Taxi drivers were once largely independent operators, or they worked as employees of taxi companies. In recent decades this was "disrupted". Drivers became contractors who rented their cars and licenses (medallions) from wealthy investors. That's how NYC medallions started being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now a taxi driver neither enjoys the freedoms of being independent nor the security of being an employee. They live the worst of both thanks to the disruption of the industry.
Taxi drivers also provided a terrible experience, had dirty cabs, refused to pick up people, would lie about the fare, take the long way, etc. Uber and the other apps took a one time anonymous transaction where the cab driver didn't care about repeat business and made it accountable. Much like yelp/trip advisor hurting business for tourist trap restaurants. It aligns the incentives.
Much of those problems with Taxis stemmed from the aforementioned previous disruption of the industry. You care a lot less about your car when you don't own it. You care a lot less about customer experience when you are not free to deal with customers directly. You don't care about response times when you are only ever dispatched from a central office, are forced to follow a GPS, and so have no home territory or local knowledge. Taxis are bad today, but they weren't always like that.
Bullshit. There has never been a time when riding in a taxi in NYC was pleasant. It was always a terrible experience. And not just in contrast to better options, it’s objectively bad and always has been.
My theory is that it’s because there’s no incentive for any individual driver to improve. The odds of getting the same driver twice is effectively nil so all they care about is not getting in trouble with the owners or the taxi commission. Outside of that, anything to improve the service is a cost borne solely by them which is not worth it.
Everything comes at a cost, though. You use the services of large corporations because they are some of the only structures that can present such convenience. But then you end up in a world where most people are pauperized and no longer have any bargaining power in the face of these changes. You end up in a situation where you have entire cities prostrating themselves in front of Amazon so that they might deign install themselves there.
The incentives are aligned for now, until the venus flytrap snaps shut are you wake up to a wall of monopolies all around you.
So? There's no question that Uber/Lyft/etc made taxi services better, but the improvements have nothing to do with the exploitation of their workers. They would still have cleaner cabs, transparent fares and routes, etc, even if they made drivers real employees or paid living wages. Instead, they try to cut corners wherever they can at their drivers' expense. That's not innovation or progress; it's just the people who happen to come up on top trying to extract as much as possible from the people who do not.
