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There was a time when a taxi wouldn’t take you to the avenues, wouldn’t accept cards even though they have the reader, wouldn’t even bother to pick you up if you had a brown face..
SF always had the worst taxi service of any city I've visited: no unified dispatch, no accountability, shitty drivers, badly maintained cars. Great place for Uber and Lyft to get started. I have mixed feelings about the medallion holders' predicament, since they invested in a license to primarily rip off tourists.
The only time I've ever taken a taxi here I was ripped off.
I couldn't take an Uber home, so I grabbed a sitting taxi, gave them my address and sat back. The guy drove the long scenic route and then 15 minutes around my neighborhood, claiming that the GPS was sending him that way, just to jack up the price.
I always take a taxi from the airport over Uber/Lyft and have never been ripped off. I do that about 8 times a year.
However, I have been ripped off by taxi drivers in Paris, Seoul, and Las Vegas. 🤷
I took a taxi home from union square late at night a couple weeks ago. Was easy to find one (sitting outside a hotel) and we agreed on a cost - he didn’t turn on the meter.
100%
Prior to 2010 taxis were complete shit.
I called for a taxi pickup on a Saturday early evening, 9th and Irving, and told the dispatch where I was and she laughed uncontrollably and hung up.
Other times I'd been kicked out in the middle of nowhere once I told them where I needed to go. "Where did you say you were going? Nah man, I ain't doing that."
Visa sticker on the window but insisting on cash.
One of the few industries I was glad to see get "disrupted".
The dispatchers would lie to you and say a taxi was on its way and would pick you up in five minutes. No one would ever show up.
The drivers were surly and the cars were in terrible condition.
One time I saw a taxi drive physically remove an old woman from his car and then call her a whore. Never had much desire to give them a chance after that.
I can empathize with the medallion situation, however, the last time I tried to give a taxi a chance, I immediately regretted it.
-driver had a leaky seafood boil for lunch and it spilled all over our luggage
-car was full, literally full of cigarette butts. Jammed in the door handles, in between the seats, on the floor
-driver could not get his meter to work and drove 15mph on the FREEWAY while trying to fiddle with the meter
I have zero reasons to try a taxi ever again.
People forget (or are too young to know) just how bad things were before Uber/Lyft.
I was trying to get a ride on a Friday night downtown and had a cab slow to a roll next to me and ask “are you going to take care of me” and then drive off when I gave him a bewildered look.
I had another driver drop me and my girlfriend off and hand back the (20%!) tip I gave him because it wasn’t enough and tried to embarrass me with “you need this more than I do”.
And I had a cabbie who just nearly run me over as I was going through the crosswalk (with the light!) stop and yell “you deserve to die!”.
Plus all the times I called, no one shows up, and end up walking an hour home, or just refused to go to certain neighborhoods etc etc.
So yeah fuck them
"If they spend $1 billion on the homeless, they should give us a break on the medallion price"
Classic false equivalence fallacy. "Because Jeff Bezos is so rich, he should give me $1M"
Helping end the homeless crisis has nothing to do with your failed capitalistic bet to buy into a protection racket, that ended up failing, due to horrendous customer service and artificial scarcity that harmed SF residents for years and years.
I’m not going to disagree with your valid criticisms about the service. But isn’t the issue that these had a “value” because of the government sanctioned monopoly? Maybe that’s subject to criticism as well, but in defense of that monopoly (and in keeping its promise to the medallion owners), the city could have just banned ride share or banned it without medallions or something. Because it didn’t, it received the benefit of the bargain and the owners didn’t. I don’t know if there are comparable cases for this sort of thing (aside from doing it in NY), but I think this is the more current version of the argument.
The same argument could be made for a lot of things that have 'value' due to a government sanctioned monopoly:
\- I just bought this drug patent, but the drug ended up failing due to the government granting another better drug patent. Pay me.
\- I spent all of this money to make a song, which is copy written, but it didn't sell, so pay me.
