There's also the other side of the problem that you don't get to see as a passenger. Uber/Lyft drivers in a rush to get to their pickups drive like maniacs here in SF. I'm from a developing country and I'm used to drivers who disregard rules but even those pay attention to the surroundings - you can read them and know if they are going to yield or not. But having gotten used to the polite driving of SF a few years ago, I find it quite dangerous to walk my dog out now. I stick to interior roads and wait till I know for sure that the car would yield for me before I cross. Driving and Biking have become usually miserable as well.

My only request is that passengers don't encourage this by blindly rating everyone 5 stars. Take at least two star off for unsafe driving - not stopping at a stop sign, not yielding to pedestrians, not giving enough space while passing a bicyclist and at least one star for not following the rules - driving on the bus lane, double parking in the middle of a busy road, driving too fast on a 25Mph zone, not waiting long enough for the pedestrians to pass safe ...etc.

If the economics don't work out for the drivers, the fare has to go up. By keeping the fare artificially low and pushing drivers to accommodate too many trips Uber and Lyft are ruining the experience for everyone and in doing so are perpetuating the need for more people to use them instead of considering alternate transport modes. This, sooner or later, will ruin it for everyone.

Take it from me, America cannot handle a developing country style traffic. It requires a different set of skills. People here are used to predictable traffic.

Never had an Uber driver driving like maniac. To be sure, I live to the south of SF and try to never drive into SF unless I absolutely have to, and when I do, I pretty much expect developing-country-type driving environment. But I may just be spoiled by suburbia-type traffic patterns. In any case, even SF Uber drivers has always been excellent for me. I realize that's anecdata, so I wonder if somebody did any kind of robust survey of this.

Seconding that. I took a half-dozen Uber rides in Las Vegas two weekends ago. My biggest concern was trying to figure out how to use the app to tip them.

All drivers were cordial, polite, had no problem with routing (admittedly, it's pretty simple in Vegas). One driver was a smoker and the car smelled and that was the only negative in 6 rides.

Overall, it's the end-to-end experience. Call up the app, type in a destination, head to the curb. The car shows up about the same time I get there, I hop in, chat a bit on the way, hop out at the destination, rate & tip via the app and go on my way. The seamless experience, so far, makes up for the (so far mild) idiosyncrasies of drivers and cars.

We all have sampling bias since the number of rides we take is so small compared to the number of ride givers. I'm sure most taxi drivers and most Uber drivers are perfectly normal, safe drivers, with the outliers being the problem.

I've personally been driven by awful taxi and awful Uber drivers, though Uber so far has the distinction of being the only one to genuinely scare me driving 3x the speed he should have on a twisty road, with tires screeching the whole way.