That said, Taxi drivers have something Uber drivers don't- a union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Taxi_Workers%27_Alliance
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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The fact that they would actually show up.
Where I live, before Uber you needed to call the cab company at least an hour before you wanted to get anywhere (in a city that you can get pretty much anywhere in 15 minutes). The dispatcher would tell you someone will be there in 20 minutes and, if you were lucky, somebody might show up in 45. Before Uber, there was more than one occasion where I ended up stranded downtown until 4 or 5am after the bars had closed at 3:00.
Being able to request a ride, having someone reliably show up, and show up reasonably close to when they said they would was an absolute game changer at the time.
unless you see the uber car circling around you on the map, then canceling the ride and cashing in the "cancelation fee"
yeah, but this is not an invention of uber. it is just that we got the to point where technology allowed what was not possible before. yes, uber was faster to adapt it than traditional taxi industry, but they are not doing it for your blue eyes, they are doing it for profit and they do lot of shady stuff to achieve it.
That's a relatively new phenomenon as people have learned how to game the system. The reliability of Uber when they first launched was complete night and day.
I never said otherwise. I was merely providing an example of why Uber gained adoption early on. The service was materially better than what taxi companies were delivering at the time in many places. I experienced that first hand.
that's definitely going on for at least 5 years
ok, from that point of view it definitely makes sense
Keyword: relatively.
Uber's been around 15 years.
Which is both a good point and quite a different scenario from what's being illustrated here which is just Uber's version of a taxi stand, and literally the final brick in them going around taxi regulations.
The problem was never when Uber provided something that wasn't being provided, it was when they provided a regulation-free version (early on their drivers were wholly unvetted and many would be driving people around in cars with no commercial insurance and hence the Insurer could deny paying compensation to the passenger in the case of accident) of what was already in the Market by using the laws for Rental Cars With Drivers to avoid the laws for Taxis.
Their business model from the start was just gaining an advantage against established players using Regulatory Avoidance, even if in some situations they did provide a better service rather than just an unregulated version (and hence cheaper because all kinds of costly rules done for the safety of customers weren't obbeyed) of the same thing.