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Comment by jmharvey | Hacker News Reader

> First this is just inherently wrong. You’ve been able to call and schedule a cab, even in the burbs, since before the internet was a thing.

And maybe the driver would show up on time, or maybe they'd see a street hail en route to picking you up and decide to make you wait an extra 40 minutes. Uber drivers cancel, too, of course, but "automatically fall back to a different driver after a cancellation" is a meaningfully different experience.

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> Uber drivers cancel, too, of course,

Or never show up. Twice with uber (I'm not a frequent user, so this is a high percentage) the driver never showed up. The app didn't let me request someone else until a very long timeout (don't remember how long). Good thing I wasn't going to a flight or other time-sensitive trip on those times, but waiting around in the dark in an industrial park, not so fun.

Pre-uber I'd reserve cab rides to a relative remote area and not once was there a delay or missed pickup.

Recently happened to me twice in a short span. After I was assigned the driver, the car was just sitting there for ten minutes. Then it suddenly started approaching and it arrived in 5 minutes, there was no traffic.

I believe they were waiting for me to cancel and have me take the penalty, but I was purposefully not giving up this time. Or they just wan to pick and choose their orders and have no way to cancel an unwanted trip.

Another time the driver came and passed me and went to a different location without stopping or answering messages. I was just watching the car get further and further away.

> Pre-uber I'd reserve cab rides to a relative remote area and not once was there a delay or missed pickup.

I wish I had your experience. Pre-Uber, I had a 75% cancellation rate with car services to the airport. I live in a suburb about 45 minutes away from the airport. Car services would frequently just not show up. I would call, they’d say to wait and I would get the runaround.

I think it was due to manual scheduling.

Uber is much better in that I don’t think I’ve ever had a cancel when going to the airport. But I’ve had many cancels when using it around town. It’s very frustrating and I wish Uber would do something about it. Lyft seems the same to me.

And maybe the driver would show up on time, or maybe they'd see a street hail en route to picking you up and decide to make you wait an extra 40 minutes.

That’s not how it worked, or works (see Curb). You didn’t schedule a particular cab you call the cab service and the dispatcher sends a cab to you and makes sure they got there. If they didn’t show up you call dispatch back and they call the guy and find out what the hell happened and/or dispatch someone else.

it was announced the other day that Curb is integrating their fleet with Uber's, so calling an Uber can get you a cab

That's definitely how it **ing worked, man. I came so close to missing so many damn flights before Uber came around, because I'd book a car the day before and it would just ghost me. I had to aim to get to the airport 4 hours early because half the time I had to reorder a fresh cab and hope for the best.

Cabs had a 45+ minute lead time in the evenings and at night too, when I could order them by phone at all. It was a joke. This was in Seattle/Bellevue, Washington, USA, FWIW

Yeah, my company paid the premium for car service because taxi dispatch was too unreliable.

It was a big thing for competing cab companies to call each other and schedule bogus pick ups. So much of the time they just disregarded calls until the 3rd or 4th time you call back, then they finally send someone.

I wonder if some new player shouldn't enter the market and start making fake pings with Uber and Lyft. Just entirely fill their system during peak times thus preventing them from operating. Can't be too complicated. And this is just exact type of play their customers love about these companies.

Yeah, I used to drive Sea-Tac airport shuttles, and we routinely rescued people whose taxis just never arrived.

You’ve clearly never called a cab pre-Uber, or you worked as a dispatcher.

Worse of all not only does the cab company often decide to not show up, if you cancel (such as calling another cab company that does show up or take a bus instead) you get yelled at and cursed to hell for letting them know you are canceling.

Everyone in the system is just an average joe, probably being paid less than they deserve. But the system was terrible and broken.

> You’ve clearly never called a cab pre-Uber

There might be some variation with things like geography, here.

Yes agreed. Some countries and cities had better taxi service than others. But one of beauties of early day Uber was that I was able to use the same app globally (in the US, Taiwan, and even Chiba) and it used my prexisting saved credit cards even! No fumbling for the local currency, registering a local payment method, or worrying if I am going to be scammed by the driver—just a consistent note global taxi hailing experience.

Uber didn't win because Yellow Cabs we're a better deal or more consistent.

It's exactly how it worked. Half the time they would either not show up or show up 30+ minutes late.

> That’s not how it worked

It's precisely how it worked everywhere I've lived. What you describe sounds like a low density suburb or smaller town. Yeah, social pressure in those situations still works.

The only time I've seen things work as you describe were small/vacation towns when I was visiting for a wedding or whatnot. The type of places where there are a dozen total cabs for the entire county.

Any major (call it NFL tier) city scheduling a pickup was a laughable joke. You quickly learn when you move to such places the first time you schedule a cab how totally unreliable it is.

Even the overly chatty cabbies would be happy to tell you how much of a scam it was, and go on to describe how every driver but them does X, Y, and Z to avoid taking such calls. This is the sole reason Uber got its foothold in my household.

> It's precisely how it worked everywhere I've lived.

Have you lived in NYC? It's not how it worked here prior to Uber. You could call one of the car services and schedule a pickup ahead of time and they'd show up. Of course it wasn't totally necessary, because you could call Northside or Arecibo at 4am and they'd come pick you up at your house within 5 minutes.

Outside of NYC, yeah it was a mess. I remember being at datacenters in New Jersey in the middle of the night to fix some server that went down when I was at the beginning of my career and you'd have to call a bunch of car services to find anyone working at 4am.

> That’s not how it worked...

In my experience that's exactly how it worked.

ROFLcopter! Yes, you are correct, you've always been able to call and schedule a cab before the Internet was a thing. What you're leaving out is that it was always a roll of the dice whether that cab would ever show up, with a much higher no-show rate than Uber.

> is a meaningfully different experience.

You know what's a meaningfully different experience? A cab company scheduling a car for you at a specific time, rather that an app starting to look for a car for you a few minutes ahead of time, and coming up with something late or inadequate, something I repeatedly experienced with Uber.

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