Taxis - Black Cabs, Uber, Illegal Cabbies

Uber is an awful company and while this is far from the end of it (undoubtedly there'll be a lot of legal wrangling), it is a decision I welcome strongly.

All the main points have already been covered, I think, except for why Uber has so much venture capital backing it, and this is because they plan to switch to driverless operation once it is ratified everywhere and get rid of most of their staff, so if you're concerned about people losing their jobs, it would be much worse once Uber operated globally as part of an oligopoly or even monopoly on certain kinds of transportation, having got there by attacking local regulations.

Much of the strategic thinking in car companies has been around replacing public transport with private hire vehicles, and Uber is on the non-manufacturer side of this. Car manufacturers have been thinking about whether they can earn more from the production of a vehicle if they continue to own it and users pay through the nose every time they use one--similar to the idea that users should pay every time they stream an audio or video file. As above, they then want to get rid of the drivers. Great, doesn't everybody want to work less? Errr ...

On the greenwash side, we are then promised that there would be far fewer vehicles, as people's privately-owned vehicles wouldn't be clogging up every street. Maybe (if people really were prepared to let go of their own cars, rather than (as is more likely) using both their own and hire cars), but this would be offset by numerous other disadvantages.

Uber obviously are using standard tactics to drive competitors off the market--invest lots from 'startup' capital while hemorrhaging money, initially keep prices low, etc. None of this would last with smaller competitors gone. They may not be perfect, but I'd take the (genuinely) self-employed black cab operators over the unwitting completely insecure slaves of a global company with extremely objectionable business practices any time.