> A car picks me up in 1-2 minutes, instead of the 10 minutes a taxi used to take.
The Phoenix metro area is quite spread out. Even so, I averaged about 7 minutes to my passengers' pickup location. This included the time it took to enter the address into my phone's navigation software. Sometimes I'd arrive seconds after the passenger hung up the phone with our dispatchers.
The taxi company's latest version of its dispatching software has all the latest features, but these were not available in 2004 or in 2008, when the old computer hardware was deployed.
To see a video of how a 2008-era electronic taxi dispatching system worked, see "Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0":
http://www.taxiwars.org/p/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.html
> And it actually comes - taxis in SF have always been unreliable.
The cab company I drove for wasn't the cheapest company in town, but we had a reputation for being reliable. The other big companies were okay too, if you weren't in an outlying area. One time a passenger told me how he'd called a random company in the phone book. They said he was too far out of that small cab company's usual area, and to just call the company I drove for.
> And instead of most cabs driving around aimlessly empty half the time burning fossil fuels,
Where does this idea come from? The only times I was empty was in slow period during the middle of the night.
The cab company I drove for bought its first Prius in 2004. Sometime in 2013 or 2014 they retired the rest of the Crown Victorias (old police cruisers), switching the fleet to a 70/30 blend of Priuses and Minivans.
The fleet was very well maintained. The vehicles were cleaned regularly, and repaired as needed. An extensive rejeuvination was performed at mid-life, which is around 200,000 miles. The cabs were looked at very carefully at 400,000 miles - most of them were sent to the boneyard at this point. The owner-operator I drove for took very good care of her cab - it probably made it to 500,000 miles, which is the state-mandated retirement age for taxis. Replacing the battery pack twice, fixing a head gasket, and replacing the original engine with a recycled engine was cheaper than buying a new cab.
The upstarts' unfortunate drivers don't have access to economies of scale for taking care of their vehicles.
Throwing cars away at 200,000 miles [1] is much more "carbon-intensive" than maintaining them for 400,000+ miles.
[1] http://business.time.com/2012/03/20/what-you-only-have-100k-...