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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

Fully agree with this.

It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich.

I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting out already had apps. Literally the only thing Uber had going for it was masses of money to undercut the market and advertise to younger millennials - basically their excess money allowed them to get better distribution and cheat the market.

I’ve used Uber three or four times in my life and each time was a worse experience than a taxi.

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Absolutely disagree - taxis in the UK used to be awful, none of them had apps before Uber. Black cabs in London were generally good due to the high entry requirements but you could only get them by flagging them down somewhere fairly central.

Uber introduced competition which has massively improved all other taxi services. These days there's nothing special about Uber except its ubiquity so I don't care if it fails now. Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices.

Maybe you were unlucky but I never had an issue at all in Essex growing up or Newcastle where I spent 15 years. Also Blueline taxis had an app before Uber gained market relevance in the UK and it was great.

If 87 in your nickname suggest your age then I guess you are not the target for Uber. I’m 10 years younger and almost all of my peers never used Taxi and take Uber/Lyft quite often.

Yeah maybe, I’m getting old now I guess :-)

That’s a bit of an absurd take. Uber entered the UK market in 2012 when he was 25 and you 15, surely he’d have been in the target demographic before you? I’m in a similar age bracket and everyone I know uses Uber rather than black cabs.

Ditto: Panther in Cambridge have always been reliable for the 20 years I've lived in the area. Same with the Ely firms.

Last time I tried to get an Uber in central London in the early hours of the morning two or three drivers cancelled before one eventually showed up after I'd phoned Uber support to complain. I'm not sure the phone call is what did the trick - in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't - but what triggered that call is I'd been trying to get a ride for 20 - 30 minutes by that point. It sounds like this kind of poor QoS might be a new problem though: I certainly wasn't aware of it before the pandemic.

This sounds really unusual, in my experience even Uber Lux usually shows up within a couple of minutes at 3-4 AM on weekdays.

I live in SW1 and end up in these situations on a weekly basis, I’ve never waited 30 minutes for a Uber.

Uber actively modifies the earnings of their drivers in real time, which causes the drivers to modify their willingness to accept rides in real time. The reason those drivers are canceling is because between the time they accepted the ride and arriving to pick you up, Uber modified their earnings such that it was no longer profitable, or simply worth the effort to pick you up. Uber is a terrible "employer".

But Uber is horribly in the red financially. They disrupted a poorly ran industry, but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point.

They produced a ton of taxi rides, surely that's worth something?

> but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point.

Utterly false. They produced people taking way more rides. More rides = more people going out to different places.

It's not like people would be stuck in the house otherwise. It's just that people would have taken public transport, their own car, or went by foot or bicycle before. I'm very skeptical of this claim that Uber increased mobility.

It’s hard to get empirical evidence for the general claim that Uber increased mobility after adjusting for substitution effects from walking etc. However, I think one can make the case from economic intuition that price reductions generally increase consumption in a category of normal goods.

E.g - a reduction in the price of wheat will increase food consumption even after accounting for people switching from other crops. Conversely, an increase in the price of Lego will reduce the amount of toys the average child gets, even after adjusting for the substitution to action figure etc.

That's Uber's problem though. Essentially their billionaire investors subsidized car rides for lots of people. Maybe it'll work out for Uber in the long run. Maybe not.

It will work out for them when/if they have destroyed the competition, that's the point. And in any case the founders are still billionaires.

This game is over. There is no way uber is getting a monopoly on taxi service. The popularity of uber has had the wrong effect: taxi companies are getting apps now, and other ridesharing companies are trying to get a piece of the action. There will not be a monopoly except in the places that are truly unprofitable to service.

This is a good effect for the economy though. The customers are benefiting from it. Not so great for Uber though.

Are there any slide decks or investor material out there that confirm this is the business model? I hear it all the time on HN but it just doesn't make sense. The barrier to entry in the taxi market is too low. You can't kill off competition and start monopoly pricing. The competition will always reappear.

I think it might be kept implicit, so investors will not start questioning it.

