Consumers did not benefit in the long term if Uber nuked their local taxi industry and wrecked the efficiency of their local bus service before suddenly ceasing operations.
In my city (Toronto) taxis actually upped their game in response to Uber/Lyft, though not before fighting it tooth and nail. Before, you'd often get an ancient cab that the driver was (illegally) smoking in before you arrived and would often (illegally) refuse shorter trips. Half the time, the the electronic payment machines were "broken" and you'd get drivers threatening you if after arriving at your destination you refuse to go to a bank with the meter still running.
In most of North America, the taxi industry is notoriously corrupt and has been that way to protect their medallion systems. While I do feel for some individual cab ower/operators, I don't feel bad for the industry as a whole despite Uber being a horrible company.
Horrible things about cabs in Chicago (I literally haven't taken a single one since I started using Uber so idk if some of these got any better)
- Drivers always claimed the credit card reader wasn't working and tried to force payment in cash - the card reader was always just clearly turned off and they would slap it pretending to try to get it to work
- Drivers randomly deciding to charge 1.5x or 2x based on the ride going outside some made-up "zone"
- Drivers all crowding around bars blocking the street and sometimes getting into fistfights over their positioning in front of the bar (this doesn't happen anymore since Uber)
- Most of the cabs had absolutely disgusting interiors
I do agree that Uber's whole pricing competitiveness is a VC-funded greater-fool scheme, but the expectations of service levels in the ride hailing have been greatly improved.
Interesting comment about Chicago. My memories of cabs in San Francisco were always pleasant enough if expensive.
Some older friends mentioned that before Dianne Feinstain was mayor you had unlicensed gypsy cabs that would shuttle random groups for a buck or two each.
I don't feel very bad for any taxi medallion owners who were exploitive, as I've heard some have been, nor for officials who let medallions become capital assets, but at least they were playing within the current local regulations. (And, even within the worst taxi medallion systems I've heard of, you'd occasionally hear of a driver who'd been saving up for a medallion, which they saw as their ticket to the American Dream, so they could keep more money from their fares.)
Then Uber comes in, knowingly ignores regulations everyone else played by, spews "sharing" nonsense, pricedumps on fares, temporarily attracts drivers and gets many hooked on loans for the recent-year cars Uber demanded, uses money and popularity of pricedumping rates to lobby politicians for official acceptance, then IPOs to keep the scheme going (and so some people can cash out).
People forget that is how Uber got into this business - they started skirting medallions (which was an artificial market in the first place) by telling regulators that these drivers were headed in a particular direction and just picked up a fare.
Uber is absolutely a scummy company, but the taxi industry was/is a scummy industry. Google "taxi corruption" and you can find many, many instances of politicians being bribed to maintain the medallion systems.
In Washington DC, there were multiple cases of taxi companies bribing politicians to introduce a medallion system. Even when many of them were caught in stings, they still kept trying (with "good" reason, many of them would become multimillionaires overnight if it passed).
Uber was so successful because we consumers had little choice, though the ride subsidies were definitely helpful.
NYC had the same problems. Plus drivers who didn't speak English (or pretended not to), didn't know the city, or purposely took you on long, roundabout routes to collect a higher fare. Oh, and they were usually distracted. It was not uncommon for the driver to be talking to family/friends on the phone for the entire ride, or even watching television while driving (I reported the television driver to the Taxi & Limousine Commission, but I have no idea what the outcome was.)
Pure anecdata, but taxi services are far better today than before Uber and Lyft took off.
I've noticed in particular that prices to Chicago ORD are lower (from the suburbs) and in Miami cabs will actually take credit cards now and show up when you call them.
I'm all for ragging on companies that skirt regulation, but the regulation was 50/50 good for consumers and straight up protectionism for the cabs.
On the other hand it surely inspired a round of modernization in many local taxi industries that would not have happened without. But I'm with you, I think that the risk of a dump, destroy, disappear sequence outweighs those benefits.
In the earliest days of Uber, the very large city I live in had mostly taxi services with no online support beyond a phone number. The most tech-savvy service offered a (not actually quite) real time map, but you just used it to guess where to go flag down a cab.
At this point, every major taxi company has a sleek Uber-style call-a-cab app, and most of them work great. Fare prediction has also become common, if not actually a guarantee, and in-app fare payment has mostly killed hearing "the credit card reader is broken" after a ride. (Which was already illegal but omnipresent, so competition solved the problem where regulation failed completely.)
Of course, this wasn't a city with medallions, so Uber couldn't just outcompete taxis by dodging regulation. I'm not sure how NYC et al have changed, since no amount of modernization could fix that problem.
There used to be a phone number, and the guy would tell you to wait an hour and a half, after which the cab probably never showed up. I used to drive airport shuttles (dispatched by VHF and pager!) and we sometimes rescued people who had been completely screwed over.
Has Uber wrecked local bus services anywhere? I imagine it cut into their revenues for a few years, but everywhere I've seen the major conflict was "taxis vs Uber", with bus services muddling along without changing anything.
Hm, this might be a city-size thing then. I can definitely picture mid-size cities with mediocre bus services looking to Uber as a reason not to invest.
I've mostly seen its effects in big cities (where public transit gets invested in regardless, and lots of people taking buses never moved to more-expensive Ubers), and small cities (where bussing was already atrocious, with no real plans for changing that).
I only have the data point from my major-ish city: Boston's public transit has been suffering from deferred maintenance, and from projects postponed. We're catching up on some deferred maintenance now, but there are daily failures. Uber comes up in conversations about that. Paraphrased typical examples: "Why should we spend all this money, when we can use Uber," "Public transit sucks; I just Uber", "We should let [worker-exploiting and unsustainable] Uber manage transit," etc.
It's not the competition, it's the congestion. The presence of a huge number of terrible TNC drivers double-parked makes it impossible to keep the bus on its timetable.
I saw some local initiatives floated where public transportation should "partner" with Uber... I was a bit surprised how willing folks were to support relying so much on a company that doesn't make money and their prospects are questionable.
Taxi industry was already nuked everywhere. That's why Uber grew to such extent. Even drivers around here were happy, because they could work for Uber paying a smaller share than they paid to work with their own cars as a taxi.
Now we have a proven market, more competitive taxi industries, and even some competition. We'll be in much better shape if Uber go away than we were before it.
Uber is by no means dumping services below the cost to provide them. Boston's UberX is $0.36/minute + $0.88/mile (plus fees and flag-drop costs). That's well in excess of the marginal cost of providing the transportation.
(I'm an UBER bear and think their shares are comically over-valued. I also think that they're genuinely and sustainably profitable in their core business operation.)
Riding for 50% off Uber and 40% off Lyft, capped at 10 rides week, really was nice. It almost approached public transit prices in some areas of Seattle.
I am surprised that somebody actually noticed this (I was going to but you beat me to it. Normally we hear only about the exploited drivers or unpaid taxes, but Uber has done so much more for people around the world. Those who like it get a better service than governments provide, those who don't have no obligation to pay for it.
My second (or first, considering the first was yours) point is Uber wouldn't be doing so bad (financially) if it didn't face government obstruction. Tesla, on the other hand, siphoned billions in taxpayer monies and isn't doing better.
Uber has a service that can be sold for more than it costs to provide. Tesla does not.
I am not saying Uber will outlast Tesla. But if neither company sucked on the government teat, Uber would win.