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Comment by URSpider94 | Hacker News Reader

I've posted this a few times in the past, but it's important to realize that the current hotel regulations have evolved over the past century in response to abuses by both tenants and landlords. Brushing these regulations off as tools used by the industry lobby to lock out competition is over-simplification.

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That's the same issue as with Uber - generally laws tend to evolve in response to the environment. Yes, they accumulate cruft, but there is always a reason behind the way it looks.

Chesterton's fence comes to mind:

http://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/

Definitely. I hate the common confusion between "I am smart and don't understand why X exists" with "it is stupid that X exists".

Kind of like marijuana laws?

Tobacco, alcohol, and pharma lobbies combined === a lot of cash. What's funny to me is that they chose prohibition instead of taking advantage of how much people want it and giving the government a cut like they do with all their other products.

You're forgetting prison lobbies. But it's a lot easier to grow your own cannabis than your own Xanax.

Not really. I read that as moral censoriousness combined with patriarchal idiocy and class bias. It's people who think they have superior morals thinking "lesser" people have deficient morals.

This is people who think they are smart assuming that anything they don't understand is dumb. So I suppose the common thread is ego and false pride leading one to underestimate others.

I'm suspicious of some of these reasons though. Why did they have so few taxi medallions in NYC? Why are they allowed to be leased to drivers?

Here's one take on it (though I'm not saying this is the only one).

In New York, taxis are part of the public transportation network. Taxi drivers go through extensive training to know where pretty much any address in the five boroughs is, and the fastest routes to get there. In order to incentivize taxi drivers to go through this training, and to incentivize owners to buy and maintain vehicles, the city limits the number of vehicles on the road at a given time to incentivize drivers and owners to go into the taxi business. According to the 2014 NYC Taxicab Fact Book, there are 13,437 medallions in circulation -- assuming that 70% of them are on the road at any one time, and taking the figure that 94% of pick-ups occur in Manhattan or at JFK or LaGuardia, that implies that there are over 200 taxis operating per square mile in Manhattan ... that's A LOT !!! It's not uncommon to grant a limited monopoly to a public utility to ensure consistent service.

Why lease medallions? Utilization. It would be really hard (and unsafe, and unpleasant) for an owner-operator to be in the car for more than 80-90 hours per week, whereas a leased car can be in operation for almost the entire 168 hours.

All that said, driver knowledge is much less important than it once was, with GPS (though taking routing advice from a mapping service in Manhattan could be a bad idea). Safety is probably less of a concern now too, since Uber tracks its drivers' every move. And, it's clear that medallion owners are reaping a lot of profit at the expense of drivers willing to work for sub-minimum wages. So, it's probably time to renegotiate the contract.

There shouldn't be incentives for drivers to go into the taxi business other than the market. Taxi rates should not be regulated, supply and demand ought to be enough. What broke the market was the extremely expensive medallion racket. They don't limit hairdresser licenses or medical licenses, why taxi medallions? It's a highly distorted market often controlled by highly corrupt mob related interests. How is that a good idea? The free market is surprisingly efficient when not encumbered by Byzantine attempts to regulate everything.

Well if deadlyfoxgrandpa's post is true that might make sense. You have to consider the additional load on the infrastructure of having more taxis on the road in an already congested area. He says passenger experience might go down with more taxis!

The free market is surprisingly efficient - in other words, ruthlessly effective - at eliminating money sinks. Like passengers with disability, which are only tiny part of client base (and not too wealthy a part) but require special adjustments to cars. I don't see how fully deregulated taxi business would do anything but ruthlessly eliminate them from the client base.

Yes, maybe we could use little less regulation. My personal issue with Uber is not the concept of less-regulated taxis. It's that it's managed by a bunch of sociopathic assholes, who openly try to exploit drivers and the community for profit, painting themselves as white knights while using every underhand tactic they can get away with to sabotage competition.

Last I checked there is no government regulation for the taxi business when done on privately owned property (either that you own or that you have permission from the owner to use). I wonder how many hairdressers are currently operating on a New York City street? Probably no where near the number of taxis.

What's the limit on limo medallions? Those use public streets.

I think that this regulation also helps to cater for people with disabilities. For purely profit-oriented service, there's no point in adjusting cars for their needs, because they're a tiny subset of client base and therefore don't matter.

I remember reading something about how if they increased the number of medallions in NYC by 20% then the additional traffic would actually cause a decrease in total passenger throughput. I don't remember where I read it, though.

I don't think the specifics are comparable, tho. Even as a pedestrian or skater, I'd rather be sharing the road with an uber or a lyft. At least here in SF and in oregon, traditional taxis are reallllly bad.

Why would you rather share the road with an uber/lyft driver vs taxi as a pedestrian?

Taxi drivers face fewer repercussions for shitty driving. Interestingly, as a function of Uber being illegal here, Uber drivers are super duper careful about what they're doing; if they have an accident, then the traffic authority isn't going to be very happy with them.

But, to be honest, a crappy driver is a crappy driver. Taxi drivers just seem to be worse in my personal experience.

Not from the US, but in the UK I'd much rather see a system where I can give a real feedback about the ride. There's a lot of talk about how Uber is not responsible for drivers and is only matching parties to workaround the law. In practice it looks like this to me:

In a usual "city-approved" taxis you get crazy behaviour, parking in dangerous places, speeding, etc. Try complaining and you'll learn that drivers only rent the communication equipment - the company is not responsible for what they do.

In Uber, I got a dangerous driver only once (where "dangerous" meant tailgating, but nothing really bad). He got 3 stars and a comment. I got 2 emails following up on the situation and Uber's assurance that the driver has been talked to.

So yes, I'd much rather share the road with an Uber/Lyft driver, because I know the feedback actually works in that case. There's another case of what insurance they have of course... but that's another topic about actually using the service.

> So yes, I'd much rather share the road with an Uber/Lyft driver, because I know the feedback actually works in that case.

Yeah, the feedback system seems to be a cool idea. In case of Uber though, keep in mind that the driver will get fired if their average rating drops to ~4.6 stars. That 3 you left there? Probably had a really big impact on him.

Yeah it's kind of crazy how people expect to see 4.5+ star ratings on everything but then also often use 3 stars to mean average, like the people who leave 3 star reviews for apps that say "looks interesting, I'll check it out later."

Like many things, regulations are a mix of sensible time tested rules and regulatory capture/crony capitalist oligopoly cementing rules.

The debate often sounds like it must be 100% of either.

Well, when you hear enough people saying "The government is always the problem" like it's a religious dogma, and claiming that a free market can solve every problem, for ever and ever amen, it gets a bit tiresome.

can you explain, specifically, how a 14% tax "evolved over the past century in response to abuses by both tenants and landlords"?

Even "past century" is an over-simplification. Inns are estimated to have existed for over 2000 years. This is a very established business model.

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