[uwuhn]

As someone who uses Uber and Lyft on a daily basis, and has done so for the past three years, their existence has measurably made my life better. Taxis were never an option due to a combination of cost, time, and inconvenience.

[mdorazio]

While I agree, it's important to note that the reason for all three of those improvements is billions in subsidies + exploited drivers. If Uber rides were not subsidized, they actually followed employment and licensing laws, and drivers actually accounted for their total expenses properly, the cost we be pretty close to what taxis charge, number of available drivers would decrease, and wait times would increase. The things you and I like about Uber a direct result of unsustainable economics.

[sokoloff]

I talk to most of my Uber drivers and almost always ask about the economics. Most of them seem to have a good grasp on the fundamentals and fall into one of two categories: subsidizing the car they already have and supplementing income or driving full-time in a car dedicated to ride-sharing. In the first case, they’re pretty obviously easily covering the marginal costs. In the second case, I can’t know, but they should able to evaluate it on their own pretty easily, just like the local snowplow operator.

I don’t buy the narrative that the company is built on the backs of a bunch of exploited drivers (assuming you believe taxi drivers are not exploited; if you believe they are as well, that’s probably a different argument than the one I’m refuting).

[adventured]

> it's important to note that the reason for all three of those improvements is billions in subsidies + exploited drivers

First, they're not exploited drivers. You could claim any worker is exploited at any and all times. It's not a statement with any grounding to it in this case. They are not being held hostage by Uber, this is the best labor market in two decades. You could claim all workers at every big and small company are all universally exploited. The person making $15 / hour should be making $30; the person making $30 / hour should be making $60.

Second, almost every major tech company you can name exists due to initial venture capital or investor subsidies (including Apple, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Workday, etc). Amazon bled a lot of red ink before they turned seriously profitable (not nearly so much as Uber granted), because they were investing massively to achieve scale. It was venture capital and investor money broadly that subsidized that build out and enabled them to have low prices. So what? It was widely claimed for 20 years that they couldn't generate a substantial profit, and now they are thanks to opportunities they grabbed hold of (perhaps Uber Eats will be that for Uber, or any number of other things).

[cm2012]

I'll second that - it was literally life changing for me.

Plus, drunk driving deaths are down like 30% nationwide. Tens of thousands of lives saved.

[joeblow9999]

How is this possibly downvoted? I suspect only a political agenda could be the cause but I'm willing to hear otherwise.

[barry-cotter]

Here’s your political agenda.

In the entire Anglophone and Francophone world the taxi industry was awful. In the US they were and continue to be racist. They lied about availability and scheduling and they did it for decades. Many people on this website are familiar with the area that used to have the worst taxi service anywhere in the US, San Francisco. Taxi service in NYC existed in large parts of the city in theory but good luck getting a taxi driver to follow the law and actually take you there. And everywhere, absolutely everywhere, the taxi regulator was useless, completely captured by the taxi companies. These awful taxi companies lobbied to keep supply artificially low and prices high, for decades. In France the taxi drivers attacked Uber drivers. Uber’s civil disobedience was completely justified if it broke taxi monopolies.

In countries where taxi service was good and regulators not completely captured Uber has not done much. I’m aware of only one country, Japan.

Fuck the entire taxi industry, with their exploitation of tourists, four hours of saying someone will pick you up in half an hour, racism, tax evasion and broken credit card machines.

That’s the political agenda that supports Uber.

[Slartie]

> I’m aware of only one country, Japan.

Germany is one of those, too. We have fairly good taxi services in any larger city, at least as far as I've seen as a user in the last 15 years. They usually have clean cars, are there on time (or waiting in taxi queues in front of public spots) and take you to your destination without major detours. I've never encountered any case (visible to me as the customer) of tax evasion or trickery with manipulated meters, so I guess correct metering is properly enforced by the regulators. And, very important: they also had apps for summoning them spontaneously and tracking their approach and optionally paying them relatively quickly after smartphones became ubiquitous and had those in widespread use by drivers, either provided by private non-taxi-related corporations (like MyTaxi) or by conglomerates of taxi companies that bound together to develop an app.

But I had multiple opportunities to "enjoy" taxi services of the classic kind in the US, specifically San Francisco and Miami, before and after Uber was a thing. And I definitely see quite a difference to the level of service I enjoyed back home, especially in the "before" time. I even think that this difference wasn't present in the minds of the Uber management - they probably thought that any taxi service in the world was generally as bad as the one in San Francisco and was thus in need of "disruption", and it seemed as if it took a while for them to notice that this wasn't the case, and to realize that people in places of the world with fairly well-working taxi networks might have much less understanding for their "civil disobedience", as you call it.