Yeah but a taxi driver can buy a home and put a kid through college, perhaps even take a vacation once a year. An uber driver may have 6 or 8 months of economic boom but eventually the house of cards will come tumbling down. It is exactly the type of company that is destroying the middle class. It is also the status quo of making a few people extremely wealthy. If you use uber you're just contributing to the decline of western civilization. That seems a bit melodramatic and believe me I'm the first guy to be looking for a deal and stick it to the bloated establishment but uber cuts all the necessary corners, sticks it to the drivers yet it's so popular because it's cheap.
A taxi driver in London can't buy a home on his own income, don't be ridiculous. An uber driver in London can put a kid through college (it's basically free). Both can take vacations.
Anecdotally, uber showing up in London was when I started to use car transport in the first place. It didn't remove me from the customer pool of black cabs - I was never there; most of the time it's competing with the tube / a bus. I would guess the only significant customers moving from taxi to uber are business travelers - but those are rarely motivated by price, and rather it's the convenience of the app that appeals.
GPS killed taxi drivers, not uber; the wage is catching up to the fact that almost anyone could drive a taxi nowadays.
