This is really obnoxious in terms of rider experience though. Quite often, these drivers will stack up their next pickup on top of their current ride, even if the next pickup is nowhere near their drop-off. Very frustrating to watch the car drift along the map for several minutes, away from your location, forcing you to cancel and try again.

Presumably Uber is capable of identifying this suboptimal routing just as they can (and do, AFAIK) monitor the route your driver takes after you're picked up.

I'd hope that drivers who Uber estimates are N minutes away from pickup but consistently take N+5 to actually make the pickup are subject to penalties.

Really? That's marvelous. Is there an app begging to be written here? For the independent driver's needs, not for the supplier (Uber/Lyft etc). An aggregator of ride request feeds.

A few years back you would be describing the role of the dispatcher for a taxi service. Now it's a killer business plan!

Uber provides the drivers with a locked-down iPhone to get the ride requests, so it's not that simple.

Surprised; I thought Uber was some sort of public-access ridesharing thing. If they vet drivers and license them, how is it different from any other cab service?

Mainly because they don't actually license them unless the local authorities force them to. They do vet them, in theory.

And to follow-on, the practical difference is that they are a lot less terrible than most existing cab / car services.

People have been selling/giving away their Uber accounts too, IIRC.

Yes, simply have every taxi related app feed into a central one, take a few cents off every transaction, boom done.

This is true in the Tampa area too. My Lyft driver said he was using both to increase the chances of getting a request. He also said that he got more requests with Uber.I suspect this is true in smaller cities where neither Uber nor Lyft have significant traction yet.