Comment Re:Translation : (Score 1) 314
What is the benefit of having an airport trip be a lottery? Why not just charge people based on the actual cost of their ride?
There's no benefit to the lottery, it was just a half way decent system that worked when they had limited technology (and not much ingenuity). People should pay the fair cost of their ride, but part of that cost is from the driver waiting in the queue or having to drive back to the airport empty. This cost should be borne fairly across all drivers.
Having a system where cabs must compensate for their losses on short hauls with disproportionate profits on long hauls, not only creates volatility (i.e. a driver can have really good days and really bad days), it means that long haul passengers are subsidizing the cost of short haul passengers.
That's bad, but the solution is not trivial.
It also means that considerate people will feel guilty about going on short hauls as they are depriving a driver of his livelihood, and price conscious passengers are turned off from going on long hauls as they know they are being ripped off.
Considerate people may feel this way, but they shouldn't. Short term trips are a necessary part of the system; it may not be good for the one driver who takes you (on that day), but it is better for every other driver behind him in the queue, so it is better for everyone.
At one point it may have been inefficient to exhaustively analyze the fair price for a cab fair or time consuming to bargain with each cab, and the benefit of having simple pricing schemes, outweighed the disadvantages of volatility and a distorted market. Now we have computers that can make price calculations fairly and quickly. Why not take advantage of them?
We're not quite there yet, actually. The problem is that we're in a transition period where traditional taxi companies need to coexist with services like Uber and the traditional companies need to serve people who aren't using smart phones. So there needs to be at least some temporary solution to keep things fair. E.g. an airport could have a short haul queue and a long haul queue. Or they could have the passengers line up at a kiosk where they are matched up with the best driver.