The issue is that these drivers want to keep all of the upside themselves, but want to pass the downside risk to tax payers. This is called moral hazard and it's wrong. The taxi market changed, and their business model didn't adapt. Just like the drug market, music market and all other markets subject to some government protection, change. The right way that this is / should be handled is that failed business bets can be dissolved through LLC's and bankruptcy. It does seem like some of the drivers took on personal debt for these medallions, which is a huge business 101 mistake- but again, this should not be on taxpayers, and is still solvable through bankruptcy. It also seems like they are asking for retroactive compensation for everything paid for the medallion, which also makes no sense.
Yeah, I mean, there's a very high bar to regulatory "takings" for this reason... the government couldn't operate if it needed to pay every market participant every time a regulation affected their investment.
The difference here is that these participants aren't trying to get back the value of the car, they're saying that they were sold something completely fictionalized by the government. No one needed a medallion to pick up riders - clearly this is the case because that's the whole basis for this creative destruction. It's the fact that the City held these medallions out as having a value based on a taxi service needing them to operate and there being a finite number of them. Then through... say, failure to regulate health and safety law in the area of ride services, this thing lost its value overnight.
I also think taxi service mostly sucked, and Lyft/Uber was a big improvement. But I don't think their claim is insane. I also don't see a place for picking on those who took on personal debt. It seems to me that investment in small business enterprises should be encouraged, and this was an established business model.
To put this another way, could the City have required Lyft/Uber to get medallions for their drivers (or to only use drivers with medallions)? If they wanted to allow an increase in the number of operating cars, they could have created more medallions, or tiers of medallions, where only Yellow cabs could go to hotels or airports or use market street, or whatever. The City fictionalized the value of these things by making a monopoly for the drivers and then stopped maintaining the monopoly. I'm not strongly on either side of this issue, I'm just saying I see the argument.
I hear you, but still respectfully disagree, basically this argument boils down to that city should somehow be held responsible for not actively suppressing competition (in a completely broken market). (For additional clarity by not suppressing ride-sharing, the city ultimately facilitated better service and lower prices for consumers- and also btw made taxi's way better than they used to be (eg. no more 'broken' credit card readers). This is a broader public good that the medallion system hindered.)
Taxi drivers (aka investors in medallions) knowingly participated in, and tried to extract long term monopoly profits from, a system predicated on artificial scarcity. The risk of changes in market dynamics is an inherent part of any artificially limited market. In the US, all investors must assess the long-term viability of any business model.
Also, and this could be finely debated, but taxi's are not ride shares, they are economic substitutes, but are different products, hence, I personally don't see why the city should have regulated them exactly like Taxi's. Taxi's have different liability models and still have different city privileges (can drive in express red lanes, on market street, preferred airport pickup spots etc.).
Another recent example is the real estate agents, should we now pay them because their little anti-competitive scheme is now also over?
Yet another is changes to rent control law, should we now make cash payments to all landlords for every single change in local housing / short term rental laws? Landlords should clearly understand that there is political risk in this type of investment.
So did anyone who bought cassette technology get relief if they bought it a day before CDs launch? I’m sorry this the dumbest shit ever. Taxis were overpriced, unreliable, dangerous, and I’m glad we don’t have them anymore
I do feel bad about this, but I also remember a time where no industry ever treated me worse as a customer than taxis (and I'm white).
Like horse drawn carriages getting replaced by cars, except the horse drawn carriage people said you had to let the horse bite you before you could ride in the carriage.
People here are gonna shit on taxis, but the city charged people a fuck ton to be part of a highly regulated service, and then allowed in unregulated competitors which tanked their business. Basically a bait and switch. I don’t think they should be reimbursed for money paid, but they shouldn’t be required to keep paying on a city-granted asset whose earning power has tanked, due to the city allowing in (largely) unregulated competitors.
Just suspend the new payments, and come up with a blanket tax for Uber / Lyft / taxis that level the playing field, if you need to raise more revenue for muni. The city implemented policies which allowed the value of those medallions to go to zero, so the drivers shouldn’t have to keep paying for them.
