“Don’t support Uber just use taxis instead!” was one of my first indications of just how out of touch a lot of the media elite was. In the US at least, taxis were (and remain) a convenient option in exactly one location - Manhattan below 110th street. Sure they existed all over, but almost nowhere else was there the density to support convenient roadside hailing - even in NY that was iffy in big swaths of Brooklyn and Queens. You were reduced to calling, figuring out how to tell them where you were (not always easy if you were out late in a city you don’t know well- a prime use case for Uber today) and half the time or more they never bothered to show up. Oh- and talk to an older Black person about how “convenient” roadside hailing was. My understanding is that Uber and its competitors have also meaningfully reduced drunk driving deaths/ injuries as well. Just massive improvements to many people’s lives but a certain kind of person finds them icky because some Silicon Valley people got rich.
"Oh- and talk to an older Black person about how 'convenient' roadside hailing was."
This was one of the "comments I wanted to immediately make but knew I'd get beaten to while still asleep.". The idea that anti-neoliberals think that the "affluent-but-hardly-billionaires dispatch companies owners" were the *good guys* here was always laughable.
Self driving cars will probably go through the same cycle: "Those evil silicon valley billionaires over at Waymo." Ummm... you mean the people that saved countless lives from car crashes and made roadside car hailing far more cheaper and convenient than it has ever been.
This is true, but worth noting that uber first came onto the scene as an affordable product. When I lived in NYC, ubers were completely unaffordable and I never took them. That, plus the fact that city bikes and the subway were always pretty convenient as well.
True! I will say, DC is just so walkable and my office, gym, house, grocery store, and where most of my friends live are all within 15 min of each other. So I basically only walk and bike here.
For house hunting, I strategically targeted the only part of Boise that's easily bikeable/walkable. The bike infrastructure is actually really good here compared to the rest of the country, but it's the only viable form of alternative transportation here, and an incomplete solution for those who are unable/fearful of doing so. At least the electric micromobility advances help out a lot.
There are many many people in many situations who aren't served by city bikes and the subway. Uber is actually especially good in suburbs, which are sometimes public transportation deserts.
Beat me to it. I grew up in the relatively urban, near-suburbs of Chicago, and the few times I had to call a taxi service as an adult that shit took FOREVER. Usually the wait would be about an hour or so, and it was almost always in situations where I didn't know ahead of time that I'd need it, so I couldn't schedule it. The few times I've needed an Uber out here, the wait has been <10 minutes.
And I'm not even in a public transportation desert! I have a Pace bus route near me, and while it is MUCH cheaper, the route radiates out from a central hub, so you have to take your bus to the hub, and then take another bus out from there to your final destination, which might still be a decent walk. The Uber is much easier compared to basically any other options besides driving oneself.
Personally, I don't think I'm served by the subway. I recall one magical evening two years ago where heading to my destination a woman (!) pulled off #1 at the end of a subway car and on my way back I had to pepper spray a teenager on the platform who wanted to fight.
If they bothered to show up at all! Most cabbies don’t want to drive all that way out to the burbs to pick up a fare. The advantage of the digital ride sharing apps is that they make for a much more efficient market matching riders to drivers, exposing the latent demand in the suburbs and making it more likely that drivers will be able to pick someone up after dropping off. It also helps that Uber holds onto the users credit card ensuring that drivers will be compensated for cancellations. I think there are a lot of things that could be done better but it’s a huge step up from the cab situation in most cities.
Ubers never made as much sense in NYC. I remember that very distinctly. But in Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, the other cities I spent significant amounts of time in during that time period, they were an absolute godsend
Uber first came on the scene as a way to arrange a limo from a specially licensed driver more conveniently than you would traditionally do for prom or whatever. Then Lyft introduced the idea that anyone could pick up a “friend” for a small fee without needing a special license, and Uber realized that was the future. But Uber already had the brand name. Then they were both affordable for a while.
Now they’re getting closer to the price of operation.
You're affirming that affordability was a bait and switch built on VC cash that cab companies that actually had to turn a profit couldn't possibly access but you think it's good, actually
The argument against Uber - which I agree is on net a far superior service to taxis, including in Manhattan below 110th (whoever was respnsible for Taxi TV should be locked in a room with it and unable to turn it off for the rest of their life) - is that the congestion issues Matt alludes to *were, in fact priced already* via the medallion system.
There’s only so much road in NYC, so there can only be so many cars on it, so the medallion system was effectively a cap and trade system on cars occupying the road looking for hails. It was at least arguably *better*-designed in some ways than the moribund congestion-pricing proposal because the latter has no marginal incentive to leave the congestion area once you enter it (there was no per-hour price) whereas putting a maximum on cabs in a fixed-capacity road system is matching problem to solution quite effectively.
In practice, cabs weren’t great, were nowhere near as convenient as Uber, the pricing was better with the latter (although screw Uber for adding the scourge of tipping to it), and it turns out there are problems creating a regulatory property right out of restricted supply in terms of political constituencies enriched by that right opposing expansion or amendment of it, but the actual cab medallion system was, I would argue, not conceptually flawed. Instead it appears that the response to Uber was more like “shrug, I guess we don’t actually care about capacity limits in our fixed-size street grids being used up by cars seeking ride hails. Lol.” Which may in fact have resulted in substantial welfare improvements (I would agree it has), but I confess I am constantly scratching my head about the fundamental rationale for rationing — i.e., allocating the fixed good of road capacity using tradable property rights — *never actually went away.*
This is not "goal post shifting." The fact that congestion may be worst in New York doesn't preclude its being a concern, including one that influences medallion adoption, elsewhere - why would that be the case? The adoption of medallion systems in places without a lot of cabs does seem potentially supportive of a more general regulatory motive for the programs, and your initial comment was relevant, but "traffic is terrible even if it isn't quite New York terrible" doesn't seem like an argument for being unconcerned about congestion. I was asking the question because traffic problems seem like a confound as to teasing out motive: any place dense enough to have street hails as a viable industry almost certainly has an incredibly shitty traffic situation -- but IDK, maybe some place like Fargo has not-bad traffic and still regulates street hails or something.
