Re:Uber’s underwater investors
by erik_seaberg on Monday May 13, 2019 @01:45PM
(#19901744)
There used to be a phone number, and the guy would tell you to wait an hour and a half, after which the cab probably never showed up. I used to drive airport shuttles (dispatched by VHF and pager!) and we sometimes rescued people who had been completely screwed over.
At this point, every major taxi company has a sleek Uber-style call-a-cab app, and most of them work great. Fare prediction has also become common, if not actually a guarantee, and in-app fare payment has mostly killed hearing "the credit card reader is broken" after a ride. (Which was already illegal but omnipresent, so competition solved the problem where regulation failed completely.)
Of course, this wasn't a city with medallions, so Uber couldn't just outcompete taxis by dodging regulation. I'm not sure how NYC et al have changed, since no amount of modernization could fix that problem.