The taxi situation in SF is so miserable. For example, right now and for the past week or so, almost every cab in SF is telling their riders that their credit card machine is broken. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/us/22bctaxi.html Basically, they aren't happy that they have to pay credit card fees -- well sorry, nobody does, but that's a cost of doing business.
> For example, right now and for the past week or so, almost every cab in SF is telling their riders that their credit card machine is broken.
"Thanks for the free ride!" - At least in Chicago, it's a part of the passenger "bill of rights" that you are able to pay by credit card. They've pulled the same thing on me a few times and, assuming I'm not in a rush, I've offered to ride with the meter turned off to the closest ATM...then the machine suddenly works.
Same experience. They always back down. I would never in a million years offer to ride to a nearby ATM. They can do card-not-present auth with their dispatchers even if "their machine is broken".
Not to continue an old argument, but to continue an old argument, these are the good medallioned guys who are regulated by the state so that they can't scam you. This is supposed to provide an advantage over e.g. Ubercab, where the perils of unregulated capitalism would allow a driver to cheat you. But they still try to scam you and their medallion is not going to get yanked for it. Meanwhile, Uber solves this technologically: they can't run payment scams because the system doesn't trust drivers with any part of the payment flow aside from hitting "The Ride Is Over."
* Regulations need to catch up to Uber, fast. Uber is good.
* Cabs should be regulated, for public safety and consumer protection. They're a unique intersection of low-barrier-to-entry, vulnerable-consumer, and serious externalities.
* Cabs are not well regulated now.
* I am ambivalent about business plans premised on "everyone recognizes that reg X is broken, so we'll force the issue by ignoring the reg and going right to market". If Uber gets to, maybe so do investment banks.
Until there's evidence of abuse, why do "regulations need to catch up to Uber, fast"? (Unless by 'catch up to' you mean 'legalize unconditionally'.)
Perhaps smartphone-dispatching, sticky reputations, and non-cash payments solve all the safety and 'consumer protection' issues better than the corrupt, captured, regulatory-commission system. That regulatory system, despite decades (or centuries!) of head-start, has resulted in a situation where "cabs are not well regulated now".
Until there's evidence of abuse, why do "regulations need to catch up to Uber, fast"?
The ideal of course is regulators are proactive in regulating, rather than waiting for the horse to bolt before deciding the door should be kept closed.
The Ubercab situation is a strong signal to regulators that the landscape is changing and they should be considering changes.
The ideal of course is regulators are proactive in regulating, rather than waiting for the horse to bolt before deciding the door should be kept closed.
This is a good idea in the case of low probability, high impact events. For example, counterparty contagion in the financial system or oil spills.
But in the case of low impact events, it's pointless. Take a few obvious precautions (e.g., track all the drivers) but otherwise just wait for problems to arise before fixing them.
The risk of an unregulated system is very low - a few consumers get scammed out of $12. The risk of regulation is very high - many consumers may be deprived of a considerable consumer surplus (i.e., they may not get a ride at all, or may be forced to overpay for a regulated cab).
Well, ignoring that you've pointed to an example of a licensed cab driver, as that's "not the point being made here", there really isn't a point to be made.
What you've pointed to is a risk of allowing people to interact, and really has very little (if any) to do with cab regulation. Being murdered is a risk anytime you're around other people; its just so remote that usually it is appropriately ignored.
Further, if there were an epidemic of cab-murders, which of course a single anecdote doesn't show, such that it made sense to worry about the risk of homicide, then the people calling cabs would be aware of this, and there would be market demand for a cab company that does full background checks, offers life-insurance policies, sends a second person to guard against malfeasance, etc. Of course, murder is illegal, so police would be looking for the perpetrators as well.
Even if for some reason a that didn't happen (say, people enjoy being murdered during their cab ride) and we wanted to prevent it anyway, the type of regulations that'd make sense would be things like background checks before issuing a license (which would need renewing routinely), which would apply to all cab operators, both new and renewing.
Keep in mind that the regulations that people actually object to are mostly of the form "we allow X cabs total in the city".
I am more worried about public safety than consumer protection personally. I know in my city there has been a lot of crime associated with our heavily policed taxi industry, the opportunity for these threats to both passengers and drivers exists with a business like Ubercabs as well.
You don't think a cabbie using Uber knows that there is an electronic record of them picking up a passenger? If anything, Uber is safer than yellow cabs.
But lets suppose this really were an issue. There is a simple solution: charge each taxi a flat $10k/year license fee (with no cap on the number of licenses issued). Use the proceeds to hire full time undercover taxi inspectors.