While New York has plenty of congestion (and it's tougher than I thought to find decent metrics on this from primary sources) and appears to be the most congested city in America (most charts seem to say circa 101-108 hours lost each year to congestion), each of Chicago, LA, Boston, DC, and San Francisco appears to have around 83-89 (or up to 96 for Chicago) hours lost per year. Better, but still terrible. And Chicago and Boston appear to have outclassed New York (which had approximate parity with Philadelphia) as recently as 2022.
Sources (most mass market reporting seem to rely on the INRIX survey. Sadly the Bureau of Transportation Statistics was not very helpful here):
So here's the deal. There are going to be taxis. It's a really important means of transportation, for lots of reasons, and their convenience and utility can't be duplicated by other methods.
Plus, the public wants there to be taxis.
Now, if you want to tax the taxi industry (including Uber) to account for traffic externalities, that's a reasonable thing to think about. But there's going to be taxis. You're not going to force everyone who has a lot of stuff they are carrying, or who is afraid of crime and grime on the subway, or who doesn't want to or can't bike or walk, to use other options.
I initially pointed out that most places don't have New York traffic. You shifted the goal posts to any traffic (seriously, despite your false denials, anyone reading this can see that). But OK, yeah, there's traffic in lots of places. But see point (1)-- so what, a lot of people like and need taxis. It's an important service. If you want to tax externalities, tax them!
The bottom line though is that Uber improved the service of something that needed to be improved. And attacking it because you don't like traffic is just saying that the American public can't have a nice thing.
Not necessarily if you want to reserve some fraction of the road (up to and including most of it) for the traditional public noncommercial use that characterizes most public road use in the US. I wasn’t there at the inception of the plan but I have to assume that this was the initial logic of limiting the the number of medallions in the first place.
I think the medallion system had more to do with regulation of the taxi industry at its inception than with congestion. And, since it's NY, I'm sure there was also a lot of rent-seeking involved.
Taxis (including Ubers) that can't respond to hails don't require medallions, so, again I don't think congestion was the primary motivation.
It would be great if the city didn't try to reserve road use for any particular kind of vehicle and just let the market work it out (i.e. congestion pricing or road-use fees for all).
"Taxis (including Ubers) that can't respond to hails don't require medallions, so, again I don't think congestion was the primary motivation."
Without commenting on the remainder of your comments (some of which I agree with, congestion pricing and road-use fees seem like a good idea as long as they're administered well), I do think that this is a bit of a technological/temporal red herring. The past, AIUI so-called "black cars" (dispatch-based taxis hired based on a call rather than a street hail) didn't really troll the streets seeking ride hails (or, if they did, it was illegal, known as 'gypsy cabs'), and there was a lot more friction (and, often, wait time) to use dispatch rather than street hails. It was basically for lawyers and bankers who were working late in the office and wasn't a general-population substitute good for taxis.
Smartphones basically changed all of that, making Uber much closer to a perfect (often more-convenient, cheaper, and more available) substitute good to a ride hail and completely removing the phone-call based friction. As a result, Ubers just kind of ride around waiting to be called (or sit in a queue-like area similar to yellow cabs at the airports, though farther away and less convenient) and pose analogous commercial and congestion-based considerations.
TL;DR: the distinction between dispatch based cabs and street hails has more or less evaporated for all practical purposes *now,* but that wasn't true when the medallion system was adopted.
Lots of people I knew in NYC when I lived there in the mid-noughts had a local cab company's number hanging around. It wasn't useful for getting home after a late night (because it would have been based where you lived), but it was what you used for getting *to* that late night or getting to the airport.
It was enough of a staple of NYC life that the three family businesses that are featured in In The Heights are a bodega, a hair salon, and a cab company.
Also worth pointing out that when Uber first launched in places like SF and Seattle, it was decidedly MORE expensive than taxis, not cheaper. It was just a vastly superior product, for all the reasons you mention, so it grew rapidly anyway.
I was happy to pay $10 more for an uber to the airport because I knew that it would, you know, actually show up and drive me to the airport, whereas if I ordered a cab the night before to schedule a pickup at 5 am, it was a coinflip at best that the cab would show up.
I can say that in Chicago, Uber and its progeny have, in the fullness of time, made urban mobility worse than where we started.
That doesn't necessarily refute Matt's broader point, but I think using Uber as an example of a growth-promoting innovation that has straightforwardly advanced the ball is just incorrect.
That's not been my experience. Chicago public transit just has so many point to point gaps - mostly diagonally. Want to get from Ogilvie to 600 W. Chicago or Watertower? Good luck. Walk. Clybourn to Wrigley? Same thing.
The Lincoln Yards project should have incorporated a bus-only lane connecting Armitage from the Blue Line stop in Wicker Park to the Brown Line stop in Lincoln Park, integrating Clybourn with both.
Armitage is the only major East-West arterial that doesn't currently pass through the highway/river so you're not taking anything away from private car users, just adding a high demand, high frequency shuttle filling that obvious gap in the transit network.
(And when I'm Mayor and we combine the Brown and Pink lines? Then we're cooking with gas folks)
I would only add the Lincoln Yards project should just get built. I don't really care much about the finer details. That Ald. Waguespack can go fuck himself for his continued NIMBY opposition and I loved Mayor Johnson coming over the top to inch it forward.
The 606 bike trail should 100% have been a light rail connecting Metra near Pulaski to Western to Metra again at Clybourn to either Armitage or North/Clybourn.
The 606 basically goes right behind my house and as a bike* and walking path it’s awesome. It being a light rail would be a no from me. I guess that makes me a literal NIMBY.
*It’s actually not great for bikes and I wish they weren’t allowed for adults. But obviously that ship as long since sailed.
