> As crazy as early Uber was I still have trouble believing that taxi companies are more deserving or were better to their employees or less corrupt. There's no evidence.
Do you have any evidence, for any taxi network in any city on the planet, of that taxi network doing anything even remotely as illegal or antisocial as Uber has been (and still is) doing? Uber's transgressions are well documented, there is great many of them, and quite a few were done at scale.
For the "deserving" part - they were there. Good or bad, I don't think any business deserves being steamrolled by an aggressive foreign multinational corporation, with practically infinite budget to undercut competitors and keep law enforcement at bay. Local businesses don't get to break the law without impunity.
For being better to their employees, I honestly don't know. But in all the rides with traditional networks I took over two decades of my life, I don't remember any driver actually complaining about their job. Ironically, the drivers of Uber-like[0] services keep complaining all the time - mostly about constantly changing terms of contracts, and constantly testing new kinds of customer acquisition schemes, that tend to take away money from the drivers.
> But most people prefer to see the price before they get in.
I never said I didn't want it either. I like this feature - and guess what, I had that, way before Uber was a thing, thanks to a private company that fought for improvement in transport regulations. That's how I know sociopathy wasn't necessary to disrupting the taxi market.
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[0] - I don't use Uber itself, it's a matter of principle.
Do you have any evidence, for any taxi network in any city on the planet, of that taxi network doing anything even remotely as illegal or antisocial as Uber has been (and still is) doing? Uber's transgressions are well documented, there is great many of them, and quite a few were done at scale.
For the "deserving" part - they were there. Good or bad, I don't think any business deserves being steamrolled by an aggressive foreign multinational corporation, with practically infinite budget to undercut competitors and keep law enforcement at bay. Local businesses don't get to break the law without impunity.
For being better to their employees, I honestly don't know. But in all the rides with traditional networks I took over two decades of my life, I don't remember any driver actually complaining about their job. Ironically, the drivers of Uber-like[0] services keep complaining all the time - mostly about constantly changing terms of contracts, and constantly testing new kinds of customer acquisition schemes, that tend to take away money from the drivers.
> But most people prefer to see the price before they get in.
I never said I didn't want it either. I like this feature - and guess what, I had that, way before Uber was a thing, thanks to a private company that fought for improvement in transport regulations. That's how I know sociopathy wasn't necessary to disrupting the taxi market.
--
[0] - I don't use Uber itself, it's a matter of principle.