I think the logic is to own the portal to taxis and become a gatekeeper, by being the only app that the user has installed for hailing taxis. So the barrier to entry becomes large because you have to convince people to install your app.

That barrier to entry starts breaking down when the ride hailing apps are integrated via an "ad" in the users' default mapping app.

There's still a speed-bump, but it isn't as jarring.

You're absolutely right. I don't know what OP is going on about but no there were 0 taxis with apps at least in Birmingham.

I just checked with my friends too and not one person remembers using an app to call a cab before uber. It is possible that some company possibly offered it but it certainly wasn't a popular option before Uber and it was just awful using the taxis here.

Blueline taxis had one in Newcastle - you could also send a text message and they’d come pick you up

Star Cars in Birmingham had an app before Uber.

You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, but back in the day you didn't have mobile phones either so not much option really. I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, and it's kind of an obvious thing to add once smartphones become popular.

I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovation" with Uber is with its business model ("employees but not employees") and willingness to just ignore local laws. This I think is the real point of the article; for all the pompous bloviating about being "disruption" and "changing the world", the actual real change is actually not all that large, with many of the changes being of doubtful or even negative worth.

>You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different,

It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number.

The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are not at typical taxi "hubs" like airports, convention centers, downtown hotels, etc.

Before Uber, getting from one suburb to another suburb using a taxi was unreliable. A traditional taxi dispatcher can broadcast a ride request from a potential passenger in the suburbs but drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for.

A traditional taxi company -- even with an app -- doesn't build that geographically distributed mesh to the same degree. The economic constraint was the taxi meter.

When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.

> When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.

I find this interesting because on the food delivery side, this is kind of mental gymnastics the worker needs to do. If it is a busy evening hour, do you want to take a (small) McDonalds order? Most likely not, unless there is a nice tip. You could do at least two deliveries in the time you wait for the McD order.

I imagine rider side is the same way as delivery. Every worker has to do this sanity check if whether something is worth doing.

If workers are taking low reward rides or deliveries, it is probably because they think they aren't missing out on something better.

> drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for.

Isn’t it the same for Uber? They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger. Dispatch worked similarly but it had its limitations of its time.

One thing that was not possible that Uber does is ride sharing.

> They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger.

That's why the GP talks about a "distributed mesh" of drivers. There's simply more Uber drivers than there have ever been taxis in most places. So in the age of Uber if you're in a suburban area there's a high likelihood there's an Uber driver near you. So there's a small amount of unpaid driving time for the driver. There's also a decent chance of them finding a return passenger at the destination thanks to a similar increase in the number of potential riders vs taxis.

> Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips

Most taxi companies in the suburbs would be a flat rate that the dispatcher would tell you before you got picked up (or the driver would ask the dispatcher curbside), they often didn't use the meter.

>Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices.

In some ways it does though. Some industries corner the market through regulation. Ie it's impossible for a new competitor to start up that follows all the rules and it's that way by design. The only way to break into that market is to break the rules or buy out an existing business.

“Taxis have never been an issue in the UK” is a statement that does not match my experience.

Living briefly in London taught me that you cannot reasonably expect a hailed taxi to take you from A to B no matter how hard it is raining or how obviously pregnant the person you’re with is, if the taxi driver doesn’t fancy going to B, even if B is still within 20m of A.

Living for far longer in Edinburgh taught me that the credit card machine is manufactured by the same company that sells McFlurry boxes to MickeyD’s. This was still true when I visited Edinburgh again 3 months ago.

Uber seems to me to be abusive to their drivers. And occasionally to their passengers. But there’s a good reason they were so successful early on. They made my life, as a customer, better, easier, simpler, less encumbered with bullshit.

I was born and live in the UK and will only take a non-Uber taxi as a last resort. Been ripped off one too many times by taxi drivers in my life. With Uber there is no opportunity to be ripped off.

The fact that I can often use Uber abroad is a massive bonus. It's almost a guarantee that you're going to be ripped off when using taxis in a foreign country.

