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Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

reuters.com

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Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#521

Post by chillacy »

iRobbery wrote: post #441
chillacy wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, unless they're paying the drivers. They're basically providing an interface to find taxis. Just like how Amazon can sell you a pack of Coke without being a food manufacturer. Or blogs can bring affiliate traffic to Amazon without being PCI compliant. Kayak and Hipmunk can get you a plane ticket without being an airline company. Etc.

sending referrals to a site or handling payments are quite different. There are plenty of definitions of the word taxi in many languages that simply mean a person transporting you from a to b exchange for money. Doesnt say it gets exchange with the driver, nor are you saying that uberdriver drives around for fun and games. He does get paid to transport people from a to b. The typical business of a taxi service :)

I was responding to a comment about uberTAXI which is AFAIK a service where uber sends you to an existing legal taxi cab, who then runs the meter as he sees fit, and then charges you through uber.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#522

Post by cpkpad »

deanCommie wrote: post #344
cpkpad wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Boston. Taxi drivers are jumping to Uber and Lyft wholesale. They make more, and perhaps more importantly, the income is steady. With the taxi system, medallions cost about $600,000 to buy, and were owned by rich investors. Cab drivers rent those medallions for around $200 per day, and after paying off the investor, kept any profit on top of that. On a bad day, they'd lose money. On a decent day, they'd wor…

You're right except the whole "making more" part. Once the market is saturated with Uber drivers like has happened in places like London, rates start to go down, and drivers make WAY less than than the used to. Simple supply and demand. No defense of the medallion system. Maybe the government should "bail out" taxi medallion owners, and simply pay back these medallion costs so that taxi drivers are free to figure out…

Boston is one of the original Uber markets. The market is as saturated as it gets. I talk to drivers. They're much better off. It's like night and day. Driving for medallion owners was sub-minimum wage, they'd sometimes lose money, and the shifts were insanely long. A driver on their 14th hour driving a given day wasn't a safe driver.

At least in Boston, a medallion loan or an individual medallion owner driving a cab are a complete myth and fabrication. A medallion costs $700,000. No one with three quarters of a million dollars is driving a cab. Investors buy medallions and lease them out. Poor immigrants lease medallions and cabs, and scrape by. Medallion owners, calling themselves small business owners, aren't even required to provide minimum wage or basic health care. It's a horribly exploitative business, and I'm glad to see it go under.

Subsidies or bailouts for medallion owners seem like a horrible idea to me, at least in a town like Boston. In a city where lower-class individuals owned medallions, it would be another story.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#524

Post by emodendroket »

rayiner wrote: post #430
emodendroket wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can you say? They've got good PR folks and well-connected political hires.

What's particularly fantastic is that they can maintain this PR shtick in the face of the fact that the thing that makes uber possible--surge pricing--is exactly the kind of "gouging" government-regulated rates we're designed to prevent. "Oh, it's raining? Well that's going to cost extra!"

I mean, it's gotta help to have guys like David Plouffe on the payroll, right?

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#525

Post by emodendroket »

jwallaceparker wrote: post #476
emodendroket wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this analogy to work the ridesharing services would need to give taxi companies a lot more than a nickel a ride.

The specific value of the subsidy is completely irrelevant to the analogy.

If the fishing rod let your friend catch 105% as much as he needed to eat you probably need to keep fishing yourself.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#526

Post by threesixandnine »

zaidf wrote: post #139
giaour wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike an individual pizza parlor, the taxi fleet in a given city plays an important role in policy planning. Public transit planning takes taxi service into account, and taxis are barred in many locales from refusing medically necessary transportation. Taxis have obligations that go above and beyond those imposed on a generic livery provider, and as such governments might be reluctant to let a few livery providers o…

Isn't that just kicking the can down the road? Wouldn't the government be better served revising the plan to take new innovation into account than instituting a tax purely to slow down innovation?

Too much work man.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#527

Post by jwallaceparker »

emodendroket wrote: post #525
jwallaceparker wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specific value of the subsidy is completely irrelevant to the analogy.

If the fishing rod let your friend catch 105% as much as he needed to eat you probably need to keep fishing yourself.

Yes, you would. But with your remaining time you'd build shelter or firewood, just not as much.

The same principle applies. You still both improved your standard of living. The extent of the improvement depends on the productivity increase afforded by the fishing rod.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#528

Post by emodendroket »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #485
emodendroket wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cab drivers don't become homeless drifters, they become your next lyft pick up. Yeah, at significantly lower wages.

How much lower? Has anyone done an analysis of the difference in pay, given any requirements to pay the cab company, pay for a gold star, etc. Does a standard cabbie make significantly more than a standard lyft driver? Cabs are certainly far more rundown generally when I take them than lyft vehicles. People seem "better off" driving lyft, but it may not be their main source of employment. So it would be cool to see a…

Uber did an analysis that they claimed showed Uber pay was better, but they didn't take into account or share data about costs the driver is stuck with in Uber that they wouldn't be in a cab: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/22/uber-drivers-pay-st...

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#529

Post by mpwoz »

BurningFrog wrote: post #464
ucarion wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know? My impression is that most taxi drivers are very busy adapting. But I don't know either. To be clear: I don't know either. I'm an outsider to this industry. I'm just offering arguments. > Let's be clear: The people hardest hit by Uber/Lyft is taxi company owners. I don't think this is true. They're losing the most money, but they have lots of money. Taxi drivers risk losing all their revenue, which…

"New York City cab medallions, which sold for as much as $1 million a year ago, now are priced at the $500K level, battered by competition from Uber, Lyft. Some Independent owners, having paid upwards of $1 million, are “under water” by hundreds of thousands of dollars on the mortgages they owe on the medallions." http://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/6471/2016-03-08/uber-ly...

Uber is more than a year old, and investors speculating on $1 million medallions should have factored in the risk of losing that gamble...

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#530

Post by pfisch »

chrisbennet wrote: post #332
pfisch wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if software developers are made redundant by AI then we have already transitioned to a new type of economy because virtually every other job has been replaced except service industry. If we are in some impossible world where that isn't true then I would say they should maybe go into medicine, engineering or law I guess. Your question is too open ended to answer really. I have like 10 follow up questions to unde…

The question was meant as a thought exercise aimed at my fellow developers. I was hoping they would ask themselves, "What will I do once my field is disrupted?" I was hoping that they could feel a little empathy for others whose livelihood has been turned upside down. (I'm not directly responding to you, just your points which are typical responses.) The general response when faced with uncomfortable questions is to…

If you drive a taxi/vehicle as your job, then it has very obviously been in the works for years now that your job is going to see diminishing returns over time and you need to find a new angle.

I don't have sympathy maybe because I own a bootstrapped software studio and we are constantly pivoting and growing. We did ios/web contract work, now we mostly do video games on Steam. Guess what though, video games on steam is getting tougher so we are also pivoting to something else right now.

Life is change. There was once a time when you could just ply your trade for your entire life, and for some people that is still true, but that is not some inalienable right that is owed to anyone.

Businesses constantly have to be on their grind and don't just get some guaranteed paycheck, and no one is entitled to such a thing. You have to provide a service to people that you can exchange for money. If you are not really doing that then you are not just entitled to money.

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