Taxi drivers often get “lost” on purpose, it makes their fees higher.
Hard to do that with Uber.
You know if Taxi drivers werent always trying to scam people, things like Uber wouldn’t be so popular.
Yep. All the cabs I’ve ever taken in the UK were phenomenal. Their atlas-like knowledge of the city is just incredible. If US cabs (or at least Chicago cabs) were like this, I’d still be taking cabs. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have to give the taxi driver nearly turn-by-turn directions.
You do understand that it can take as long as five years to pass the required street knowledge and navigation test to get a London cab license? It’s a phenomenally demanding requirement.
While I prefer knowledgeable cabbies myself, I think that such a requirement here would absolutely cement the general Yellow Cab model into place.
Yes, I am. But in Chicago, I often have to give directions to some basic landmarks, which is completely mind-boggling to me. This is not directions to some obscure street on the southeast side that nobody’s ever been to. This is some of the most basic geographic knowledge. The other day, I had to tell a driver how to get to the Civic/Lyric Opera, for instance.
Uber isn’t publicly traded. This is venture capital, so there really isn’t a way to “dump” an investment yet. In fact, Uber’s investor agreements prohibit all secondary sales so the only way to dump your Uber holding is to sell it back to the company.
Conversely, I was shocked to discover that cab drivers in the US did not possess The Knowledge. “You want me to tell you where to go?”
So what’s the argument here - that Uber-amateurs will somehow be better at navigation and knowing the streets than hackies?
(No argument that I’ve had some ignorant idiots behind a yellow wheel, but it’s not the rule. Not in Noo Yawk, anyway, or SF or Boston or… Chicago. Philly, now… Uber uber alles, there, and drag the hackies behind you. 
)
In my experience, yes. Uber drivers have given me a far higher level of service and have been more pleasant than pretty much any cab I’ve ever taken in Chicago. If that’s what it takes to get taxi cabs to step up their game, so be it. Have you ever used a ride sharing service?
Another very simple example: almost every time I’ve taken a taxi in the last two or three years, the driver is talking on his phone the whole way. I feel somewhat embarrassed to interrupt him to tell him, hey, you want to take this turn over here. This is no exaggeration. With Uber, I haven’t run into this problem. Uber drivers tend not to do this, because they know it will affect their ratings.
I don’t get why pleasant conversations with drivers are supposed to be a positive. Mostly when I’m in any kind of hired ride I just want them to shut the hell up. I don’t want to be friends with my driver, I don’t want to discuss my day, I don’t want to talk about what I do for work, and I don’t want to know anything about my driver either. It’s a commercial transaction. This “pleasant driver” stuff is I suppose to help maintain that the driver is “sharing rides!” and not “an underpaid, underinsured casualty of economic disaster.”
Well, I said none of the sort. I’m not talking pleasant conversations. I don’t want my driver to just be jabbering on the phone the entire time. It’s annoying when trying to give directions and, hands-free or not, it’s not the safest thing to do.
Haven’t had the need. I don’t think it exists within 30 miles of me, and I haven’t needed anything but rail mass transit my last dozen visits to cities.
I like cabs and tend to have good luck with them. Philthy excepted.
That’s all I need to know.
I don’t believe the “value” of any of these tech startup companies is at all grounded in reality. It’s the “dot-com bubble” all over again, because VC types have the memory of a goldfish.
I’m not sure the future you’re envisioning is all that different from the one AB is. Certainy not as different as the semantic differences suggest.
At some point, digital hails will supplement or supplant standing on the sidewalk and sticking your arm out. If the taxi companies are fighting this, I can come up with no other explanation than a knee-jerk resistance to change; it seems to me it will be a net benefit for both drivers and riders. It is a shift caused, or at least hastened, by Uber et al. But that doesn’t make leaving the “rideshare”/e-taxi services unregulated the best course of action
I actually agree with Deeg on this one. “Surge pricing,” as I understand it, is simply a balancing of supply and demand to a degree and with a precision that has only become practical recently, but any company that doesn’t understand that said supply isn’t limited only to its own cars is going to be taught this lesson fairly quickly.
Traditional taxis are subject to strict price regulation, but what they get in exchange is a monopoly on (legal) street pickups; the regulation is to thwart the most obvious abuse of that monopoly. ETA: I don’t think government control of the price of a good or service is better than throwing it to the market (or something in between), but nor do I think it’s automatically worse.
And, um, what stops Uber drivers from scamming people?
Perhaps that the customer knows up front what the cost of the ride will be?
Sorry, that wasn’t directed at you. Just venting in general, and off topic to boot. My apologies.
they don’t, Uber does it for them via that “surge pricing” you seem to think is just okey-dokey.
Why is that? I’m not judging the participants. I’m evaluating the model, and I am far from the only one who can see the limitations the idea (ideal) is going to have to come to terms with.
Maybe it will. There sure isn’t much to disagree with that “taxi service” is a few decades overdue for improvement. OTOH, a few improvements pioneered by the bright kidz could just solidify Yellow, Metro, et al. for another half-century.
You do get an email receipt that shows a map of your route and the breakdown of the charge. If you are unhappy, you rate the driver poorly and he or she doesn’t last.
Howard Beale lives. :rolleyes:
So the big protection scheme in Uber is… online ratings?
Idle afterthought: what happens when a majority of drivers have indifferent ratings?