Montreal City Weblog

Kate 11:04 on 2024-04-02 Permalink Reply  

• Meezly 12:46 on 2024-04-02 Permalink

  Don’t know if “passivity” had anything to do with it. Bill 17 was passed by the CAQ knowing full well that the taxi drivers would get royally screwed, despite protests from all opposition parties and the taxi industry.

  I remember a conversation with a taxi driver last year who was planning to retire some years ago when his permit had real value. Since Bill 17, his permit became worthless and what the government offered as compensation was nowhere near enough. I can’t imagine how absolutely crushing that must have been.

• Kate 13:08 on 2024-04-02 Permalink

  (Meezly, your comment was held for approval although it has no links, so I don’t know why. I saw that you tried twice and approved one. Sorry about that.)

  I guess I mean passivity in the sense that the Quebec government – it was the Liberal party then – seemed mesmerized by Uber, like a rabbit by a snake. It was like, if you can make money, that’s the holiest and highest thing a person can do, so our laws and regulations simply have to bend to make it easier for you.

  There was a lot of talk at the time about what a mess the taxi system was in, although I honestly didn’t see how it was so bad and I was convinced a lot of that talk was manufacturing consent for the arrival of Uber.

• Joey 13:55 on 2024-04-02 Permalink

  Once again, the business geniuses who run our province could not distinguish between “shiny and new” and “legitimate business model.” Uber used its size, notoriety and sort of international outlaw posture to convince governments all over the place that it could legitimately offer cheaper, faster, safer, better taxi service than existing cab companies. Anyone with a whiff of critical thinking at the time could easily tell that its business model was built on endless venture capital funding, no expectation to turn anything remotely resembling a sustainable profit, and exploitation of its workers. Not that cab companies were shining beacons of honest business, but at least some of the ‘normal’ rules of business applied. To your point, Kate, Uber didn’t even have to make money to complete its snake charm offensive!

  I think Uber finally turned a profit last year, but it never would have lasted if it had been required to play by some version of the rules.

• Blork 14:47 on 2024-04-02 Permalink

  We went through a period where the notion of “disruptive technologies” was seen as heroic and was held aloft as the thing that would fix all problems by shaking up embedded and immovable systems within our society. Obviously, if a system was old and percieved to be broken all we needed was a hot-shot startup to come save us.

  Well. Be careful what you disrupt. Disruptive technologies gave us Airbnb, and we all know what a shitshow that turned into. It also gave us all the food delivery platforms that on the one hand made it easier for us to get dinner delivered, but on the other hand yanked a huge amount of money out of the restaurant industry through high fees.

  Streaming services? Disruped the heck out of Cable TV, and now some people are paying more for streaming than they ever did for cable because it is so segmented that you need five or six services just to get the shows you want. Plus, by gutting the television industry, quality has gone down (the Golden Age of television is over), and a lot of older shows are disappearing because the streamers don’t want to have to pay residuals.

  And there’s Uber, which frankly is brilliant from the consumer’s POV (an easy to get and use app that everybody has, super easy to get a ride, etc.) but it has severely f*cked over a lot of people from the taxi industry (drivers, as Meezly pointed out) and introduced the idea of surge pricing to the masses, which is now starting to trickle across to other industries such as the food industry (your $5 latté will soon cost $6 between 7:30 and 9:30AM). Surge pricing makes sense in some contexts, but it can also be hacked and used to make everyone pay more and/or deny service to people when pricing is low.

  Teachers in the future will present early 21st century “disruptive technologies” as the last big smoke and mirrors cash grab from Silicon Valley before the whole thing collapsed and ate itself.

• dhomas 17:59 on 2024-04-02 Permalink

  The taxi industry before Uber was kinda shitty, to be frank.

  Many taxis would not accept credit cards unless REALLY pressed, preferring cash. I can’t count how many times I came home from a business trip from the airport on a 70$+ fare and the driver would ask me for cash. 2 reasons this would not work for me: 1) I was usually coming back from the US, so had no CAD on me, and 2) I needed to use my corporate credit card in order to get my expense approved. I would sometimes have to ask 2-3 times for the driver to pull out some old “clak-clak” machine to take a carbon copy of my credit card. The payment via app is a godsend in comparison.

  Another reason it sucked was because dispatching was terrible. You needed to know the taxi company with the closest “taxi stand” nearby in order to get quick service, and even then, you never knew when the taxi would arrive. Waiting 15 minutes in the cold for your taxi to arrive in the winter was never fun. Contrast that with Uber where you know the exact GPS location of your ride; it’s no contest.

