So the VC's might lose money. But if the central bank is aiming for a bigger picture, Uber and Lyft have been great improvements on the market/society/efficiency overall. A car picks me up in 1-2 minutes, instead of the 10 minutes a taxi used to take. And it actually comes - taxis in SF have always been unreliable.
And instead of most cabs driving around aimlessly empty half the time burning fossil fuels, now you have the majority of Uber cars carrying at least 1 customer (sometimes 2 or 3 with UberPool/Lyft Line) most of the time.
All that's really happened is that Uber side stepped some of your shitty laws. The efficiency gains, etc is all bullshit, not much has changed here in the UK apart from now you can use an app rather than a phone call. They turn up a minute or two quicker, wow. Uber are subsidising our rides a bit at the moment so it's like 20% cheaper for now. I hear prices go up after a year or two.
As for taxis during peak time, rich people can now pay more for priority pickups with surge pricing. That's not a plus for society, it's a plus for rich people.
In the US, I could always make a phone call asking for a taxi. They would tell me it'll arrive in 90 minutes, and the odds were 50:50 it would never arrive at all. That's not because of any shitty law, that's just gross incompetence in incenting their drivers.
Not only rich people but poor people who are really in a hurry. If you're suddenly about to be late for work, it's probably better to pay surge pricing than get fired. Of course it's not entirely fair since a rich person can afford to treat more trips as important than a poor person, but it's still better than the traditional system which is a gamble and ignores priorities of riders.
But don't you know, if you make things easier for rich people, the benefits trickle down. Or is the argument currently that people who can't afford the inflated prices don't deserve transport? Not sure.
There's also the basic observation that many big companies that provide valuable products and services pay rich people lots of money to run them or compensate them for their financial help. Would there be an Uber at all without anyone getting rich off it?
Another observation - when we need a doctor or a lawyer, we find their contributions to us to be worth so much we'll pay them more than we pay a cleaner. After all, we could do the cleaning ourselves if we had to but the barrier to start operating on ourselves or writing our own contracts is higher and those rich people have invested work in overcoming that barrier so they could provide those services to people who can't.
Isn't that basically what you'd expect with a progressive tax system? Paying taxes is not the only way to contribute to society -- almost all the money people earn do to some extent, through taxes, and consumption, and investments, etc. Which contributes more I don't know. That's why I was hoping for a citation.
To your second point, there is evidence that CEO performance is negatively related to their pay: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1572085. Measuring competence is difficult, wealth is a appealing proxy but maybe not that reliable.
It's been the other way for me. Uber/Lyft says a car is two minutes away, but it takes 5-10 between DC traffic and driver confusion. It's refreshing to just hop into the can that's waiting on the corner (cabs in DC are pretty readily available).
The only reason I don't use taxis is because I love paying $1-5 to commute across DC in an Uber/Lyft.
> A car picks me up in 1-2 minutes, instead of the 10 minutes a taxi used to take.
The Phoenix metro area is quite spread out. Even so, I averaged about 7 minutes to my passengers' pickup location. This included the time it took to enter the address into my phone's navigation software. Sometimes I'd arrive seconds after the passenger hung up the phone with our dispatchers.
The taxi company's latest version of its dispatching software has all the latest features, but these were not available in 2004 or in 2008, when the old computer hardware was deployed.
> And it actually comes - taxis in SF have always been unreliable.
The cab company I drove for wasn't the cheapest company in town, but we had a reputation for being reliable. The other big companies were okay too, if you weren't in an outlying area. One time a passenger told me how he'd called a random company in the phone book. They said he was too far out of that small cab company's usual area, and to just call the company I drove for.
> And instead of most cabs driving around aimlessly empty half the time burning fossil fuels,
Where does this idea come from? The only times I was empty was in slow period during the middle of the night.
The cab company I drove for bought its first Prius in 2004. Sometime in 2013 or 2014 they retired the rest of the Crown Victorias (old police cruisers), switching the fleet to a 70/30 blend of Priuses and Minivans.
The fleet was very well maintained. The vehicles were cleaned regularly, and repaired as needed. An extensive rejeuvination was performed at mid-life, which is around 200,000 miles. The cabs were looked at very carefully at 400,000 miles - most of them were sent to the boneyard at this point. The owner-operator I drove for took very good care of her cab - it probably made it to 500,000 miles, which is the state-mandated retirement age for taxis. Replacing the battery pack twice, fixing a head gasket, and replacing the original engine with a recycled engine was cheaper than buying a new cab.
The upstarts' unfortunate drivers don't have access to economies of scale for taking care of their vehicles.
Throwing cars away at 200,000 miles [1] is much more "carbon-intensive" than maintaining them for 400,000+ miles.
I appreciate that you're a good and honest cab driver. My experience with cabs tells me that people such as yourself are actually quite rare, and things that are very common:
1. Long wait times for adhoc pickup requests.
2. Taking questionable / long routes to things.
3. Making it difficult to pay with a credit card and expecting a tip no matter what.
4. No real recourse against bad drivers. Have a complaint? Who cares!
So the VC's might lose money. But if the central bank is aiming for a bigger picture, Uber and Lyft have been great improvements on the market/society/efficiency overall. A car picks me up in 1-2 minutes, instead of the 10 minutes a taxi used to take. And it actually comes - taxis in SF have always been unreliable.
And instead of most cabs driving around aimlessly empty half the time burning fossil fuels, now you have the majority of Uber cars carrying at least 1 customer (sometimes 2 or 3 with UberPool/Lyft Line) most of the time.