Before becoming mayor, de Blasio lived here in Park Slope. I guess he never used these yellow cabs he’s so interested in preserving because getting one to go to Brooklyn from Manhattan is fucking impossible.
Seriously, everything about yellow cab service is worse. Why don’t they buy back the medallions instead?
So true, my girlfriend had a driver pull his emergency brake then claim his brakes "didn't work" and she had to get out, because he didn't want to drive to Brooklyn. I have 0 sympathy for yellow cabs, Uber and Lyft have raised the bar. If cabs want to compete they need to completely rethink their experience.
Cab driving is a low skill job, which is why it's so important that proper competition can exist. My first ever Uber driver had water bottles and gum and even throw pillows and a blanket in the back. He was in a suit. He was really polite and all that. Because he's looking for 5 star rankings.
Dump all taxi drivers into the same market as this guy and they'll have to improve or be pushed out of business when they get too many "1 star: tried to defraud me" reviews.
Maybe we need an app that lets us photograph the legally mandated ID card so we can collectively leave reviews. But even then it's too late. You're already in the cab.
Yeah, I think discussions like this one tend to focus on price, which is certainly one of the benefits Uber and Lyft bring to the table, but certainly not the only one.
I typically travel for business, so I don't care about the price so much. Uber/Lyft are great because they provide a much better experience.
I hate cabs because of all the friction: rude drivers imposing their personal preferences upon me, often illegally.
The biggest improvement Uber introduced is accountability for drivers. Efficiency improved too, and reduced the price. But if you look at the comments here and in TFA, a lot of them are about service quality. Most of the worst offenses, like refusing to accept credit cards, are illegal. But the city has done a terrible job of enforcing it, so cab service has been terrible for decades.
Then came Uber and Lyft and finally brought service that people love. So the city tries to take them down. Just like SF is harassing successful companies with bizarre new rules and regulations, such as banning cafeterias.
Already having a 'universal' app that works across 'all' the markets you visit is surely part of the experience as well.
It would really be nice if there were a standard API and naming system so that a global hierarchical registration system could be used by any application speaking that standard to provide the functionality presently provided by Lyft and Uber.
> Cab driving is a low skill job, which is why it's so important that proper competition can exist. My first ever Uber driver had water bottles and gum and even throw pillows and a blanket in the back. He was in a suit. He was really polite and all that. Because he's looking for 5 star rankings.
I see the offers of water bottles and gum as expressions of desperation in the face of precarity: a 4.6 average will get you fired from Uber (https://therideshareguy.com/10-things-that-can-get-you-deact...). I want good service, which means a driver that does his job well, not a driver that makes me cringe because he feels pressured to humiliate himself in a performative display of over-the-top customer service.
I really wish they'd adopt a simple "did something go wrong? was something exceptionally awesome?" flow instead of a star rating.
4/5 stars in a movie is pretty great. 4/5 stars in an Uber is, for some nonsensical reason, abysmal. What's the point of having 1-3 at all at that point?
Additionally, one person's 5 star is another's 3 star. It should be the deviation from your typical ratings. If I give everyone 3s and I give someone a 2, that's less significant than if I regularly give everyone 5s and I give the person a 2. The second person likely messed up way more.
Moreover, they will ask you for the rating several days later if you don't take frequent rides and open the app again. Unless it was terrible, I probably don't remember the details.
> Cab driving is a low skill job, which is why it's so important that proper competition can exist. My first ever Uber driver had water bottles and gum and even throw pillows and a blanket in the back. He was in a suit. He was really polite and all that. Because he's looking for 5 star rankings.
He's doing that because a small amount of ratings, however fickle or unfair, can make or break his ability to make money while driving for Uber.
Haha, that's a good one. I had a guy take his seatbelt off, and try to tell me that the dinging I was hearing was an alarm about oil pressure. The only sympathy I have for the yellow cabs is that the city screwed them with those pricey medallions, the city should refund a substantial portion of the money.
I'm not so sure the city was selling them for that much, although I don't know the list price. The artificially limited supply was causing the secondary market to skyrocket. So the stories of $1m medallions were usually rich guys or corporations that already owned a bunch of medallions.
