Usually I feel bad for traditional businesses quickly displaced by emerging startups. However, I've been in too many cabs where the driver is constantly on the phone while driving, abusing the speed limit, slamming on the breaks every 8 seconds, foul odors, dirty vehicles, roundabout routes, the list goes on. Good riddance.
Amen to that. Living here in SF, the customer service aspect of cabs is appalling. I'm tired of getting dirty looks for paying with a credit card, having cabs with their light on and nobody in them drive right by me, playing the "where are you going" game, drivers talking on phones, and general surliness.
The day the industry unionized, that pushed me over the edge. I'm now 100% using Uber to get around and my only regret is that I didn't try it sooner - it's awesome.
Don't forget: Uber and Uber's drivers have been responsible for children's deaths, interfering with the normal course of competitor's business, stuffing blind persons' service dogs in the trunk, price gouging during states of emergencies. All on top of a proprietary, unpublished 'surge pricing' algorithm.
I know you think taxis are the devil, but Uber's behavior as a parent company has been downright heinous.
Personally, I avoid supporting them, whenever possible, and go with better-acting players in the market like Lyft and Sidecar.
Not sure why you're being downvoted a bunch for this post (seems like you're just stating facts that have happened, as well as your opinions, albeit in a somewhat negatively biased tone, but nothing out of reason).
So here's an upvote. I'd forgotten and/or downplayed these issues and your post made me reconsider and start using Lyft for the first time (been lazy thus far), so thanks for your post. :)
Thank you! I've been watching the downvotes, too, and wondering the same thing! Cynical lolwutf wants to think it's tied to yet-another-overly-aggressive Uber suborg, but who knows.
Glad to provide the perspective! Thanks for the upvote.
Uber's recently disclosed behavior has been incredibly disappointing. I still have fond feelings about them for their original innovation (a taxi that came! How fucking remarkable exactly nowhere but in san francisco.) But the way they comport themselves to their competitors and drivers makes it tough to continue using them. I just installed lyft.
Agreed on all the above behaviors. The sf taxi system is abysmal. I was on crutches for 9 months and they made getting to work hell [1]. Between their unwillingness to tell you if they're actually going to come get you and their inability to keep to anything like their estimates, they treat customers terribly. Hell, people jumped to uber when you used to pay significantly more, just to avoid sf taxis.
Some cab drivers were nice, but they simply aren't part of a functioning transport system in sf.
> The new companies, unlike taxi operators, have lesser insurance requirements, no restrictions on the number of vehicles they put on the streets, no clean-air standards and less-stringent background checks.
There are clean air standards for taxis? I'm not sure how well they work, since about half of the taxis I have taken recently (worldwide) have had the engine light on, indicating a likely emissions problem. Since taxis drive so much, an emissions issue on a taxi for a month is probably equivalent to a year on many private vehicles.
That said, even private vehicles have clean-air standards in any state (like mine) with emissions inspection requirements.
"Today 92 percent of the taxi fleet is comprised of hybrid or CNG vehicles. There are 1,318 alternative fuel vehicles out of a total of 1,432 eligible vehicles. CNG vehicles account for 89 of those and the hybrids account for 1,229."
> had the engine light on, indicating a likely emissions problem.
Is that true? I thought the engine light could be for many things and only a few of them emissions related? (true for the European cars I've owned, anyway)
edit: actually, I guess, many of the faults are probably directly, or indirectly, likely to result in an emissions change.
The agency...required electronic information systems in all cabs and encouraged the use of dispatching apps. Most cabs now use electronic hailing apps similar to what the ride services offer.
So it took some healthy competition from startups to get the Taxi industry to actually improve their product? Next, I'd like startups to tackle banks, insurance, hospitals, airlines, and nearly every other established industry.
Meanwhile, outside the Valley, across the ocean, five years ago, some regular taxi companies where I lived launched hailing apps, all on their own. No startups required. Maybe the competition was stronger?
But those innovative taxi companies still charged a 10% surcharge for using your credit card. Which mysteriously dropped to 5% when Uber appeared on the scene.
Stockholm, Uber just entered it, so that's going to be interesting to follow.
To be fair though, Uber's app is (now) better than the existing taxi company apps, with its integrated payments and map where you can see how far away your car is, so there's some value there.
The only industries that won't be demolished and rebuilt, are those in which it's nearly impossible to compete by design / by law, or for which there isn't a great business opportunity.
