Many tax services don't allow you to order a taxi ahead of time. You have to flag one down (eg NYC). For ordering a car, you need to otherwise deal with an (expensive) car service
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.
Second there’s now services like Curb (in NYC) or Flywheel which allow you to use an Uber/Lyft style experience with cabs.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In San Francisco (due to what I hope was a uniquely bad system), calling and scheduling a cab was theoretically possible, but in practice unreliable and frustrating. Dispatchers had no way to locate an available cab in any reasonable time, and even cabs that agreed to pick up a call would often not arrive because (I was told) they would pick up hailed rides on the way to a pick-up. I missed many appointments when dispatchers took thirty minutes to tell me that there were no cabs available, or when an agreed cab never turned up.
I don't think this problem is true of every city, but Uber was clearly an improvement on the existing taxi system in San Francisco. (In fact for many years the main topic of conversation between me and cab-drivers was speculating on how the SF cab system could be improved, and we'd often end up inventing something like Uber, or now Curb. I'm pretty sure SF would not have got to a reasonable system without pressure from Uber and Lyft -- it took them many years to get to what we have now.)
This is not my experience living near Palo Alto. I have had to drive my wife to the airport multiple times because her cab never arrived. Uber/Lyft aren't perfect, but they are 90/10 as opposed to 30/70 for cabs.
In some places, e.g. SF, scheduled cabs mostly didn't show (at least pre-uber). They'd send a driver, but the driver would just pick up the first person they found on the street-- A fare in the seat is better than a fare on the street.
I didn't have that experience in the DC area or NYC, so I know it wasn't universal... but in some places uber really was a massive upgrade in terms of transport reliability even though uber drivers do cancel at a disappointingly high rate too.
[DC had it's own issues-- I never had many problems with them beyond them being thoroughly ignorant about the local roads an geography, but my partner frequently got sexist insults from the driver, refusals to take her directions, etc.]
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.
Second there’s now services like Curb (in NYC) or Flywheel which allow you to use an Uber/Lyft style experience with cabs.