That's my take, too. Half the time when my wife and I go down there from up north, we just end up walking (or taking an Uber, if we are dressed nicely), because there are so many gaps and once you figure in the busses and whatnot, it's not worth it, time-wise. The bonus is that Chicago is the best summer and fall walking city, to me.
I worked in Cicero for two-ish years, which, while I understand not technically the city, is close enough to count for this conversation. There was basically no way for me to get to work using public transportation that was sub-3 hours, which is wild because I live within spitting distance of the UP-North Metra line. The door-to-door drive was only 1 hour, 15 minutes.
As a resident of the far north side (Andersonville) who works from home & doesn't need to commute daily, I would agree with David. For trips where biking isn't feasible, I can get around much faster at an affordable price point than I could on the El or CTA bus. Thanks to the rideshare apps, my fiance and I have managed to stay car-free, whereas in the before times we almost certainly would have bought a car.
The fact that CTA ridership is down is because of its post-pandemic decline in service, which in turn is downstream of mismanagement by Dorval Carter and indifference on the part of Mayor Johnson.
Do you refuse to take buses? I mostly just use Divvy in those situations (or, well, in all situations—biking is usually faster, cheaper and more enjoyable for me), but a bus or a little bit of walking put a train makes those things work fairly well.
Nope. It might have been worse for me though since I was living in the West Loop and that areas is more isolated from the CTA but I took the #8 to work for 5 years. And yeah, Divvy a game changer for the shorter commutes. But I don't know that I could take it 2-3 miles in work cloths in anything but the mildest spring and fall weather.
I don't know what you have to wear to work, but I rode year-round except for rain for 8 miles a day last year. Such a great way to start the day, and I rarely arrived feeling inappropriately sweaty. I worried about that, but it generally wasn't a problem. And in the loop (where I wasn't working), you can rent showers/lockers in gyms without bringing your total commute cost up to what CTA or driving would cost.
Give it a trial run on your commute home today—such glorious weather!
Noted and all great points. But just to the point my comment replied too ... Divvy is a genuine improvement to the network and is operated by Lyft (maybe was? IDK) so - I still think Chicago mobility currently is >> than the prior pre-Uber period.
It's essentially a two-step of the initial surge of Uber killing the cab companies and diverting massive resources from the CTA, followed by Uber becoming much more expensive and less available.
Ubers cost more and take longer to acquire than cabs used to (and are just generally worse road users than cabs were), and the CTA is less reliable.
The silver lining (and maybe the redemption of Matt's argument) is that the Curb app which offers Uber-like functionality for proper cabs seems to be becoming more and more popular. Maybe we end up with Uber's ride hailing technology innovation overlaid onto what we previously had.
What did Uber to do CTA and what public resources did they divert? If Uber never came to be is CTA somehow magically better or more reliable? IMO CTAs problems are way more intwined with deep city machine politics, post covid office culture, union negotiations, and the basic inability of any US polity to create any infra project at a reasonable cost and I none of those things are Ubers fault.
It just siphoned away ridership and therefore fare money. Which is the same thing more available and cheaper traditional cab service would have done, it's not like there's some special magic about Uber in that regard, but that is in practice what happened in the early to mid 2010's.
Yea but more fare rev doesn’t make the service better magically, it gets consumed by the city machine that views CTA as a jobs program, not a constituent service. IMO a in universe 2 without Uber CTA has essentially the exact same performance coverage etc. this isn’t a Chicago specific issue either, basically all cities w transit in the US have the same issue
Are there good figures on this, or is it just intuition?
When I lived in Chicago (mid to late nineties), the backbone of CTA ridership was commuters, and I'd be surprised to learn that rideshares ate into that significantly.
If I had to predict how Uber would eat into the CTA's business, I'd expect reduced red/purple line evening and weekend service would be the first victims (where that's standing in for whole class of bus and train services). Is that what happened?
This was the point I wanted to make. The cheap convenience Uber offered in the early years is gone, but public transit was substantially harmed.
Ironically, now that the VC subsidies are gone, when I do need a ride for something, I find cabs are much more reliable (like airport transit). If you arrange for one, it actually arrives when you schedule it.
When I first moved to Los Angeles there were flyers up around downtown saying “new program - hail a cab”. Apparently it was a trial that cabs could pick people up from the street.
But it failed because there wasn’t enough density of users and vehicles.
Then a year or two later Lyft started the idea that anyone could pick up anyone with a car, and suddenly the phone gps made it much easier to make the connection than trying to visually identify someone looking for a ride, who might be a block or two away.
You are genuinely a huge fucking moron and incredibly disingenuous. There's are profound labor-based humanitarian argument against Uber. There's the observation that Uber only accomplished what it did because of the deeply toxic dynamics of VC funding. There's the fact that drivers have terrible working conditions and pay. But, no - the ONLY reason anyone could criticize Uber is because Silicon Valley is icky. You're a joke dude.
I know you've got a big following and I've enjoyed reading some of your pieces in the past. But we have rules in the comment section, and one of which is we don't engage in ad hominem name calling. You're always welcome to substantively disagree, and it's totally welcomed.
That's not always a good argument, though. People will accept shitty paid work if they don't personally have a better alternative, and allowing even shittier paid work can allow for a worse equilibrium (worse for workers). This is an old argument for minimum wage, old enough that Marx made it (or something similar) -- workers don't benefit from the "freedom" to accept bad deals if it means bad deals are what will be offered to them, versus an alternative where they cannot accept the bad deals and employers are compelled to offer something better.
You could study the effects of Uber more accurately if you could find two similar labor markets, but one allows Uber and the other doesn't. Or look at Uber drivers around the time Uber enters or leaves a market -- are the same people better off with Uber around or without it? I don't know the answer, but that kind of natural experiment is much more informative than just saying there are people who will accept money to do something.
