| Well, as a brazilian, his statement sounded very true to me. I'll try no to generalize as much as he did and tell the story from our perspective. Taxi drivers and politicians in Brazil are fighting Uber because they are losing slices of a pie that is deeply corrupted. A single person (most of them are politicians or friends with city councilmen) hold hundreds of Taxi Plates and "rent" them to ordinary drivers that obviously can't have their own plates because they're not fairly distributed and even if they were, would be prohibitively expensive. So these ordinary drivers start their working days owing R$200 to the plate holders, resulting in a service that has the customer safety, comfort, etc as the last priority. We do have laws and regulations but it'd be naive to think they benefit the passengers. One of them requires the cars to be inspected every six months, which would be a nice thing, except these inspections are only another way for the abovementioned politicians/government have more money to be diverted - some cars are ridiculously filthy and poor maintained. When Uber arrived last year it was indeed a disruption: polite drivers, well maintained cars, fair service. The so called inspections happen in real time through in app reviews by the people who are supposed to be protected after all - the passengers. As the only city councillor to vote in favor of Uber in Sao Paulo well said: "it was a massacre", corruption is so evidently high that not even a discussion took place about how the things Uber does right could be incorporated into the existing Taxi ecosystem. And pg's statement fits right in: politicians fought so ferociously to ban Uber (faster than many other agendas that are crucial to Brazil) that it becomes a picture of how corrupt they are. To complete, I think that services that try to disrupt existing services are good to take us to the opposite side of a sine wave - they come to draw our attention of to things we were probably overlooking. Honest cities and politicians will take the opportunity to bring the good things into discussion, corrupt ones will ferociously try to suppress it. Although a disproportional comparison, I remember when I visited one of the post offices in my city as a kindergarten student in the late 90s - the manager that was taking us through the guided visit was very anxious of how emails were driving the telegram usage down. |