And maybe the driver would show up on time, or maybe they'd see a street hail en route to picking you up and decide to make you wait an extra 40 minutes. Uber drivers cancel, too, of course, but "automatically fall back to a different driver after a cancellation" is a meaningfully different experience.

Or never show up. Twice with uber (I'm not a frequent user, so this is a high percentage) the driver never showed up. The app didn't let me request someone else until a very long timeout (don't remember how long). Good thing I wasn't going to a flight or other time-sensitive trip on those times, but waiting around in the dark in an industrial park, not so fun.

Pre-uber I'd reserve cab rides to a relative remote area and not once was there a delay or missed pickup.

I wish I had your experience. Pre-Uber, I had a 75% cancellation rate with car services to the airport. I live in a suburb about 45 minutes away from the airport. Car services would frequently just not show up. I would call, they’d say to wait and I would get the runaround.

I think it was due to manual scheduling.

Uber is much better in that I don’t think I’ve ever had a cancel when going to the airport. But I’ve had many cancels when using it around town. It’s very frustrating and I wish Uber would do something about it. Lyft seems the same to me.

I believe they were waiting for me to cancel and have me take the penalty, but I was purposefully not giving up this time. Or they just wan to pick and choose their orders and have no way to cancel an unwanted trip.

Another time the driver came and passed me and went to a different location without stopping or answering messages. I was just watching the car get further and further away.

That’s not how it worked, or works (see Curb). You didn’t schedule a particular cab you call the cab service and the dispatcher sends a cab to you and makes sure they got there. If they didn’t show up you call dispatch back and they call the guy and find out what the hell happened and/or dispatch someone else.

Cabs had a 45+ minute lead time in the evenings and at night too, when I could order them by phone at all. It was a joke. This was in Seattle/Bellevue, Washington, USA, FWIW

Worse of all not only does the cab company often decide to not show up, if you cancel (such as calling another cab company that does show up or take a bus instead) you get yelled at and cursed to hell for letting them know you are canceling.

Everyone in the system is just an average joe, probably being paid less than they deserve. But the system was terrible and broken.

There might be some variation with things like geography, here.

It's precisely how it worked everywhere I've lived. What you describe sounds like a low density suburb or smaller town. Yeah, social pressure in those situations still works.

The only time I've seen things work as you describe were small/vacation towns when I was visiting for a wedding or whatnot. The type of places where there are a dozen total cabs for the entire county.

Any major (call it NFL tier) city scheduling a pickup was a laughable joke. You quickly learn when you move to such places the first time you schedule a cab how totally unreliable it is.

Even the overly chatty cabbies would be happy to tell you how much of a scam it was, and go on to describe how every driver but them does X, Y, and Z to avoid taking such calls. This is the sole reason Uber got its foothold in my household.

Have you lived in NYC? It's not how it worked here prior to Uber. You could call one of the car services and schedule a pickup ahead of time and they'd show up. Of course it wasn't totally necessary, because you could call Northside or Arecibo at 4am and they'd come pick you up at your house within 5 minutes.

Outside of NYC, yeah it was a mess. I remember being at datacenters in New Jersey in the middle of the night to fix some server that went down when I was at the beginning of my career and you'd have to call a bunch of car services to find anyone working at 4am.

In my experience that's exactly how it worked.

You know what's a meaningfully different experience? A cab company scheduling a car for you at a specific time, rather that an app starting to look for a car for you a few minutes ahead of time, and coming up with something late or inadequate, something I repeatedly experienced with Uber.

I don't think this problem is true of every city, but Uber was clearly an improvement on the existing taxi system in San Francisco. (In fact for many years the main topic of conversation between me and cab-drivers was speculating on how the SF cab system could be improved, and we'd often end up inventing something like Uber, or now Curb. I'm pretty sure SF would not have got to a reasonable system without pressure from Uber and Lyft -- it took them many years to get to what we have now.)

In some places, e.g. SF, scheduled cabs mostly didn't show (at least pre-uber). They'd send a driver, but the driver would just pick up the first person they found on the street-- A fare in the seat is better than a fare on the street.

I didn't have that experience in the DC area or NYC, so I know it wasn't universal... but in some places uber really was a massive upgrade in terms of transport reliability even though uber drivers do cancel at a disappointingly high rate too.

[DC had it's own issues-- I never had many problems with them beyond them being thoroughly ignorant about the local roads an geography, but my partner frequently got sexist insults from the driver, refusals to take her directions, etc.]