Matt writes: "There’s no magic formula of growth-and-redistribution that ensures an endless series of electoral victories"
For all of the Democracy is on the Ballot rhetoric (some of which I agree with), the vision of the anti-neoliberal faction appears to have coalesced around a very anti-democratic approach:
1. Use regulations to accomplish what the legislature will not do. (Trust the Experts™, California banning ICE vehicles)
2. Implement those regulations through the actions of Executive Agencies.
3. Insulate executive agencies from the democratic process as much as possible. (see: CFPB original design)
4. Neuter the judiciary's role in limiting what actions the executive agencies can do. (see: the uproar over Chevron and resulting Biden SCOTUS proposals)
Legislative policy wins require the slow, tedious process of winning elections, compromise, incremental reforms and persuading voters to accept change. But for those who are convinced by the catastrophizing of the moment, incremental changes are too slow, too uneven and too precarious to leave to the democratic process. Trump scares me more than the anti-neoliberal left. But both are threats to our system.
I won’t be because I agree with more of Obama’s policies. But that’s my point, the anti-neoliberal left executive lawmaking is seen as more of a threat because many of us here view the policies to be not very good.
The Bad Person was already POTUS for four years, and it didn't really seem to materially impact people's sentiment regarding executive power. People's views still seem to be "executive power good when I like the executive action, bad when I don't." It's really unfortunate that a lot of people's thinking is stuck in the present moment, seemingly incapable of considering the past or future.
Maybe that would change if Trump wins and a lot of the scary stuff people fear actually happens, but I doubt it.
I think this is underselling the extent to which the structure of our legislature drives people to a favorable view of executive power. There are so many veto points it's hard to legislate - that naturally results in seeking other avenues to accomplish goals. And it's really charge to change the veto points in the legislature. I think the only real way to change this is to make legislating easier.
Agreed that we need to implement reforms to make legislating easier. Part of the reason why the executive and judicial branches exercise so much power is because the legislative branch isn't working as it should.
One would hope that seeing one individual (POTUS) and a handful of unelected judges (Supreme Court) have so much power would drive support for legislative reforms, but that doesn't appear to be the case
This is the key point, I think. The main the downsteam effect of a weak legislature is that it makes the country's laws less responsive to emergent problems for which the broad population demands better policy outcomes. In a situation like that you'll constantly have a ton of slow-burn areas where the US is out of sync with popular opinion for one reason or another, making executive orders intrinsically appealing because they seem like they are the only way to cut through a dysfunctional legislature.
It may just be a lack of faith that if your side holds back, the other side will too. I don't think that Obama using less executive power would've made Trump go "ah, yes, that is a norm that I should not break - instead I should maintain the standard that's been established on the appropriate limits of executive power." On a related note, I fully expect the Republicans to get rid of the filibuster the next time they have 52+ seats in the Senate.
I feel obligated to preserve the argument that GWB and Obama both should have been impeached and removed for signing Bills/Executive Orders that the they publicly professed to believe to be unconstitutional. Obama absolutely violated his oath to the constitution in a way that should be recognized as a disqualifying threat to the republic.
Clearly unconstitutional presidential actions can’t be impeachable. What is or is not unconstitutional changes continuously. What you are proposing is to empower SCOTUS with initiating an impeachment any time they feel like it.
What is impeachable is whatever Congress says is impeachable. It has nothing to do with SCOTUS. GWB and Obama absolutely took actions they themselves explicitly called unconstitutional in violation of their oaths. That's plenty.
I think you are underselling the intransigence and inflexibility of many legislators. We have a lot of veto points that make addressing problems difficult.
It's not! But I also think this has been going on throughout both parties throughout much of the 20th century, the best example being the president completely usurping war making power. The anti-neoliberals did not invent it.
Not really sure how taking away agencies ability to make decisions absent clear direction from Congress and giving said power to (in practice) to Reed O’Connor or Mathew Kaszymark, two judges with political views to the right of 80-90% of the country, is a turn to a more democratic way of doing things.
My disdain for the conservative legal movement is pretty high right now (as evidenced by snark above) but there is an intellectually honest kernel in conservative legal doctrine; there is a lot more Congress could and maybe should be doing and they very deliberately choose not to exercise power. Your beef is with Congress ultimately. There is a lot of reasons why Matt (rightly) rails against things like the Filibuster and a big one is it needlessly hamstrings Congress from exercising the power it should and yes ends up giving way too much power to bureaucrats. This isn’t so much of a power grab as it’s an example of the adage nature abhors a vacuum.
“Don’t support Uber just use taxis instead!” was one of my first indications of just how out of touch a lot of the media elite was. In the US at least, taxis were (and remain) a convenient option in exactly one location - Manhattan below 110th street. Sure they existed all over, but almost nowhere else was there the density to support convenient roadside hailing - even in NY that was iffy in big swaths of Brooklyn and Queens. You were reduced to calling, figuring out how to tell them where you were (not always easy if you were out late in a city you don’t know well- a prime use case for Uber today) and half the time or more they never bothered to show up. Oh- and talk to an older Black person about how “convenient” roadside hailing was. My understanding is that Uber and its competitors have also meaningfully reduced drunk driving deaths/ injuries as well. Just massive improvements to many people’s lives but a certain kind of person finds them icky because some Silicon Valley people got rich.
"Oh- and talk to an older Black person about how 'convenient' roadside hailing was."
This was one of the "comments I wanted to immediately make but knew I'd get beaten to while still asleep.". The idea that anti-neoliberals think that the "affluent-but-hardly-billionaires dispatch companies owners" were the *good guys* here was always laughable.
Self driving cars will probably go through the same cycle: "Those evil silicon valley billionaires over at Waymo." Ummm... you mean the people that saved countless lives from car crashes and made roadside car hailing far more cheaper and convenient than it has ever been.
"But last year a Waymo car crashed, so they are still dangerous as long as you don't compare that number to anything else!"
This is true, but worth noting that uber first came onto the scene as an affordable product. When I lived in NYC, ubers were completely unaffordable and I never took them. That, plus the fact that city bikes and the subway were always pretty convenient as well.
