Exactly, many of these ideas likely can never work outside of compact cities like SF or NYC. Where I live in the DFW metroplex Uber doesn't even support 1/4 of the population. I can drive almost an hour E N or W and still be in the metro area. It's hard to scale if the distance is too great.

No they can work fine anywhere just like Dominos can.

They just need to get transaction/delivery volume up, so that density of orders shrinks the coverage area for any given "driver agent".

Scaling while trying to maintain balanced supply and demand key.

Moderate increase in delivery density can mean step changes in efficiency and almost all other aspects of these businesses.

Source: I work at Munchery mentioned in the article but I'm from Nebraska originally and delivery drove in collge.

Except Instacart, the company mentioned in the lead-in of the article, is not just in SF or NYC. Neither is Uber or Lyft. So I'm not sure what you're saying totally holds up.

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I did! But i'm from Canada. Up here we hardly have any of these 'instant' services. But there are exceptions.

Yes.