The medallion system is wildly unfair. I was devastated when the New York City medallion prices crashed after Uber got into the market and all these taxi drivers lost everything and killed themselves. I really loved New York taxi drivers, and in literally thousands of taxi rides there, I can only remember good things.
I did live in these neighborhoods, as I said. Car services worked OK, as well as the illegal van-busses. It was somewhat haphazard and medium-effective.
Important: car services were actual businesses, with employees and benefits and vacation days. You could make a steady middle-class living working for a car service and have fixed hours.
Then Uber came in. Uber has been able to take a 25 to 30 cent loss on each dollar of revenue it takes in for over a decade because of billions of dollars in investment capital.
No real business could compete with that! So Uber could easily undercut the market, destroying all these actual, viable, profitable businesses.
In fact, when you can lose money on every ride, you can even start to put public transportation out of business. Which is just terribly wasteful and polluting.
The Sherman Act of 1890(*) is supposed to entirely prohibit selling a good or service for less than its value in order to create a monopoly. Uber is obviously flouting that law, as have so many other new technology companies.
For almost a century, America would aggressively enforce that law under both Republican or Democratic Administrations. Then the Internet happened, and both sides shrugged and said, "The Internet doesn't count," and "Enforcing the law was for previous generations!"
Regardless, the Sherman Act is ethically still the law of the land, which makes Uber a cheat.
Additionally, Uber relied on people's lack of understanding of risk and amortization by simply sloughing the cost of the fleet and of insurance onto individual workers, and the passengers.
And finally, Uber relied on flouting and warping the law, both by ignoring local ordinances on commercial cars, and by pretending that all these people who work for them are "contractors".
I should add that the latter, despicable, lying practice alone, to rob workers of the benefits and security that make life somewhat bearable as a wage slave, this deliberate and mendacious cruelty and mockery of labor law should prevent any compassionate person from ever doing business with that company.
It's a travesty it took until this month for this bullshit to get refuted in court, but the poor ethics of their Big Lie have always been clear to any compassionate person.
Uber cannot continue to sell dollar bills for $0.70 forever. They haven't come up with any actual source of revenue comparable to their expenses; and they do not have a particularly great competitive advantage.
Their app is fine, but nothing that could be reproduced fairly easily by another big software company. (I wrote programs for Google for five years.)
Uber is not in a defensible market. Unlike operating systems, social networks or search, there is no natural monopoly for local transportation. Neither consumers nor operators have any particular loyalty to Uber, and moving to a new service is just installing another app.
Better solutions were needed, yes. But Uber did not provide a workable solution!, just a spewing of transportation investor dollars into more cars, nearly all gasoline powered, and the introduction of a lot of new problems, particularly for the workers.
Uber is like taking painkillers to hide the pain of your cancer. And soon it will collapse, unless they come up with some miraculous scheme to stop hemorrhaging cash.
Good riddance.
Communities needs to be empowered, by which I mean funded, to provide transportation in the best way for them, and not be sending money made and spent in your community to some billionaire in Silicon Valley.
(* — Trivia note: I first learned about the Sherman Act from the still very entertaining Robert Heinlein novella, Magic Inc., where one of the characters fighting against the forces of Hell was a magical trust-busting investigator…)
