In Praise of Taxi queues
Is ride sharing really better than grandpa’s way?
Like Airbnb and Spotify, ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft are so much a part of modern life that you can forget there was ever a different way. I don’t fetishize the thousands of records, cassettes, and CDs lugged around and stored, and of course I love being able to listen to anything I want, any time. So I’d say that for music, the New Way is mostly a win.
But ride-sharing, as it’s euphemistically called, is mostly awful. Sure, you can get a car to your door on an app, just as you used to with a call to 777-TAXI. But for every safe, polite, helpful driver with a clean car, there are ten who plainly DGAF. There’s no owner or fleet to answer to. The purported advantages of app-controlled dispatching are clearly mostly about influencing the supply of drivers, and implementing horrors like surge pricing, with the unspoken goal of extracting more from riders and paying less to drivers. Any optimization is clearly in the name of platform (not driver) profitability rather than customer service. This really shows up where taxi queues (used to?) regularly form.
As I walked out of LGA baggage claim last night just before midnight, I shouldered through the collision domain of expectant youngsters nodding down (at their app) and up (for their car) like they were waiting for the return of taxi messiah, all in each others’ way, fighting for space at the curb and dragging their bags over each others’ feet. Despite having cross the street to the now-deprecated taxi queue, I passed them, joined the short and orderly taxi line, got in, and told the driver my destination. I used the (pretty cool) NYC Curb app to pay for the ride with my saved business Amex, no fumbling with a card in the cab. What about that experience is improved by Uber or Lyft?