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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.
They also stopped the monorail to airport.
...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.
There's more to it than that. In most jurisdictions the taxi companies have been subject to more rigorous (i.e. expensive) standards than Uber has been following. For example, the taxi companies are regulated as to what what cars can be driven, the quality and inspection of those cars, insurance level, background checks, fee control, artificial scarcity of operating licenses (eg New York Taxi medallions) etc. All of these add to the cost of operating a conventional taxi business, and are things that Uber has been ignoring under its completely bogus "we are not a taxi company" claim. I am glad Uber is coming in to shake things up because a number of the above are simply there to protect a monopoly or outdated business model and desperately need revision. BUT Uber IS (or at least in just about every meaningful way behaves as) a a taxi company that is simply ignoring the regulations and is thus undercutting the competition and this is fundamentally not fair either.