Roughly 3 years ago we spent a couple days in Rome pre-cruise. While I had prebooked private limos from/to the airport, I found that Uber/Lyft were not widespread there for intra-city trips
It could be because of local laws, but I was pleasantly shocked (is that possible?) at how affordable the standard white taxis were, like €10 for a ~30 minute ~20 mile trip.
In London there are also two kinds of taxi with similar rules. The traditional black cab (which may come in any colour these days) can ply for hire, and you can flag one down in the street.
The others are classed as “private hire”, which means that they can only serve prebooked customers. This category includes Uber and many small companies. Back in the 60s we had minicabs. Originally, they were small cars, but the idea soon caught on with many operators jumping on the bandawaggon.
Rivalry was serious, with all kinds of dirty tricks played. I recall a driver trapped in a telephone box with his car against the door until someone came to let him out (no mobile phones then). Phoning for a ride from somewhere out of the way was another common ploy. Many minicabs were unlicenced and not insured for the work.
“While Jennelle was quite pleasant and efficient, the three year old child in the trunk screamed the entire ride, making conversation difficult and creating a stressful environment”.
2/10 would not recommend.
Yes, such things as Uber-like apps for traditional taxi services already exist. Curb is one and there are local options as well. (Here’s one I found using Google in the Connecticut area.)
Maybe - I find that about half the time in the outer boroughs of NYC when I arrange an Uber ride it’s a car service* vehicle that shows up. The drivers don’t work for the car service - they generally pay the car service a either a weekly fee or a percentage of the fares dispatched through the base.They work when they want
to since the drivers aren’t employees. I’m fairly sure Uber/Lyft affected the bases, but maybe not the actual drivers. Especially since Uber/Lyft has a few advantages for the customer - I stopped using a car service because I once arranged a ride in advance and when it came time for them to pick me up, there were a bunch of issues , all of which stemmed from the fact that they didn’t have a driver due to the weather. With Uber, an actual driver accepts the ride even in advance, not a dispatcher.
*“Black cars” are not exactly the same as a car service. Black car bases not only send vehicles on pre-arranged trips, but they must get 90% of payments through other means than cash and the cars are owned by hte owner of the base, not the drivers. “Car service” includes livery bases where the drivers often own or lease their vehicles and they can accept a trip from the base, drop off that passenger and then accept a Lyft or Uber trip.
They certainly do now but too little too late. Uber actually partnered with Yellow Cab four or five years ago. The major cab companies could have developed some kind of app on their own early on instead of paying lobbyists to try to regulate Uber out of existence. I personally have so much built up bad will with traditional taxi companies that I can’t see ever going back.
Of course now we are on the cusp of driverless taxis disrupting the Uber/Lyft model and Uber is a player in that. I suspect this was their long term goal all along.
It’s crazy to me that this didn’t happen, and I wonder if it was even pitched to them by developers? Money left on the table for everyone.
I think there’s a major network effect, though. Uber is one app you can use across the world, as both passenger and driver, with your profile and preferences and payment methods already pre-saved.
Having one app per municipality means you have to re-enter all that information just to get a ride.
It also means losing the efficiencies of scale from a centralized operation when it comes to things like customer service, trust & safety (sketchy drivers and passengers out there), dispute resolution, or even something as mundane as proper routefinding — even Uber and Lyft struggles with properly navigating to newer roads or buildings.
Those are all things that local governments and small companies are not so well equipped to handle, and having to reinvent it 10,000 times means there’s many more opportunities for a perfect storm of small flaws to add up to a poor rider or driver experience.
Transit apps (many of which are semi-local) are in a similar boat today, each with their own pros and cons and it takes forever to find the right one and set up and account etc. vs just putting it all into Google Maps.
What might’ve worked better is a loose federation of local transit/transportation authorities and taxi companies, each contributing to a centrally organized app that can support local differences (think Craigslist or Localwiki or Fandom’s models)
It may be that they tried. I’m not sure. Very very speculative here but if their lobbyists claimed that there was something sinister about using an app to hail a car, they couldn’t very well do the same thing. Or maybe it was a Blockbuster like flub.
Good points but there are things like pay for parking apps that are used across multiple agencies. The agencies presumably have a subscription or license of some kind to use them.
Yes… and the experiences there are similarly bad 
My city went through like 3-4 different parking apps in as many years, for the same parking lot, and each one had its share of quirks and bugs. And then you go to the lot next door, owned by a private business, and it’s a different app altogether. And then some operators start cross-listing extra spaces on multiple apps but lack a way of properly “revoking” a space from the other apps when it’s booked on one… it’s just a mess.
