assigned. You could even listen to the dispatch radio and realize how much of a shitshow it was with cabbies assigned to a pickup ditching it for a street fare randomly. And how little dispatch cared about it all.

Uber was a night and day overnight change for the better.

The only "good" cab experiences were flag pulls from the street within short city trips. Usually the loop to back home during peak after-work or bar traffic times. Anything else was frustrating to outright unusable.