I would only take an Uber as a last resort - even the few occasions I’ve used one it was flaky. I’ve tried another few times but there was never a driver near but and the one who accepted just didn’t show up, carrier on driving around doing their own thing.

If something was critical I would never use an Uber - I’d rather walk, or cycle if a traditional taxi wasn’t possible for some reason.

If that was a common experience, Uber wouldn't have grown to the size it has and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I don't doubt that you have had bad experiences with Uber, and also that other people have. But you would find it very hard to convince me that people have better experiences with non Uber taxis on average.

I used to have a great experience with Uber.

Looking at the app store reviews in the UK of Uber, sorted by most recent

1* - Lost my trust

1* - Has gone downhill

1* - Uber Scammed me

1* - Can't get an Uber anymore

1* - The worst experience I have ever had

2* - Uber is deteriorating

2* - waiting times have increased

3* - Cancelled rides

1* Deteriorated over lockdown

etc.

All referring to the same problems I see, rides accepted by drivers, then cancelled a minute or so later.

Going further back, full of 1/2 reviews:

A sad Decline, Slow at finding drivers, Getting worse by the day, Scheduled trips are canceleld, Getting worse & worse, Most unreliable, etc

Maybe the occasional 3* but going back 6 months, "Uber is dead, No Longer the no 1 ride in London, Drivers keep cancelling, Cannot get a booking, Never any drivers, Never turned up, 1 star is too much, used to be great", etc. etc, those were back to October.

I'm not sure how long it's been going on (the same complaints go back at least a year on the reviews), but Uber don't seem to exist any more, otherwise they'd be concerned and change something to fix it.

Those latest 9 reviews happened over the space of 5 days. If Uber was generally bad, given the number of trips they're doing, I'd expect to see a lot more negative reviews in those 5 days than 9.

I'm not surprised to see no good reviews. I can't imagine people going out of their way to leave good reviews for Uber at this point. Their overall rating is 4.5/5 though

Look through the last 12 months, hardly any with more than 2 stars

The overall rating is based on the last decade of reviews

Your argument is essentially that just because you don't need/like Uber doesn't mean it's useful? The problem Uber is addressing is not just a US problem - with Uber you essentially don't have to deal with all the shit taxi drivers pull, like refusing rides if they have to go to a slightly less profitable area, overcharging for rides for people new to the area/tourists, etc. Not to mention that with Uber you know exactly when the driver is coming, how much you will be charged up front, etc. You may not like how Uber is addressing these problems - and indeed there are fair criticisms, but ride sharing apps are most certainly solving a real problem.

Friends complain all the time that Ubers don’t show up, take forever to arrive and don’t allow you to plan ahead. I’ve literally never bad that problem with taxis. I can book ahead, they arrive on time, they take me where I need to go, charge a predictable price and if I’m in a town or city I can just walked to the nearest taxi tank and find dozens of taxis waiting to take me somewhere. Yes this is anecdotal but I just don’t see the problem Uber is solving in the UK

> with Uber you essentially don't have to deal with all the shit taxi drivers pull, like refusing rides if they have to go to a slightly less profitable area

That's exactly what happens now

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uber-upfront-destinations

> Not to mention that with Uber you know exactly when the driver is coming

Not any more, they cancel

"I’ve never seen the need for Uber."

A very bold claim. I am not sure about the finances of Uber and how it impacts shareholders vs employees and how many people are getting rich off it, but let me tell you that services like Uber have been a God send as a consumer. The haggling with old school taxi drivers is one of the worst experiences one can have, not to mention that you have no idea what the prices should be if you are not local.

Uber and similar apps remove all that nonsense. You can disagree with their business practices or even how much they charge, but I hope apps and services like Uber do not die, EVER. I don't want to go back to being harassed by taxi drivers.

Yes, in certain areas that huggling was very common and Uber did help customers avoid it completely. Quite often the hugglers were attacking Uber drivers for disrupting their business practices.

