Hopefully this is the start of artificial, government imposed barriers being torn down. Hopefully someday anybody will be able to be a lawyer or plumber, or anything else they want without government requiring a competition and innovation killing license. Thanks Uber!
Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
91–100 of 270 posts
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#92| The union is calling on the city take several actions to provide relief for the city’s struggling taxi industry, including changing rules so taxi drivers aren’t required to replace their vehicles as often
Right! Let's loosen the rules and allow the cabs to be in worse condition than they already are, that will get the customers back! /s
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Whether it's for the better or worse simply doesn't matter Yikes- I have only a little sympathy for the taxi industry, but it is very scary that you do not believe we should be concerned with whether market forces improve society or not. I think it is extremely important to the vast majority of people that any enormous change in transportation occurs for the benefit of society - the ideology that capitalism is an en…
I read the original post a couple of times after reading your comment, and I don't get any vibe that he doesn't think we should be concerned about the impact of market forces on social wellbeing. Unless you're implying something about the taxi industry being a social good more so than Uber or Lyft, but that seems unlikely given that you have little sympathy for the industry. I live in Chicago, and I don't know if Lyf…
The city gets their $2/ride or whatever from Lyft/Uber, I strongly doubt they're too concerned.
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taxi medallions were being sold for $300k three years ago. Taxis likely didn't buy with cash, but rather financed them, leading to significantly higher operational expenses.
Yeah but don't those medallion prices tank now, so anyone who got one recently doesn't have that overhead? Obviously those who bought into the pyramid ponzi scheme at the wrong point will go under. The use of medallions where it still exists needs to die - but what better time than when prices reach bottom?
> so anyone who got one recently doesn't have that overhead
If you were a lender and you are aware that the medallion market hasn't bottomed, would you lend $200k-300k? Probably only if the down payment was very significant. The article states that foreclosures on medallions are increasing, so the market hasn't capitulated.
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#95| The union is calling on the city take several actions to provide relief for the city’s struggling taxi industry, including changing rules so taxi drivers aren’t required to replace their vehicles as often Right! Let's loosen the rules and allow the cabs to be in worse condition than they already are, that will get the customers back! /s
Well, we bail out banks who make shoddy investments.
That's my only counter to the idea that medallions are going to ruin some lives soon.
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and I bet after Borders shuts down, you'll see Amazon raise book prices sky-high! People always claim this will happen, and it never seems to. If Uber tripled prices, a competitor would start up to cut into their market share.
VCs wont pay for rides forever.
VCs are just paying for rides until self-driving cars get to the point that drivers are no longer needed.
I'm not concerned with the price of rides increasing, I'm concerned with the unemployment our country is going to get punched in the face with. Between cab drivers and OTR (truckers), we're going to have a MUCH bigger problem on our hands than we've seen since Detroit collapsed (which was arguably less of an issue since it occurred over a longer period of time).
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'll see what you think of the cab industry when uber raises their prices by 3 times in order to become profitable, after the cabbies all gone.
I'm pretty sure Lyft, which is just about as good as Uber for taking ordinary trips, will moderate that. Lyft isn't going anywhere; their cash reserves are large. Also public transit, car rentals, etc.
Public transit and car rentals are a poor substitute for a taxi service.
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you also feel bad for the slumlord who spends a million dollars on a property that eventually gets condemned because he didn't take care of it? This is the wrong analogy, for trivially obvious reasons. As I'm sure you're aware, the drop in value of taxi medallions wasn't contingent on the owner being a bad driver. Put plainly, even a driver who went above and beyond to provide honest, high-quality service was af…
> Neither this nor the fact that the regulatory regime was horribly flawed change the fact that many drivers got screwed through no fault of their own because gov't policy was incompetent enough to create bad policy and fail to sustain it. There's an important clarification here: Taxi drivers did not get screwed. It's medallion owners that got screwed. Yes, some of the drivers actually own their medallion, but many (…
TL;DR: In an economy with government involvement as heavy as ours[1], it's ludicrous to claim that people should not only know the "true" value of something but know precisely when the gov't is going to decide that the market value should be allowed to revert to its "true" value.
> Taxi drivers did not get screwed. It's medallion owners that got screwed
Right, good catch, I wasn't thinking about that fact. That's not central to my point but it is a good point to clarify.
> The medallion owners who got screwed do partially have themselves to blame, because they saw the outrageously inflated prices for medallions and chose to pay them anyway.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. What is the "true" value of a taxi medallion, in a regulatory context where the government is setting the supply? If we implement [insert optimal healthcare policy] and (hypothetically), doctor salaries drop precipitously, are doctors to blame for seeing how "outrageously inflated" med school tuition was and choosing to pay it anyway? Should they have stayed out of the field entirely until healthcare policy in this country is perfectly optimal?
For the life of me, I'll never understand the lack of empathy required to see someone get screwed by unstable rules and conclude "well, it's your own damn fault: you should have been born one of the X-Men, with the ability to predict the future perfectly and realize that this particular inefficient policy regime was going to be disavowed at this exact time". Providing a stable legal framework is one of the most basic and most important jobs of a gov't, and making changes like suddenly deciding to stop enforcement of policy that the industry has been dealing with for decades is what legal scholars call "a dick move".
Here's another example which might be more directly relatable: if you buy a house in California and Prop 13 gets repealed or if you own real estate anywhere and our idiotic policy regime around real estate gets fixed: you'd suddenly lose a huge portion of your life savings, but you'd have yourself to blame because "you saw the outrageously inflated prices and chose to pay them anyway"?
Bear in mind that even if you were intellectually consistent here and agreed that those homeowners are to blame, that would be terrible advice for the literally centuries' worth of landowners/homeowners in whose lifetimes real estate policy wasn't made efficient or fair, and real estate value growth accrued to arbitrary people through rent-seeking.
[1] Not that that's a bad thing necessarily
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#99I probably won't ever take a taxi again, but have some sympathy for the cab drivers who put their life savings in medallions. The city effectively promised them the exclusive right to give taxi rides, but didn't do anything about a non-medallion entity doing that same thing. They put hundreds of thousands of dollars into something meaningless.
> have some sympathy for the cab drivers who put their life savings in medallions Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope. They were speculators in a bubble market. It didn't matter what percentage of their life savings they used. If you feel sorry for someone who purchased a $300k taxi medallion which had an intrinsic value (the total value a medallion can be used for rental to taxi drivers over X years) which is far less, y…
> If you feel sorry for someone who purchased a $300k taxi medallion which had an intrinsic value [...] which is far less, you are enabling such behavior.
Dude.
Feeling sorry for someone else makes you a human, not an enabler.
Re: Chicago taxi industry sliding towards collapse
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'll see what you think of the cab industry when uber raises their prices by 3 times in order to become profitable, after the cabbies all gone.
Yeah, and I bet after Borders shuts down, you'll see Amazon raise book prices sky-high! People always claim this will happen, and it never seems to. If Uber tripled prices, a competitor would start up to cut into their market share.
I was happy with my settlement check from amazon