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.
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.