[908B64B197]

> Uber broke the back of your local city's taxi medallion scheme.

Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).

The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.

And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648

[c22]

Uber is just a different rent seeker, though. Over time the situation will likely just keep getting worse until it is as bad as the system it is replacing (many things about the ride-sharing ecosystem are already not great...)

While it's always nice to see a broken rent-seeking system in our world become eroded we should not laude the transfer to another fiat regency.

[isoskeles]

Rent-seeking means, roughly, trying to extract wealth without creating any wealth.

Creating and maintaining software that connects a person with a device to a driver with a device and routes them from point A (driver) => A' (person) => B (destination) isn't some trivial nothing that you can just rent-seek into existence. I believe 'wealth' was added to the economy that did not previously exist when people had to deal with hailing cab drivers, not have a map of their route, and not know an approximation of their fare ahead of time.

[908B64B197]

And payment processing.

Remember the sign on cabs that said they accept all major cards, only to find out the "card reader doesn't work?".

[omginternets]

>Remember the sign on cabs that said they accept all major cards, only to find out the "card reader doesn't work?".

Do I?! It's still commonplace! I have lost every ounce of sympathy I ever held for taxi drivers.

[PoignardAzur]

Even if we accept that claim, at least Uber has to compete with other VTC apps, which limits its rent-extracting capacity.

[portpecos]

By that statement, you can claim TaskRabbit and the like are also rent-seekers.

[c22]

Yes.

[lucideer]

Sounds like the old system was pretty bad, but also sounds like you're looking at Uber through extremely rose-tinted lenses.

> a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air

In what way is Uber not a rent-seeker taking advantage of often poor new immigrants?

The fact that the old system was so poor just lowers our standards for anything that may seek to replace it, but that's no reason to throw all critical thinking out the window.

--

Europe is a really good example to look at. Uber entered the market in most (all) European countries, but they simply couldn't compete with what already existed. (speaking only of Uber taxis; Uber Eats is doing fine in Europe)

[908B64B197]

> In what way is Uber not a rent-seeker taking advantage of often poor new immigrants?

Doesn't trap them.

Used cars are a liquid market (with a lot of transactions) with well established pricing. It's easy to buy and sell at the blue book's price and get cheap financing. This makes it easy to get into Ubering and out of it, as at any point you know exactly how much money the car is still worth.

Compare that to a taxi medallion, often financed through "alternate means" (no banks will touch them), completely opaque pricing (there's no market place, transactions are often done privately) and at the mercy of regulators (tomorrow the city council might create 10x the current amount of medallions out of thin air, thus crushing the price of existing ones).

[eropple]

If it's so cheap and easy to enter and exit, why is Uber also in the (predatory) leasing game?

[kmeisthax]

I'm not saying the old system was any better, I'm just saying that the winners of the tech industry were decided not just by what we traditionally think of as "disruption" (building a better mouse-trap) but also political disruption (finding a way to avoid traditional liabilities).

Uber in particular is interesting, as it's a vastly superior service built by somehow even more morally deficient individuals.

[cccc4alll]

Uber and Lyft reworked the medallion system into mobile apps.

Instead of a physical medallion bolted on the car, it's a verified driver ID and rating in Uber/Lyft app.

Uber/Lyft are now collecting what the medallion owners were collecting previously from the drivers.

The apps are more convenient for riders and there are more efficiencies in the routes. But, it's still the same system. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

[resonantjacket5]

that not a good analogy or apt at all. The medallion system was basically a local monopoly or like a guild that only allowed themselves to say make candles in the city. It really didn't make any sense whether with uber or not why the cities should be restricting or handing out the medallions in the first place.

Sure perhaps there could have been a national taxi license like how truck drivers receive it if one is talking about safety and other regulations but per city never made any sense beyond rent-seeking by both the city and the taxi companies