Imagine if driver's licenses were treated the same way cities treat taxi licenses and liquor licenses.<p>The number available is limited, so if you want a driver's license you have to wait for someone to die, and then buy the license from the estate. Since it's artificially scarce you'd have to pay a pretty penny to get one. Some companies might step in and buy up driver's licenses to rent them to drivers for only a few hundred dollars a month...<p>Treating any form of license as transferable private property seems to be against the public interest.
"The threat to medallion owners isn’t that they’ll lose passengers to these services. It’s that they’ll lose drivers — who have been aggressively courted by Uber.
“Without the drivers, we’re dead,”
"<p>Oh really? Please tell me again how people were thinking a gimmick that's valuable only because of a government imposed monopoly is a sound investment.<p>The bubble is popping. And it would be interesting to ask why did the price started going up around the 2000s...
Am I the only person that thinks government regulation is a reasonable thing for the taxi industry? Regulations on work hours, car safety, tougher environmental standards, driver training, requiring pickup if called, etc all seem reasonable. It's unfair that Uber is able to skirt most of these rules. The same could be said for hotels (noise, safety regs, etc) and restaurants (food safety, etc). Should all services be unregulated? Anyways, I do think things like Uber and Airbnb are very cool and innovative, I just feel a little uncomfortable about where it's leading us to.
Just another business model that refuses to evolve. Driverless cars will be here soon enough and the model will have to change again. That's life.<p>If history has proven anything, it is that evolution always wins.
There's a kind of live by the sword, die by the sword theme here. If government rules can be enacted to make an item's value go up, they can also change to make the same item's value go down.
From the article:<p><pre><code> In February, he sued the city on behalf of medallion
owners, brokers, managers, financiers and cab
affiliations. The suit argues that the city has violated
their rights by allowing new companies to provide an
essentially identical transportation service without
complying with existing regulation. By eliminating the
exclusive right of medallion owners to provide that
service, the suit argues, the city has taken away the
thing that gives medallions their value as property
under Illinois law.
“If you think it’s an improvement to change the rules,
maybe you can do that,” says Edward Feldman, a partner
with Shakman. “But you have to provide compensation for
the property rights you’re destroying. And that’s the
Constitution.”
Medallions represent a promise, he says. And on that
promise, medallion owners took out mortgage-size loans.
If the city backs out of that promise, it must make them
whole.
</code></pre>
So, if I buy a fishing license but fail to catch any fish, can I sue my state's Department of Fish and Wildlife for a refund of my $50? I wonder what people would say if I tried?
Taxi medallions have also been a great barrier to entry in the taxi business. John Stossel investigated this a while ago:<p><a href="http://youtu.be/anKCO99_O8s?t=1m53s" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/anKCO99_O8s?t=1m53s</a>
The arguments about chaos without regulations is bullshit. There are proofs around the world.<p>It's going to be very interesting to see how the industry will change.<p>1. Almost all will switch to Uber, Lyft etc.
2. Driveless cars take over.
3. Distributed network of driveless cars backed by bitcoin like transactions. No need for central logistics like Uber.<p>What will happen first: 2 or 3
I loved Nassim Nicholas Taleb's discussion of why being a taxi drive can be better than being a banker (Antifragile).<p>This Uber stuff is throwing a twist into his conclusions.
Anyone else find the graph of medallion values a little weird?<p>Looking at the DJIA, It was ~11,700 in Jan 2000 and by March 2009 it was down to ~6,600. The graph makes it look like it was about 100% of what it was in 2000. That makes no sense.<p>Also, they have the CPI plotted, but it's a straight line at 100. So they might be correcting for CPI, but in that case, you'd expect the 2009 DJIA to be even lower.
How much can someone who already has their own car make doing Lyft, UberX or Sidecar? It might be a good option for empty-nesters who need extra cash but don't want to sell assets or dip into pension pots.