That gets you about 1 inspector for every 10 cabs. Assuming each inspector rides 10x/day (i.e. 5 hours/day riding, 30 min/ride), each taxi will be inspected every single day on average.
but most regulations are useless and serve only the bureaucrats who proposed them, and there is little scrutiny on the tens of thousands of pages in the federal register.
democracy is highly inefficient for this purpose. no one is going to elect obama to change EPA regulation 1.2.093 or whatever. so the only way to sunset a bad rule in practice is to incentivize flagrant public nullification.
I'm in Chicago as well, and I've had drivers give me a 'free' ride when I try to pay with a card. It's only happened a couple times, but both times they were quick trips less than $5. When I pulled my card out they would have some choice words telling me to get out of the cab...
Why should they be forced to subsidize your credit card fees? Do you understand that they are barely surviving living in a high cost area such as San Francisco? The city shouldn't be a place where only the rich tech billionaires can live. They're forced to save costs anyway they can because of the large income gap that they're suffering. Capitalism has stolen from the poor and elevated the rich. It's classic 21st century colonialism.
That's how it used to be here in Aus, but they finally fixed the law to give vendors the right to charge a surcharge for cards. Most vendors only do 2-3% (around the actual chard, though Amex is higher) but there are a few bad apples who go a bit higher.
The municipal transit authority just voted to allow cabs to raise fares by another 10c per unit (to 55c for 0.2 miles/3 minutes' wait time) and another 'temporary' 10c to accommodate higher fuel prices. SF now has the priciest taxis in the US. The regulatory board is completely the creature of the taxi operators.
There is a tremendous gap between the rich and the poor. Clearly, something needs to be done. Raising prices will help these tax drivers who are paid 100x less than the typical Silcon Valley CEO. San Francisco is clearly doing the right thing by intervening before costs of living gets out of hand for their taxi drivers.
I would take taxis more frequently if they were a) more affordable and b) more available. As things are, a ride home from downtown costs about $20, and getting a cab on the street is a non-starter in most of the city. Medallion holders are supposed to 'use it or lose it' and must drive unless they are disabled; most of them fulfill this requirement by driving one day a week and renting out their medallion for the other 6 days at a healthy profit. It is they who are going to derive most of the benefit from these cost increases rather than the drivers, most of whom pay exploitative taxi rental fees and are put on the street with no training of any kind and are prone to getting lost in SF's peculiar geography.
I don't see what your point is in comparing a taxi driver's income with that of a tech CEO. I'm not wealthy either, and now take cabs only in emergencies because the cost has become prohibitive. Maybe you should compare drivers' incomes with those of medallion holders and taxi company CEOs. In general I'm a pro-regulation, pro-governance kinda guy, but not when it comes to price controls. the taxi industry is the way it is because of a corrupt arrangement between incumbents and administrators.
Your "more available" point is so important to me that I'm willing to pay Uber prices for regular cabs if they can make that happen. I've used Taxi Magic and called in the past and never had much success in terms of reliability, and well, I'm not one for standing around for 15 minutes on a street like Market or Van Ness trying to flag down a cab. Which I have done in the past, and I'm tired of doing it. I want to give cab drivers my money, but apparently they don't want it.
About the only time I've found myself in a cab in a timely manner is with the taxi zones at SFO. That happens to be pretty much the only time I ever get a non-Uber ride too.
On one hand I don't feel bad for Uber because they knew exactly what they were getting into but the idealist part of me also wants to cheer them on. I'm absolutely tired of asshole cab drivers, dirty cabs, and no-shows multiple times per week. Thus loving Uber.
I think Travis enjoys living on the edge. One of his previous companies, Scour, was sued for $250 billion. (Source: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/travis-kalanick). I guess he fits pg's definition of "naughtiness"?
They're just the messengers. If the newspaper published an article saying "jrockway needs a ride from 123 Green St at 2PM", that's free speech. So why is it a problem if a website does it?
Anyway, I see a simple solution to San Francisco's laws: run the site out of Libya or something. Pretty sure there's nothing San Francisco can do about that, except start cracking down on the users (but oops, who aren't doing anything illegal).
Yes but local laws can supersede state ones on this. ie it can be legal in Modesto but illegal in SF.
SF Definition of a Dispatch Service:
Dispatch Service" shall mean any person, business, firm, partnership, association or corporation that receives communications from the public regarding taxi service for the purpose of forwarding such communications to motor vehicle for hire drivers, and shall include any owner, manager, employee, lessee and any agent of said service. "Dispatch Service" shall not include any service through which the public is able to communicate directly with Drivers, and shall not include any effort on the part of a Driver to market his or her services to the public.
