[acchow]

People have dreamt about on-demand car hailing for a long time, but it's always been a pipe dream - building the two-sided network is such too hard and too expensive, and a small network is just not worth using as a consumer. How is this not innovation?

[amalcon]

Most of the innovation there was in the cell phone[1]. You've been able to order a car by phone in major metros for longer than those have been around. In fact, Uber started off as an app for using those very services.

Props to Uber for execution, but all the pieces were there.

[1]-edit: some in the smartphone, but most in the old "makes calls" cell phones

[phil21]

The older I get the more I realize execution is simply all that matters.

A zillion people had the same basic idea for Uber. They made it a reality, and made it Not Suck(tm).

The user experience prior to Uber for ordering a car via phone was absolutely horrific.

[discardorama]

I've heard it said many times: ideas are a dime-a-dozen, execution is everything.

[nostrademons]

Execution and timing. Uber had a big advantage in being new & shiny just as the market was ready for it. They tried it multiple times and the first few it failed to gain any traction.

[DINKDINK]

>Props to Uber for execution, but all the pieces were there.

Much innovation looks very easy from an ex-post perspective. Putting wheels on a suitcase etc.

[endgame]

I hate wheeled suitcases. If I have to drag it I've packed too much.

[chetanahuja]

Ummm... as a matter of fact, Uber was only a black car service until Lyft (and perhaps others) started P2P service. Uber was a fast follower in that space.

[jsemrau]

I have been able to pick up a phone and call the cab company for decades.

[thehashrocket]

yeah, but unless you're in a city like New York (possibly a handful of others) the wait is FOREVER. In Phoenix it was routine to have to wait half an hour or more. Same in SLC. It's awful. Uber and Lyft reduced the wait to a fraction of the time with better, quicker and cheaper service.

[rando18423]

I don't disagree with you, but your statement is incomplete without acknowledging these were also illegal services.

[Moshe_Silnorin]

Sure, but these are stupid laws.

[rando18423]

Wow, I forgot we set up our society so tech developers got to decide what kind of society we wanted. Laws requiring cabs to serve disadvantaged areas? Accept cash so people without credit could get around? Provide safe living spaces, up to code, for visitors from out of town? How disconnected from reality are you?

Furthermore, what kind of precedent does flaunting legitimate laws set? Thankfully Austin was able to have some balls and not allow that shit to fly.

[kchoudhu]

I've spent plenty of time waiting for my Uber as well: lots of "your car is 5 minutes away for 15 minutes".

Uber isn't as brilliant as they want us to believe they are.

[jacalata]

"Your car is five minutes away. It is currently on a freeway driving away from you at 50 miles per hour. Now it is six minutes away".

[p4wnc6]

This complaint makes no sense to me. You just call the taxi company further in advance of when you need the ride. If you know it's always around a 30 minute wait, just call 45 minutes ahead of time and tell them the time you need picked up.

Phoenix & SLC are also not cities in which people are likely to rely on on-demand ride sharing. Most people own their own car especially if they care about being able to determine exactly when they engage in transiting.

Further, in all of the non-mega / non-already-has-developed-rapid-transit-system cities I've been in, apart from one single city (San Francisco), the wait time for Uber is on the order of the wait time for a taxi. The difference between needing to call or book ahead to avoid a 30 minute wait vs. a 15 minute wait is utterly irrelevant.

The real reason why Uber succeeds in these markets is that they currently subsidize the rate paid to the drivers and thus compete on price. They also have way better marketing and do a good job of making people think the market for Uber rides is more liquid than the market for taxi rides (though in truth it's not more liquid except in dense areas).

Uber is not profitable in these areas, and is just hoping it can subsidize the losses on most decentralized transit regions long enough to defeat regulatory issues, outlast competitors, and put pressure on taxi services. It's still quite a significant gamble.

[pyromine]

I just logged in specifically to tell you that as a SLC resident without a car, I use lyft extensively. Similarly all my friends do as well, for the almost perfect example people use of preventing drunk driving.

I'm already pretty strapped for cash, hence why I don't have a car but I utilize Uber & Lyft when I'm unable to get to my destination in a timely manner.

I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't know the number to call, I don't know when they'll arrive at my house, and simply the entire taxi experience is just horrible.

[salemh]

When I used to use Taxi's in SLC (I am still a resident), I had to call two companies at a time, then wait 20 minutes for one to show up. The taxi cab drivers aren't FT like larger cities (according to a long-time dispatcher of Yellow Cab), so have (or had, this was a few years back) had preference of fares or shifts, skirting regulation.

I now use Lyft (for pricing and the drivers), then Uber (if Lyft is unavailable).

[p4wnc6]

This just makes your comment lose all credibility to me, I'm afraid:

> I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't know the number to call, I don't know when they'll arrive at my house, and simply the entire taxi experience is just horrible.

You don't know the number? Really? If you have a mobile device from which to use Lyft, then getting the number is completely and entirely trivial.

While there is some variability in taxi arrival time (just as there is with Lyft or Uber arrival time), taxis typically are no later or more difficult to estimate. You just tell them when the taxi should arrive and that's when it will be there. There are even many apps for tracking taxis on a map interface. Those apps mostly only work in large cities, but it's easy to see they will expand to many other cities, certainly a city of the size of SLC.

You say "the entire taxi experience is just horrible" but your two biggest complaints are that you don't know the number (and apparently can't be bothered to look it up one time and add it to your contacts) and you don't know when they'll arrive (even though you tell them when to arrive, that's when they arrive, and their variability is not significantly different than Uber or Lyft variability).

