jadero

The key is to figure out why Belgium's taxis are so expensive in comparison to other places.

What are the differences in regulation?

Are Belgian taxi drivers each completely independent operators responsible for covering all their costs with only one driver while other places have vehicles shared by multiple drivers?

What are the differences in standards of living and employment opportunities? In my experience, people migrate away from low paying jobs quite quickly when the opportunity arises. For example, in Canada you won't find anyone other than management deliberately making a career out of working in fast food because the pay and working conditions are crap. The only reason anyone works fast food is because of lack of better options. That's what's killing fast food in certain places in Canada. There have been so many well paying jobs in the oil sector for long enough that in places like Fort McMurray, McDonald's and Tim Hortons have often had trouble staffing their outlets.

Unless your existing taxi services were wildly over regulated, wildly profitable, or paid very well, that price reduction might be temporary. The cars must still be paid for and maintained and fueled. The drivers still need to pay for food and shelter. There is only so much room to move on costs.

It could well be that a globally managed booking system is enough to kick the tires out from under traditional taxis, but I think the other costs have a much greater role in final pricing than mere booking.

Yes, increasing efficiency. I don't know enough to say one way or the other whether efficiency can be achieved through any means other than economies of scale (profit margin) or process (labour costs), so I flipped a coin and left it off.

And you might not be using MS Word, but the platform does use the very common concept that the system knows better than you what number is appropriate. :)

Ubers are supposed to be cheap. Like a fraction of the price of a taxi but also cleaner and safer.

That was always a scam. There are only 4 ways to make something less expensive:

1. Reduce profit margin
2. Reduce the cost of equipment and supplies
3. Reduce labour costs
4. Reduce regulatory costs

Uber is a nice case study:

1. By operating globally, their volume is high enough that they can shave margins to nearly nothing and still get bags of money.
2. They claim be only a booking platform, so they don't actually have to buy anything related to the frontline provision of the service.
3. As only a booking platform, they have no labour costs associated with providing the transportation service.
4. Their booking platform claim means they're not a taxi service, so they don't have to pay for the relevant licensing. It also supports their claim that the drivers are actually independent businesses so that the burdens of pay, payroll, worker's compensation, employment insurance, etc are the responsibility of the driver, not Uber.

Note that all of those costs that Uber is avoiding are still actual costs that must be borne by someone. That means the price to the consumer cannot actually go down, except in very narrow circumstances. Like when I'm driving my car some place that is compatible with your origin and destination, which is just a formalization of standard hitchhiking. When each driver is actually offering a true taxi service, the price must actually climb if the worker is to be fairly compensated, because there are no economies of scale.

The only way that Uber can work to provide taxi-like service at a lower price than traditional taxi service is for enough people to sign on that the formalization of hitchhiking can service the majority of trips. I'm guessing that the critical mass is probably well over 50% of car owners.

Safer is a function of training, regulation, and incentives. None of those are part of the Uber model. For safer taxis, mandate background checks, safety-oriented driver training, and structure the pay so that aggressive driving doesn't increase earnings.

Neither of those provinces were anywhere near as being off the rails as they are today. It wouldn't have been an easy time for the nation, Quebec, or any of the provinces, but we'd have got through it.

It wouldn't surprise me that, by now, the Maritimes would at least be trying to hook up with Quebec or the US. I have no basis for that beyond the likelihood that they would be very isolated otherwise.

Is it too much to hope for that they also realize that going ever harder might be the wrong approach?

I agree. It's just part of the cycle.

I think it's quite clear that, in that case, the server is the face of that business. What happens if instead, the person is working in the back room keeping the books?

Absolutely not. What business is it of mine who you work for?

I disagree. If I'm a welder in the back of the shop, nothing I do on my own time reflects positively or negatively on my employer as long as I leave my employer out of it. That some busybody wants to make it my employers business is unreasonable and unfair. And that goes double for the employer who decides to make it their business.

Fair enough. As I said, I can see room for exceptions, but the more control your employer has over your free time, the less free that time is. I'm not interested in going back to the days when a person could be fired for driving the wrong make of car.

They could start by focusing on profits instead of margins. I don't care if your margins are 50% or .005%, if you're extracting billions in profit, you have room to reduce your margins, preferably through some combination of price drops and increased wages for everyone who works in the actual retail outlet.