Comment by gojomo
11 years ago
Sometimes understanding the original purpose of the fence can make you more confident it's now OK to come down, because the same protections are available in better ways.
Taxi regulations made a bunch of sense when:
* rates were hard to discover
* distances/routes were hard for a customer to evaluate
* after each transaction, every car/driver disappeared into an undifferentiated fleet
* getting in a random car meant at least a tiny chance you could be abducted/victimized, with no record of your assailant or last-known location
Handheld internet/GPS devices, and dispatching/payment via a network service with persistent reputations, solve all these better than the old regulations. So tear down that fence!
So what happens when my Uber driver/kidnapper turns off the GPS as he finds out I'm famous/wealthy?
Your phone has GPS. To be matched at all, Uber had to know both the driver and you, with some mixture of identification/credit/payment information. They relayed your request to just one specific driver, for a pick-up in a specific location. Even if the driver immediately cancels and goes rogue, that's a better record of your-last-known-contact than any other transport system.
Uber relays to you a photo of the driver and the make/color/license-plate of their car – so anyone who pays a little attention won't get in any unvetted cars. The driver gets your chosen alias as another lightweight mutual authentication step – when they call you by that name, they've proven they're in the system.
Taxis still offer none of this. The only check before getting in is, "does it look like a city taxi?" Only flimsy pieces of paper, stuck inside the vehicle, tell anything more about the driver. Turns out, these paint-job and paperwork signals-of-authenticity have historically been easy to fake: http://missionlocal.org/2009/05/mta-poised-to-crack-down-on-...