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Seoul City To Introduce Uber Rival Premium Taxi Service
An anonymous reader writes Seoul city has today announced that it will be launching a luxury taxi service this summer to rival the global cab-hailing app Uber, adding to the obstacles that the U.S.-based firm is currently facing in the Asian market. The government's move comes after the country's transport department rejected a proposal from Uber last week for a new driver registration, and enforced its stance against Uber operating in the area. The new premium service will be introduced in Seoul city in August with 100 luxury and mid-sized saloon cars. "We will provide a premium tax service which excels that of Uber..." the Seoul government said in a statement. It stated that a taxi association would be partners of the scheme to help establish the service, but added no detail regarding which company they would be working with.
btw, some people live only by copying and finally build the whole economy on it :)
With all the great news and new sayings of the state media ahead of the 70th year Anniversary I am sure NK has to have such better service
This coming from such a great airline service
http://saveie6.com/
a taxi association would be partners of the scheme
Well that about sums up what you'll get from THAT.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Uber responds with its own premium service.
The software Uber uses isn't particularly complex. A lone coder could code it up very rapidly. The only thing it got going for it in terms of competition is that,"Why should people use a different service when this one works?" So if another country wanted to make an Uber competitor and ban Uber, they can do it very easily. Every different country could have its own version of a smart phone summoned taxi service and it wouldn't cost that much in term of dev hours to the profit gained for not using someone else.
God spoke to me
I think this Seoul government's move doesn't understand where the Urber's business is.
There is an ironic typo in the op which tells you a lot about such municipal "competitors": "We will provide a premium tax service".
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
even though you use the words 'forward slash forward slash' But that's how I felt when I read Seoul city twice
"Seoul City To Introduce Uber Rival Premium Taxi Service"
This, this makes no sense. Is Seoul introducing a rival to Uber called "Premium Taxi Service" (Koreanglish)? Is Seoul introducing an uber rival to premium taxi services? As Seoul introducing a Premium Uber Rival called "Taxi Service"? There are tens of ways I could go with trying to parse this.
Clearly the problem is that someone, either an editor or the submitter, wanted to steal Reuters' sensible headline (Seoul city to launch premium taxi service to take on Uber), and took the high school plagiarism-avoidance tactic of jumbling up the words and using a couple similes so it's "original".
Some suggestions for headlines that actually make sense, while reusing, rearranging, or recycling (the 3 Rs) most of the words in the current title. Replace "Seoul" with "Seoul City" or "Seoul Special City" or "the city of Seoul" at your leisure if you want to be less ambiguous:
Seoul introduces premium taxi service to rival Uber
Seoul to introduce new Uber rival
Seoul introducing premium taxi service to rival Uber
Seoul's premium taxi service to rival Uber
Seoul to introduce premium taxi service to rival Uber
Uber rival to be introduced by Seoul
if their service would be better then Uber then why forbid Uber to compete?
You either let them compete or you're afraid of them. And if you're afraid then you think they're going to out compete you. Which means you think they're better at providing the service then your native industry. And given that every driver would be a korean... and the pay for drivers is pretty good... who are you protecting?
Not the consumer. The consumer is the one that would choose uber.
Not the driver. Uber drivers are well paid and don't have to go into debt to buy a taxi medallion.
The cab companies? I suppose you could be helping them but you're really just subsidizing their own unwillingness to adapt.
Possibly the governments that like to charge fat medallion fees? That seems the most likely.
So there you go. You're either screwing over the consumer to protect campaign donors or to protect local taxi registration extortion fees. Either way, you're assholes.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'd like to see this happen in every municipality. Why not open up licensing for anyone to drive, with nominal fees? Make it cost neutral. Who needs Uber or AirBnB or any of these "sharing" apps that essentially create a race tothe bottom where ONLY the investors and owners win? Why should these sharing ideas only be private investor-run? I hope Seoul's service does well, and good for Seoul in limiting Uber's footprint!
better taxis. Yipppppeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!
