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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

People that want to stop drunk driving would disagree. Taxis are way to unreliable in the vast majority of US cities to be used as transport to/from a dinner with drinks.

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Yep. The primary way I get to/from drinking events is Uber/Lyft. The other use case is when going somewhere without parking. Taxis were always very unreliable for trips like this; they'd show up late or not at all, especially for leaving events late at night.

This is what I don't understand. When I lived in the Boston area, I used Uber instead of taxis, because of this neat little feature Uber (and Lyft) had called "showing up". Sometimes when I called a cab company, I wasn't even able to reach the dispatcher (maybe 20% of the time, because I was often calling in the very early morning). When I spoke to the dispatcher, I could never be certain that he actually understood what I was saying. If those hurdles were overcome, there was about a 75% chance that taxi would show up, but the time of arrival was always uncertain.

I could not have cared less about the cost of Uber. I'd have paid ten times the cost of a cab, in order to have a service I could rely on. I've never once been stood-up by an Uber or Lyft driver. Reliability is what's important - little things like the car not being filthy and the driver not screaming at me about the Yom Kippur War are just extras.

Why don't taxi companies just clone (as closely as they can) the Uber dispatch and driver tracking technologies?

As I understand it, taxi companies have done just that - they now have apps as well.

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