Depends on your needs. Good luck getting uber to the airport at 5am. I had no luck reserving a car in advance neither. In this case, licensed minicab met my needs and I don't even bother getting uber to airport anymore. Hailing a taxi is out of question.

Edit: I forgot how many times an uber driver was on the way and then cancelled the order. Or oftentimes they just refuse to go to the centre because of the congestion charge so you get out of the car, request a new car and hope for the best.

Yes, uber provides crappy service. Crappy because it's like a russian roulette - even if you are in the car you don't know if you will be taken to your destination.

Before Uber came to the city I was in at the time, you could not reserve a car. You could call one of the two cab companies and they would tell you that they were going to do it, but it was a coin flip whether that car showed up.

Anecdote and all, but I felt the same way. Hired a car service to pick me up at 6am. Morning of, at 6am, car hasn’t arrived. Dispatcher blames “mechanical difficulty”. Yeah right. Called the Lyft while on the phone with them. It arrived on time 10 minutes later, thankfully still made my flight.

I don’t live in an urban area but do live about 15 minutes from the airport in suburbia.

Yes Uber and Lyft are terribly unreliable for early morning trips outside the densest urban areas. The advance reservation features don't actually guarantee any car availability.

For taxis, depends where you are and what other taxis you were booking. Compared to a London Black Cab, much better, compared to a licenced minicab, about the same but via an app instead of a phone call.

For Uber Eats though, I've had them claim that there is no expectation of food arriving hot. First few times I had delivery problems I got full refunds and the reputation was always "give it a go, worst case you can get a refund anyway". Now it's hard to even get in touch with support let alone get them to acknowledge an order issue, and refunds are almost unheard of.

Edit: I had forgotten about all the issues with sexual assaults by Uber drivers. They tried to downplay the issues, but ended up having to implement a lot of controls to understand who was driving the cars, in some markets they now have to be licenced, it's all changed a lot since the beginning because of how the service was actively dangerous compared to incumbents who were typically much more tightly regulated.

The Uber experience is (or at least used to be before covid) way, way better than London minicabs used to be. Minicabs had no accountability and small fleet sizes - so at peak times they'd either turn up really late or not turn up at all, with no recourse.

I think they've forced everyone to change now - if they disappeared tomorrow another operator would fill the void. But when Uber first started operating it was a radically improved service.

My Uber eats orders were constantly missing items and they eventually stopped issuing me refunds when I kept submitting requests. I understand to a degree that some people will abuse an infinite refund policy but it sure left a bad taste in my mouth when my driver didn't actually deliver the order, just marked it as delivered and drove off, and my refund request was denied. That was my last order with them.

Heh, I had the opposite problem.

I submitted an order, it popped up "503 Service Unavailable -- Try again" in the app. I tried again and it went through.

Food showed up, was just finishing up and they showed up and delivered it a second time. Checked and the order had indeed double-submitted two seconds apart, and I was charged twice.

Obvious error. It would have been a superhuman feat to submit the order, readd all the items to a new order, and submit it in two seconds.

I contacted support and explained what happened and they refused the refund because they had delivered the order, so I had to pay for it. "Thanks for understanding." No amount of arguing that this was obviously an issue with their app got anything out of them besides food showed up, you pay for food, "thanks for understanding".

Upside is I went from wasting probably a hundred bucks a week on ordering food to actually getting off my ass and walking somewhere nearby and picking it up myself for half the price.

For future reference, I suggest contacting the bank in a situation like this. They're likely to refund a duplicate charge filed a few seconds after an initial charge.

Every food delivery service I've tried has been a nightmare. They don't check the food to make sure it's correct. It gets tossed around and mangled on the way.

I had one time where there was someone else's order delivered to me; literally their name was on the bag... the delivery person grabbed the wrong bag. Then I tried to get them to fix it before he drove away and he told me to call the restaurant. Trying to get refund from the delivery service was nigh impossible. I wound up calling the restaurant and the dealt with getting me a refund and the correct food.

I no longer use food delivery at all, unless it's provided directly by the restaurant. Otherwise, I go pick it up.

I’d say that depends on where you live but broadly I agree with you. That said, Uber launched in 2009. The iPhone was only two years old at that point. It feels like a big assumption to say that absolutely no existing car service would have realised the benefits of allowing booking via smartphone.

I don’t wonder about past vs present, I wonder about present vs a possible present where VC funding doesn’t flood the market and destroy competition.

A good comparison is perhaps restaurants. Seamless, Uber Eats and the rest swallowed up the online food ordering business. Slowly more and more restaurants let you order direct, some using startups like ChowNow that facilitate the transaction without dominating it. But it’s still an uphill climb.

Uber is basically the McDonald's of hired transportation. There are limitations, the experience definitely isn't premium, but its ultimately a fairly consistent purchasing experience that works most of the time.

Regular taxis? Sure, download this city specific app. Or one of the two city specific apps. Or call one of the local cab companies and find out you picked the one that doesn't consistently dispatch to your hotel so you end up waiting around with zero feedback. Or maybe you call and they show up in five minutes and its great.

It's ok though, not everything as to be optimised for convenience. Uber allowed us to do thing we didn't do in the past, and now these things seem natural, but we'd be just fine without them. Not every step is a step towards progress