Uber to pay $272M to Australian taxi operators

This is like compensating purse snatchers because the promotion of mobile payments reduces their income. Sydney&#x27;s taxi is a shame to this wonderful city.<p>I still remember when I first just arrived in Sydney, I took a taxi from the airport to Waterloo and was charged $95, which made me fearful of Sydney prices. It took me time to realise that I had just run into a scam and that the ride should have cost just $20+. Nowadays I would never take taxi. That&#x27;s why &quot;they lost income when Uber entered&quot;.

It&#x27;s worth noting that Australian taxis are generally <i>terrible</i>. They&#x27;re expensive and notorious for ripoffs, particularly from the airport: scenic routes, bogus surcharges, &quot;broken&quot; credit card machines (plus 5% surcharge when they do work), drivers refusing destinations (by law they&#x27;re not allowed to), and to top it all off they&#x27;re not even safe, with taxi drivers responsible for a long string of sexual assaults.<p>Uber and its competitors have their own problems, but they&#x27;re still way better, and they&#x27;ve forced positive change onto taxis as well with 13CABS (the largest company) now offering an Uber clone app with fixed fares, tracking, etc.

Does someone know the real story? How can a company be fined for disrupting an existing business?

My friend drives Red Cab in San Francisco. A couple of weeks ago he charged ~$500 from SFO airport to San Jose (taxi meter price). He informed the passenger, since he thought it&#x27;s going to be too much for her, and gotten the response he shouldn&#x27;t count her own money, and should just drive there, lol.

What is the difference between taxi licenses and medieval monopolies (corporations)? Corporations had exclusive right to do some trade (e.g. make bread or produce salt) and nobody else was allowed to do it.

Taxi&#x27;s in NSW&#x2F;Sydney are much better these days. Uber X are typically shit by comparison.<p>A $95 UberX ride home is about $109 in a taxi for me.<p>Talking to a few friends who also live a similar distant from the CBD&#x2F;downtown find that Taxi&#x27;s are the better &#x2F; more reliable option these days too.<p>The taxi is pretty much always newer, with a professional driver who usually isn&#x27;t almost falling asleep behind the wheel. The quality of the driving is typically significantly higher. It feels like a safer ride.<p>Of the recent UberX&#x27;s I have caught, the car was typically in need of a suspension replacement or significant servicing and around 6-7 years old or older.<p>Most recent taxi rides I have had a car around 12 months old or less.<p>Taxi&#x27;s are better regulated and provide a better service. I&#x27;ll happily pay the little premium there is in this market to use one over an Uber.<p>On a recent trip to NZ the uber to taxi price comparison was massively different.. Taxi was like 2.5x more expensive..

This entire thread is people arguing that breaking laws you disagree with is fine or even a &quot;moral imperative&quot;.<p>You can hold that opinion, but as with most things it doesn&#x27;t excuse you from the consequences of your actions.

It&#x27;s ridiculous - you provide bad quality service with high fees and scammy operators, another competitor enters the market and takes your market share, then you sue them and win for beating you? Imagine that in any other scenario.<p>Not to mention, every trip in NSW has a $1.32 fee to help compensate taxi drivers.<p>Taxi operators should have tried competing on merits like price and cracking down on dodgy drivers instead of suing. The last time I got a taxi it was $80 for a 10km trip that&#x27;s $32 on Uber. If they weren&#x27;t so terrible then Uber would have never had an in on the market in the first place.

they didn&#x27;t break the law. Otherwise, if your boss asked you to drive their friend to the airport, then that would be illegal.

All these takes here.<p>Two preambles: Y&#x27;all need to read Invisible Hands, really need to. That book is about how various losely connected sometimes even competing groups of businessmen worked to roll the New Deal back. It&#x27;s not a conspiracy theory, there was no shadow cabal behind the scenes -- but the goal was common. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wwnorton.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;Invisible-Hands&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wwnorton.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;Invisible-Hands&#x2F;</a><p>Second, Amazon was started to become a monopoly in retail and only begun with books because it was a relatively easy thing to work with.<p>Similarly, while Uber started with fancy cars soon enough it became a means to destroy the protections organized labor managed to get in the last hundred or so years. Or at least what remained of them. In this the company was exceptionally successful by creating what is called the &quot;gig economy&quot;. As people hate taxis, using that market for this purpose was the easy way. If you think past the introduction of UberX in 2012 Uber had anything to do with transportation then, pardon the pun, you have been taken for a ride.