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.
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.
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
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.
I guarantee you, after a few medallions get pulled, this problem will evaporate.
What you have is lack of will in enforcement.
The medallion lobby is strong and politically connected (as we've just seen), so pulling of medallions is highly unlikely.
So once cant support the Uber crackdown and say: oh, and we can [theoretically] "just" crack down on discrimination using this method. It hasnt been enforced for 30+yrs, no need to assume laws will be enforced suddenly starting today.
When the medallion owners all tell their politicans that $agency is terrible and bad for business then $agency gets told to knock it off and/or de-prioritized in next years budget.