Uber to exit San Antonio due to regulations; says they're the most burdensome in the country.

Look. If I share my ball with you, I don't charge you for it. That's renting you my ball.

We all learn what sharing is in kindergarten and this is a Luntzian PR tactic to make people believe that what a massive corporation with a black logo and the name "Uber" is doing reflects a "nice" activity that is generally more or less applauded by society, when in reality they are trying to transform a highly regulated industry through the use of ruthlessly capitalist techniques— the offsetting of business cost risks to everyone but themselves.

The truth is their major markets, like NYC, London, Paris, etc... don't have backward regulations. They have intelligent regulations developed over nearly a century because of the high population density of the cities and past experience with exactly the types of problems Uber will create (including price fixing, price gouging, and safety). It's why NYC developed the Medallion system on which most systems are based.

Secondary markets like SF were in many ways ripe for disruption, but it's still more complicated. SF had something like 500 private hire vehicles and 1800 medallion cabs prior to Uber. NYC in contrast had 13,000ish medallions (has added and was in the process of adding 18000 outer borough medallions), 15,000 black cars, and over 35,000 private hire vehicles.

So you're potentially looking at a real demand issue for SF. It was the perfect launch market. Whereas NYC, all you're doing as adding the ability to order via an app. They didn't create new drivers.

Additionally, many areas are underserved by radio dispatch or private hire vehicles because the demand function didn't or doesn't really exist. For example, private hire vehicles in most areas of the US simply aren't used except to get home from bars at night, or by occasional business travelers. So there is a reasonable limitation on how many medallions you can have so as not to cause the problems NYC faced during the great depression. But by adding non-professional drivers to the driver pool, you're creating a safety risk as well.

You can't just make your above statement and leave it at that; you have to understand why the regulations were established not just by cartels, but by cities. Will you be able to cherry pick examples to support your point? Sure.

Is San Antonio one of them? No.

Is even "fighting the good fight" a justification for lying about what you're doing? Also no.

/r/business Thread Link - sacurrent.com