That said, Taxi drivers have something Uber drivers don’t- a union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Taxi_Workers'_Alliance
Taxis made their bed by being pieces of shit for a long time. No one will have any sympathy for their plight.
Now uber piece of shit, friendship over. Taxi new best friend
I’m not sure if anyone else here has mentioned this… At least up until Uber/Lyft came out, taxis were suuuuper racist. It was really hard for black men to hail taxis.
I remember one time, in Boston, I (white dude) was downstream of a black guy.
Cabbie went right by the black guy and stopped for me.
Black guy came running up and slashed his tire and then ran off.
I was like “cabby deserved it, but at the same time black guy justified it.”
Not really a justified decision if it was the wrong one. The cabbie got his tires slashed by being a dickhead. If he’d have not been a racist, he would’ve had no problems. This is like the guy in the meme who puts a metal pole in his bike spokes. Cabbie caused his own problems.
Why would you give a regular taxi driver an Uber PIN? You just walk up to a taxi and get in.
Because Uber needs to insert themselves somehow to be able to squeeze as much money as possible out of both you and the taxi driver.
That still makes no sense. Cabs have no affiliation (e.g. yellow cab) with Uber. I doubt any cab driver cares about Uber PINs. What am I missing?
Uber effectively weaseled their way into the taxi industry by somehow enticing drivers to work for them while also assuming all of the liabilities. Truly, capitalism at its finest.
A few times as a kid I had to take a taxi alone. I knew the way home, but the driver decided to make a lot of unnecessary turns and go this round about way to run up the fair. I was probably in 3rd grade and knew what he was doing but didn’t have the guts to call him out.
Would be epic for a third-grader to loudly firmly vociferate a taxi driver back into shape
You kiss your mother with that mouth?
But now you can’t just tell the driver where to go and give him cash, you have to use the app first and you are out of luck if you phone battery is dead. So technology makes the experience activly worse in this case.
Yeah but it’s cheaper than a taxi, and the best part is that you don’t have to interact with a human, which means you don’t have to tip (if you book a self-driving car). Furthermore, if you practice good charging habits, you never have to worry about a dead phone.
why do you have to tip a taxi driver?
Short answer: America.
Long Answer: Because American companies are so greedy that they won’t even pay a livable wage; they expect working class citizens to pick up the slack with tips in every industry they can get away with doing such a thing. All thanks to the policies of a long dead president from the 80s (Reagan), that were never rolled back. In other words: America.
Tech bros also just reinvented trains recently, so this is pretty appropriate
Taxi drivers in my city also have something else Uber drivers don’t- a licence that was bought decades ago and is limited to a certain number, they never expire and can be bought and sold between private parties and you end up with one asshole who owns a bunch and rents out the licenced car to drivers who pay him a rent. It’s a pretty hardcore mafia and predates on immigrants.
They are also fucking maniacs who almost kill people every day with their reckless driving, but Ubers do that too.
Same in France. They had huge protests years ago to ban Uber, because they didn’t want competition making it harder to pay for their license.
Motherfucker, who lobbied to limit the number of licenses in the first place?
Yet I value those licenses and medallions more than any rideshare contract.
I drive a delivery truck around the city for a living and watch taxis “drive” all day,
I wouldn’t piss on them if they were in fireI don’t value them.
That’s Uber propaganda. The system was created because prior to that cities had traffic jams with a ton of freelance cabs with no quality controls or regulation. The medallion system set a price floor and mandated inspections and insurance and background checks. Uber bypassed all of that for years and surprise; women were being assaulted by drivers with criminal history, passengers were injured from uninspected vehicles and couldn’t get remedied because the drivers were uninsured, and cities have worsening traffic jams because there was no limit on Uber drivers choking downtown streets.
The taxi industry evolved this way for good reasons. Uber was initially sold as good for immigrants and now immigrants protest how that company gets special treatment over every other cab company and hurts their bottom line.
To the immigrant thing - I was on vacation a few weeks ago and took five Uber rides. None of the drivers spoke English. I wonder if ride sharing is going the immigrant predator route these days.
For clarification, it didn’t bother me to have non-English speaking drivers. They were all great.
