RIDEGURU
How long till a story like this about UberLyft? http://bit.ly/TaxiCon
How Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Taxi Drivers
Posted 5 years, 6 months ago
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Posted By
Dmitry Samarov (Samarov)
1448
Rider
Ride Scholar from Chicago, Illinois
Retired Cabdriver, Chicago
I write dog portraits and paint book reviews in Chicago, Illinois. You can see more of my work than anyone would ever want to at http://dmitrysamarov.com.
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Comments
Already happening. Maybe not as bad as buying a medallion, but I know people who are buying cars on a crazy loan in hopes they will successfully start up third Uber business. I’ve also seen UberX drivers buy a luxury car to bump themselves up to UberBlack, and these are people who have no business taking large loans on nice cars.
All I can think about is that the risk is too high. One deactivation can ruin a driver.
Gotta think twice of making it a business when the job was originally designed to be a part-time, off-the-cuff, side job.
I would never buy a lux car to do taxi work for poverty income.
It all comes down to cities screwing the medallion system up. They should never have allowed a scarce commodity like taxi medallions to be transferable. Doing so led to a secondary market with ridiculous values, so of course greed comes into play and predatory practices like this pop up all over the place.
There is a similar problem with liquor licenses in a lot of cities. Restaurants have to buy them on a secondary market for hundreds of thousands of dollars because the city only allows X licenses. So they have to take out loans to do it. Then one day the city decides to stop limiting liquor licenses, or increase the pool of licenses. Now the value of a license plummets, and all those restaurants that took out loans for their liquor license are under water.
The thing is, if someone tried an "uber for liquor", without a license, there is no way they'd get away with it. They'd get shut down immediately by the city. No question about it. Yet these same cities let Uber come in and operate unregulated for so long. Maybe you are right that they screwed up the medallion system to begin with, but they also really screwed up by not protecting the taxi industry when they should have. They should never have let uber run rampant. They were way too slow to react, and they still haven't, and now Uber is powerful enough that they never will. The amazing thing is that that seems to be universal. There is no city that I know of that actually responded to Uber's appearance on the scene, at all. just a complete clusterfk.
I can't speak for all but here in NYC the medallion owners got the royal shaft and their case is still in court. Any for hire vehicle should always be priced higher then a yellow cab and that should be a law for a fair game . We do not need a Uber for every resident in NYC nor do we need uber x and pool is now cess pool officially. On top of this fair game should be a mandatory 15% surcharge that goes directing to the driver because of A holes who think tipping is a trend or two dollars is good for a $50 fare.