In Las Vegas the taxi mafia -- which is indistinguishable from the real Mafia -- is also standing up their own ride-summoning app to help suppress Uber.
In other words there's an app, but you'll get the same shit-ass Vegas taxis.
Or is it Pusan? SOmething out of Mission Impossible, the 60s version.
"We will provide a premium tax service
Yes, that about describes the protectionist bollocks that is most taxi licensing systems.
We in the carriage industry, while we do support the "automobile" ban, do recognize that you, the public, values some aspects of this new technology. Therefore, we are announcing an effort to build new and more luxurious horse carriages with much larger manure traps to meet your needs. We trust that these wonderful new carriages will prove much more popular than these dangerous, unlawful automobiles.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I have.
The Seoul cab market is very competitive. There are certain zones (the UN base (mostly American) at Yongsan is one) where only one cab company has a monopoly, but otherwise there are many more cabs in Seoul than are in say, New York City, absolutely swarming the streets. The cab service is pretty awful most of the time, about on a par with NYC service, though the drivers are more polite in speech. Very rarely do they speak English even though it is very common in Seoul. It's honestly an encouragement to learn some basic Hangul. They chew nasty coffee grounds and have some pretty odious air fresheners in the cars. They can't find obvious things, things any driver in their home city should know.
A dude in a car would be better in most cases. Therefore, this article makes a lot of sense to me.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Not surprised at all. If any of you have been to Korea, you'll have noticed the cabs are already super plush high end versions of newish and older Hyundai's we know here in the states. The cab rates are already super low. This will be interesting to watch.
Metropolitan Seoul has a population of 25 million. Furthermore, unlike New York City which is laid out in a nice grid, the streets in Seoul are a byzantine mess of turns, angles, and alleyways. Also, as per Asian custom, most of the streets don't have names - the destinations do. (Kinda like Squares in Boston - instead of the street being called Boylston St, it'd simply be called "To Copley Square".) I'm frankly amazed at how many streets the taxicab drivers there know. GPS is a convenience in the U.S., but it's practically required in cities like Seoul which originally grew organically without central planning.
You also have to understand the historical pretext. South Korea, and Seoul in particular, has one of the highest population densities on earth. Of countries with more than 5 million people and excluding city-states, only Bangladesh and Taiwan have higher population density. Space, and especially road space is a premium.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, they had a pretty good system. The government taxed cars so that the cost about $40,000 (about $90,000 in 2014 dollars) as a way to discourage car ownership. Instead, people were encouraged to take public transportation and taxis. Even traveling between cities was simple with an extensive express bus system with departures every 5 minutes between major cities. It worked pretty well - I hardly recall seeing any traffic jams during that time, and you could flag down a taxi literally within 30 seconds.
All that fell apart n the late 1980s, one of the U.S. Presidential candidates made an issue of this tax. He complained that Hyundai was allowed to sell its cars in the U.S. for $5,000, while an equivalent U.S. car cost $40,000 in Korea. He conveniently omitted that the same Hyundai cost $40,000 in Korea as well. The huge uproar in the U.S. eventually led to the South Korean government repealing the tax in order to protect its fledgling overseas car sales industry.
What happened next was predictable. Car prices dropped like a rock in Korea, and Koreans bought cars. Tens of millions of them. Way more than the road infrastructure could handle. The streets became parking lots. During the lunar new year, it wasn't uncommon for a 400km road trip to take more than 24 hours - as slow as a fast marathon runner. And not only did it negatively impact car travel, it also slowed down public bus transportation since they were stuck on the streets with the cars.
During the 1990s and 2000s, Korea worked its ass off to expand and improve its roads to handle all these cars. It's still nowhere near as good as it was in the 1970s, but at least traffic moves now, with just the regular traffic jams like you'd expect in any modern urbanized country. There is no way in hell they're going to allow millions more drivers roaming the streets trying to make some extra pocket change with Uber.
I have spent a lot of time in Korea since 2007, but I didn't know much of that - I knew the Olympics had resulted in a lot of change, but not the tariff process stuff. Thanks for the enlightening post.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.