>Albeit the taxi companies created the unfair terms. Obviously it is not necessary to have a medallion to drive someone around. HN is generally anti-lobbying to protect corporate interest, but now that Uber is big there is some regret...
This myth of the taxi companies lobbying to avoid competition doesn't seem based in reality. Taxis didn't seek out regulation to protect themselves. Cities began regulating fares, service areas, and the business model. Cities put rules on them for the public good. The medallion is there is to balance out the price regulations placed on taxi companies and to ensure that the rules didn't make the taxi business unprofitable.
I've never seen any indication they sought out these regulations.
Really it smells like a smear campaign to make a bunch of immigrants driving cars 12 hours a day the bad guys and to make the 60 billion dollar corporate titan the underdog.
In New York the medallion system was introduced when the supply of taxis exceeded demand. Medallions were a way to control supply and artificially inflate fares, which were also regulated. Unfortunately the supply of medallions has not kept pace with demand which caused medallion prices to skyrocket from ~$3000 ($50k in 2017 money) at their introduction to over one million dollars in the mid 2000s.
Market forces clearly aren't dictating the number of medallions, it's political. Given that fares are still regulated, there's no benefit to creating a shortage of taxis other than inflating the price of medallions. Who benefits from the inflated cost of medallions and who rents them out to taxi drivers?
Like I said, Medallions are there to control supply to ensure profitability of taxi drivers. Sounds like bribery? Well not if the government is dictating your price and business model.
The government says "you can't charge 10 bucks a mile when it is raining during rush hour." And note, that is exactly what Uber does when it is raining.
Limiting competition is the compromise for limiting their profitability. The government is ensuring they'll profit, but not too much. It was a common method of regulation in the past.
The problem you're ignoring is that demand vastly outpaces supply which is why the cost of medallions is so inflated. Additional medallions could be sold by the city to increase supply without affecting existing cab utilization or profits but that doesn't happen. Why? Well because the medallion owners rent their medallions out and if the supply of medallions increases then the demand and thus rent paid for medallions go down.
> In New York the medallion system was introduced when the supply of taxis exceeded demand. Medallions were a way to control supply ...
Regulating supply is about more than fares. Traffic is an externality for the taxi/rideshare company, a 'tragedy of the commons'. I've been in cities where traffic has become much worse due to the large, unregulated influx of rideshare drivers; the cities should auction off slots - which is what medallions are (AFAIK).
Medallions can be used in a number of ways. My comment was pointing out that why they were introduced initially was not to create a commodities market.
>Really it smells like a smear campaign to make a bunch of immigrants driving cars 12 hours a day the bad guys and to make the 60 billion dollar corporate titan the underdog.
The taxi industry has been running its own smear campaign for the last 50 years by offering completely terrible service in the majority of the US.
From the consumer perspective, Uber/Lyft are the only real options for reliable taxi service outside of a few really dense urban areas. The status quo before was calling a number, hoping they didn't hang up or scoff at the route, waiting 20-120 minutes, getting scammed by taking an inefficient route, and then getting lied to about the credit card machine not working. Oh, and then your only recourse being a report to a local taxi authority which is completely unreasonable if you are traveling due to the time effort involved.
That status quo was the thing that made Lyft/Uber an instant winner in the USA. It often gets lost amid the noise of Uber breaking the law.
The pre-rideshare world was awful and full of ripoffs. Disrupting that is the win for all.
I remember the last time I had to use a taxi. It was in Saint Louis - there was no Uber/Lyft at that time at that ___location. They had no website. So I had to call somewhere - cell service was nearly non-existent for some reason. My flight left in 3 hours. The taxi dispatcher sent someone, but, well, I called the dispatcher after 30 minutes. He's on his way. Great. An hour and 45 minutes before my flight, the guy pulls up. Of course he got lost or something, I don't care. We make our way to the airport. Happily, this time the credit card worked.
A few years before that, I was in Boston. Taxi had a TV playing in the headrest in front of me. Of course it was charging me, but it didn't say that. The driver didn't have a credit card reader - until I told him that I had no cash, so he had to figure it out. Then the reader came out. I asked for a receipt (business trip), and he scribbled something on literally the back of an envelope.
Immigrants driving cars 12 hours a day werent the ones making money off medallions. Rich investors bought medallions as very lucrative investments, until Uber came along.
In pre-Uber San Francisco, many of the drivers who had medallions made a decent living renting them out to the likes of Yellow Cab instead of driving themselves. This alone shows the wrongness of that system, at least as it was done in SF. (Not sure what the system is now, but probably similar.)
