I can't express how angry it makes me that I only had access to taxis for a couple years in the city before they were all pushed out and rates were jacked, screwing both the customer and the driver providing the value. It will take decades to reverse this course even if everyone has decent intentions, and shareholders rarely do.
They did have a local taxi app here that was reasonably popular and founded by a group of taxi drivers and was pretty liked by passengers and drivers.
Then they sold to a UK company, who sold to a German company, who recently sold to Lyft, each step along the way the new owner finding ways to make the service worse.
Here in Italy I don't know if I hate more uber or the taxi drivers themselves. Most cities do not have uber because of them striking and paralyzing cities. Most taxi drivers will try to scam you if you are a tourist, will not take credit cards and will under-declare profits to avoid paying taxes. Taxi licenses are limited in number and re-sold between taxi drivers and new potential buyers. No new licenses are emitted because the government is scared of them.
You go to the phone booth and underneath there'll be a book in a plastic case. Inside that book you go to the part that's yellow and you look under T for taxi.
In lieu of that, you can just look at the back of any taxi. They'll have the number on it. It's usually like 8888888, because the personal injury lawyers always have 7777777.
They did. But the model of uber was obviously designed to drive them out of business, damn legality and short term losses and devastation of the local community.
Well, now we're stuck at the airport waiting for a mob of cars to fight each other to transport us each as least efficiently as humans have figured out how to do. But at least we can stare at our phone while we wait to get fucked.
And this doesn't even touch the horror of the driving side
Meanwhile, my city is suing a local cooperative for "safety reasons" or some bullshit. I don't expect anything to ever improve at this point.
