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Comment by arthens | Hacker News Reader

Are taxis more reliable than lift/uber where you live? My experience in Australia is the opposite.

I never had a uber (no lift here) not showing up , while booking a taxi is almost like a lottery. Few years back our office manager booked 4 cabs for 6pm of the following day because we had a work function to go to. The first cab showed up at 6.50 after countless calls to the taxi company, the other never did.

We ended up calling 3 uber and we were on our way within 10 minutes.

That was the day I swore to never get on a taxi again, unless I really really had to.

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Similar experience as you with taxis in America. About 6 months ago a good friend was getting married and we booked 3 taxis from one company to take us from his house to downtown. Ultimately the taxi company only sent one guy to drive back and forth 3 times, making it take almost an hour to get everyone there. Coming home 3 of us simply ordered 3 different ubers and we all got back in 10 minutes.

"America" is a very large place. The taxi experience in NYC is going to be very different than somewhere in North Dakota (or even just another city, like Los Angeles).

I've had bad experiences like this with both taxis and Ubers. With Uber, I've had dozens of experiences where either (1) There were no drivers available in my area, (2) The drivers repeatedly canceled on me, or (3) The driver didn't cancel, but also never came to pick me up, and instead just drove in the opposite direction for 10-15 minutes.

I now don't trust taxis, Uber, or Lyft to get me to the airport very early in the morning. I live in DC, not exactly a small town.

This is why I still use an old-school limo company ("limo" as in fancy black car, not a real limousine) for airport pickups/dropoffs in my home city. Years ago I found one that's extremely reliable and trustworthy. Nearly five years later I haven't had a single issue.

Uber in general is much better than taxis, but I still wouldn't really trust it for time-critical early morning pickups.

A tactic some Uber drivers seem to use to avoid having to cancel (which can get them kicked off the platform if they do it too frequently) is to just drive away from you until you get frustrated and cancel on your end.

it's a death spiral. If you call for more than one taxi and drop them, it incentivises taxis to drop their pre-booked clients and pick up people on the road instead, which incentivises people to call for more taxis than they need, etc.

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