You click a button, someone comes to pick you up in a few minutes. You know exactly how much you are gonna pay. Even if you are just a tourist. Uber (and other applications like it) is so much more superior to taxis that you cannot even compare them (unless you want to frivolously whine). They brought insane amount of innovation and I am so thankful for that.

I already had access to this exact experience with a taxi firm in Newcastle where I used to live pre Uber - so yeh, I don’t see what benefit Uber brought. Also, the firm that had that app had clean cars, with driver in clean clothes and they knew the roads well.

Oh, you had exact experience with one taxi firm in Newcastle. Superb. I had this exact same experience with Uber in different countries and different cities. "I’ve never seen the need for Uber.". Well, you are one of very few, pal. I can tell you that for sure.

Alright chill your beans “pal”. It wasn’t just one company in Newcastle, growing up I never had an issues with taxis

And as far as I know you still can’t book an Uber for the next day or whatever.

We had Blueline in Harrogate too. And there was Apple Taxis in Exeter with an app. Ideally Uber should just be an interface that ties these different companies together.

At least here in Berlin, when I book via Uber, I'm told more often than not that it won't be an Uber picking me up but a normal taxi.

>I already had access to this exact experience with a taxi firm in Newcastle where I used to live pre Uber - so yeh, I don’t see what benefit Uber brought.

It seems like the benefit of Uber was that it provided better service for many who didn't have the superior taxis in Newcastle.

If all the other replies (including some UK ones) in this thread contradicting your personal experience don't convince you, would that be a form of solipsism? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism)

The same can be said about people complaining how taxis in their cities were dirty, inconvenient etc.

Now instead of having this patchwork, we have one giant monolithic taxi provider (Uber) that threatens both the good and bad taxi services of old. And because Uber is more than happy to subsidize rides thanks to VC funding having an equal/superior experience is often not enough to compete.

You were lucky. Before Uber it was almost impossible to get a taxi in San Francisco and Paris for me. Now it just works the same on both cities.

let's all move to newcastle!

You're sample is simply not representative. If we could go back in time to 5 years before Uber's founding, I could show you the taxi system on the entire west coast of the US was non-functional, from San Diego to Seattle, service, pricing, availability were all abysmal.

FWIW, I actually agree that the "Gig Economy" is riddled with problems, but at least in the case of Taxi's where Uber started, the existing system was rotten and in need of replacement.

Sure, but like I said - solving a problem in the US and then rolling it out across the globe just “because” doesn’t mean the rest of the world needed it, just mean you had enough money to outcompete even if your service is worse.

It would seem that many other folks in this thread disagree that Uber's service in the area you referenced is worse. I've never been to the UK, so I can't offer an opinion.

Yeh either I got lucky here in the UK or they have been unlucky.

Why did people take to Uber outside the US if there wasn't a need?

Because Uber subsidized the rides.

This, they used their VC money to undercut the local market. Everyone complained when China did it with steel but not when Uber did it with taxis

Most other countries have different companies like Ola DiDi etc which have localized models more suitable to the country theyre in. Uber actually failed to replicate its model in these countries

as a counterpoint, there were places like nyc where the cabs and black cars were very reliable, fast and cheap and there were both drivers and family owned black car bases that were keeping the overheads rather than see them sent elsewhere.

many drivers were first generation immigrants.. owned homes in queens, were putting kids through college, looking at their name come up on the medallion wait-list in a few years as a retirement.

all that stopped with appcars.

The fact that medallions were so expensive that you could retire off owning one was the problem. There weren't enough taxis.

The insanity was that medallions had monetary value in first place. Just imagine that you couldn't start software company unless you bought medallion from someone already operating one. Or any other business for that matter... As for each type of business there is very good reasons to limit amount of those...

Business licensure is a thing, despite not every business licence is a medallion type of licence.

that insanity was why there were professional drivers who were making a good living at the trade.

but i suppose if the only constituents you really care about are customers, the people getting rich writing dispatch/billing software and the people facilitating the construction of a massive venture capital fueled duopolistic takeover of an entire industry, this works too i guess.

again, in the nyc market, it was fine, if not very good.

most drivers i spoke to seemed to like the medallions as they offered some long term investment potential and a sort of seniority reward. there was of course big capital at play, but drivers could have complained to the tlc... what can they do now? file a support ticket?

