There's a few taxi and black cab app hailing services that make Uber et. al. moot here in southern Germany. TaxiMagic, for example, is great and provides the full core set of capabilities (favorite drivers, estimated costs, time-to-pickup, in-app payments, etc.) and is actually a network of medallion-holding taxi drivers.
Consider that, if taxi companies offered competitive phone-based reservations (removing the convenience market differentiatior), they'd actually end up being the more reliable provider. No surge pricing, more consistent availability of favorite drivers, more predictable trunk/boot sizes ( no worrying if your luggage will fit when all the taxis in the city are ___ cars). etc.
There's a bunch of these app companies champing at the bit to find taxi providers to partner up. Which is to say... incumbent taxi ecosystems can absolutely be competitive and possibly offer a richer/more lucrative range of services beyond the awkward ride-along you get with an occasional Uber driver.
It seems like that's not true in London, even though it would be trivial to comply. There, (my understanding is) you get to obey fewer regulations if you're offering a pre-booking service, and that exception requires that people be able to make a request for "a car at 3pm".
And IMHO, that's a pretty reasonable requirement; it's not saying customers have to specify a time, and it allows requests of the form "3pm or ASAP". It's also a feature many customers have asked for. But for some reason, Uber has this bizarre insistence on not allowing pre-booking:
https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Uber-allow-customers-to-pre...
If Uber knows it needs a car at 3pm, it can push work availability notices to drivers near the pick-up location who may not at the moment be working. It would be a benefit to the driver to be able to have the guaranteed fare, and if the driver is late Uber can just give it to a different driver. Pre-booked cars can be priced differently for the driver or passenger to ensure the opportunities are attractive enough for the slight inconvenience of having to drive a bit more to pick up the passenger. And it's more convenient for the passenger to know a car will be there.
Pricing can still do its surge thing, or they could require a pre-booking fee or something.
I don't see how ^ would require a fundamental reengineering of the system.
(And, as a round-about way, I agree allowing pre-booking would be a reasonable requirement, if it's indeed an existing statue.)
https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Uber-allow-customers-to-pre...
And instead, they are suing apps like MyTaxi in Germany. [1] The app allowed you to call cabs and pay via the app. But because MyTaxi promoted their app with discounts - even though MyTaxi paid for these - they sued them. Because f*, we don't need any new customers.
And considering they sued Uber as well, it seems like most taxi driver associations just don't want to improve and hope for the best.
Another example: In Berlin, they went to court over a new law forcing them to accept cards and collect a 1.50€ surcharge for it.
And this is even though a 1.50€ surcharge greatly covers their costs. https://sumup.de for example charges 0.95% for the debit cards that are very popular in Germany, so they make a profit for all payments under 158€ which seem very rare. And SumUp is quite expensive already.
They seriously need to improve their product. "Sorry, no app orders", "Sorry, card machine is broken", "Sorry, xyz"
[1] http://news.newsdirectory2.com/daimler-subsidiary-mytaxi-thr...
Edit: Obviously artificial quality reduction legislation is a bad idea, but uber as a company has been pretty adamant about ignoring all regulation. Even if it is a bad regulation you don't ignore it, you lobby to get it changed.
That's certainly valid, but on the flip side, shouldn't Uber at least compete on even ground? They basically storm into town, ignoring things like taxi medallions and such. That's why laws like these start to get enforced, so that Uber can't try to sneak past laws by saying "we're not a cab company we're a <something only slightly different>".