Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
Taxi Companies Uber and Lyft Aren't Regulated As Such
Having driven a taxicab in Santa Barbara for the past 16 years, I feel especially qualified to weigh in on the incursion of the “ride sharing” industry composed of the online companies Uber and Lyft.
The term “ride sharing” is a misnomer. The only two ways “ride sharing” could be an accurate description of the service rendered, would be if 1) Uber or Lyft gave a customer a ride now in exchange for a ride from the same customer in that person’s vehicle sometime later, or if 2) Uber or Lyft picked up multiple individuals who were all going to the same relative destination, as a city bus does. Given that Uber and Lyft charge their fares based on the same factors that taxis do, distance travelled and time consumed, they are quite simply taxicabs. There’s no “sharing” in the equation.
Uber and Lyft are taxi companies. Accuracy in labeling such a new innovation for intellectual consumption is the responsibility of the media. I shouldn’t have to spend time conducting in the preceding breakdown what is obvious to any consumer. If an industry is improved through technology, there’s no need to confer a new label. When typewriters became digital keyboards, the media didn’t change the basic label of its product. Newspapers were still newspapers, magazines were still magazines. The advent of online versions of these products resulted in the addition of the word “online” to the preexisting labels. That’s all. If anything, Uber and Lyft should be labeled online taxi companies. The “ride sharing” label makes no intellectual sense and just reflects these companies’ attempts to distinguish themselves from their competition. Media that follow along are either dimwitted facilitators or complicit in the marketing scheme.
