I know they’re still around, I see cabs. But how much market share have they lost?
There don’t seem to be any national statistics. For New York City it is about 85% Uber/Lyft and 15% taxis.
In Chicago, annual taxi rides dropped from 32 million in 2014 to 5.8 million in 2023, a decrease of 82%. (source)
A Chicago “taxi medallion” – a license to operate a taxi – sold for about $400,000 in 2012; they were obviously very expensive, but they were seen as a surefire path to a steady income; the price was so high because they rarely came up for sale. (Chicago had several major taxi companies, but also lots of smaller taxi companies and independent drivers.) According to this Chicago Sun-Times article from earlier this year, they now sell for about $5,000. Drivers who took out loans to buy medallions before the rideshare boom now find themselves deeply in debt, with no good way to pay it back.
The situation in NYC is similar. People would go into significant debt to buy a medallion knowing that they could eventually sell it and retire comfortably. People caught in the middle are screwed and no fault of their own.
In Australia the proportions are now roughly 60:40 for Uber:taxis, which is probably muddied a bit by many smaller taxi operators working in various Uber-style business arrangements as well.
We experienced the massive drop in the value of taxi plates (the same concept as medallions) when the taxi industry was deregulated, but as this was a governmental act there had to be a compensation scheme for existing holders paid for from levies on fares. This seems reasonable, given that operators had forked out $quarter of a million+ on a plate that should have represented their future and be worth something upon retirement, only to be gutted by a political decision.
The survey that reported the 60:40 split said it was quite age-dependent, and as a budding Grandpa Simpson my preference has, and continues to be taxis.
I’m personally glad to see the taxi system get disrupted. Way too many assholes and bullies amongst the cabbies and dispatchers in the past. That said, I do feel some sympathy for the medallion (or equivalent) holders who got stuck holding the bag.
Kind of. The taxi license system had ceased to be a reasonable system of moderating taxis and had become a rent-seeking shakedown. People who bought licenses bought it for that reason. My sympathy is limited.
True. Some people bought them and rented them out to others to do the driving. Some owned more than one medallion. Fuck those guys.
London regulates its taxi drivers not by requiring them to buy a medallion (they do need a “green badge”, but there is just a modest administrative fee for that), but through a famously difficult exam called “The Knowledge”. Essentially, cab drivers are required to know virtually every named street, hotel, or tourist attraction in Greater London (which is extensive) and are tested on it; test questions take the form of something like “You pick up a passenger on So-and-So Hotel who wants to go to Whatever Square. Name the direct route and all streets that intersect your route.” Prospective drivers spend years studying for this exam, and this (rather than the price to buy a licence) keeps cab rates high. It’s a system that made sense in the pre-GPS era to make sure your cabbie knew where he was going; but nowadays it’s evidently a way to keep competitors out, so I am similarly happy for the hit the London cab industry took from Uber and Lyft. It’s an occasional point of disagreement that I have with my girlfriend, who’s very much anti-Uber, whereas I don’t see the point of paying the excessive rates of official taxis.
All of those various antiquated gatekeeping techniques were bad for consumers. Good riddance
Mine too. Mind, our little city has maybe six Ubers, tops; and they only work when they feel like it. Great in the middle of the day; not so great when you’re closing the pub at 2:00 am when they decide not to work. So taxis are the better bet at such times.
Way back when I drove a private hire taxi in London, we had a rule that we would only pick up customers from a pub if we had taken them there.
This was because some people would phone every taxi company and take the first one that turned up.
At least uber etc are transparent - if it’s 2am and there may be no ubers operating you can try to book one and quickly find out if one is, or is not, on the way. I would never be so rude as to…
… but I can see why people would be tempted. Taxis were so opaque - all you could do was wait. The dispatchers (and drivers) lied through their teeth about how far away they were and whether they had actually picked up a sneaky hail on their way etc.
In Australia taxis had a reasonable amount of time to see that uber were coming. They are also large conglomerates that commanded substantial resources. When they found out uber was on the way did they launch an app for booking? Make payment easier? Require GPS so you could know how far away your taxi was?
Hell no. They spent nothing at all on improving their service in any way to compete with the new entrant. They spent megabucks on lobbying to keep uber out instead to preserve their cosy little system.
As I said, my sympathy for the loss of value of their licences is limited. Very limited.
I like that with Uber/Lyft I know upfront what the charge will be. With a traditional taxi service, the meter drops and the fee increases every few minutes. Plus as said, once an Uber driver accepts the offer, I am able to see how far they are and when they will arrive.
New York traditionally had two types of cab operating under separate regulatory schemes. Yellow medallion cabs (as mentioned above) could pick up street hails or at airport taxi ranks but couldn’t be reserved in advance. Car services, a.k.a. black cabs., could be reserved in advance but were prohibited from picking up street hails. It’s the latter type that was hit hardest by ride sharing.
(The city introduced “green cabs” about a decade ago, which were authorized to pick up street hails, but only in upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs. Unfortunately, ride sharing took off in popularity right around that time, and now there are only a few hundred green cabs still operating.)
I’ve noticed a trend (at least in Miami and Tokyo) where my Uber ride is actually a taxi that is signed up for ride share.
Has anyone else encountered a worrying trend that Uber/Lyft drivers are becoming more scarce? On a recent train trip to Simi Valley in southern California I needed to get from the station to my hotel at around 9pm (a short couple of miles) and no Uber and no Lyft responses. Apparently short hops aren’t very worthwhile for these drivers. I looked up cab companies and got a woman with a crying child in the background. The same woman picked me up about 5 minutes later (I wonder what she did with the child).
Edited to add: Using Gemini to ask “Are Uber/Lyft drivers becoming more scarce in some markets?” produced a “yes” with a very close description of my exact scenario and speculation about short hops.
That’s what the trunk is for.
As an aside, I wish local governments or taxi coops could’ve made their own Lyft-like apps, minus the VC middleman, and split the savings between the rider and driver. Uber and Lyft’s algorithms tend to pit both against each other, trying to extract as much profit as possible from both sides and putting both riders and drivers in bidding wars.
But if that actually happened, you’d end up with dozens or hundreds of apps instead of one or two. And each one would be of hugely variable quality and reliability and subject to network effects and chicken and egg problems.
Not an easy marketplace to solve, especially without the huge subsidies riders and drivers got in the first few years of Uber.
IIRC, trading medallions in NYC was one of the businesses that made Michael Cohen (Trump’s on-again-off-again buddy) get rich.
One concern I’ve read about is how the process of “enshittification” is taking hold. Once a service like Uber gets a good hold on the business, they squeeze both ends - the customer and the driver - to appropriate a larger share of the revenue themselves. Meanwhile, at first everyone who first got into it was doing well, then everyone would sign up and the share of revenue went down unless they were a real go-getter - too many drivers, too few fares. And, add the cost of gas now…