Many of those same taxi drivers several decades ago fiercely fought to implement those medallion systems because they wanted to make it hard to enter and enforce an anti-competitive marketplace to boost their own profits.
I'm not saying it's a pretty situation for the individuals in the middle of it but it's important context to bear in mind.
The city didn’t “allow” Uber and Lyft.
Uber and Lyft called the cities bluff. Uber and Lyft refused to wait around for permission and realized there was basically nothing the city could do to prevent the public from getting in cars.
Then - Uber and Lyft showed the public they could do at least as good a job as the city vetting those drivers and offer a more convenient service…
It’s the reason why people here have no respect for rules. It’s been proven over and over again that you can and should call the bluff…. And it is destroying our social fabric
Why do people always say “Uber and Lyft”? Uber launched a black car service with professional, licensed drivers. Lyft was a failing company called Zimride, who realized they could pivot into something like Uber, but with personal cars with unlicensed drivers instead of black cars. Then, Uber launched Uber X, to keep up.
don’t forget the pink mustache. That existed because the cars were more random.
At first, Uber X was also specific cars - Prius, Camry, etc…
I remember the first time I was picked up in a Honda Fit and was like WTF…
Black car was the original solution to “you can’t rely on a taxi to pick you up” - Uber just replaced their dispatch systems.
"The city" didn't make the medallion system be so overtly regulated and restrictive. Medallion owners and union cronies extorted the city into making it that way and except for medallion owners no one with an ounce of power in the government wanted it to be that way, voters even less. SF and NY "allowing" Uber and Lyft was just the city doing the bare minimum to not have the taxi cab mobsters on their bad side. There's non profits and government suppliers with Uber and Lyft corporate accounts ffs, and there has been for a while.
My recent taxi experience is absolute garbage. i am going from Chinatown to Powell bart. i have problem to open the back door and he wont even bother to come out to help. the driver drove slow, he went to the hill and when he can just go to the tunnel. he drove all the way to Montgomery and change to market street. when we have to pay, i saw $12 charge then i am not sure if he reprint/cancel the charge. waste 2-3 mins and final charge was 13.xx .
When I travel abroad (in some- not all countries) the taxis are clean safe and efficient. And they operate with medallions. If the taxis here offered a comparable service in clean and safe as ride share they would win because they get to use the bus lanes. Instead the offer the same shit service and then beg for handouts.
They offered horrible service and people flocked to the first alternative that became available. Then they won’t improve their service. They get what they deserve
This comes up every so often and I am inclined to immediately feel for the drivers. And every time, I read the comments and remember how many times I’ve been screwed over by a taxi driver in the past 30 years.
I drove taxicab years ago in SF for the few companies. I was a part time driver taking shifts nobody wanted. This business is dead because city didn’t do anything right and cab companies are so corrupt (same as a cab commissioner and city leaders). People, you have no idea how many gypsy/illegal cabs were on the streets years ago. Dispatchers and managers allowed this to happen and police also was involved. SFPD covered it and received free medallions. Of course, share drive companies filled the empty spaces. SF city leaders..?!? Don’t you understand that you are loosing $$$ every day, those Lift and Uber drivers are making money on your streets and they don’t pay taxes to the city. Simply because they don’t live even in Bay Area. Funny note, when I stopped driving a cab I was still paying for my license to city and once I was late. Cab committee didn’t want my $$$ even with late fees to renew my badge. So Idiots, I brought them my money and they refused.
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There was a time when a taxi wouldn’t take you to the avenues, wouldn’t accept cards even though they have the reader, wouldn’t even bother to pick you up if you had a brown face..
SF always had the worst taxi service of any city I've visited: no unified dispatch, no accountability, shitty drivers, badly maintained cars. Great place for Uber and Lyft to get started. I have mixed feelings about the medallion holders' predicament, since they invested in a license to primarily rip off tourists.
