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Sex, Drugs, and Transportation: How Politicians Tried To Keep Uber Out of Vegas
HughPickens.com writes: Johana Bhuiyan has written an interesting article about how the Las Vegas taxi industry used every political maneuver in its arsenal to keep Uber and Lyft off the strip. Vegas is one of the most lucrative transportation markets in the country, with some 41.1 million visitors passing through it annually. The city's taxi industry has raked in a whopping $290 million this year to date (PDF). What made Vegas unique — what made it Uber's biggest challenge yet — was the extent to which local governments were willing to protect the incumbents. According to Bhuiyan, in Las Vegas, Uber and its pugnacious CEO Travis Kalanick really did run into the corrupt taxi cartel bogeymen they'd long claimed to be saving us from, and this cartel would prove to be their most formidable opponent. But when push came to shove and the fight turned ugly, the world's fastest-growing company ran right over its entrenched opposition.
What I don't get is why taxi services don't just provide good service. If they really want to crush Uber, that's all they need to do. It shouldn't be hard or costly to do, either.
They could start with these changes, which would make a world of difference:
1. Ditch the third-world drivers. It's frustrating dealing with taxi drivers who don't know where they're going or what they're doing, since they only arrived in the country a month before. It's also frustrating when they can't speak or understand English, which is the international language of the travel industry worldwide, especially in countries that are natively English-speaking. And it's utterly disrespectful when they spend the whole trip chattering loudly on their phones or headsets in Arabic or some other obscure language the entire trip. Instead, they should hire locals who know the area, who know the local language (plus English, if they differ), and who won't treat the customers like utter shit.
2. Charge reasonable fares. A $6 starting fare, plus $8/mile after that, plus $1 for every 5 seconds idling at a light makes short taxi trips unbearably expensive, and it makes medium and long voyages pretty much impossible. The rates are excessive even if they were providing excellent service. But as we saw in the first point, the taxi customers are paying top dollar for third-world service. Short trips should be competitive with public transit fares. Longer trips should still be within reason. If an airline charges $800 to fly thousands of miles, it should not cost $100 to take a taxi just a few miles to get to the airport to catch that flight!
3. Never refuse rides. Despite even short rides costing the customer a lot of money, it's still not uncommon for taxi drivers to outright refuse to drive customers because their trip is too short, or may take the driver to say a residential area where there won't likely be other fares to pick up afterward. Pick up the customer promptly, drive the customer to where the customer wants to go, and don't bitch about it.
4. Stop resorting to third-world harassment tactics. This is also tied in with the first point, but we've seen many taxi drivers in Western cities around the world continually resort to really pathetic third-world harassment tactics in their fight against Uber. That's not how business should work in Western nations! If you can't keep up with your competitors, then you go out of business. You don't resort to criminal or quasi-criminal behavior. It just makes you look sleazier and shittier than you already look when you do stuff like that! So don't go blocking major roads. Don't go attacking Uber vehicles with passengers in them. Don't go attacking normal, non-Uber vehicles where the one passenger just happens to be sitting in the back instead of the front.
They should start with those four basic things. Even then, they all boil down to: don't treat your customers like shit, and don't subject them to a shitty experience.
Uber is only a threat to taxi services that provide shitty service. Uber really offers no advantages beyond taxi services that provide good service. It's not like the customers really give a fuck how they get from here to there. They just don't want to be subjected to the shitshow that taxi drivers have typically subjected them to. If taxi drivers just did a good fucking job for once, then Uber couldn't do a thing to them.
Fuck, these taxi services might even see an increase in business, and profit, if taxi rides started to become known as something convenient and enjoyable, rather than the third-world screw job they tend to be these days.
They also stopped the monorail to airport.
Context of the story aside, my worst experiences with taxis have all been in Las Vegas. Being being asshats with lawyer ties to politicians, they are angry at their customers just for being customers. It has gotten to the point where I'd rather pay for a private car or take a hotel shuttle over a taxi any time we visit Las Vegas. I've been yelled at, my wife's bags tossed to the ground and just made really uncomfortable when dealing with them.
...other than the fact that it's one-sided bullshit.
One of the reasons Uber, Lyft and all the other "ride sharing" app companies get so much flack because they are breaking the law. The taxi industry is regulated for very good reasons (one being safety) and all the "ride sharing" app companies blatantly ignore them. This, in turn, infuriates the traditional taxi industry that follows regulations and sees them as unfair competition.
The other reasons for the controversy revolves around some pretty awful labor exploitation but that's a whole nother story.
As many media outlets are commited somehow to spread the word about one but ONLY ONE of the many apps that promote illegal semipublic transport operating on no insurance or permits whatsoever. We bring this astonishing news about a city that tried to keep this illegal operation controlled and how a CEO complains about the big money involved and how they would love to have the government under their control.
Well the great part is now we have choice! Customers concerned with driver screening and safety can take taxis. Customers who are not can throw caution to the wind. What I don't get is people who *want* a monopoly either way. Of rather have competition and choice, so even if I never use Uber or Lyft, I'm glad they exist.
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