Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix

"It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you."

You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?

> You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?

For the most part, they were the same drivers I think

I imagine most traditional taxi drivers converted into Uber and Lyft drivers. Unique regulatory circumstances in places like NYC might have delayed that process some of course (eg trying to pay off a medallion).

Uber and Lyft drivers are taxi drivers.

I've been in plenty of Uber & Lyft rides in what were literally taxis.

It's funny how "exploit workers worse (medallions) and worse (rideshares) until we can fully cut them out" has played out in such a perfect microcosm, and yet somehow people here don't seem to register that it was never the workers' own fault.

Taxis didn't lose because rideshares played the game better, they lost because rideshare companies used investor money to leapfrog their apps, ignored actual commercial transport regulations that would have made them DOA, and then exploited workers by claiming they weren't even employees, all so they could artificially undercut taxis to kill them off and capture the market before enshittifying.

Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place. Uber and Lyft created a superior product that people wanted. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, the buyers preferred something that was more convenient.

There was never a situation where uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.

> Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place.

This shows just how badly behind they were. All the large cab companies have had apps for years. No one knows about them.

Here's YellowCab's: https://rideyellow.com/app/

> uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.

Are you under the impression that most cabs are/ were independent? That wasn't the case since at latest the 1980s. Having a radio dispatcher is a huge necessity as a cab driver.

Taxi drivers were already not employees, they were exploited contractors for the taxi companies.

And do you not remember what using Yellow Cab was like in the Bay? It was like being kidnapped. They'd pretend their credit card reader was broken and forcibly drive you to an ATM to pay them.

When I first moved here I went to EPA Ikea, afterwards tried to get home via taxi, and literally couldn't because there was a game at Stanford that was more profitable so they just refused to pick me up for hours. I had to call my manager and ask him to get me. (…Which he couldn't because he was drinking, so I had to walk to the Four Seasons and use the car service.)

Taxis lost at least partly because the workers were assholes. Refusing to take credit card payments (the card reader is "broken") or not picking up members of certain ethnic groups or not driving to certain areas. Sure some cabbies were nice, honest people with good customer service skills but those were the exception in many cities.

There was nothing stopping taxi companies from raising investor capital to build better apps and back end technology infrastructure. They were just lazy and incompetent.

I think you have to go market by market to make that statement. In NYC, for example, it was explicitly illegal for yellow cabs to accept radio/pickup calls, which was the domain of the livery cabs (black cars). The tradeoff was that only yellow cabs could do street hails. That worked for everybody for years - yellow cabs did a volume business, livery cabs were for outer boros or luxury/business travel and would sneakily try to pick up street hails.

In those days if you needed a car to take you someplace, aside from the outer boro examples, it was always faster to get a yellow cab. The car services could maybe get there in 45 minutes if you were lucky - big companies would often have deals with car service companies to have a few cars stationed at their buildings for peak times, so execs didn't have to wait for a car.

The yellow cab operators were essentially all independent - many rented their medallion/vehicle, either from a colleague or an agency, but they worked their own schedules and their own instincts on where to be picking up fares at given times.

No one expected something like uber - what is essentially a street hail masquerading as a livery cab. This basically destroyed yellow cabs and the traditional livery cab companies, but some of it is attributable to the VC spend, lowering prices (yellow cab fares are set by the city, livery cab fares are market-regulated) and incentivizing drivers. They made it so lucrative to drive an uber that you had thousands of new uber drivers on the road, or taxi drivers who stopped leasing their medallions and started driving uber.

At some point, though - the subsidies dried up, prices went up, and now its often faster to get a yellow cab than an uber/lyft. This is anecdata, but I take cabs a lot, and I've spoken with ~6 taxi drivers in the last year who either started with driving uber and shifted to driving a taxi, or went taxi-uber-taxi. Then I've had a lot more taxi drivers where they need passengers to put the destination into the driver's waze or google maps, even for simple things like intersections - I suspect they're uber drivers who became depedent on the in-app directions and native language interactions.

But the broader point I'm making is that in NYC, the drivers themselves were essentially unable to do anything about the changing market. The only power they had was to shift between the type of fares they were getting. And today when you order an uber, sometimes you get a yellow cab.

Drivers rarely owned the medallion. They leased the cab for 8-12 hours and drove it on behalf of the medallion owner.

> some cabbies were nice, honest people

Most were, in fact. You just remember the assholes a lot more.

What a stupid process. It bothers me that farmers rarely own the land too. We can't shake our tendency to let wealth turn us into tiny little kings that live off the rent. (not so tiny in the case of farms, but you get it).

Enshittifying? It's still better than taxis ever were and competition between providers is preventing that from regressing.