Mostly my takeaway from this and other municipal experiments is that our local & state governments really are not equipped to triage/evaluate tech from vendors very well, much less be able to build and maintain their own. It’s just a totally different skillset (and paygrade, and interest gap) with the commercial tech world.
Some bigger municipalities have civic hacking groups, sometimes with official participation from local bureaucrats… those seem to work better than the behind-closed-doors vendor selection processes that most places seem to use.
That’s fair, I was just picturing a single developer selling a single app via subscription to a bunch of municipalities around the world. But it still wouldn’t have the coverage of an Uber.
I think it takes many big teams of people to navigate the procurement procedures (and bribery/revolving door customs) of just one or two small local governments, much less across states or countries…
A lone developer wouldn’t stand a chance, I think. Even if they built the best, most user-friendly tech, a bigger company would just come along and patent troll them to death and make a good-enough copycat to sell to their existing crony contacts.
Meh. When did I get so cynical, lol.
Where’s govWorks when you need it?
I don’t use cabs often, but when I do they will always quote the exact price for your ride on the phone. Personally I refuse to do business with Uber or Lift since they came into Californian and bankrolled an initiative to bust California labor laws to keep their employees as contractors instead of employees.
Around herre we have a taxi app that takes reservations or hails a cap and quotes you a price.
FWIW my unmarried, 40-ish daughter won’t use Uber or Lyft. She wants a cab with the driver’s name and photo prominently displayed, where a central dispatcher sent it and knows where it’s supposed to be going. We had one case where a lone woman in a ride share was raped by her driver, and at least two cases where lone women were dumped in bad neighborhoods by their drivers.
Yeah, that’s always scary
The apps have been slowly adding safety features though, like being able to request women drivers (Lyft, Uber), along with semi-automated safety checks as you’re riding — including texting a friend for you automatically, monitoring your ride for unexpected stops, sending check-in messages and contacting authorities for you. I don’t know how well, in total, they’ve worked…
I suspect that across the world, many such incidents do happen still, and Uber is simply too big and too decentralized for the authorities to rein in in any meaningful way — no local law enforcement can really affect a multinational like that At most they might catch that one driver, but the overall system keeps chugging along as always.
I think Uber has always been a step ahead of the law, opting to pay fines or bribe regulators after the fact. Their entire business was based on moving faster than the law or regulators can catch up So much of the Gig Economy is predicated on pitting normal people against each other in a two-sided marketplace that labor laws just aren’t equipped to properly deal with yet. And in the US we can’t really effectively fine or otherwise sanction companies once they reach a certain scale anyway, and Uber is easily past that.
Lyft has been able to market itself as the slightly nicer player, but not sure how much of that is actually meaningfully different. And they don’t operate internationally, so have fewer sets of laws to deal with.
I don’t know about where you are but around here and in the UK, cabbies are independent contractors or sole traders, not employees. I’ve seen innumerable people say they insist on using cabs and not uber because uber drivers aren’t employees without understanding cabbies aren’t either! From what I can see, that’s true of many cabbies in California also.
Much of this doesn’t make much sense since ubers have always been tracked and driver details are known to uber. For every story of uber drivers behaving badly, the same has always been true of taxi drivers. Heck, if you hail a taxi on the street there is no record showing you even got in the taxi. And while some taxi companies may now track their taxis, that is a development driven by the need to compete with uber.
The reality is that (a) people find new things scary and (b) the taxi lobby pumps any story of uber driver malfeasance to the media as part of a concerted campaign and (c) if you google you will find plenty of stories of traditional taxi drivers raping and murdering (d) everyone has a story about taxi drivers doing unsafe dropoffs.
The whole and entire business model of Uber was that they would deploy a fleet of driverless automatic taxis. In fact they would develop that fleet from scratch with their own self-driving AI software.
That Uber uses human-driven cars was always a temporary afterthought.
A bit like the withering of the Communist state, the advent of universally capable driverless taxis is taking longer than we / they thought.
In San Antonio where I live the old “Yellow Cab” company I used for airport trips mostly either rebranded itself or was bought out by some other company. It’s now “zTrip” whose website bills it as “Finally, the perfect hybrid between rideshare and taxi!” Not sure how the driver experience is any different between the old “Yellow Cab” days and now, but for me as a user it’s not really any different.