Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Yay for Uber!

Last I heard, Uber was worth more than General Motors.

I owned a taxi for five years, and was it an eye-opener. For one thing, all taxi companies are corrupt. The laws concerning taxis are corrupt – their purpose is to protect the multi-millionaire owners of the cab companies. The drivers don’t count.

The head of the County Taxi Commission was a corrupt old bastard named John Hill, now deceased and I’m sure broiling in Hell. He used to try to extort money from the company owners. I saw him do it twice. He thought it was his due, and used to threaten the owners that if they didn’t pay him off he would do things to them.

I didn’t drive in the county but I knew a man who owned some airport taxis, and I knew Hill from him. Like all the corrupt he had sex, money and drug problems.

I’ve never seen such corruption as in the cab business. One airport cab company was owned by an old crazy woman, clearly in her 70s but who dressed as if it was 1966 – miniskirts and go-go boots. The first time I saw her from across the street I thought, “What the hell is that?” When I told some drivers what I saw they explained the situation.

She also stabbed her rich husband to death, put a nick on her arm, hid in the closet, said intruders did it -and got away with it. That’s how she ended up owning a cab company.

As far I as I’m concerned there should be no laws at all concerning cabs. It’s none of the government’s business, and it doesn’t protect the drivers or the public at all. Background checks, fingerprints – all worthless. We had one guy who had been in prison for child molestation, but still somehow got a taxi license. The owner of one company I worked for was a convicted felon – he got caught running a city-side gambling operation.

Such scum as the child molester never had the brains to own a taxi, so they rented them. At least at Uber you have to own your car, and they’ll even finance one for you, of course at an astronomical interest rate.

All cabs should be owned by the drivers. It automatically gets rid of the riffraff. Which reminds me – there is a reason the Founding Fathers only wanted property owners to be allowed to vote.

Owning a taxi was the best job I ever had. It was a party. The drivers were great – the ones who had the brains and ambition to buy their own cabs. The criminal lowlifes rented their cabs day by day.

Every law I’ve seen concerning taxis was about protecting the cab company owners. Not surprisingly a lot of laws are about protecting the wealthy from competition by people smarter and more ambitious than they are.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If someone's not an Uber fan yet, he should try getting a normal regulated cab on a Friday night in a big city. A friend and I tried to split a cab last year when we were both too tired for our respective bus rides and long walks. I tried calling a cab service from a neighboring suburb that I had used several times before, but they weren't legally allowed to pick us up half a mile over the city line. We called a local service that said they'd pick us up in fifteen minutes. Forty-five minutes later, we got on a bus.

Unknown said...

You got it. Government-regulated cabs generally can only pick up in certain areas. One block outside - nope.

Anonymous said...

Here in Canberra, the cabs are owned by investors in Sydney and Melbourne. One argument for Uber is that it keeps the money in the city.