Uber becomes legal in NSW, Australia – taxi owners to be compensated • Hacker News Board

Post by wycx » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 4:01 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #33

victorhooi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not really. It's not like the government took away the rights of taxi drivers to drive people around. It's just that there's a new entrant now, and they actually need to compete. In fact, taxi medallion prices went down post-2011 (before Uber) because the government released more, because consumers (i.e. everyday people) complained about crazy prices. You don't see the government compensating people there. It w…

But the whole selling point of a taxi medallion is that the government will limit supply. If a developer was sold the rights to build 1000 apartments under an agreement that the government would limit future development in the region and they later opened the market, the developer they made that promise to would be right to expect some compensation. The problem isn't the compensation. The problem is that the governme…

Does the legislation specifically state artificial scarcity will be enforced, or just that supply will be regulated by the govt?

Post by will_hughes » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 5:26 AM UTC

victorhooi wrote: post #30

will_hughes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's closer to 'Bought a taxi plate for $400k, it's now worth ~$280k, here's $20k for your troubles' I'm not sure that the $280k pricetag is going to work given the changes (in Sydney, anyway). The only advantage now that a taxi plate has is that they can stand at ranks, be hailed and operate at the Airport.

Taxi medallion fell in price around 2011, because the government increased the supply (consumers started screaming about high taxi prices - and trust me, as a Sydney-sider, they are ridiculous, and the service is on the whole, pretty shoddy. I challenge you to find anybody who will defend Sydney taxi pricing, or their service). You don't see the government compensating the taxi drivers for that - taxpayers would be u…

Taxi prices have nothing to do with the availability of plates - taxi rates are fixed, not demand based.

Lower availability of plates would be linked somewhat to higher profits for taxis though (since it should increase their utilisation if the taxi is deployed in high demand areas).

Taxi plate owners did complain at the time the supply was increased (iirc saying mainly that there were already too many taxis), but there was little they could do other than make some noise.

I'm a Sydneysider and semi-regular taxi user, and given how far out I live from work - well aware of how expensive Sydney taxis are.

Uber becomes legal in NSW, Australia – taxi owners to be compensated

Re: Uber becomes legal in NSW, Australia – taxi owners to be compensated

Re: Uber becomes legal in NSW, Australia – taxi owners to be compensated