"Taxi" shall mean a vehicle operated pursuant to a Taxi or Ramp Taxi Medallion that is legally authorized to pick up passengers within the City with or without prearrangement, of a distinctive color or colors and which is operated at rates per mile or upon a waiting-time basis, or both, as measured by a Taximeter and which is used for the transportation of passengers for hire over and along the public streets, not over a defined route but, as to the route and destination, in accordance with and under the direction of the passenger or person hiring such vehicle.
"as measured by a Taximeter", "for hire over and along the public streets"
Because TCP's are legal in SF, and Uber can prearrange trips in a legal fashion using them, and there's no special law that applies to Uber only, in theory Uber should be able to operate legally.
Technicalities like whether the trips are fully prearranged (pick-up AND drop-off) might come into play, but these are details they could fix.
IANAL, but from what I've seen, If ordering a TCP via the internet is legal, ordering a TCP via the internet using Uber is also legal.
Taxis are state-sanctioned cartels in many cities. The number of "licenses" (medallions) is capped to inflate the revenues of existing businesses. In San Francisco (where Uber's legal problems are), the quota is ~1,400, and there's a waiting list more than 10 years long to get a "license".
This cartel appears to be the product of a joint effort between the taxi corporations and the drivers union. I don't hear the cab firms arguing for greater competition or an increase in the number of taxis either.
seems like a great example of the line between "naughtiness" and "evil" being discussed yesterday in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2580458 ... if a law gets in the way of your innovative business plan, should you just ignore it?
There are certainly times when unjust laws should be ignored. However, when one ignores the law one should be prepared to suffer the consequences of his actions. Uber's CEO is clearly not prepared to suffer those consequences.
The immediate consequence is a trial, not necessarily a conviction, which may or may not follow. The CEO (and just as importantly, his backers) seem entirely prepared to run this risk.
One of the abiding virtues of due process is that it's public. In the event that a cartel captures a regulatory agency, and turns it against the people it's supposed to serve, a system of open justice will force them to fight for their odious privilege in full view of the press. The risk - for the cartel - is that the trial will backfire by spotlighting just how corrupt and abusive their underlying legal supports have become. Even if they do win in court, the victory my by Pyrrhic.
In the absence of a clear (and superior) alternative, the arguments that supported the initial regulatory capture may still carry some weight with an otherwise ambivalent public. In these cases, private acts of cartel-busting may be truly foolish. But in cases like Uber or Airbnb - where the public can not only see the alternative clearly, it can download it as a wildly useful app - it becomes exponentially harder to strangle genuine progress. Extreme and widespread dissatisfaction with the norm (which is very much the case with SF Taxi service) makes aggressive legal suppression even riskier - especially when cash-strapped states and municipalities can be convinced that the new market is big enough to substantially augment their tax bases.
None of this means that the overt cartel-busting approach to business development isn't risky as hell. It is. But timed correctly, and supported by the right technological breakthroughs, it can pay off spectacularly. If anyone deserves the entrepreneur-as-hero laurels, it's these guys.
I detect sarcasm, and I agree to the extent that the public debate on this matter is sorely lacking any analysis of why the laws in question exist. Both sides of the argument seem guilty of this.
"Public debate"? I pay a cabbie, s/he drives me, it's a private matter between the two of us. It's not the public's business to debate!
The horrific notion of criminalizing a consensual economic intercourse between two adults -- with prison penalties, at that -- isn't an issue of democratic politics, but of basic rights.
Oh get real Uvdiv. The idea of taxi licensing is that you can identify a cab on the street and get from A to B without any serious worries about being assaulted or held up for hundreds of dollars at the end of the journey. Somehow I doubt that if you ended up having to pay $250 for a short ride in someone's car that you'd just treat it as a regular business transaction instead of calling the police.
Addressing a problem by going to the opposite extreme is just foolish. There's a reason that most people wouldn't feel safe accepting a ride from a random stranger, and why children are taught not to do it from an early age. Hint: it's not fear of capitalism.
If it were about safety, they wouldn't be driving a hundred miles an hour down residential streets, and there wouldn't be a finite number of medallions.
Let's use another regulated field as an analogy: medicine. You have to receive extensive training and receive government certification in order to become a doctor. This is to protect your future patients against someone who knows nothing about medicine, which we can all agree is fair. Here's the difference between being a cab driver and a doctor: if you are qualified to be a doctor, you can be a doctor. But to be a cab driver, you have to buy an arbitrary license from the government of which there are only a finite number of. You could be the safest most wonderful driver in the world, but without that arbitrary piece of metal bolted to your car, it's illegal for you to drive anyone around.
Medallions are not about safety. They are a government subsidy for cab drivers.