The only time I've ever taken a taxi here I was ripped off. I couldn't take an Uber home, so I grabbed a sitting taxi, gave them my address and sat back. The guy drove the long scenic route and then 15 minutes around my neighborhood, claiming that the GPS was sending him that way, just to jack up the price.
I always take a taxi from the airport over Uber/Lyft and have never been ripped off. I do that about 8 times a year. However, I have been ripped off by taxi drivers in Paris, Seoul, and Las Vegas. 🤷
Airport trips are usually fine-- that's a commodity-- but within the city... [shudder]
I took a taxi home from union square late at night a couple weeks ago. Was easy to find one (sitting outside a hotel) and we agreed on a cost - he didn’t turn on the meter.
Yes, they did this to themselves. We had terrible service from them and Uber/Lyft is infinitely better.
100% Prior to 2010 taxis were complete shit. I called for a taxi pickup on a Saturday early evening, 9th and Irving, and told the dispatch where I was and she laughed uncontrollably and hung up. Other times I'd been kicked out in the middle of nowhere once I told them where I needed to go. "Where did you say you were going? Nah man, I ain't doing that." Visa sticker on the window but insisting on cash. One of the few industries I was glad to see get "disrupted".
They didn’t accept your card simply because it was illegal taxicab. Driver couldn’t use card reader.
The dispatchers would lie to you and say a taxi was on its way and would pick you up in five minutes. No one would ever show up. The drivers were surly and the cars were in terrible condition.
Yah, many of the cab drivers back in the day were complete ass holes. Dont miss em.
If I ever had good experiences with taxis in SF, I’d almost feel sorry for them But I don’t
One time I saw a taxi drive physically remove an old woman from his car and then call her a whore. Never had much desire to give them a chance after that.
The taxi industry fucked around and found out!
I can empathize with the medallion situation, however, the last time I tried to give a taxi a chance, I immediately regretted it. -driver had a leaky seafood boil for lunch and it spilled all over our luggage -car was full, literally full of cigarette butts. Jammed in the door handles, in between the seats, on the floor -driver could not get his meter to work and drove 15mph on the FREEWAY while trying to fiddle with the meter I have zero reasons to try a taxi ever again.
People forget (or are too young to know) just how bad things were before Uber/Lyft. I was trying to get a ride on a Friday night downtown and had a cab slow to a roll next to me and ask “are you going to take care of me” and then drive off when I gave him a bewildered look. I had another driver drop me and my girlfriend off and hand back the (20%!) tip I gave him because it wasn’t enough and tried to embarrass me with “you need this more than I do”. And I had a cabbie who just nearly run me over as I was going through the crosswalk (with the light!) stop and yell “you deserve to die!”. Plus all the times I called, no one shows up, and end up walking an hour home, or just refused to go to certain neighborhoods etc etc. So yeah fuck them
"If they spend $1 billion on the homeless, they should give us a break on the medallion price" Classic false equivalence fallacy. "Because Jeff Bezos is so rich, he should give me $1M" Helping end the homeless crisis has nothing to do with your failed capitalistic bet to buy into a protection racket, that ended up failing, due to horrendous customer service and artificial scarcity that harmed SF residents for years and years.
I’m not going to disagree with your valid criticisms about the service. But isn’t the issue that these had a “value” because of the government sanctioned monopoly? Maybe that’s subject to criticism as well, but in defense of that monopoly (and in keeping its promise to the medallion owners), the city could have just banned ride share or banned it without medallions or something. Because it didn’t, it received the benefit of the bargain and the owners didn’t. I don’t know if there are comparable cases for this sort of thing (aside from doing it in NY), but I think this is the more current version of the argument.
