> A couple years ago, the city allowed independent car services to paint their cars green and take street hails.
Does anyone else see the absurdity in that? Compare to: "In 2014, the city allowed people to wear green socks"
If you want to transport people for a fee, what rational, moral justification is there for anyone to intervene in that? -To decide what colour your car should be, or where you can pick up customers?
> And you can. There is absolutely no law stopping your from picking up people in a car and taking them places. On land you own.
Imagine you could only wear blue socks on land you own, but anywhere else you'd need to pay $250k for permission to wear them. Would that be alright?
> When it is communal land, communal rules are made (sadly they far too often benefit a well connected minority, but the concept itself isn't bad).
You're kind of seeing a problem, but not really wanting to.
But for starters, the word "communal" doesn't work when you have a small group of "community leaders" imposing their will on ~330 million "community members" they've never met.
The major part of that was being able to pick up street hails not he color of the car.
Cabbies themselves have been the biggest reason for all the regulation from the city. Picking up tourists and aimlessly driving around for half an hour to run up the meter, refusing to take people where they want to go and not picking up black people are just some of the shenanigans they pull on a regular basis.
> Picking up tourists and aimlessly driving around for half an hour to run up the meter, refusing to take people where they want to go and not picking up black people are just some of the shenanigans they pull on a regular basis
Well, if you need a X-hundred-thousand-dollar taxi "medallion" to be allowed to transport people for a fee, that cuts down on your competition quite nicely, and then you're not really motivated to provide a good service.
Uber has shown that there are plenty of people who wouldn't mind transporting people for a fee, but they haven't been able (or motivated to) get permission to do so, which means the licensing system has been highly effective in keeping competition low and prices high, just the way the state-maintained monopoly/cartel wants it.
Can an Uber driver pull nasty shit on people and keep getting gigs? No, but taxi drivers can, and there's a reason for that. Well there you go.
The road is a limited common resource, and it's difficult to directly charge drivers per their usage of it, so the local government uses other forms of regulation.
As electric cars become more common, we can lower gas taxes to the point that they only cover environmental externalities and switch to a weight x mileage tax for roads.
(Mileage to be measured at vehicle inspection time and incorporated in registration fees.)
Roads could be private too, and payments could be collected for (and only for) using them, even without setting up a state-maintained taxi monopoly/cartel.
So I'm not sure what you think is currently handled well.
Does anyone else see the absurdity in that? Compare to: "In 2014, the city allowed people to wear green socks"
If you want to transport people for a fee, what rational, moral justification is there for anyone to intervene in that? -To decide what colour your car should be, or where you can pick up customers?