Could you lie when hailing the cab and once inside say they misheard you and say the genuine destination? Not allowed I imagine but pretty hard to enforce that rule? (Genuine question, as a UK reaident I’ve little experience of the US taxi system and have always had excellent service from taxi firms in the UK - as a result I’ve never really understood the problem Uber is solving in the UK)
Yes, I did that a couple of times. Then once I got in, i changed the destination. It made for a tense ride because you're already in an adverserial transaction for something that should be a default right of rider.
Oh, and my mom has bigger problems. Cabs pass her by at Manhattan hospitals. Of course no one knows drivers' intents for sure, but there is some quick eyeballing, i'm sure, of whether the potential passenger is B&T (Bridge and Tunnel -- NYC Yellow cabs hate B&T passengers because they often have to deadhead back to Manhattan on the return trip -- so they take pains to avoid B&T passengers, which favors wealthier Manhattan residents and harms residents of other boroughs.) Uber/Lyft has been a lifesaver for her.
There is also a larger problem Uber solves (one of many) -- once you lose density (i.e., outside airport/centercity) it is hard to hail a cab, so you have to dial a cab. You dail, they invariably say "wait outside be there in 5 min" -- sometimes they show up in 5min, sometimes 10min, sometimes 30min, sometimes never. Variable pricing and GPS tracking solves this.
A lot of these problems were traditionally not problems at all, but the NYC transit system has ground to a halt on evenings/nights/weekends in the past 3-5yrs, so people are relying increasingly on Uber/Lyft and pooled rides for things traditionally accomplished via mass transit.
> There is also a larger problem Uber solves (one of many) -- once you lose density (i.e., outside airport/centercity) it is hard to hail a cab, so you have to dial a cab. You dail, they invariably say "wait outside be there in 5 min" -- sometimes they show up in 5min, sometimes 10min, sometimes 30min, sometimes never. Variable pricing and GPS tracking solves this.
Variable pricing solves this for people with the ability to pay. Rationing scarce goods by wealth is not necessarily a better overall outcome then distributing scarce goods by lottery.
Also, if full-time night-shift cabbies are driven out of business by part-time rideshares, you may end up in a situation where the only night-time service available - ever - is at surge pricing. This is less of an issue in NYC, then it is in smaller towns.
I agree with almost everything you say. However, I do want to note that you can pay with dollars or pay with time. The old way was that you paid with time/uncertainty. You'd wait, and wait, and wait. Now you can get what you want right away, you just need to auction/bid on it to get it immediately. Totally agreed this solves the problem for those who can bear higher prices, so it disfavors the poor.
That said, people have voted quite a bit with their wallets and accepted surge pricing to solve the old problem of uncertainty. When I used to be a consultant and go to the airport every Monday morning, i'd have to leave 40+minutes earlier just in case the dial-a-cab randomly decided not to show up for 30min. That problem has mostly gone away.
Same thing for rainy weather -- cabs would disappear. That was legitimate because the cost of driving is indeed higher in rain (fewer rides per hour) and thus deserves more compensation. Instead...the old way was...dial-a-cabs would just stop answering their phone during storms, etc.
Sometimes people did nasty things like call 2 separate cab companies, go with the first arrival, and leave the other one hanging (another problem solved by ride-hailing services, who have the concept of identity and reputation scores.)
Same thing for rainy weather -- cabs would disappear. That was legitimate because the cost of driving is indeed higher in rain (fewer rides per hour) and thus deserves more compensation.
I think you have this backwards. The traditional explanation is that it's harder to get a cab when it rains because demand goes up, not down, because no one wants to walk in the rain. The more complex modern explanation[1] is that the higher demand but slower traffic offset, so cab drivers make the same amount in the rain as at other times. In either case, I don't think the cabs actually "disappear", rather they are all occupied. Or maybe this is what you meant?
>I do want to note that you can pay with dollars or pay with time.
And it's generally far better overall to pay with money. If you pay with money, then someone gets that money - Uber drivers earn more through surge pricing, in this instance.
If you pay with time, then that time is simply gone forever.
It's not raining. There's one cab. The fare costs 5 dollars. There's one rider. Everything works great.
It's raining. There's one cab. The fare costs 5 dollars. There's two riders. The driver flips a coin. One rider pays $5, and gets a ride. The other has to wait, and then gets a ride.
It's raining. There's one cab. There's surge pricing, so the fare costs $15. There's two riders. One rider can afford to pay $15, and gets a ride. The other has to wait, until the surge dies down, and then pays $5 for a ride.
When there's a shortage of cabs, someone will have to pay with money. Under the lottery system, it's a random rider. Under the price surge system, it's the poorest rider. You haven't actually produced any more value in the third case. The same amount of time is wasted.
It's not the "poorest" rider though who pays with time. It's the person who values the ride the least relative to time. That isn't totally uncorrelated, but it's significantly not the same, which is what produces more value.
By law, they have to take you to where you want to go in the five boroughs, plus... Westchester and somewhere else. So the trick is to get into the cab before they figure out that they can speed off before you can grab their number and file a 311 complaint.
This all makes sense. But i cant get my meek and honest mother to start acting like this. It requires a certain level of street smarts. It is almost a weekly issue for my mom, going into Manhattan for doctors' visits and the like.
Uber solved many of these types of issues democratized access to taxi rides.
I’ve never really understood the
problem Uber is solving in the UK
I've had excellent service from taxi firms in my hometown in the UK, and I always try to use a local service before I resort to Uber.
Times I've resorted to Uber include when I visited Bournemouth and got scammed by a driver who "didn't have change" for £20 on a £16 fare, when I visited Coventry where taxis don't accept credit cards, and when I visited Montreal where their homegrown uber-equivalent doesn't support foreign phone numbers.
In other words, fairly basic service delivery issues that local taxis could easily solve, but that for some reason they haven't solved.
