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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

That's not the reason why Uber is getting moderately popular in São Paulo. We have a few great taxi calling apps and here the taxi service is fairly good and reliable (unlike Rio de Janeiro, where taxi service is hell, dishonest, rude and unreliable - there, Uber is a god sent gift).

Here in SP people use it only because of the price (about 30% cheaper than taxi). Uber Black was here for some time and no one never noticed. Only when they came with cheap UberX that people started using.

But taxi lobby fought back hard and Uber is oficially forbidden here until further regulation (unoficially still running though).

Anyway, just to share that here in SP is mostly a price competition. Not much else.

EDIT: Just for curiosity, the two bigger taxi apps in SP 99Taxis: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taxis99&hl... Easy Taxi: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.com.easytax...

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The Brazilian taxi "lobby" (some would say mafia) is really fighting back:

Taxi drivers assault Uber driver in Brasilia: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

In Porto Alegre: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

In Sao Paulo: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pt&tl=en&u=h...

Yes and the reason it's cheaper is that it's unregulated.

Thats the insight here.

Taxis in Panama are also more or less unregulated. The cars are barely serviceable, the rates vary wildly, especially if the driver doesn't like your skin color, and congestion is so bad that if you want to get across town during rush hour, the driver will not even bother to pick you up.

Markets optimize for cost. The point at which they will begin to correct for congestion is well after the point of total gridlock (since it costs the driver very little to sit in traffic). You can't drive down fuel costs, so any cost savings have to come from driver salaries and vehicle maintenance. Hopefully the Uber app provides sufficient feedbacks to correct for the market's tendency to drive down those costs, but I tend to doubt it. There is no particularly effective way to provide disincentives for gridlock as far as I'm aware, beyond limiting the number of vehicles allowed on the road. Some countries do this for all personal vehicles already, which may work better than a medallion system, but I doubt it would be popular in the USA.

Same with telco. Markets that were unregulated ended up having the cheapest phone and internet service (and, surprisingly, also the best).

in densely populated areas

Which are by definition, the areas that matter to most people.

The existence of a densely populated area doesn't imply that most people live there. The majority of a population can be sparsely distributed just fine.

In Canada it only became true ~80 years ago that most lived in urban areas according to statscan. In the territories it's only reached parity in the last 10 years.

Hence, regulation, so the minority isn't ruled by the tyranny of the majority.

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