For San Francisco Cab Drivers, Once-Treasured Medallions Now a Burden

For every poor hardworking cab driver who has taken a mortgage out to buy a medallion, there are a dozen sleazy operators who own piles of them, do not drive, and have leased them out to cabbies at horrific rates.

For example, a couple of days ago I took an Uber. The driver that picked me up was a student. I asked him why he was driving, and he said, "Oh, well I came [to this city] to hang out with my friends, but they can't do anything for another hour. So I decided to do a few rides while I wait."

Uber was able to take the unused potential of someone just messing around in a city and use them to pick me up.

They are able to do that because they can watch everything that happens via the app. If someone tries to screw you over and take a long route if you're new to the city, Uber gives you a refund and the driver doesn't get paid. If the driver is driving like a maniac on bald tires while they talk on their phone, you can give them a low rating. Enough of those and they get kicked off of the service entirely. In other words, instead of an expensive and burdensome network of licensing and regulations, Uber was able to better regulate what was happening using technology.

The first time I ever took an Uber a driver came and picked me up, opened the door for me, gave me a water bottle and some candy, turned on the music I like, and was very safe and professional. And the whole thing cost less than a taxi. I haven't been in a taxi since.

So the app is the main attraction, but not because you can hail a car (though that's nice, especially when you're in underserved areas). It's because the app allows Uber to create a completely different economy around the supply and demand of ridesharing.

It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than funding lawyers and lobbyists like they have been.

Uber did start the shift to using apps instead of hailing or calling cabs. Now, the idea is in the "fragmentation stage" with the early adopters, where everyone and their brother has developed a different app. Once some of the underperfomers fade away, there will hopefully be more centralization when late adopter customers start using this market.

I badly broke my leg and, because I lived too far from public transportation to crutch over, had to take taxis to work 4-5 times a week, often both ways. No taxi company in sf will reliably come, even if you make it clear that you are going to take a cab at least 4 days a week for most of the next year. Instead, even when you are in the middle of the mission in a relatively dense location and going to soma, dispatch simply lies and says "10 to 15 minutes". A 95% wait time was 3 hours, and a 85% time was 1 hour 15 minutes, for what should be an approximately 15 minute drive. Even simple requests like calling a couple minutes before the taxi arrives so I could get down 2 flights of stairs on crutches without detaining the driver or having the driver leave couldn't be followed. Needless to say, this causes significant disruption to your life when you have to leave 90 minutes plus the length of the drive before going somewhere if you want to have any hope of reliably getting there on time. And god forbid you have to see your surgeon or something else with a hard deadline. The taxi services should be ashamed of themselves, and frankly participated in a violation of my civil rights as done by a quasi-governmental monopoly. And there are other issues: when I would occasionally have to pay with a card, the meter would suddenly be broken until you made it clear drivers had two choices: call the card in or not get paid. A fucking miracle would occur, and the card reader would start working. The taxi system literally shat on their customers.

The advantage of uber is simple: when requested, they either come, or say they won't. That allows you to be an adult and either make alternative arrangements or tell the other party you'll be late. I used uber even when they cost 2x as much as a cab just for this reason.

In conclusion, fuck taxis. Also, fuck sf. Only in sf is "a taxi that comes" a disruptive service.