New Yorkers have that advantage of abundant alternate transportation options that most other places don't.
True! I will say, DC is just so walkable and my office, gym, house, grocery store, and where most of my friends live are all within 15 min of each other. So I basically only walk and bike here.
For house hunting, I strategically targeted the only part of Boise that's easily bikeable/walkable. The bike infrastructure is actually really good here compared to the rest of the country, but it's the only viable form of alternative transportation here, and an incomplete solution for those who are unable/fearful of doing so. At least the electric micromobility advances help out a lot.
Is the weather in Boise mild enough for biking in the winter?
Most of the time, yes. Just treat your outer clothing like you would if you were skiing.
There are many many people in many situations who aren't served by city bikes and the subway. Uber is actually especially good in suburbs, which are sometimes public transportation deserts.
Beat me to it. I grew up in the relatively urban, near-suburbs of Chicago, and the few times I had to call a taxi service as an adult that shit took FOREVER. Usually the wait would be about an hour or so, and it was almost always in situations where I didn't know ahead of time that I'd need it, so I couldn't schedule it. The few times I've needed an Uber out here, the wait has been <10 minutes.
And I'm not even in a public transportation desert! I have a Pace bus route near me, and while it is MUCH cheaper, the route radiates out from a central hub, so you have to take your bus to the hub, and then take another bus out from there to your final destination, which might still be a decent walk. The Uber is much easier compared to basically any other options besides driving oneself.
Personally, I don't think I'm served by the subway. I recall one magical evening two years ago where heading to my destination a woman (!) pulled off #1 at the end of a subway car and on my way back I had to pepper spray a teenager on the platform who wanted to fight.
You do often have to wait 15-20 minutes for a car to come though.
I usually experience waits of less than 10 minutes, sometimes less than 5.
Back before Uber, you'd wait an hour for a taxi.
If they bothered to show up at all! Most cabbies don’t want to drive all that way out to the burbs to pick up a fare. The advantage of the digital ride sharing apps is that they make for a much more efficient market matching riders to drivers, exposing the latent demand in the suburbs and making it more likely that drivers will be able to pick someone up after dropping off. It also helps that Uber holds onto the users credit card ensuring that drivers will be compensated for cancellations. I think there are a lot of things that could be done better but it’s a huge step up from the cab situation in most cities.
Ubers never made as much sense in NYC. I remember that very distinctly. But in Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, the other cities I spent significant amounts of time in during that time period, they were an absolute godsend
Uber first came on the scene as a way to arrange a limo from a specially licensed driver more conveniently than you would traditionally do for prom or whatever. Then Lyft introduced the idea that anyone could pick up a “friend” for a small fee without needing a special license, and Uber realized that was the future. But Uber already had the brand name. Then they were both affordable for a while.
Now they’re getting closer to the price of operation.
You're affirming that affordability was a bait and switch built on VC cash that cab companies that actually had to turn a profit couldn't possibly access but you think it's good, actually
The argument against Uber - which I agree is on net a far superior service to taxis, including in Manhattan below 110th (whoever was respnsible for Taxi TV should be locked in a room with it and unable to turn it off for the rest of their life) - is that the congestion issues Matt alludes to *were, in fact priced already* via the medallion system.
There’s only so much road in NYC, so there can only be so many cars on it, so the medallion system was effectively a cap and trade system on cars occupying the road looking for hails. It was at least arguably *better*-designed in some ways than the moribund congestion-pricing proposal because the latter has no marginal incentive to leave the congestion area once you enter it (there was no per-hour price) whereas putting a maximum on cabs in a fixed-capacity road system is matching problem to solution quite effectively.
In practice, cabs weren’t great, were nowhere near as convenient as Uber, the pricing was better with the latter (although screw Uber for adding the scourge of tipping to it), and it turns out there are problems creating a regulatory property right out of restricted supply in terms of political constituencies enriched by that right opposing expansion or amendment of it, but the actual cab medallion system was, I would argue, not conceptually flawed. Instead it appears that the response to Uber was more like “shrug, I guess we don’t actually care about capacity limits in our fixed-size street grids being used up by cars seeking ride hails. Lol.” Which may in fact have resulted in substantial welfare improvements (I would agree it has), but I confess I am constantly scratching my head about the fundamental rationale for rationing — i.e., allocating the fixed good of road capacity using tradable property rights — *never actually went away.*
Bear in mind they had taxi medallions in cities that didn't have NYC's traffic problems or plethoras of cabs.
Interesting. What cities support a hail-cab industry without also having NYC’s traffic problems? Urban traffic congestion seems like a universal.
That's goal post shifting. Every place has some traffic, but few places have New York traffic.
This is not "goal post shifting." The fact that congestion may be worst in New York doesn't preclude its being a concern, including one that influences medallion adoption, elsewhere - why would that be the case? The adoption of medallion systems in places without a lot of cabs does seem potentially supportive of a more general regulatory motive for the programs, and your initial comment was relevant, but "traffic is terrible even if it isn't quite New York terrible" doesn't seem like an argument for being unconcerned about congestion. I was asking the question because traffic problems seem like a confound as to teasing out motive: any place dense enough to have street hails as a viable industry almost certainly has an incredibly shitty traffic situation -- but IDK, maybe some place like Fargo has not-bad traffic and still regulates street hails or something.
While New York has plenty of congestion (and it's tougher than I thought to find decent metrics on this from primary sources) and appears to be the most congested city in America (most charts seem to say circa 101-108 hours lost each year to congestion), each of Chicago, LA, Boston, DC, and San Francisco appears to have around 83-89 (or up to 96 for Chicago) hours lost per year. Better, but still terrible. And Chicago and Boston appear to have outclassed New York (which had approximate parity with Philadelphia) as recently as 2022.
