The mighty disruptive tidal wave of Uber has finally reached London. The venerable black-cab drivers are prepared to strike over the ways that Uber is evading the normal requirements of taxi service in the British capital – that the smartphone app with its surge pricing essentially amounts to a taxi meter in a private car, which is not permitted. Setting aside altogether the fact that Uber drivers will presumably be spared the Knowledge, the exacting command of every street in the city that black-cab drivers are required to know from memory before they can drive.
The bloom is off the rose for me for Uber. Every time I’ve tried to use it outside San Francisco, the results have been charitably described as dismal at best. More and more, it seems like Uber’s success is down to a combination of massive subsidy from investment capital, sidestepping the existing regulations around cab service on one technicality or another, and relying heavily on “private contractors” for whom they disavow responsibility in a pinch. In other words, the perfect 21st century American corporation.
It’s the cod-libertarian mentality of Silicon Valley in a nutshell – these rules are inconvenient, so they should be ignored. And yet, people fail to understand why we have regulations. You go up in a plane, you want to make sure it’s not going to collide with another one – we need the FAA. You want to buy stock in a company, you need to know the company actually exists – we need the SEC. (The Securities and Exchange Commission, that is. We could probably get by all right without the Southeastern Conference.) You want to build a house, you need to know the wiring’s not going to burn it to the ground and it’s not going to collapse the first time they blast for coal or the wind comes up – you need building codes and inspections.
Think about UberX, or Lyft, or Sidecar: their business proposition boils down to get in a car with a stranger because this app said it was OK. And yet the more these companies disavow responsibility for the conduct of the drivers, or the operation of the vehicles, or compliance with existing law and regulation, the less plausible – or safe – that proposition sounds. There are other companies – Flywheel for one, though I’m sure there must be others – who are doing what Uber should have considered all along: take the technology, the payment system and the hailing mechanism and arrival tracking and such, and license it to existing taxi providers. The thing that people love about Uber isn’t anything qua Uber itself, it’s the ability to pull out the phone, summon a vehicle, get in, get out, and not have to fumble with the money. Smoothing the rough edges off the taxi experience is a far easier operation than trying to replace it outright.
But that wouldn’t be “disruptive.”