For some people, yes. Black folks routinely had issues getting cabs to pick them up, cabs would ask where you were going before you got in and then drive away if the answer was Harlem or outer boroughs, of course you could barely find a cab in the outer boroughs, everyone's credit card reader was "broken", etc.

Meanwhile, many of those immigrants were working off of someone else's medallion for peanuts, so the medallion owner could book Nicki Minaj for his kid's bar mitzvah.

the issue with black people getting yellow cabs in manhattan was real, but tlc would also vigorously enforce any complaints.

i think total rent for a car was something like $260/day and $280/day with medallion. (i think this also includes insurance)

remains to be seen whether this is better than encouraging drivers to go out and buy a late model car on personal credit.

regarding the boroughs, you had to know how to live in the city. any bodega, bar or restaurant would have the number for the nearest black car dispatch and would often call for you... pickup was usually within 5 minutes.

anecdotally: yellow cab drivers often seemed like financially stable professionals who were often raising families and in a good financial position. uber drivers always felt like temps. black car bases throughout the boroughs were often small and family owned. again this is anecdotal, but i like talking to people.

In some places with expensive unreliable public transport, the quickest & cheapest way (a group) into town was by taxi. Minicab to precise. The five minutes away for 45 minutes variety. The cancel without any notice. The sorry I don't take card mate. How about the ones who got hopelessly lost to charge you more?

The old way was awful and Uber got a hell of a first mover advantage.

While I don't disagree with the article, I don't fully agree with it either.

The article cites a study on (USA) GDP as a metric measuring of productivity, however, GDP is a poor proxy measure of "things being produced". USA GDP includes financial services and consumer spending, so using debt to pay for things vs. producing more, can still boost GDP.

In the United States, pre-Uber around 2010, it was very hard to find cabs in certain cities and even neighborhoods in those cities. New York City had no problems, but as I had lived in Chicago and San Francisco with lower population densities compared to top tier cities in the world -- the only way to get cabs even a few miles outside the main downtown area, was to call taxi dispatch, if you knew their number -- it was even hard to look it up online -- and schedule a pick up, which usually took 30min+. The US taxi system was stalled at the time, and Uber forced it to start adapting to the smart phone era. The tragedy is that the people investing in and also running uber had their own pyramid scheme instead of pricing out the business correctly. They also didn't consider the social/gov implications -- places with good taxi systems didn't need them, as you alluded to with the UK, but they shoved into it anyways.

So Uber was an innovation, one that is trying to find its financial balance still. I'd never care to schedule another taxi pick-up for next morning, 16hrs in advance when I want to go to the airport.

But the article saying that uber innovation and having others try it on other industries is stymying productivity isn't completely correct either.

++ taxi companies were corrupt due to the taxi medallion system.

As decided by the people. They could have politically campaigned to change that, buy out all the medallions at fair market price and the redistribute them for free in sufficient quantity.

Fuck that. Medallions are licenses and the government can grant more licenses as they see fit. They don’t need to compensate people who already hold them for granting more.

You are completely correct.

Take, for example, Hailo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hailo.

They were available in London before Uber, and they had an entirely different model where they just franchised the technology for people in each city to use.

They were profitable, and were driven out of existence by Ubers blitz scaling, which still hasn't produced a profit :(

I would say a taxi app is a good though obvious idea, worth pursuing. What was a bit surprising was the sheer scale of it. That crowding out point in the essay is very relevant, we are basically allowing the bully with the big stack to raise everybody out of the poker game, no matter how good his cards actually are.

If we want a functioning market, let a bunch of little guys show what they can do, don't let one huge guy scare everyone else away.

Dumping of service should outside very limited promotional offers lead to massive penalties. That is multiple times the generated revenue. Possibly distributed to proven operators on the market.