Sources (most mass market reporting seem to rely on the INRIX survey. Sadly the Bureau of Transportation Statistics was not very helpful here):
https://inrix.com/scorecard/#city-ranking-list
https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/?country=US
[Summarizing 2022 INRIX data with Boston and Chicago ahead of NYC - https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/10-cities-with-the-worst-traffic-in-the-us ]
So here's the deal. There are going to be taxis. It's a really important means of transportation, for lots of reasons, and their convenience and utility can't be duplicated by other methods.
Plus, the public wants there to be taxis.
Now, if you want to tax the taxi industry (including Uber) to account for traffic externalities, that's a reasonable thing to think about. But there's going to be taxis. You're not going to force everyone who has a lot of stuff they are carrying, or who is afraid of crime and grime on the subway, or who doesn't want to or can't bike or walk, to use other options.
I initially pointed out that most places don't have New York traffic. You shifted the goal posts to any traffic (seriously, despite your false denials, anyone reading this can see that). But OK, yeah, there's traffic in lots of places. But see point (1)-- so what, a lot of people like and need taxis. It's an important service. If you want to tax externalities, tax them!
The bottom line though is that Uber improved the service of something that needed to be improved. And attacking it because you don't like traffic is just saying that the American public can't have a nice thing.
What fraction of road congestion were taxis responsible for? It seems to me that this analysis only makes sense if it was most of it.
Not necessarily if you want to reserve some fraction of the road (up to and including most of it) for the traditional public noncommercial use that characterizes most public road use in the US. I wasn’t there at the inception of the plan but I have to assume that this was the initial logic of limiting the the number of medallions in the first place.
I think the medallion system had more to do with regulation of the taxi industry at its inception than with congestion. And, since it's NY, I'm sure there was also a lot of rent-seeking involved.
Taxis (including Ubers) that can't respond to hails don't require medallions, so, again I don't think congestion was the primary motivation.
It would be great if the city didn't try to reserve road use for any particular kind of vehicle and just let the market work it out (i.e. congestion pricing or road-use fees for all).
"Taxis (including Ubers) that can't respond to hails don't require medallions, so, again I don't think congestion was the primary motivation."
Without commenting on the remainder of your comments (some of which I agree with, congestion pricing and road-use fees seem like a good idea as long as they're administered well), I do think that this is a bit of a technological/temporal red herring. The past, AIUI so-called "black cars" (dispatch-based taxis hired based on a call rather than a street hail) didn't really troll the streets seeking ride hails (or, if they did, it was illegal, known as 'gypsy cabs'), and there was a lot more friction (and, often, wait time) to use dispatch rather than street hails. It was basically for lawyers and bankers who were working late in the office and wasn't a general-population substitute good for taxis.
Smartphones basically changed all of that, making Uber much closer to a perfect (often more-convenient, cheaper, and more available) substitute good to a ride hail and completely removing the phone-call based friction. As a result, Ubers just kind of ride around waiting to be called (or sit in a queue-like area similar to yellow cabs at the airports, though farther away and less convenient) and pose analogous commercial and congestion-based considerations.
TL;DR: the distinction between dispatch based cabs and street hails has more or less evaporated for all practical purposes *now,* but that wasn't true when the medallion system was adopted.
Lots of people I knew in NYC when I lived there in the mid-noughts had a local cab company's number hanging around. It wasn't useful for getting home after a late night (because it would have been based where you lived), but it was what you used for getting *to* that late night or getting to the airport.
It was enough of a staple of NYC life that the three family businesses that are featured in In The Heights are a bodega, a hair salon, and a cab company.
Also worth pointing out that when Uber first launched in places like SF and Seattle, it was decidedly MORE expensive than taxis, not cheaper. It was just a vastly superior product, for all the reasons you mention, so it grew rapidly anyway.
I was happy to pay $10 more for an uber to the airport because I knew that it would, you know, actually show up and drive me to the airport, whereas if I ordered a cab the night before to schedule a pickup at 5 am, it was a coinflip at best that the cab would show up.
I can say that in Chicago, Uber and its progeny have, in the fullness of time, made urban mobility worse than where we started.
That doesn't necessarily refute Matt's broader point, but I think using Uber as an example of a growth-promoting innovation that has straightforwardly advanced the ball is just incorrect.
That's not been my experience. Chicago public transit just has so many point to point gaps - mostly diagonally. Want to get from Ogilvie to 600 W. Chicago or Watertower? Good luck. Walk. Clybourn to Wrigley? Same thing.
The Lincoln Yards project should have incorporated a bus-only lane connecting Armitage from the Blue Line stop in Wicker Park to the Brown Line stop in Lincoln Park, integrating Clybourn with both.
Armitage is the only major East-West arterial that doesn't currently pass through the highway/river so you're not taking anything away from private car users, just adding a high demand, high frequency shuttle filling that obvious gap in the transit network.
(And when I'm Mayor and we combine the Brown and Pink lines? Then we're cooking with gas folks)
I would only add the Lincoln Yards project should just get built. I don't really care much about the finer details. That Ald. Waguespack can go fuck himself for his continued NIMBY opposition and I loved Mayor Johnson coming over the top to inch it forward.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/06/20/sterling-bay-lincoln-park-housing-project-advances-despite-aldermans-opposition/
The 606 bike trail should 100% have been a light rail connecting Metra near Pulaski to Western to Metra again at Clybourn to either Armitage or North/Clybourn.
It actually used to be a railroad back when Biden was a young man.
The 606 basically goes right behind my house and as a bike* and walking path it’s awesome. It being a light rail would be a no from me. I guess that makes me a literal NIMBY.
*It’s actually not great for bikes and I wish they weren’t allowed for adults. But obviously that ship as long since sailed.
That's my take, too. Half the time when my wife and I go down there from up north, we just end up walking (or taking an Uber, if we are dressed nicely), because there are so many gaps and once you figure in the busses and whatnot, it's not worth it, time-wise. The bonus is that Chicago is the best summer and fall walking city, to me.
I worked in Cicero for two-ish years, which, while I understand not technically the city, is close enough to count for this conversation. There was basically no way for me to get to work using public transportation that was sub-3 hours, which is wild because I live within spitting distance of the UP-North Metra line. The door-to-door drive was only 1 hour, 15 minutes.
