[stormbrew]

Something rather big has changed since the regulations were put into place (sometimes fairly recently, my city didn't cap taxi plates until the mid-90s). It used to be most taxis were gotten by hailing, and some by phoning. Neither allowed you to verify anything about the cab that eventually picked you up. Apps change this greatly, and now when I ask for an Uber I have reason more reason to trust that the person picking me up is an Uber driver, and has met the standards they established and I can verify in some way, than I ever did that the cabbie who picked me up is the one I called, or that they're a legally sanctioned taxi if I hailed it.

This change is glossed over in this discussion a lot, but it is the single most important distinction between the old and new systems, and it definitely should reduce the barrier to entry when it comes to regulatory reasons.

I'm absolutely in favour of maintaining extremely strict controls over vehicles that can pick people up off the street with no prior arrangement. Loosening that is a bad idea, and it's not really at issue in the current debate.

[Qworg]

Certainly, but Uber has Uber-controlled protections (however they're determined). It certainly appears as "vehicles that can pick people up off the street with no prior arrangement". I'm not advocating for a return to what was, I'm advocating for a reasonable set of protections in this brave new world that aren't controlled by the company. The company has no compulsion to maintain any protections beyond the minimum required to maintain profitability.

[stormbrew]

Profitability in their case does include a requirement of an expectation of safety (one that in my experience exceeds the expectation of safety I can expect with city-approved taxi services, incidentally). I am not, in general, a fan of appeals to the invisible hand (I fit somewhere on the socialist end of things, to be honest), but the truth is that the capitalism of uber is an improvement on the quasifeudalism of taxi oligopolies.

And no, it does not appear as that at all. The prior arrangement may only be minutes before, but it includes knowing the name, license plate, and location of the person who's picking you up, all of which can be verified before getting in the car. This is categorically different from a taxi hail. It baffles me that someone could assert they're the same.