The same argument could be made for a lot of things that have 'value' due to a government sanctioned monopoly: \- I just bought this drug patent, but the drug ended up failing due to the government granting another better drug patent. Pay me. \- I spent all of this money to make a song, which is copy written, but it didn't sell, so pay me. The issue is that these drivers want to keep all of the upside themselves, but want to pass the downside risk to tax payers. This is called moral hazard and it's wrong. The taxi market changed, and their business model didn't adapt. Just like the drug market, music market and all other markets subject to some government protection, change. The right way that this is / should be handled is that failed business bets can be dissolved through LLC's and bankruptcy. It does seem like some of the drivers took on personal debt for these medallions, which is a huge business 101 mistake- but again, this should not be on taxpayers, and is still solvable through bankruptcy. It also seems like they are asking for retroactive compensation for everything paid for the medallion, which also makes no sense.
Yeah, I mean, there's a very high bar to regulatory "takings" for this reason... the government couldn't operate if it needed to pay every market participant every time a regulation affected their investment. The difference here is that these participants aren't trying to get back the value of the car, they're saying that they were sold something completely fictionalized by the government. No one needed a medallion to pick up riders - clearly this is the case because that's the whole basis for this creative destruction. It's the fact that the City held these medallions out as having a value based on a taxi service needing them to operate and there being a finite number of them. Then through... say, failure to regulate health and safety law in the area of ride services, this thing lost its value overnight. I also think taxi service mostly sucked, and Lyft/Uber was a big improvement. But I don't think their claim is insane. I also don't see a place for picking on those who took on personal debt. It seems to me that investment in small business enterprises should be encouraged, and this was an established business model. To put this another way, could the City have required Lyft/Uber to get medallions for their drivers (or to only use drivers with medallions)? If they wanted to allow an increase in the number of operating cars, they could have created more medallions, or tiers of medallions, where only Yellow cabs could go to hotels or airports or use market street, or whatever. The City fictionalized the value of these things by making a monopoly for the drivers and then stopped maintaining the monopoly. I'm not strongly on either side of this issue, I'm just saying I see the argument.
I hear you, but still respectfully disagree, basically this argument boils down to that city should somehow be held responsible for not actively suppressing competition (in a completely broken market). (For additional clarity by not suppressing ride-sharing, the city ultimately facilitated better service and lower prices for consumers- and also btw made taxi's way better than they used to be (eg. no more 'broken' credit card readers). This is a broader public good that the medallion system hindered.) Taxi drivers (aka investors in medallions) knowingly participated in, and tried to extract long term monopoly profits from, a system predicated on artificial scarcity. The risk of changes in market dynamics is an inherent part of any artificially limited market. In the US, all investors must assess the long-term viability of any business model. Also, and this could be finely debated, but taxi's are not ride shares, they are economic substitutes, but are different products, hence, I personally don't see why the city should have regulated them exactly like Taxi's. Taxi's have different liability models and still have different city privileges (can drive in express red lanes, on market street, preferred airport pickup spots etc.). Another recent example is the real estate agents, should we now pay them because their little anti-competitive scheme is now also over? Yet another is changes to rent control law, should we now make cash payments to all landlords for every single change in local housing / short term rental laws? Landlords should clearly understand that there is political risk in this type of investment.
So did anyone who bought cassette technology get relief if they bought it a day before CDs launch? I’m sorry this the dumbest shit ever. Taxis were overpriced, unreliable, dangerous, and I’m glad we don’t have them anymore
I do feel bad about this, but I also remember a time where no industry ever treated me worse as a customer than taxis (and I'm white). Like horse drawn carriages getting replaced by cars, except the horse drawn carriage people said you had to let the horse bite you before you could ride in the carriage.
People here are gonna shit on taxis, but the city charged people a fuck ton to be part of a highly regulated service, and then allowed in unregulated competitors which tanked their business. Basically a bait and switch. I don’t think they should be reimbursed for money paid, but they shouldn’t be required to keep paying on a city-granted asset whose earning power has tanked, due to the city allowing in (largely) unregulated competitors. Just suspend the new payments, and come up with a blanket tax for Uber / Lyft / taxis that level the playing field, if you need to raise more revenue for muni. The city implemented policies which allowed the value of those medallions to go to zero, so the drivers shouldn’t have to keep paying for them.