As a resident of the far north side (Andersonville) who works from home & doesn't need to commute daily, I would agree with David. For trips where biking isn't feasible, I can get around much faster at an affordable price point than I could on the El or CTA bus. Thanks to the rideshare apps, my fiance and I have managed to stay car-free, whereas in the before times we almost certainly would have bought a car.
The fact that CTA ridership is down is because of its post-pandemic decline in service, which in turn is downstream of mismanagement by Dorval Carter and indifference on the part of Mayor Johnson.
Do you refuse to take buses? I mostly just use Divvy in those situations (or, well, in all situations—biking is usually faster, cheaper and more enjoyable for me), but a bus or a little bit of walking put a train makes those things work fairly well.
Nope. It might have been worse for me though since I was living in the West Loop and that areas is more isolated from the CTA but I took the #8 to work for 5 years. And yeah, Divvy a game changer for the shorter commutes. But I don't know that I could take it 2-3 miles in work cloths in anything but the mildest spring and fall weather.
I don't know what you have to wear to work, but I rode year-round except for rain for 8 miles a day last year. Such a great way to start the day, and I rarely arrived feeling inappropriately sweaty. I worried about that, but it generally wasn't a problem. And in the loop (where I wasn't working), you can rent showers/lockers in gyms without bringing your total commute cost up to what CTA or driving would cost.
Give it a trial run on your commute home today—such glorious weather!
Noted and all great points. But just to the point my comment replied too ... Divvy is a genuine improvement to the network and is operated by Lyft (maybe was? IDK) so - I still think Chicago mobility currently is >> than the prior pre-Uber period.
Interesting conjecture, how do you define and measure “worse”
It's essentially a two-step of the initial surge of Uber killing the cab companies and diverting massive resources from the CTA, followed by Uber becoming much more expensive and less available.
Ubers cost more and take longer to acquire than cabs used to (and are just generally worse road users than cabs were), and the CTA is less reliable.
The silver lining (and maybe the redemption of Matt's argument) is that the Curb app which offers Uber-like functionality for proper cabs seems to be becoming more and more popular. Maybe we end up with Uber's ride hailing technology innovation overlaid onto what we previously had.
What did Uber to do CTA and what public resources did they divert? If Uber never came to be is CTA somehow magically better or more reliable? IMO CTAs problems are way more intwined with deep city machine politics, post covid office culture, union negotiations, and the basic inability of any US polity to create any infra project at a reasonable cost and I none of those things are Ubers fault.
It just siphoned away ridership and therefore fare money. Which is the same thing more available and cheaper traditional cab service would have done, it's not like there's some special magic about Uber in that regard, but that is in practice what happened in the early to mid 2010's.
Yea but more fare rev doesn’t make the service better magically, it gets consumed by the city machine that views CTA as a jobs program, not a constituent service. IMO a in universe 2 without Uber CTA has essentially the exact same performance coverage etc. this isn’t a Chicago specific issue either, basically all cities w transit in the US have the same issue
Are there good figures on this, or is it just intuition?
When I lived in Chicago (mid to late nineties), the backbone of CTA ridership was commuters, and I'd be surprised to learn that rideshares ate into that significantly.
If I had to predict how Uber would eat into the CTA's business, I'd expect reduced red/purple line evening and weekend service would be the first victims (where that's standing in for whole class of bus and train services). Is that what happened?
This was the point I wanted to make. The cheap convenience Uber offered in the early years is gone, but public transit was substantially harmed.
Ironically, now that the VC subsidies are gone, when I do need a ride for something, I find cabs are much more reliable (like airport transit). If you arrange for one, it actually arrives when you schedule it.
When I first moved to Los Angeles there were flyers up around downtown saying “new program - hail a cab”. Apparently it was a trial that cabs could pick people up from the street.
But it failed because there wasn’t enough density of users and vehicles.
Then a year or two later Lyft started the idea that anyone could pick up anyone with a car, and suddenly the phone gps made it much easier to make the connection than trying to visually identify someone looking for a ride, who might be a block or two away.
Well, they have also make taxis more easily callable from fixed locations. :) [Like charter and non-charter public schools.]
You are genuinely a huge fucking moron and incredibly disingenuous. There's are profound labor-based humanitarian argument against Uber. There's the observation that Uber only accomplished what it did because of the deeply toxic dynamics of VC funding. There's the fact that drivers have terrible working conditions and pay. But, no - the ONLY reason anyone could criticize Uber is because Silicon Valley is icky. You're a joke dude.
I know you've got a big following and I've enjoyed reading some of your pieces in the past. But we have rules in the comment section, and one of which is we don't engage in ad hominem name calling. You're always welcome to substantively disagree, and it's totally welcomed.
But dropping a warning here!
Just a fucking warning - really?
Now that I know the rules, I'll definitely save my one free "huge fucking moron" for an opportune time.
Yep! Per the rules I posted months ago, first infraction is a warning.
I would think it best to treat people equally, even if they should have much. If you would ban an ordinary commenter for it, then ban him for it.
Why not leave out the first and last sentences, and stick around to engage in a conversation?
"There's the fact that drivers have terrible working conditions and pay"
They do it voluntarily.
That's not always a good argument, though. People will accept shitty paid work if they don't personally have a better alternative, and allowing even shittier paid work can allow for a worse equilibrium (worse for workers). This is an old argument for minimum wage, old enough that Marx made it (or something similar) -- workers don't benefit from the "freedom" to accept bad deals if it means bad deals are what will be offered to them, versus an alternative where they cannot accept the bad deals and employers are compelled to offer something better.
You could study the effects of Uber more accurately if you could find two similar labor markets, but one allows Uber and the other doesn't. Or look at Uber drivers around the time Uber enters or leaves a market -- are the same people better off with Uber around or without it? I don't know the answer, but that kind of natural experiment is much more informative than just saying there are people who will accept money to do something.