Taxis in Shanghai were terrible. They weren’t much better in Ireland. They didn’t stop for foreigners (in Shanghai). They refused to take you if they didn’t feel like going where you wanted to go after you flagged them down. Uber and its copycats made the world better by making the “regulators” irrelevant. Taking a good taxi experience from a thing in some cities in some countries to everywhere they operated was and is massive.

> I’ve used Uber three or four times in my life and each time was a worse experience than a taxi.

Every time I call an Uber in London, an extremely professional and courteous driver shows up within a couple of minutes in a Mercedes S-class or equivalent, at a price only slightly above that of a black cab.

I doubt that you can find a better taxi service anywhere.

It's all sunshine and rainbows, while you are in your hometown and know which one is good, won't scam you etc.

I landed in India or Brazil a few times, with language familiarity limited to "bon día". Without local sim card. This trip would be orders of magnitude harder without Uber and similar.

When we had Uber in Oslo, they were safer than taking a taxi.

Safer in what way? A real way or a manufactured way created by Uber to scare you away from traditional taxis?

> I’ve never seen the need for Uber

It's incredible spending time in the undeveloped/developing world - all the problems and solutions that "gig" apps supposedly are good for live on to this day all over the world.

Need a place to stay? Ask around the village and someone will be more than happy for you to sleep in the spare room for $1/night.

Need a ride? Wait where the locals are, you'll get in a communal "taxi" with locals for 10 or 20 cents to the next town.

In the Western World there are apps for this kind of thing that funnel profits to mega corporations. In the rest of the world there are average people on the street doing it every day as part of normal life.

> Need a place to stay? Ask around the village and someone will be more than happy for you to sleep in the spare room for $1/night.

Out of curiosity - where did you have such experience?

Also who are you and who were you traveling with? Because gotta say, as a female, I'm not staying in rando's spare rooms...

I've done it at least 50 times through Central and South America and all the way around the coastline of Africa.

Real people out there are much friendlier and welcoming than seems possible.

A big benefit of Uber is the fact it works in multiple cities. I was in a new UK city the other day, no idea where I'd get a cab from. Just opened Uber and booked one, and it worked.

Tried it again that evening and it failed -- multiple times the ride would be accepted, then cancelled. Ended up walking.

Looking at recent reviews for the Uber app it seems this is common, Uber has gone from being somewhere reliable I can get a cab, from Sydney to San Francisco to Singapore, to being something that can't be relied upon

How do you pay your regular taxis in the UK?

Cash, card or tap and pay. I was paying taxis with card before Uber was a thing.

US payment systems lag the rest of the world massively - particularly the UK

> Cash, card or tap and pay.

Still way more friction than Uber where you setup a payment method in the app once and no actual payment is ever required to the driver, pretty much anywhere in the world.

Also:

    1) how do you tell the driver where you want to go? I've found this to be a major PITA with many cab fares, especially if you drive to unusual destinations. I've met many a cab driver that simply are incapable of using google maps. Case in point: a month ago in a small European town where Uber is banned by the local thugs who run the town, I give my destination to the driver at the cab station, lo and behold, he proceeds to spending 10mn first asking and then arguing with his colleagues in the local patois how to get there. I tried to step in to show them on my phone, they basically ignore me, because they obviously know better. The fact that I;m in a hurry is the least of their concerns. Ugh.

    2) How easily and quickly can you get cabs to pick you up exactly where and when you want, especially if we're talking less than 10mn delay? In a big city like LON that might not be a problem, but from experience, and I'm talking about European capitals, and smaller cities in the US or Asia, this is *way* worse than the Uber experience.

As a matter of fact, an Uber ride requires zero interaction with the driver other than agreeing that you're the customer and he's the provider.

Quasi-frictionless and immediate, which - in my book - makes it a winner in spite of them having a despicable corporate culture.

The price considerations are a different conversation, but AFAIC, I'm certainly ready to pay more for an Uber to get to that frictionless transaction.

The day a cab ride is as easy to setup as an Uber ride, I'll very gladly stop using Uber.

But in most places, that simply isn't the case.

Taxis in the UK were awful before Uber

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