When I was in a small city outside Moscow I was paying $1.50 for a 1 min of a phone call and $1.40 for 10 mins cab ride. It was cheaper to take the cab and talk to someone than to make a call.

Did you call Alpha Centauri? Did you use Russian service provider?

You haven't seen their prices in T2 cities, it is like $1 per 5 to 6 kms. And they have the problem of "Uberists" - people who drive themselves around when Uber subsidizes rides. And they also have issue of botters who do the same, but at industrial scale (without actually driving themselves or anybody else of course)

So they have two phones, one for driver and one for customer, and they request rides and accept themselves? Clever.

How does the driver ensure that he will receive his own order? AFAIK, a driver can reject an order, but this action will badly affect his rating in Uber's system.

I think that the rating system helps at least partially to fix this exploit (if it actually is an exploit and not a fantasy).

If you don't receive your own order, have the passenger phone cancel the request and try again. I doubt the utilization is high enough that turning on the driver app immediately accepts a random request.

Amusingly, that's comparable or slightly lower than what I'd have to pay for a Auto (tuk-tuk) ride here in India.

I'm from Bucharest, Romania. The average price here is something like $0.35 / Km and the price I'm paying for a ride is somewhere between $2.5 and $5.

And that's the price of Uber as well, which can go up in rush hour, but we now have Taxify as well, which I prefer because their prices are more predictable.

So when you're saying that you paid $200 for 30 rides, that seems expensive to me.