Uber is opposed in principle to even the most minimal safety legislation.
Taxi regulations typically limit supply (raising costs for consumers), protect drivers over passengers (in Vegas a complaint against drivers must be notarized), and protect favored ethnic groups (c.f. Shiv Sena's taxi law in Maharashtra). Can you name any contemporary real life problem that taxi regulators solve better than Uber's own regulators?
I'm aware that historically, taxi regulation purports to solve real problems. But I claim that in the modern economy, Uber has solved every single one of those problems better than regulators can.
Of all the cities I'm familiar with (NYC, Vegas, Chicago, Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Kuala Lumpur), I can't think of a single instance where a regulated taxi gave me better consumer protections than Uber/Lift/Ola.
So again, the simple question: what problems that currently exist would regulation solve?
Edit: why am I down voted to max? The government limits supply but the medallions are still sold on the market.
(The claimed rationale for limiting the number of taxis is to reduce traffic. I would suspect the actual rationale is to favor the existing taxi businesses that already have licenses and don't want competition.)
So I searched, and found this document extremely enlightening. Note that it's from 1995, long before Uber, and gives many pros and cons and reasoning behind different types of legislation:
Living in Québec I've never had a bad experience with taxi drivers the way people seem to have in NYC, etc. Uber was still far better, if anything just for how proud some drivers were of being part of it. The lower barrier of entry seemed like a positive thing overall.
A nice woman drove me once, offered me starburst candy and a bottle of water, both of which were in a basket in the back seat. Made my day extra nice.
Trust Quebec to do everything they can to legislate innovation and improved quality out of existence in favour of preserving the status quo (and their tax dollars).
This is what a free market looks like. Don't like that? Take a look at Venezuela, and tell me you'd prefer to be dumpster diving for your next meal. Capitalism and Democracy are aweful aweful systems, but everything else is worse.
However, maybe it's encouraging taxi drivers to step it up a bit. In my ride to the airport in Chicago yesterday, the driver offered me a bottle of water, which I think was the first time I've experienced that in a taxi.
No permits, no insurance, any driver can participate. Faster and more frequent service than anything I've experienced back home in North America.
Similar systems exist throughout the Third World. God forbid we ever allow something like that in our "developed" countries.
In Cochabamba you could also flag a taxi and either trust them to charge you the normal rate, or negotiate a fare. Stressful to do at first, but once you got the hang of it no big deal.
Quick story: We never needed a car while living there, but rented one once to take a road trip. Just outside the city a cholita (Quechua speaking indigenous woman) with a huge bag flagged us down along the main road, got into the back seat without a word, then asked to "bajar" a dozen km later. On the way out she handed us a peso (~15 cents), again without a word.
The real fear for cab drivers seem to be self driving cars even more than Uber.
If you want to see mob involvement related to cars you want to look at the towing industry, but generally they stick to the money, which is construction.
There are also companies going after Uber's model but with strong ethics, such as Teo, which seems to be widely praised (good app, fully electric cars, good conditions for drivers, wifi inside the cabs).
My main annoyance against the taxi industry is its lobby, which is always against any sort of change in the transportation industry, such as new train lines (airport train or bus line), bike/bixi ride-share, etc. Taxis and Uber-type systems offer more transport solutions that reduce the requirement of having a car. I would love to get rid of my car, but it's not viable in Montreal (I bike to work, use the car mostly on weekends and Communauto requires me to do too much planning).
Not quite organized crime, but not far from it!
https://www.vice.com/read/of-course-there-is-a-snow-removal-...
It's Montreal. They couldn't organize crime if they tried.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/uber-quebec-deal-1.36...
In my opinion, the government and the ride hailing companies should have bought back a share of the taxi permit pool value, then cancelled them. It would have been costly, but by taxing the ride themselves (at a fixed rate) then letting competition drive the ride price down while increasing the ride volume. The government could have had their money back, eventually. Uber technically owe "theoretical tax money" since they operated without permit in a regulated industry. They had said at some point they didn't care about paying that back, so it would have been a better solution. After that, the regulations could have been lifted/relaxed.
The current deal isn't very good, but at least there is one. Technically, with self driving and automation (including apps), a lot of people will lose their job, so obviously they will resist changes, any changes. We can complain all we want as developers, but from the taxi driver point of view, change suck. Then again, in my opinion, so does regulation. One positive point, at least, is that this saga allowed time for discussions and consideration. A abrupt disruption would maybe have destabilized the industry too fast, while the time it took for this law to be passed allowed for the creation of a "middle market" where new taxis companies managed to enter the industry with hybrid solutions (including one Tesla/Leaf + app company) and the "dinosaurs" had time to [try to] adapt [and fail]. In the end, this did create more competition instead of players being pushed out and replaced by less players. There will be a market consolidation eventually anyway, but until that, the users will be the real winners.
Time will tell. I am still not convinced this law was the right call, but appreciated the debate.
Accident are stuffs that cannot be predicted. A bug is something that can be avoided.
As far as I am concerned, 99% of the software industry is not able to write critical software that is able to handle with a correct costs the case of failures and/or "abnormal" behaviors.
Software will fail. It will eventually fail dramatically. And with software it can fail in a reproducible way. Nowadays all experiments are made far from worst case (congestion, interferences, extreme conditions....)
Who is gonna pay for the predictable accidents? And will self driving cars will be better at avoiding accidents than humman given a same operating cost on the long term?
My guess, is : hell no.
