In San Francisco, the birthplace of Uber, the largest traditional taxi company has filed for bankruptcy.
But Yellow Cab Cooperative doesn't call out the ride-hailing giant as the reason for its woes. Instead, the company said that lawsuits filed by passengers had finally forced it to restructure its business.
Last year, The San Francisco Chronicle reported, a San Francisco Superior Court jury found that the company was liable for a crash allegedly caused by a Yellow Cab driver. The jury awarded $8 million to the injured passenger.
Not that the Ubers of the world are immune from such pressures. In one tragic instance, an Uber driver on New Year's Eve 2013 ran into a family in a San Francisco crosswalk, killing a 6-year-old girl and seriously injuring her mother and brother. In July, Uber reached a settlement with the family, the terms of which were kept confidential.
But ride-hailing services do have an advantage over traditional taxi companies, at least for now, in the form of billions of dollars in funding.
Yellow Cab declined to comment on whether competitive pressures from app-based services like Uber were a factor in its filing.
