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Comment by varunprasad | Hacker News Reader

Well, iphones have also only existed since little before Uber came around.

The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.

Maybe what you should be demanding is that cab services provide apps so you don't have to hail/call, etc. There are several companies that can provide this for your cab jurisdiction area as a third party service and they won't price gouge the cab drivers and/or the customers, and they won't use illegal threats and bribes to change laws to suit their needs.

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The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.

Nah, it was would because taxi company owners are lazy morons. Well, to put a better face on it, a given one-city taxi company would have at a most a few hundred drivers and maybe ten actually back-office/real-employees. That level of small business isn't going to create a web interface to their operations in the early 2000s. Sure, third parties were offering some high priced web-based hailing service but of course that kind of thing would have to be higher priced than the already high-priced (and crappy) "interface" that calling the dispatcher for a ride involved. Why didn't taxis create their own phone/internet hailing service? The same reason Al Gore's "information superhighway" was dead in the water. That is, the average abusive monopolist - like a local taxi company - could only look at the Internet and say "sounds all-right but I'm not lowering my price for that, I'm raising them web-design costs money".

Local taxi companies also weren't in a position to arrange to burn through millions and millions in cash from VCs.

Exactly. No Saudi prince would give $250k to some dude name Al with and his 10 car fleet.

I’ve used non-Uber taxi apps in cities like Austin and they failed to show up multiple times and about 50% of the time the “finding driver” part takes about 15-20 minutes before I gave up and just used Uber (one time my phone died during this process and I was left with no taxi). It’s obviously treated like a 3rd tier part of their companies.

People want tech companies providing taxi services, they don’t just want the old local taxi service with a half-assed app bolted on + the usual dirty city taxi cars w/ no review process.

Non-Uber taxi apps in Germany are horrible.

The apps are buggy and the service is unreliable.

Uber is far better in my experience.

In Sweden, I have had the opposite experience. The Uber app is never used, due to how low paid the drivers are. The taxi apps are actually decently good and pretty reliable. They are not as feature rich as the Uber app, and more expensive, but when you need a ride at three in the morning, don't expect the Uber app to get you one.

I don't know why the app would need anything more than "I want to be picked up here". Dispatching worked fine when you had to call a phone number. The app could literally be an interface to texting.

Because no one wants to sit and wait around wondering if a car will show up?

> Dispatching worked fine when you had to call a phone number.

Dispatching absolutely did not work fine when you had to call a number. You were often left twiddling your thumbs wondering if a car will actually show up.

> The app could literally be an interface to texting.

Why not start your own competitor then? I'm sure it will be easy to create such a simple app. Better include some load-balancing, because I'm sure everyone will rush to use your featureless app instead of these other apps with nice interfaces, that show you exactly where the car is, with accurate ETAs, integrated payment, safety features, etc.

Have you ever even used the Uber app?

> You were often left twiddling your thumbs wondering if a car will actually show up.

They always showed up for me. And I have no idea what city/country you think it didn't. I feel like this is just Uber PR.

> Why not start your own competitor then?

Because the network effects of drivers and network effects of riders. It would cost a lot of money to compete with that. Also, to deal with a lot of other backend issues that have nothing to do with the app itself - like making sure the driver's cars are in good repair, commercial insurance, etc.

The actual app itself is much easier compared to the business side of things. If someone wants to do the business side, I'll spearhead the app development.

> Have you ever even used the Uber app?

Yes. Also, I never said it was trivial to create a clone of the Uber app. I said things worked fine before there was a complex app and would work okay with a simpler app. Because the complaint I was responding to wasn't feature parity, it was bugginess. But lets go through your points.

>that show you exactly where the car is

Uber actually has admitted that the majority of the cars you see on your screen are simulated to give you a feeling for how many cars are in the area.

Or do you mean once a driver is assigned, in which case I don't know the point of it. I can just look at the ETA.

> with accurate ETAs

Now who never used the Uber app. Their ETAs are wildly inaccurate.

> integrated payment

That you have to check and dispute in case the bill you for drivers cancelling on you, and a variety of other things hooked directly to your card. I'd much rather pay people what I owe them in a one-off transaction.

> safety features

I've never seen them in action, but I'm glad they're building them.

Can we collectively agree that the reason why people are reporting very different experiences with cabs before uber, is because cab-rides in different locations were very different experiences?

In London, the chance that calling a cab (or even the less regulated minicab services) would result in a no-show seemed remote. In San Francisco, it was a regular occurrence. In the rural UK, calling a cab would have been a rare, expensive event, and would require finding an unoccupied local driver among a very small subset.

I'm sure there is even a wider variety of taxi implementations worldwide.

> cab-rides in different locations were very different experiences?

Sure. I'll agree with that.

and i’ve used uber in austin and had some of the worst experiences i’ve ever had. personal anecdotes dont really matter— uber is a shitty company and so are taxis, two wrongs dont make a right.

Uber fails to show up for me about half the time. It just goes through driver after driver, moving to another when the previous one doesn’t come well past the estimated time. Has happened in three different cities in the past three months.

In 2007 I had to drop my car off to get some work done. The plan was to take a taxi ~3 miles down a major road to my office, then taxi back up there at the end of the day.

Well it took three calls and about 90 minutes, but eventually someone showed up to drive me six minutes down the street in blistering 98F. It was more like 2 hours of standing outside baking in the sun to get someone to drive me to the shop at the end of the day. Turns out in my city (Dallas) taxis really only exist to drive to and from the airport. Worst case with ride-share companies, you're looking at ~30 min wait for an uber to arrive, with real-time updates if the driver feels like canceling, and auto-orders you another one.

Taxis work nothing like uber. If you are not traveling to/from a major sporting event, convention center or airport, the taxi does not want your business and will actively avoid/ignore you. For small, one-off trips like a coffee date, going to a concert, dropping your car off for service etc uber is great. Taxis absolutely do not want to be in that business. What this fight is about, is who is allowed to pick up/drop off at places like the airport, metallica concerts, apple wwdc etc.

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