this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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Won't find many people shedding tears for the legacy cable companies or the legacy taxi industry. Two of the most hated industries before they got disrupted.
I may be an outlier, but I liked old taxis you order by a phonecall more than drivers juggling five different apps and coming to your place with an according delay for they try to be a delivery guy and a taxist for many companies just to keep a positive balance; cable was great in Russia too, for one Discovery channel alone could completely capture the day of a young teen like me, unlike what it is now. YMMV.
Did your phone call taxis actually show up close to on time? Almost every person I've talked to about them had the same experience of them often being hours late if they came at all with no notification of the delay. Any time you called dispatch they'd say they're on their way.
Yeah i remember tacos well. On hold, then a 40 minute Wait, no guarantee they'd call you when they arrive, so lots of waiting outside.
I did befriend a cabbie eventually who gave me her personal number to avoid that shit, but that's just a personal story i included for no reason other than I'm high
Although it's anecdotal and can't act like statistics, mostly, yes. In rush hours or in the night I called different operators to get the better deal, but I do so too with apps. The weirdest time happened when apps just started to come and drivers halved between two, so both was undermanned. Now, suddenly, the problem is tech, because it enables drivers out of here navigate the streets by GPS, so they can work without any experience on our streets unlike phone-taxi guys who seemingly did. Another, and more dangerous problem is that apps pay even less to their drivers or even lend them cars for a high price, so they work much more, and I have at least three drivers visibly fall asleep behind the wheel. Gig-app economy feels even worse than shitty practices that were before.
and this is why we should push for taxis to be replaced by public transport and carshare services.
If you can drive, carshares are just better than taxis in every single way unless you specifically need to not drive yourself for some reason, and good public transport is just always better.
There was nothing more anxiety inducing than waiting for a cab you scheduled when you have a flight to make, because about half the time they just wouldn't show up.
It's so baffling that even american cities often don't make it feasible to get to and from the airport by public transport, that's the one destination where no one in their right mind is ever going to drive themselves to.
In an even slightly sane world all american cities would at the very least have usable bus services for getting to and from the airport, if nothing else.
It's worse where I live. Our (VERY major) airport was designed deliberately to prevent any public transit, and fought legislation to build public transit access for decades.
Didn't have anything like that but can imagine how horrible that is.
Taxis did have a big potential of being rip-offy though in Russia as I recall my dad telling young me and my mom to get out before he tore a Moscow cabbie a new asshole for trying to outright scam us lol
Especailly when you have one point at an airport or train station. The thing is, automation didn't do it more fair.
This is absolutely true. But Uber and lime etc also directly undermine useful mass transit. Over the years I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve gone to a place thinking that I will easily be able to get back via Uber, and then found that there are no drivers, or no drivers that want my fare for the return trip. So far after some time I’ve been able to finally find someone, but it’s become more frequent and I’ve been concerned I wouldn’t be able to get home.
A more amusing anecdote: my brother was in a Midwestern small city for a conference. His flight out was at 8am, airport serving the town was about 20mins away by car. He woke up and tried to get an Uber, Lyft. No dice, no one out driving. Tried calling the one remaining cab company, but they didn’t have any drivers out. There was no airport shuttle, or mass transit. Freaking out a bit, he finally spotted one of those electric scooters, and sighing, he signed it out. He was dressed in his conference gear, and had his bag. The city was very hilly, and he found that with the extra weight of the bag, the scooter didn’t have the power to get up hills, so he had to kick push to augment it. An hour later he gets to the airport, soaked in sweat, to see multiple scooters discarded along the road, others had clearly used the same method recently. The cost for the scooter was close to 40 bucks, 2.5 times his Uber fare in from the airport. Anyhow, an isolated incident, but sort of funny depiction of how the transit landscape has degraded a bit over time, and how Uber etc is not as instant and reliable as it sells itself to be.