I never blamed the drivers (nor the non-drivers) as it wasn't them who rigged the system. And most were pretty cool, even in the days when getting one to show up was a real challenge. (For SF folks: I would regularly wait 45 minutes for a cab to 5th and Howard in 2000, and knew better than to call Yellow which would just not show up half the time. Veteran's at least showed up eventually.)
Now that we have Uber and Lift clogging the city I would have expected the taxis to push things like customer service and professionalism... but last time I was there a taxi driver in front of my business hotel refused to take me to my doctor's office because: "You can walk that."
So I guess I'm prioritizing Lyft next time out. </anecdotal>
It's the same in NYC and Boston. If you can afford a medallion you have enough money to not be a taxi driver.
Honestly, I'm not convinced Uber's fast-and-loose approach is a bad thing. We view disruption as a good thing when it ousts an exploitative private entity -- why is it any different for the government?
> private entity
> why is it any different for the government?
For the record, I don't think the medallion system is good or right or fair - it's not. Just pointing out that there are distinctions here and willfully ignoring them would be foolish.
I'm not sure I understand your post -- I'm asking why people view Uber as evil for trying to disrupt industries that are protected by the government but not when a company tries to disrupt private industry.
> I'm asking why people view Uber as evil for trying to disrupt industries that are protected by the government
That's not why people see Uber as evil. It's because they see Uber as brazenly disregarding the laws of their communities, treating their employees badly (including drivers), exploiting people who need rides in bad weather, and competing unfairly.
It is because of the idea that the government is here for public good, because they're not self-interested, whereas private industries are there because of their greed and self-interest, and they harm their customers whenever they can. In reality, nobody would eat at a government-run restaurant when they have an option to eat at private ones, and nobody would buy a government-designed cell phone when they can buy Android/iPhone. Yet government regulation of transportation, healthcare, and education is the right thing, because they are so much less important than our dinners and phones, and we can afford bureaucratic inefficiencies in these industries, right?
> Cities began regulating fares, service areas, and the business model. Cities put rules on them for the public good.
The popularity of Uber, Lyft and similar show those two statements are in contradiction. I'm sure they weren't aware at the time, but that's what happens when you regulate business models. The status quo is locked in, and things are worse than they could be with perfect invisibility.
It wasn't the need for people to take taxis where the regulation stemmed from. It was because cities didn't want their streets to be overly congested by private vehicles (where at least in manhattan, uber has made far worse).
Taxi regulations date to a time when governments thought it was a good idea for the government to regulate rates. The government decided how much you could charge and your pricing policies, and in return, it limited competition.
Some history of the Haas Act here: https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2013/0.... One thing to note is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. This was happening at a time when the government regulated things in ways it wouldn't dream of doing today. If you wanted to build a new telephone line, operate a new freight trucking or airline route, or build a new railway, you'd have to ask a government agency for permission, and also get approval for the prices you wanted to charge. The agency would decide "oh, there is no need for a route from here to there" and could deny permission on that basis, or decide "oh, this price is too high, you can't charge that much."
The government back then generally viewed competition as a pernicious thing. So they imposed entry requirements to limit competition. That necessitated also bringing prices under government control, to curb monopoly abuses. The Haas Act followed the same basic logic. Limit pernicious competition by limiting licenses, but curb potential abuses by controlling rates.
And who can blame them, really. When it costs thousands of dollars to get a medallion, you want to protect your investment and do whatever you can to maximize your profits.
> And who can blame them, really. When it costs thousands of dollars to get a medallion, you want to protect your investment and do whatever you can to maximize your profits.
AFAIK, in most places in Europe a taxi license costs tens or hundreds of dollars, not thousands. (There are exceptions, of course, most famously London where the cost is more in time than in direct money, and Paris where licenses are sold second-hand for hundreds of thousands.)
It’s not just the cost of the license. In the US, and presumably in Europe, taxi rates are set by the government. Taxis can’t use things like surge pricing to maximize revenues.
This myth of the taxi companies lobbying to avoid competition doesn't seem based in reality. Taxis didn't seek out regulation to protect themselves. Cities began regulating fares, service areas, and the business model. Cities put rules on them for the public good. The medallion is there is to balance out the price regulations placed on taxi companies and to ensure that the rules didn't make the taxi business unprofitable.
I've never seen any indication they sought out these regulations.
Really it smells like a smear campaign to make a bunch of immigrants driving cars 12 hours a day the bad guys and to make the 60 billion dollar corporate titan the underdog.