"The idea of taxi licensing is that you can identify a cab on the street and get from A to B without any serious worries about..."
But that is not the idea of taxi "licensing" as it exists. It doesn't merely regulate taxi driving; it prohibits it altogether, outside of a protected group. It's not licensing, but cartel enforcement. Its aim isn't protecting the safety of the public, but protecting the business monopoly of the taxi industry.
Uber isn't prohibited from operating taxis because they're unsafe, uninsured, or unwilling to subject themselves to registration, inspection, insurance, background checks, or whatever "public safety" requires. They're banned simply because they are competition. And this has nothing to do with public safety!
When I say 'the idea of' I'm talking about the ideal, not the actuality. You can see from this thread that I have an overwhelmingly negative view of the actual implementation here in SF.
In Phnom Penh you can get a moped ride across town for under $1. Think they have to deal with his medallion nonsense? It just seems like we should be able to do as well as some Cambodian kids.
I think what could be interesting is to write a site/app that would allow people to order taxis with ease (using GPS, etc), but instead sell it to cab companies as a way of getting business, so essentially anyone can be as accessible as Uber. A bit like what E-Resistible did here in the UK.
As someone who occasionally has to order cabs from unusual and hard-to-describe-over-the-phone places, ordering with GPS would be a bloody godsend.
Most of the people on the end of taxi numbers dont even seem to have a map in front of them. If you can't give them a street address, they don't seem to comprehend that you're describing a real place, on the same planet as they are. The drivers naturally know where everything is instantly, the issue is persuading the phone operator to relay your directions to them.
TaxiMagic does exactly that. Apps for Android and iPhone, free to use if you pay cash, a fee to pay with CC thru the app. I use it for short trips in SF and Uber for longer trips. It always takes less time for the Ubermobile to show up than a taxi.
Travis kind of thrives on stepping over the line - his first big deal was P2P service Scour and he likes to tell everyone about how there was a half-trillion dollar judgement against them. I don't think he's likely to face anything like that with Uber!
'On the record' in legal terms means being under oath, eg during a deposition or when testifying in court. A comment like this could be offered as evidence, but the outlandish idea of spending 20,000 years in jail means it could just as easily be taken as a complaint about the unfairness of the charge.
Disruptive? Please. Uber is a driver service where you simply book it over the web. It's hardly disruptive, or much different than services already out there.
Downvotes but no reply? Could someone point out exactly what is disruptive about ubercab? Disruptive to me is Netflix. The cab industry could easily add a web-interface for booking cabs... and it's not going to be destroyed by uber. Which industry are they disrupting?
I've not up or down voted you but it's pretty obvious to me why you are being down-voted:
As you can see from the debate at the top of this page, it's disrupting the regulation of the cab industry which is about creating artificial scarcity of the cabs in order to keep the prices of rides inflated. (EDIT: actually the price of rides is regulated and would be the same regardless of how many cabs there were. It is actually to ensure daily revenues for the cabs remains high by ensuring optimum utilization)
From that perspective it is even more disruptive than Netflix because Netflix operates in a free-market environment. You could choose to rent your DVD's from Amazon or Blockbuster. With cabs in cities like SF you have no real direct alternative.
The cab industry could easily add a web-interface for booking cabs.
They could but they won't because they already have more potential customers standing on street corners wanting cabs then they can service (because, as already explained, the number of cabs is artificially restricted).
There is no benefit to the cab industry to innovate in any way (such as build an app) unless regulator steps in. Which is why a private player able to do this is so disruptive.
Sounds to me like you don't really understand the way the cab market works which is why you're not getting the disruptive element.
Uber runs a livery cab service. At the disadvantage of not being able to pick up street hails, they do not require a medallion, and operate under different terms than a taxi.
I agree with the permit restrictions in San Francisco. Without it, you would have monopolies dominated by big business and the rich, which hurts minorities from having their own taxi services. Uber is a clear example of the rich trying to take over business from minorities and people who need money most.
Really. Please tell us which taxi firms are minority owned and operated then, since you seem to have joined HN specifically to educate us about this issue. I'm curious about this, because there seem to be far fewer Asian or Latino cab drivers than one would expect from looking at the city's demographics.
Perhaps you can also explain how it benefits minority folk who have arrived in SF in the last ~30 years that virtually no new medallions were issued from 1978-2010 despite a ~15% increase in the city's population during that time.
And next time you can't find a cab, keep this in mind -- SF didn't add any (transferable) cab licenses for 33 years, until 2010. http://www.ktvu.com/news/24519083/detail.html
It's pretty clear who is writing the rules for taxis in SF, and it's not someone with the consumer in mind.