I’m starting to wonder whether ride-sharing has devolved into a net negative.
Being in New York City this week for the office holiday party, I’ve noticed that it’s become extremely difficult to find regular yellow cabs, while Uber and Lyft have been prohibitively expensive.
Early on, ride-sharing was a much-needed disruption. It broke up the taxi monopoly that placed arbitrary limits on the number of cabs. It also connected drivers and riders in a much more efficient way than the old random system, in which at any given time there were empty cabs roaming around the city looking for fares and potential customers standing on street corners trying to find taxis.
However, the success of ride-sharing reduced the number of regular cabs available, and then the pandemic forced many drivers to find other jobs and made it hard for the ride-sharing companies to recruit new ones.
Last night, I had a hankering for Katz’s pastrami, and Lyft and Uber wanted $67 to get there from midtown on a weekday night. I get that it is holiday tourist season and it happened to be raining, but still, that’s just absurd. And certainly worse than the old system in which you could normally hail a cab within a few minutes in Midtown if it wasn’t rush hour. A few of us just ended up taking the subway and the pastrami on rye was still great (though now smaller and a ridiculous $25.95). True, another passenger vomited in our car on the way back — but hey, still beat a $130+ round trip.