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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.
Seems like Seoul has missed the point. I don't think Uber is upending taxis worldwide because they are luxury! It's because they are cheaaaap!
How will a luxury taxi service in Seoul affect the traction that a car-sharing service could gain by undercutting standard, economy taxi pricing? (Except that apparently they have banned them from operating. That sounds like an effective obstacle.)
"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
They are missing many points about Uber. Two big ones are: It is fast because of their driver ubiquity. And their drivers have a reputation that matters because it follows their profile which has customer feedback. These are good.
The downside is that this is austerity sock-puppetry saying, "We are not going to be building anymore public transit. Share your shit among the techno-poors instead."
Except how is the government able to decide what is and is not better?
Do I let the government decide what is a better pair of shoes or a better plate of food or a better house or a better hotel room? I'm sure they regulate all these things and sometimes even for good reason. But no one has a problem with a reasonable amount of regulation. The issue is that they are effectively inflating the cost of taxi service to either protect campaign donors or to protect extortionate fees they charge cab services.
Either way, they're fucking over their consumer for their own selfish greed. Which means they're liars and assholes.
If the "superior" service they were offering were really worth the extra money then there would be no reason to lock Uber out of the market. While I'm sure they're going to have a luxury service, they'll still over charge for it. That is the whole point. They're trying to protect an outmoded system using heavy handed government fiat powers.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I lived in Seoul for most of my life, and the only time I took taxis were either when I had a lot of luggage, or on late nights when there is no public transport. On daytimes the traffic situation is so bad that anything other than public transportation is just horrible. So horrible that I didn't even consider buying a car.
Buses are on a better situation since they get to use bus only lanes(which are on pretty much every busy road), which are enforced using dash-cams on the buses themselves.
Now I live on the outskirts of Seoul... and going any place on public transportation takes roughly 3x longer than driving. Ahh.. I miss Seoul.
Then why ban them? And then clone them?
Some people are saying good, even more competition. Government running competition out of town on a rail to hand it over to itself and its crony taxis is not freaking competing! It's old-school corruption.
It's why politicians seek office.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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