Hacker News Reader

Comment by moab | Hacker News Reader

I think what'll come out of this entire experiment is something very, very similar to the current taxi industry - simply with better apps and dependability, and I will not complain at all. A little part of me suspects that this will not be Uber (at least in America, where the regulatory blockade feels really impenetrable as an engineer), although at this point it's anyones game.

View on HN

My honest hope when I first heard of Uber was that it would give a huge wakeup call to the industry. Let's face it, America is a service industry and many of its services suck. The attitude is marginal at best, horrifying at worst. I hoped this level of customer scrutiny on performance would bring it up to the same level as in Japan.

I'm still hoping someone will make it happen. Or rather, perhaps an entire army of services will make it happen as we've seen, a de facto monopoly, yields terrible results.

Your point reminds me of that recent New Yorker article on learning [1]. In particular, the author points out how particularly niche industries (competitive sports, theatre, orchestras) have seen significant improvements in median performance over the past few decades. However, this has been limited mostly to fields where there are a small number of potential openings and a pool of candidates significantly larger than the number of openings. One of the big questions I think about sometimes is how America can push its citizens and employees to be a little more disciplined/dedicated (ahh not exactly clear how to phrase that..) purely through economic manipulation (and not cultural impetus a la Japan).

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time

That was a fantastic article! Thanks for linking that. It certainly gave me a lot of food for thought.

Über's ran into legal problems in Germany, but a city like Berlin has a very same regulatory system. Taxi licenses are available at a reasonable processing charge, drivers have to be licensed for driving skill and commercially insured, and the majority of drivers are single or a few car small businesses. Also, the cars are plentiful, inexpensive, clean and modern (there's some variery, but a random hail will usually net a Mercedes with leather seats). It's mostly what Uber says they want, except that if they play by the sensible rules here then they don't have any competitive edge.

There are multiple apps like mytaxi which add a layer of usability, estimated pick up time and cost, pay from app, interactive maps, and driver rating.

Why haven't taxi companies done this themselves to see off the upstart competitors?

Probably because taxi companies are a dime-a-dozen across various cities and states, and the capital required for an engineering investment to pull something like this off just isn't there at any given shop. It's a technology problem that the existing industry faces, and because the existing competition is essentially a coalition of independent companies, they can't band together to build something like this without a joined effort (nigh impossible).

I was recently in Pittsburgh and saw a clunky touch-screen app stuck to the back of the passenger seat that sounded just like Uber, so it's clear that someone out there is working on building Uber-like dependability for your taxi. But I also remember talking to the cab-driver on that trip, and having him tell me that their 'dispatch' is still one person sitting in an office somewhere manually dialing and dispatching cabs to received calls. The status quo in the industry is just so ancient in so many ways. Here's to hoping they can start moving and respond though.

Probably because it would be expensive and risky to roll out something across a large, already existing network, but at the same time running an innovative "side project" may well be met by anxiety (and corresponding resistance) by those who aren't able to participate. It seems to me that both of these responses are fairly economically rational, given the corresponding risks.

Regulation could be useful here, if properly designed, by helping to alleviate the fears of those in the existing industry who are most likely to be directly affected by these useful innovations. Unfortunately, the allergic political response of some sectors of society to anything interventionist makes coming to reasonable arrangements quite difficult, so we just end up with something that isn't really that great for anyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com