That said, almost all of the notable legislative and regulatory battles were conducted and won by Uber.
The wrongful actions by companies do get forgiven eventually, as toxic executives leave (as in the case of the CEO, Legal Officer, and now the CSO), but no public is foolish enough to immediately absolve any company of wrongdoing. Uber will have a reputation for sexual harassment long after it meets or exceeds the standards of other large companies.
In fact, there was a company called SideCar[1] who popularized the idea of ridesharing before Uber and Lyft. There was a time, maybe 2013 or 2014 when I exclusively used Sidecar until Uber became more prominent. Uber was only offering their high end cars at that time.
It's not like Uber did one bad thing. Uber has been a fountain of terrible things for years and years. You even admit that Uber's market-dominant position has been been achieved through those terrible things. And those are only the terrible things that we've discovered despite Uber's energetic attempts to cover things up. Lord knows what horrors you're still hiding.
Until Uber loses their ill-gotten lead, I won't even consider using them.
We fought all the battles, took a hit on our reputation and set it up nicely for Lyft who very smartly played along with the nice guy approach to capitalize. Net-net, no Uber would have most likely meant existing taxis everywhere and as most riders/drivers will tell you, there is nothing inherently better about either app, they offer the same, pay the same but vastly differ in perception.
That said, we took our aggressive attitude way too far. In an ideal world, Travis would have evolved or replaced himself a couple of years back once the company essentially reached escape velocity where our consumers themselves became our most fervent supporters. Unfortunately that did not play out and making a near perfect switch like that is probably unlikely.
Given this important context, I hope you will give Uber another chance as in the end, Dara and the employees are genuinely trying to evolve by doing the right things and putting all of this behind us. You can get some sense of this from going to sites like reddit.com/r/uberdrivers (or r/lyft) and seeing the changing perception at least from the driver side of things.