The previous solution to this for taxis was crippling the supply of taxi jobs (via medallions) so each taxi job paid more as well as setting a minimum fee for entering a car.
Uber drivers would likewise make more money if there was less of them, so they would always have new calls waiting. But that also still means there’s less people making money, as well as far longer wait times for consumers and higher costs.
The medallion system was designed around the ideas taxis = your career, not some side gig you can start/stop whenever you like.
You could also do it by setting price floors but gov messing with prices at that fine grained level is dangerous (as Venezuela learned with food).
Uber was only cheaper than taxis when they were artificially dumping the price. They're now far more expensive and they're still losing money hand over fist.
Taxi drivers were never working to pay the salaries of hundreds/thousands of SWEs, international sales teams etc.
The medallion system is specific to a few cities and has major issues in even fewer. People talk about taxis as if every city is New York.
Right, the vast majority of places where you can order a non-Uber taxi are no more regulated than any other job. There was no "Evil medallion cartel", that was always just propaganda that Uber explicitly paid for.
I only have experience in couple of cities (Toronto & Ottawa), and medallions are... just an insane thing. A positively insane thing. Nominal price of about $1k, their market price was up to $300k. For many people I spoke to, their one and only retirement financial planning was essentially a mortgage on their own medallion. When Uber came along and medallion prices fell, they were... devastated, angry, distraught, hopeless.
On one hand my heart completely goes out to them - they worked hard and invested in something they perceived or were assured had permanent value.
On the other hand, W.T.F. You are banking your family's entire life that... what, city will never change the model or expand number of licenses or revamp their code, basically that nothing will ever change?
So I don't know if there was an "evil medallion cartel", but there definitely was "extreme lobbying by people whose livelihood was intimately tied in shortage of transportation methods" and a little bit of "unspecified people going to uber office with bats and having a little smash-the-computers fun".
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On the other topic you mention - if there indeed exist cities where "taxi is no more regulated than uber", then what IS the distinction between "Uber" and "Taxi" in such places? Can I just slap a sign on my car and pick up people?
A taxi medallion has been sold for $100,000, a record for the price of these taxi licenses, which once cost $10. The number of medallions has been frozen since 1937 so by law there are only 11,787 medallions, which license cabs to pick up street hails, in the city. But demand has been rising rapidly and so has the price.
...
The first medallion to hit the $100,000 mark was sold earlier this month to a 30-year-old Asian, Stanley Cheung, who lives on the Lower East Side. He is like so many of the city's cabdrivers over the years - energetic young immigrants able to borrow enough money to buy a medallion and a cab and take off in pursuit of the American dream.
However, according to Jay L. Turoff, chairman of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, a medallion has been rising in value so much that it is producing a new kind of buyer - the doctor or lawyer or other professional who looks upon the medallion simply as an investment. ...
It reads like similar pieces I saw about high priced medallions in the 2010s. I don't remember seeing articles criticizing taxi medallions in cities where they weren't expensive.
Uber drivers would likewise make more money if there was less of them, so they would always have new calls waiting. But that also still means there’s less people making money, as well as far longer wait times for consumers and higher costs.
The medallion system was designed around the ideas taxis = your career, not some side gig you can start/stop whenever you like.
You could also do it by setting price floors but gov messing with prices at that fine grained level is dangerous (as Venezuela learned with food).