Furthermore, what kind of precedent does flaunting legitimate laws set? Thankfully Austin was able to have some balls and not allow that shit to fly.
Uber isn't as brilliant as they want us to believe they are.
Phoenix & SLC are also not cities in which people are likely to rely on on-demand ride sharing. Most people own their own car especially if they care about being able to determine exactly when they engage in transiting.
Further, in all of the non-mega / non-already-has-developed-rapid-transit-system cities I've been in, apart from one single city (San Francisco), the wait time for Uber is on the order of the wait time for a taxi. The difference between needing to call or book ahead to avoid a 30 minute wait vs. a 15 minute wait is utterly irrelevant.
The real reason why Uber succeeds in these markets is that they currently subsidize the rate paid to the drivers and thus compete on price. They also have way better marketing and do a good job of making people think the market for Uber rides is more liquid than the market for taxi rides (though in truth it's not more liquid except in dense areas).
Uber is not profitable in these areas, and is just hoping it can subsidize the losses on most decentralized transit regions long enough to defeat regulatory issues, outlast competitors, and put pressure on taxi services. It's still quite a significant gamble.
I'm already pretty strapped for cash, hence why I don't have a car but I utilize Uber & Lyft when I'm unable to get to my destination in a timely manner.
I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't know the number to call, I don't know when they'll arrive at my house, and simply the entire taxi experience is just horrible.
I now use Lyft (for pricing and the drivers), then Uber (if Lyft is unavailable).
> I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't know the number to call, I don't know when they'll arrive at my house, and simply the entire taxi experience is just horrible.
You don't know the number? Really? If you have a mobile device from which to use Lyft, then getting the number is completely and entirely trivial.
While there is some variability in taxi arrival time (just as there is with Lyft or Uber arrival time), taxis typically are no later or more difficult to estimate. You just tell them when the taxi should arrive and that's when it will be there. There are even many apps for tracking taxis on a map interface. Those apps mostly only work in large cities, but it's easy to see they will expand to many other cities, certainly a city of the size of SLC.
You say "the entire taxi experience is just horrible" but your two biggest complaints are that you don't know the number (and apparently can't be bothered to look it up one time and add it to your contacts) and you don't know when they'll arrive (even though you tell them when to arrive, that's when they arrive, and their variability is not significantly different than Uber or Lyft variability).
I'm not able to make any sense of this if it's intended to be a criticism of the taxi experience in SLC.
These days, when I visit SV (or almost any other city), this problem is solved. Uber, bam, done.
https://www.yelp.com.au/search?cflt=taxis&find_loc=Mountain+...
I don't see what you're getting at. This looks like exactly what I'd use to quickly find a cab company and their contact info.
> While there is some variability in taxi arrival time (just as there is with Lyft or Uber arrival time), taxis typically are no later or more difficult to estimate. You just tell them when the taxi should arrive and that's when it will be there.
A charitable interpretation of this is that you must live a charmed life. The only people I know who say things like this are people who have cars and don't tend to use much else or live in and exclusively travel in very large cities.
I have literally waited two hours for a taxi, on a normal friday night. Multiple times. My average wait for a taxi in the city I live in has usually been on the order of 30+ minutes, peak hours or off. Other cities have not been much better, unless they were cities like New York where normal hailing actually works.
Also, smaller cities don't get these wonderful taxi apps you're talking about until Uber comes into town and forces them to compete. Hell, in many cities reliably being able to pay with a credit card only becomes possible when a rideshare company comes to town, before that "the machine is broken!"
I've experienced none of the problems you describe, and I've used taxis in small (less than 30,000 people), medium (100,000 - 300,000 people) and large (Boston (where I lived for a long time), Chicago (nearest large city to me now), New York (visited friends there many times), Austin (work travel), Paris (worked there in 2010), and various other places I traveled) cities and towns.
If you call with a bit of advanced notice, it's rarely an issue. If you call at the last minute, of course there's a problem. But the exact same problems happen with Uber/Lyft.
If I do it, who the hell knows. I've called the night before and still waited almost an hour for a taxi beyond when it was supposed to come. The difference between taxi and uber/lyft variance is night and day, in my experience.
Your experience seems to be exceptional to me.
Having used taxis in multiple countries for most of my life until Uber/Lyft...
... HAH!
If this was the case then there wouldn't be so much of a problem. The number of cab companies that say they'll show up and don't (or show up late as hell) is massive.
Uber at least lets you know if it's running late (ie - an ETA). Taxi companies should have been on this way before they were.
As a data point to the contrary, in Chicago we stopped calling taxi dispatchers to our apartment because they would arrive up to 30 minutes late. Even if we scheduled ahead of time, it didn't seem to matter; as if the dispatchers were holding our request until the last minute and then dispatching into the general queue (so why call ahead?)
With the Uber app, whenever we call a car (even a taxi) we get an ETA based on GPS coordinates of the driver, which is both accurate and updates live. There's a level of accountability that was never available with the existing taxi dispatch.
http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-profitable-in-hundreds-o...
I openly acknowledge I could be wrong. But vague quotes like this effectively do not mean anything, one way or the other, to me. Companies say this kind of thing all the time when it's not actually true by accepted accounting standards.