Nobody will be disrupting JP Morgan this century. That's by dictate of the US Government that will never let go of its direct control over the financial industry. Try and you won't be tangling with some annoying city board.
Airlines won't get disrupted until new technology comes on line to make it drastically less expensive, or something like Hyperloop is built. The problem there is not lack of competition. Not to mention, software is already sucking the best profits out of that industry: Priceline & Co. The airlines are the commodity box makers to Priceline's Windows.
Never has creative destruction ever been so enjoyable to observe and partake. For all the waiting in the cold, rude cabbies, cash only bullshit, and lack of availability, to the taxi industry of SF, I say to you: you have only yourselves and SF City Council to blame.
Yellow Taxi, Green Cab decimated themselves. Living in SF there was one thing you learned quickly: calling the taxi was a complete waste of time. The reason Uber, Lyft, etc won was because they could actually perform a job the taxi's had been failing at for years.
> Among biggest impacts of the ride services has been the drop in taxi rides taken by people in ramp taxis, which carry people in wheelchairs. As the ride services have grown and the number of cabs has diminished, so has the availability of wheelchair-accessible taxis, which are costlier to operate.
That's certainly a negative effect, but why would it result from the rise of ridesharing services? If taxi companies need to scale back the number of cars in their fleet, shouldn't they only take from the cars that aren't accessible?
It's worth pointing out that they seem to have a monopoly in handicapped transport too. Not saying this is a major plus and not saying it's a profitable market, but they can at least use it to their advantage in marketing and courts.
Traditional taxi companies are forced by regulators to provide less profitable accessible transport in exchange for being given a monopoly on taxi services. Part of the way that Uber is undercutting the taxi companies is by not providing services to the disabled (or at least not without added cost).
In many places it may not be profitable enough for transportation companies to voluntarily offer it. That would explain why the regulator was forcing some taxis to have this capability.
I have no sympathy for the SF taxi industry. I can't count the number of times I was left stranded at 2 AM on a friday or saturday night, having to walk home in the rain. It's about time.
Either the author is attempting to bias their readers or was unintentionally misleading -- California generally requires personal vehicles to be smog tested on a regular basis. I should know; my less than four year old car (at the time) had to be smog tested just this past year.
Given how few rides occur (less than what a single taxi driver sees in a month), it seems like the sort of thing Uber/Lyft could subsidize, particularly if all they commit to is the incredibly crappy service levels you get from the Taxi company.
The really evil part of me is thinking, and maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick here, like this:
When you request a ride with a taxi-service, it's up to the discretion of the service which car to send. You need something for a wheelchair? Fine, they send you what's available from their fleet.
When you request a ride from Uber or Lyft, those two are just middlemen who put you in touch with one of a thousand little companies. Potentially, each one is available.
So, here's the evil bit: require each ride-providing service (a taxi company or an Uber contractor or a Lyft contractor) to provide a minimum of one or two ADA-compliant vehicles.
The independent contractors for Uber and Lyft immediately go away, except for the one or two that are so wealthy as to be able to afford a ramp-van or other compliant vehicle.
Interestingly, asking Google to define "decimate" returns a modern definition, "kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of", and a historical one, "kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group".
Honestly I have never really found a situation where I wanted to exactly (or even slightly) mean reduce by 10%. It is too specific of a definition to be truly useful.
I find it much more convenient, and useful, to have a word that means the current modern definition of decimate. Perhaps decimate is a poor choice to represent that, but honestly not every word has to sound or have roots that directly relate to the definition of the word. It is more important words are used, rather than languish or die in history books.
There's somewhere around 1,000,000 words in the English language.
> Honestly I have never really found a situation where I wanted to exactly (or even slightly) mean reduce by 10%. It is too specific of a definition to be truly useful.
I hope you realise that your use cases for words isn't the same as every other English-speaker's.
> I find it much more convenient, and useful, to have a word that means the current modern definition of decimate.
The word you're looking for, as mentioned, is devastate. Perhaps ruin, destroy, wreck, ravage, desolate, demolish, raze, etc. If you're happy with a phrase rather than a single word there's plenty more to choose from to convey your desired meaning.
> Perhaps decimate is a poor choice to represent that, but honestly not every word has to sound or have roots that directly relate to the definition of the word.
Agreed, but where words have a specific use (even if not to you) it's frustrating to have their meaning modified to a concept that is more than adequately conveyed by dozens of other, existing, commonly used words.
That's my point.
> It is more important words are used, rather than languish or die in history books.
