Uber, ride-hailing apps are essential for travel

In some places, using Uber
and its competitors aren’t just about saving money, but about
staying safe.
Ints
Kalnins/Reuters

• After using taxis and ride-hailing services like
  Uber in
  dozens
  of countries, I’ve become convinced that ride-hailing apps
  are here to stay, with or without regulation, for a simple
  reason: They serve a need.
• While taxi services in major US cities are usually
  reliable and efficient, taxi services in many foreign countries
  are unreliable, riddled with scams, or frequently price-gouge
  both tourists and locals.
• In countries like Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia,
  using ride-hailing services over taxis can be a matter of
  safety, while in China, I found that I could rarely get a taxi
  to stop for me because drivers didn’t want to navigate the
  language barrier.

Last Saturday, I left the National Archaeological Museum in
Athens, Greece about an hour before sunset. A local had
recommended that I head to Lycabettus Hill, the highest point in
the city and about a 10-minute drive away, to watch the sunset
descend on the Acropolis.

For a moment, I had the internal debate that many urban
millennials have everyday: Do I call an Uber or hail a taxi? I
spotted four or five taxis lined up on the curb in front of the
museum and thought “Why not?”

Big mistake.

I went up to the first cab in the line and told the driver where
I was headed. He stepped out of his car and began trying to
negotiate a price with me. It’s a flat fee to Lycabettus, he
said, telling me that I had two options: either pay 16 Euros for
him to drive me to the top of the hill or pay him 8 Euros for him
to take me to the cable car. The cable car fee (for
two) plus the taxi ride would end up being 18 Euros.

When I told him I wasn’t negotiating and that I wanted to pay the
metered price, he refused and walked over to another couple
looking for a ride. Infuriated, I walked away from the taxi line.

At the next corner, I opened Uber, ordered a taxi — all cars on
Uber in Greece are metered taxis — and got one five minutes
later. The driver took me to the top of Lycabettus Hill and it
cost me 6 Euros on the meter.

I understand the downsides of ride-hailing services like Uber,
Lyft, and Grab. When I was in Bali, Indonesia I saw first-hand
how ride-hailing services
are upsetting centuries of tradition. Living in New York
City, I talked nearly everyday with Uber drivers who work 12-hour
days to make a living.

The New York City government
recently undertook measures to require ride-hailing apps
to pay drivers minimum wage and prohibit the apps from hiring new
employees for a year will have. The effect of these measures
remains to be seen, but it’s likely a good thing that these
services are being more heavily regulated. 

As Business Insider’s Josh Barro
recently wrote, Uber may call its drivers “driver-partners”
but “what they do looks a lot like being an employee
without the legal protections that come from a payroll-employee
relationship.”

But for anyone still thinking that governments can regulate Uber
and its competitors out of existence, interactions like the one I
had in Greece have convinced me that they are sorely mistaken.

Taxi services outside the US are often unreliable and riddled
with scams

A
Yandex taxi waits for the traffic light to change in central
Yerevan, Armenia, April 30, 2018.
Reuters

In nearly every country I’ve traveled to, I’ve had one or
more interactions with a taxi driver like the one I described
above that would have been easily avoided with the transparency
and accountability provided by a ride-hailing app. In many
places, it was far worse.

When I was
in China in April, I couldn’t get a taxi to stop for me. The
drivers had no interest in trying to figure out where I wanted to
go based on my bad Mandarin and the address I had listed in
BaiduMaps. The only way for me to get a ride was to call taxis
using Didi Chuxing, the Chinese Uber-equivalent, so they didn’t
have to interact with me in English/Mandarin.

If you are trying to hail a cab in Shanghai or Beijing at a
particularly busy time — say, rush hour or when the bars close —
the drivers will only take you if you accept some exorbitant flat
fee that they offer. Consider it their own kind of surge
pricing. 

Meanwhile, two firefighters from Georgia I met in China told me
how upon arriving in the airport in Beijing a taxi driver showed
them a laminated rate card for rides to the city — a classic scam
in China. Not knowing any better, they went with the driver. The
ride to the center of Beijing cost them the equivalent of $100; a
week earlier it cost me $20 in a metered taxi that I called via
Didi Chuxing.

When I visited Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, locals told me to
never hail taxis. All over
Buenos Aires,
Medellin, and Mexico City, there are fake taxis with fake
meters, taxis that will drive foreigners in circles, and,
occasionally, taxis that will actually
kidnap you for ransom.

In Buenos Aires, I once made the mistake of hailing a taxi with a
rigged meter. The ride cost me four times what it should as he
drove me in circles around the city.

Using ride-hailing apps isn’t just about saving money

Using ride-hailing services in those places isn’t a question of
the ethics of ride-hailing’s business model, but one of survival.
If you plan on getting around, using a ride-hailing app can
literally save your life.

The longer I travel, and the more people I talk to in other
countries, the more apparent it has become to me how necessary
ride-hailing services are and how many long-standing problems
with taxi services they are solving, from price-gouging, opaque
pricing, and language barriers to availability in far-flung parts
of a city.

In a number of countries I’ve visited —
Russia,
Greece, etc — ride-hailing apps frequently operate as booking
services for taxis. You still pay the metered rate, but you just
pay through the app, which also keeps a record of the driver and
the ride. Even in those cases, I would still use the app every
time. It’s not about saving money, but consistency and
accountability.

I can understand why taxi drivers are pissed off, particularly in
major cities like New York, London, Tokyo, or Paris, where the
taxi services are established, extensive, and reliable. In those
cities, I can see, from taxi drivers’ perspectives, how Uber or
Lyft or Grab makes driving seem like a hyper-competitive race to
the bottom.

But in many cities and countries where taxi services are
unreliable or riddled with scams, ride-hailing services are a
critical tool to level the playing field for locals and
travelers. And for that reason alone, they won’t be going
anywhere anytime soon.