Most of the drivers out there don't own their own medallion, they just pay a lease fee to the medallion owner.
Why should the city buy them back? They sold the assets, they have no obligation to re-purchase them. Investment risk is in the hands of those people (usually companies) who purchase them. Besides, at what price would they even buy them back at? They're certainly not worth the price that some people pay for them (last I checked, about $1M each).
Because the city sold them on the basis that they offered an exclusive right to pick up street hails in manhattan. Uber, et al, have essentially eliminated that exclusivity.
They sure did. I used to have three numbers of black car services on my phone, and if I couldn't get a cab, which was common in my neighborhood, and I needed a ride badly enough to pay 2-3x what a yellow would cost, I'd call those numbers one by one, until one of 'em had a driver available. If I was in manhattan, I'd pretty much never call a car, because it was easier to street hail a yellow, usually.
People who bought million dollar homes and then saw them plunge in value to $300k didn't commit mass suicide, so why would you assume it would happen in this case?
>CURRENT OWNERSHIP: 17 percent of medallions are owned by cab fleets; 54 percent are owned by leasing agents, who delegate management to fleets; and 29 percent are owned by independent drivers.
I think 29%, 12,187 * .29 ~ 3500 cab drivers, is not insignificant numbers. I don't know though anyone who owns their own medallions -- a few I knew worked for a company that leased their medallions and they paid something like $1000 per week.
Risk is inherent in any investment. If someone put their life savings into Bitcoin while it was at $20k should b they be compensated by the government? A taxi medallion is like any other investment: its price is subject to fluctuation and if someone took that risk of investing in it the consequences are on them.
We live in a free market, they're free to find work elsewhere. Not only that but these cabbies have the unbelievable fortune of being able to unload these medallions through declaring chapter 7/chapter 13 bankruptcy.
There are so many avenues for them to relieve themselves from this burden and better their circumstances that you'd be hard-pressed to take any claims of mass-suicide seriously.
Suppose that your state government embarks on a program of land reform. And suppose that they institute new/raise existing taxes/restrictions, that cause the value of your Silicon Valley home to go from ~2.2m to something reasonable, like ~200k.
Most economists are in agreement that dramatically increasing the cost of owning property (And, conversely, lowering the market value of existing properties) is one of the answers to the current housing crisis. Once the rules are changed, the free market can figure things out going forward!
Are you going to cheer this process on? It will, after all, greatly improve life for people who don't have millions of dollars to pour into housing.
> We live in a free market, they're free to find work elsewhere.
except taxis aren't currently a free market, and definitely weren't when many of those medallions were originally purchased. the government shouldn't have been mucking with the market, but it did.
They don't buy them in cash, they take out a loan to purchase the medallions. They have the option to declare bankruptcy, default on their loan, or if they're from another country, move out of the United States. In any case, it wouldn't make sense to bail out all these medallion owners, because essentially the owners are banks.
How many individual drivers even own medallions? I was under the impression most of the time cab companies own them and drivers take the cars out from a pool.
They can take responsibility for their actions like everybody else, and that includes having the advantage that nobody else in the history of debtors has ever had -- the ability to declare bankruptcy and survive with their hide intact.
They sold the medallions based on a guarantee that they would enforce a monopoly around those medallions. Then they didn't enforce that monopoly. Sounds like the city is in the wrong.
The medallions are only for street hails. Uber does not accept street hails, they just made another way of hiring a car convenient enough to replace a significant portion of street hails. The medallion owners invested in something that became less valuable because of technology (cellphones becoming ubiquitous). They have no one to blame except for themselves.
The city would never buy the medallions back, because the price was based on an assumption of monopoly- they are worth much less now with the ubiquity of Uber and Lyft.
The cabbies have gotten the short end of the stick though.
Manhattan is plagued with Uber cars. They outnumber yellow cabs 5:1. At this point it is a serious public safety issue if an evacuation is ever necessary. Your problem can be addressed with incentives for more borough cabs.
Seriously, everything about yellow cab service is worse. Why don’t they buy back the medallions instead?