  You also couldn’t track down any driver unless you memorized his taxi license number. With Uber, the app remembers and you can contact the driver if you forgot something in their car. You can also report drivers that are not behaving properly.

  That’s not to say Uber was a good thing, but its “disruption” should have lit a fire under the taxi industry’s ass. If they had spent as much effort on creating their own Uber-like app that would have grouped together all taxi companies as they did bitching to the government, they could have stood a chance. Even better would have been if the government would have legislated against Uber and created such an app themselves to force the taxi industry to modernize, without letting the Uber fox into the taxi henhouse. By the time Téo came along, it was already too late. Plus, since Uber was operating at a loss to consolidate market share, so too did Téo require some subsidy. Seeing how Alexandre Taillefer was behind Téo as well as being the campaign chair for the PLQ, his government subsidies (from le Ministère de l’environnement, le Ministère de l’Économie et de l’Innovation, la Caisse de dépot, and le Fonds de solidarité) quickly dried up as soon as the CAQ got elected. (For reference, the CAQ was elected in October 2018, Téo folded in January 2019).

  I’m glad that Téo is back (even if it’s under PKP’s ownership) and use them whenever I need a taxi since I refuse to use anything Uber. I still think the government could make things right by expelling Uber and maybe licensing the Taxelco (Téo) tech to make all taxi companies have a singular platform for dispatch and payment. We see that it can scale since Téo added Taxi Diamond and Taxi Hochelaga into the fold, which now work seamlessly through the Téo app.

• Blork 18:23 on 2024-04-02 Permalink

  Oh, I am well aware of how bad the taxi industry is/was before Uber, for all the reasons you describe and then some. Téo was a good shakeup locally, and I was sad when it went under. I didn’t even know it had come back.

  What would have been great is an Uber-scale app that any taxi company anywhere can buy into. After all, another HUGE advantage of Uber is that it works everywhere. If I go to Toronto or Chicago or whatever, I can get a ride right away using a familiar and (more or less) trusted app. I do NOT want to have to research/download/learn a different taxi app for every city I visit, especially if I’m only there briefly or only need a ride once or twice.

  As it is, the only time I’ve used Uber (as payer) is in other cities, and it’s like a miracle for the reason I mention above. In Montreal I rarely need a taxi, and the last time I used one it was Téo. Now that I know it’s alive again I’m going to grab the app again for future reference.

• Nicholas 22:45 on 2024-04-02 Permalink

  One other advantage the big apps have is price certainty once booked (though yes, no surge pricing). It helps to make a decision when you know, right before booking, what it will cost, and, usually, how long until they arrive. With taxis (and it seems with Teo too? Their website doesn’t say unless I create an account!) that they use the taximeters, and don’t even give an estimate: is a trip from downtown to Pointe aux Trembles $30 or $70? Do they want me to do the math calculating km and time? I won’t know until I arrive, and if I get stuck in traffic it’ll get worse (which adds stress). Last time I took a taxi, to catch a last minute flight, he went through downtown during rush hour rather than use the highway and got stuck in traffic, and were it not the flat airport fare I’d have been annoyed if not stressed about missing the flight. I see that Teo also doesn’t guarantee reservations due to a driver shortage, so that’s not great.

  I agree the service sucked in the past, and it’s a bit better, but they really had to be dragged into the 21st century. The old model was limit the supply of drivers using medallions to keep take home pay high enough, but it meant they didn’t have to provide a good service. Now there are too many drivers, even though I believe people take taxis/ridehail more than before, so the pay is spread around too much, and the venture capital subsidies are going away. The Uber model is very predatory, and people are often bad at math, so drivers don’t take into account all the costs of driving before realizing the pay is too low, and then they’re replaced by new drivers who don’t know better.

  At the end of the day, it’s just not economical to pay someone to chauffeur you around individually in an expensive vehicle unless you do it very occasionally as a treat or emergency, or you’re well off. Robot cars are going to completely destroy the human-driven taxi industry in a decade or so, once most regular cars will have self-driving, especially given they can much more easily map out defined areas the taxis will stay in. It’s already happening in San Francisco, though they still have kinks to work out. It’s still going to be more than transit, but it’s coming, and mixed with CommunAuto I bet it’ll be cheaper than owning a car for even more people. (I should add I’ve never paid for an Uber or Lyft, though have twice driven in one in another city that a colleague booked. I rarely but occasionally use taxis, like once every few years.)