[neilv]

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).

[hdpq]

>spews "sharing" nonsense

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.

[hylaride]

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.