What they never were, was "the underdog fighting taxi mafia". That's just propaganda. They beat "taxi mafias", plural, with divide-and-conquer, market after market, and they did that as a multinational corporation with ~infinite money supply thanks to VC funding.
Uber is a story of the Goliath going from town to town and beating everyone's Davids.
Here they all are required by law to have their cost stayed up front, printed on a sticker in the window.
Most of them have had apps for booking, with geolocation, ETA, and mobile payments for >10 years now.
Never had a single refusal, or complaint, or incorrect drop-off. Even in places which are lower class run-down areas.
They have always sent a wheelchair-compatible car when requested.
Uber was able to offer "reliable pickups, not complaining about your destination, and not having 'broken' credit card readers" for a competitive price by a combination of:
- Not servicing people with mobility issues
- Not servicing unprofitable areas in the city
- Subsidizing fares with their ~infinite VC money supply to a degree that didn't even pretend to be sustainable
- Offering unsustainably favorable conditions to drivers to create the initial impression of premium, high-quality service
- Blatantly breaking the local laws, and using their ~infinite VC money supply to avoid law enforcement and tie up any cases against them
The last three points being a plain and obvious bait&switch. The business was based on hoping they'll destroy local transportation businesses and gain reputation with people to make regulators face public backlash faster than they run out of money.
Market by market, they succeeded to a greater or lesser degree, and then perfectly predictably, they behaved like the paragons of honesty and virtue they always were: the drivers got shafted, service went to shit, and all good it did was to replace local businesses with multinational franchise of shit pseudo-taxi.
A McDonald'ification of the taxi market, if you like, except McDonald's doesn't suck as much.
The only people who ever fight mafias, are up-and-coming crime syndicates themselves.
I wonder if a state could cap their cut of the fare to say, $1. Index it to CPI every 3 years, so they don't have future legislators itching to bump that number up so often. Would this be fought out in courts, by secret meeting lobbyists, or would they just add a bunch of fees to it in such a way that it becomes opaque again (the fees could be paid by the driver, for instance, so it's totally under the radar of any customers/passengers)?
I don't trust those companies with important stuff anymore, I either go straight for public transport, or in some cases (airport) I pre-book an early enough departure to still be able to catch a bus to airport if the driver doesn't show.
On the other hand, Waymo has never scammed me; I've never had a conflict with a shitty Waymo driver; and in fact I'm rather happy to participate in their testing phase and give generous feedback about minor things that could be better after each trip.
But once that was dead and all taxi competitors no longer have to pay medallion-holding gentry for the right to do business? Uber is just a massive pile of debt and some slick marketing that adds very little value. Now that my local taxi companies have mobile software basically as good as Uber plus decades of established good name in my community? I've no reason to use Uber.