Do you think there’s some magical job people are doing in the places without Uber that Uber is somehow displacing?
How much do you think Uber drivers make?
Right back at you Freddie.
If only there was a way to implement a pigouvian tax specifically on being a douchebag/bro like Travis Kalanick, then I'd be happy to just let it rip.
Uber>>>car services in outer boroughs
Matt writes: "There’s no magic formula of growth-and-redistribution that ensures an endless series of electoral victories"
For all of the Democracy is on the Ballot rhetoric (some of which I agree with), the vision of the anti-neoliberal faction appears to have coalesced around a very anti-democratic approach:
1. Use regulations to accomplish what the legislature will not do. (Trust the Experts™, California banning ICE vehicles)
2. Implement those regulations through the actions of Executive Agencies.
3. Insulate executive agencies from the democratic process as much as possible. (see: CFPB original design)
4. Neuter the judiciary's role in limiting what actions the executive agencies can do. (see: the uproar over Chevron and resulting Biden SCOTUS proposals)
Legislative policy wins require the slow, tedious process of winning elections, compromise, incremental reforms and persuading voters to accept change. But for those who are convinced by the catastrophizing of the moment, incremental changes are too slow, too uneven and too precarious to leave to the democratic process. Trump scares me more than the anti-neoliberal left. But both are threats to our system.
Obama did a lot of policy making through executive order, but we clearly view him as not as much of a threat to the democratic process.
If the Bad Person becomes President, I doubt if you will be sanguine about executive order overreach.
I won’t be because I agree with more of Obama’s policies. But that’s my point, the anti-neoliberal left executive lawmaking is seen as more of a threat because many of us here view the policies to be not very good.
The Bad Person was already POTUS for four years, and it didn't really seem to materially impact people's sentiment regarding executive power. People's views still seem to be "executive power good when I like the executive action, bad when I don't." It's really unfortunate that a lot of people's thinking is stuck in the present moment, seemingly incapable of considering the past or future.
Maybe that would change if Trump wins and a lot of the scary stuff people fear actually happens, but I doubt it.
I think this is underselling the extent to which the structure of our legislature drives people to a favorable view of executive power. There are so many veto points it's hard to legislate - that naturally results in seeking other avenues to accomplish goals. And it's really charge to change the veto points in the legislature. I think the only real way to change this is to make legislating easier.
Agreed that we need to implement reforms to make legislating easier. Part of the reason why the executive and judicial branches exercise so much power is because the legislative branch isn't working as it should.
One would hope that seeing one individual (POTUS) and a handful of unelected judges (Supreme Court) have so much power would drive support for legislative reforms, but that doesn't appear to be the case
This is the key point, I think. The main the downsteam effect of a weak legislature is that it makes the country's laws less responsive to emergent problems for which the broad population demands better policy outcomes. In a situation like that you'll constantly have a ton of slow-burn areas where the US is out of sync with popular opinion for one reason or another, making executive orders intrinsically appealing because they seem like they are the only way to cut through a dysfunctional legislature.
It may just be a lack of faith that if your side holds back, the other side will too. I don't think that Obama using less executive power would've made Trump go "ah, yes, that is a norm that I should not break - instead I should maintain the standard that's been established on the appropriate limits of executive power." On a related note, I fully expect the Republicans to get rid of the filibuster the next time they have 52+ seats in the Senate.
I feel obligated to preserve the argument that GWB and Obama both should have been impeached and removed for signing Bills/Executive Orders that the they publicly professed to believe to be unconstitutional. Obama absolutely violated his oath to the constitution in a way that should be recognized as a disqualifying threat to the republic.
Ah, Zivotofsky v. Powell->Rice->Clinton->Kerry...and then once Tillerson got in the Zivotofskys finally got their way.
Clearly unconstitutional presidential actions can’t be impeachable. What is or is not unconstitutional changes continuously. What you are proposing is to empower SCOTUS with initiating an impeachment any time they feel like it.
What is impeachable is whatever Congress says is impeachable. It has nothing to do with SCOTUS. GWB and Obama absolutely took actions they themselves explicitly called unconstitutional in violation of their oaths. That's plenty.
SCOTUS doesn't initiate an impeachment process. That is the House of Representatives.
These links might help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution
Obviously. However, if any unconstitutional presidential action was impeachable then they could by redefining constitutionality (as they so often do).
I tolerated the results of his executive orders but I was not happy he was using them instead of going through Congress.
I think you are underselling the intransigence and inflexibility of many legislators. We have a lot of veto points that make addressing problems difficult.
I agree, John’s comment makes the most sense if the US had a parliamentarian system.
So your solution to that is encouraging the President to exercise extra-constitutional unilateral lawmaking power? Seriously?
It's not! But I also think this has been going on throughout both parties throughout much of the 20th century, the best example being the president completely usurping war making power. The anti-neoliberals did not invent it.
More feasible than adopting a parliamentary system.
I think those are not the only two choices....
We can always dream of a new constitution. I certainly have my own unworkable ideas.
Not really sure how taking away agencies ability to make decisions absent clear direction from Congress and giving said power to (in practice) to Reed O’Connor or Mathew Kaszymark, two judges with political views to the right of 80-90% of the country, is a turn to a more democratic way of doing things.
My disdain for the conservative legal movement is pretty high right now (as evidenced by snark above) but there is an intellectually honest kernel in conservative legal doctrine; there is a lot more Congress could and maybe should be doing and they very deliberately choose not to exercise power. Your beef is with Congress ultimately. There is a lot of reasons why Matt (rightly) rails against things like the Filibuster and a big one is it needlessly hamstrings Congress from exercising the power it should and yes ends up giving way too much power to bureaucrats. This isn’t so much of a power grab as it’s an example of the adage nature abhors a vacuum.
We will all be happy the judiciary exists to check Executive overreach if Trump is reelected. Or when the next generation of Vance-types ascend.