The city has just 39 licensed cab drivers.
“we don’t want to pay min wage” -billionaire run companies who cannot pay people competitively with taxi services 10 years ago.
Minneapolis should make public transit free for a few* months, to encourage folks to use that instead. Golden opportunity.
public transit?
For the areas it covers, Minneapolis has a pretty good public transit.
its pretty cool you can go from home to work to the store and back home without ever going outside. lifesaver in some of the harsh cold winters
The shitty gig companies decimated the taxi industry, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see things like drunk driving tick up, especially come winter.
I hope the city can incentivize something new to fill the void. And hopefully they can also put guardrails around it so drivers and passengers don’t get screwed.
The industry got decimated due to being worse than the apps. The apps 100% exploit drivers, but let’s not act like calling a cab was such a good experience 20 years ago.
100%
American cabs fucked passengers. Gig companies fucked drivers.
I recently said “fuck it, I’ll take a cab from the airport cab pool.” It was like immediately time traveling to a differently shitty moment in history. The cab smelled like it was made out of Newport filters and ass, and when we got to my home, the guy refused to take a credit or debit card.
Dude was picking up people from the international terminal, where they were often landing without local currency, then he would tack on a trip to the bank, with the meter running.
He had Master and Visa card stickers on his car.
That’s when you refuse to pay, not your fault their card reader is “broke” and they didn’t inform you when you got in. They can get fucked, they tried pulling this shit on me before. I straight refused to pay cash.
Yeah, that’s what I did. I said, you can take me to the bank for free, or I can not pay you.
After arguing with me he then relented and one of these magically appeared.
Man I have not seen one of those credit card carbon copy machines in a long time! It’s funny current credit cards will not work on them since they don’t have any raised numbers
Haha yeah. My CC doesn’t even have numbers on the card. They’re in an app so they can be quickly swapped out if the card is compromised.
The apps weren’t profitable. They sold rides for less than it cost them, which killed the industry. That’s what all disruptive companies do, sell for an unprofitable price and have investor money make up the difference.
Taxi companies could not compete. How could they? It didn’t matter if they were good or bad. There was no chance to compete because they all went out of business.
Again, the apps didn’t win because they were better, it’s because they didn’t allow competition. In a sane world they would have had to have made a profit, and the taxi companies would have made their own app, and things would be pretty much equal across the board. But that never happened.
Again, the apps didn’t win because they were better, it’s because they didn’t allow competition.
I rarely ever took cabs or other such transport because they’re universally dodgy as fuck. Apps made it convenient and accountable, thus succeeded.
You miss the point, taxi companies couldn’t compete with apps, they couldn’t have their own app. Because of investor lead disruption
Some taxi companies made their own applications.
Again, they did and failed because they couldn’t compete because investors paid for the likes of uber to run everyone out of business. I don’t know how more I can explain this to you, but you don’t seem to understand.
they couldn’t have their own app
There was nothing stopping them and they set their own up; I’m referring to places in the UK where I know it happened, and some other countries too (SEA).
I don’t know how more I can explain this to you, but you don’t seem to understand.
Likely because of your explanation in the first place.
And at least Lyft is sending emails to customers making it sound like paying a decent wage makes their business model unsustainable.
Which is weird because what’s their overhead? They run an app. 99% should be going to drivers.
Card fees, keeping it updated, onboarding drivers and doing checks, accounting for fraud, employees, advertising. 99% is a silly figure to request.
We support a minimum earning standard for drivers
Is that why they spent millions to defeat a law in CA that would have clarified that their employees are in fact employees and should be covered by minimum wage laws?
I have to wonder how hard it would be to build some kind of open source platform to compete with these companies. Then the drivers will be free to set their own rates and this rent-seeking behavior can be undermined.
