Calling a cab in San Francisco is a miserable experience, especially if you're calling from an area that attracts fewer rides. If you can get ahold of a dispatcher, there's no guarantee a cab will even show up. And after making the call, you have no way to assess how long a taxi may take to arrive. With Uber and Lyft, these are not problems.

I've never ordered a taxi in a small town, so I can't comment on what that process is like.

You can't get on the phone and call a cab, and expect it to arrive in San Jose; even when the dispatcher tells you it's on it's way, and it'll arrive shortly. Uber shows you where the drivers are before you request a ride, and once you request a ride, it shows you which car was picked for you and that the car is making progress towards the pickup location, and provides a price estimate before you request the pickup.

I'd guess I've called in for around 10 cab rides, and have had two experiences where a cab was requested, I was told it would come, and had it not come after waiting for much longer than was reasonable.

> Uber shows you where the drivers are before you request a ride

Uber doesn't actually show you where the drivers are before you request the ride. Those little animated icons just represent the density of available drivers, not actual car positions.

Doesn't matter. The animation solves the user problem, which is knowing whether pressing the button is going to result in a cab soon or not soon.

I've heard this many times on HN. Where is the source material for this?

(It just sounds really dishonest for the app to do this)

The TLDR of this article is that vehicle locations are out-of-date due to latency and no more than eight vehicles are shown at a time.

Of course you can. I've had two jobs where a cab was part of the commute - one short term (2 months) but daily in Chicago, and I scheduled the cab two hours before I needed it and it would wait at the train station for me, and the other only on Sunday mornings at 5am in Baltimore, and I would schedule it the night before.

It was neither difficult nor traumatic as the descriptions of the "problem" that Uber is solving that I see in these Uber threads. I've never driven a car in my 40 years of life, and therefore taken 1000 cabs in a dozen cities, but I've clearly only taken the best ones.

Baltimore. Good one. Baltimore's cab dispatch system is what prompted me to install Uber and Lyft on my phone. Asking for a pickup two hours from now lead me to get a blaring horn (no doubt waking up my hotel neighbors) 30 minutes later. Asking for a taxi as soon as possible left me waiting for over an hour. One time, the taxi service shamelessly said the drivers changed their mind and wouldn't get me from Amtrak at all.

Maybe things have changed since the introduction of these ride sharing apps, but reliability of the Baltimore taxi system used to be atrocious outside of the 5 block radius of the Inner Harbor.

If you had said "black car service," I would have believed your story could be representative, but that is simply incongruent with every experience I've had in Baltimore. I tried the 3 major cab companies in Baltimore and had similar experiences with each.

I'm not alleging any moral shortcoming, it's just that there was no incentive to improve service to an acceptable level until Uber and Lyft arrived.