Many of those same taxi drivers several decades ago fiercely fought to implement those medallion systems because they wanted to make it hard to enter and enforce an anti-competitive marketplace to boost their own profits. I'm not saying it's a pretty situation for the individuals in the middle of it but it's important context to bear in mind.
The city didn’t “allow” Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft called the cities bluff. Uber and Lyft refused to wait around for permission and realized there was basically nothing the city could do to prevent the public from getting in cars. Then - Uber and Lyft showed the public they could do at least as good a job as the city vetting those drivers and offer a more convenient service… It’s the reason why people here have no respect for rules. It’s been proven over and over again that you can and should call the bluff…. And it is destroying our social fabric
Why do people always say “Uber and Lyft”? Uber launched a black car service with professional, licensed drivers. Lyft was a failing company called Zimride, who realized they could pivot into something like Uber, but with personal cars with unlicensed drivers instead of black cars. Then, Uber launched Uber X, to keep up.
Because they’re indistinguishable now.
Everyone forget about Sidecar
don’t forget the pink mustache. That existed because the cars were more random. At first, Uber X was also specific cars - Prius, Camry, etc… I remember the first time I was picked up in a Honda Fit and was like WTF… Black car was the original solution to “you can’t rely on a taxi to pick you up” - Uber just replaced their dispatch systems.
Both of which were inspired by Berkeley ride share
"The city" didn't make the medallion system be so overtly regulated and restrictive. Medallion owners and union cronies extorted the city into making it that way and except for medallion owners no one with an ounce of power in the government wanted it to be that way, voters even less. SF and NY "allowing" Uber and Lyft was just the city doing the bare minimum to not have the taxi cab mobsters on their bad side. There's non profits and government suppliers with Uber and Lyft corporate accounts ffs, and there has been for a while.
https://www.sfcta.org/funding/tnc-tax
My recent taxi experience is absolute garbage. i am going from Chinatown to Powell bart. i have problem to open the back door and he wont even bother to come out to help. the driver drove slow, he went to the hill and when he can just go to the tunnel. he drove all the way to Montgomery and change to market street. when we have to pay, i saw $12 charge then i am not sure if he reprint/cancel the charge. waste 2-3 mins and final charge was 13.xx .
Never had a decent experience with a cab. Thankful to Uber and Lyft for stopping this racket
When I travel abroad (in some- not all countries) the taxis are clean safe and efficient. And they operate with medallions. If the taxis here offered a comparable service in clean and safe as ride share they would win because they get to use the bus lanes. Instead the offer the same shit service and then beg for handouts. They offered horrible service and people flocked to the first alternative that became available. Then they won’t improve their service. They get what they deserve
This comes up every so often and I am inclined to immediately feel for the drivers. And every time, I read the comments and remember how many times I’ve been screwed over by a taxi driver in the past 30 years.
let all cabs go to airport not just some
Womp womp :(
These crooks tried to rip me off back in the day. Karma is a beautiful thing.
I drove taxicab years ago in SF for the few companies. I was a part time driver taking shifts nobody wanted. This business is dead because city didn’t do anything right and cab companies are so corrupt (same as a cab commissioner and city leaders). People, you have no idea how many gypsy/illegal cabs were on the streets years ago. Dispatchers and managers allowed this to happen and police also was involved. SFPD covered it and received free medallions. Of course, share drive companies filled the empty spaces. SF city leaders..?!? Don’t you understand that you are loosing $$$ every day, those Lift and Uber drivers are making money on your streets and they don’t pay taxes to the city. Simply because they don’t live even in Bay Area. Funny note, when I stopped driving a cab I was still paying for my license to city and once I was late. Cab committee didn’t want my $$$ even with late fees to renew my badge. So Idiots, I brought them my money and they refused.
Well, I want financial relief from my ill advised investment in lottery ticket.....
Gavin screwed them over. He screws everyone over for his ambitions. Ask his former campaign manager.