I'm not able to make any sense of this if it's intended to be a criticism of the taxi experience in SLC.

[jpatokal]

I remember trying to find a cab in suburban Silicon Valley on my first visit in the days before Uber. Then as now, if you Google for "taxi Mountain View" or similar, you get 2.5 million results. Should I call Yellow Cab or Yellow Taxi Cab or Bay Area Yellow Cab or Sky Cab? Which one is going to show up in a reasonable amount of time and not gouge me? Who the fuck knows! Not even my local coworkers did, because they all drive and never take taxis. I ended up asking reception, who sorted me out, but odds are she books with the company that gives her the biggest kickbacks...

These days, when I visit SV (or almost any other city), this problem is solved. Uber, bam, done.

[stormbrew]

Meanwhile, in drops in credibility, you say this:

> While there is some variability in taxi arrival time (just as there is with Lyft or Uber arrival time), taxis typically are no later or more difficult to estimate. You just tell them when the taxi should arrive and that's when it will be there.

A charitable interpretation of this is that you must live a charmed life. The only people I know who say things like this are people who have cars and don't tend to use much else or live in and exclusively travel in very large cities.

I have literally waited two hours for a taxi, on a normal friday night. Multiple times. My average wait for a taxi in the city I live in has usually been on the order of 30+ minutes, peak hours or off. Other cities have not been much better, unless they were cities like New York where normal hailing actually works.

Also, smaller cities don't get these wonderful taxi apps you're talking about until Uber comes into town and forces them to compete. Hell, in many cities reliably being able to pay with a credit card only becomes possible when a rideshare company comes to town, before that "the machine is broken!"

[abritinthebay]

> even though you tell them when to arrive, that's when they arrive

Having used taxis in multiple countries for most of my life until Uber/Lyft...

... HAH!

If this was the case then there wouldn't be so much of a problem. The number of cab companies that say they'll show up and don't (or show up late as hell) is massive.

Uber at least lets you know if it's running late (ie - an ETA). Taxi companies should have been on this way before they were.

[ycombobreaker]

> Further, in all of the non-mega [...] cities I've been in, apart from one single city (San Francisco), the wait time for Uber is on the order of the wait time for a taxi.

As a data point to the contrary, in Chicago we stopped calling taxi dispatchers to our apartment because they would arrive up to 30 minutes late. Even if we scheduled ahead of time, it didn't seem to matter; as if the dispatchers were holding our request until the last minute and then dispatching into the general queue (so why call ahead?)

With the Uber app, whenever we call a car (even a taxi) we get an ETA based on GPS coordinates of the driver, which is both accurate and updates live. There's a level of accountability that was never available with the existing taxi dispatch.

[p4wnc6]

I live in northern Indiana and have visited Chicago many times in my life, downtown, near UChicago, and both airports. I've never experienced late taxis beyond a very normal 5min sort of thing.

[ycombobreaker]

My late taxi experiences were always in more residential neighborhoods (Ukranian Village, Wicker Park, Lincoln Park, Roscoe Village). It isn't the land of taxi stands, but there are definitely cars in those areas, on major streets. The heart of the city is crawling with taxis at all hours, so I would not expect to see any delays there.

[pfarnsworth]

No, you are wrong. Uber is profitable in hundreds of cities.

http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-profitable-in-hundreds-o...

[p4wnc6]

I do not believe the quotations about profitability in hundreds of cities from the article. When the books are opened and it can be verified, then I'll believe it. Until then, I choose to chalk it up to duplicitous accounting.

I openly acknowledge I could be wrong. But vague quotes like this effectively do not mean anything, one way or the other, to me. Companies say this kind of thing all the time when it's not actually true by accepted accounting standards.

[d4rti]

on demand car hailing = taxis?

[jsemrau]

For me still this equation holds true. Taxes are abundant and cheap in Singapore. Riding in someone's car makes me uncomfortable. (But that is just me, I suppose)

[pbarnes_1]

The success of Uber in a city is directly proportional to how much taxis suck in that city.

So Singapore is one of a few cities where that's the case (NYC also -- Uber doesn't really work there. I was there for 8 days and requesting an Uber as a 10-15 minute wait. You can get into one of a million cabs that go by in that time. I gave up).

[geomark]

Same in Bangkok. Taxis are plentiful and cheap. But like elsewhere if you flag one down they often refuse you if you want to go somewhere inconvenient for them. That's where a taxi hailing app like GrabTaxi is useful. It works like Uber except it's a taxi that picks you up. Uber exists here but hasn't got much traction (as far as I know).

[jsemrau]

I have good friends at Grab and use it frequently in Singapore. Mainly because of the auto-pay functionality. I.e. pay with credit card.

[awad]

NYC is actually one of Uber's most important cities. Don't forget that NYC is more than just Manhattan below 125th street. Getting a taxi in the outer boroughs was miserable. The green ones help but were a little too late. The black car services are entirely unpredictable and unreliable, doubly so if you are not of the ethnicity of the dispatcher/drivers they employ.

And let's not even talk about the number of times a cab driver straight up refused to take me to Brooklyn, both during the day and late at night. Totally illegal, but it happens all the time.

[jsemrau]

Agreed, when I was living in the Valley in 2003/4 public transportation was terrible and taxis nowhere to be found. But then I was driving a shitty Ford ....

[cstejerean]

Except when it's 4 pm and you want to go to the airport from Manhattan, at which point none of the million cabs are interested in picking you up.

[1986]

Or in the other four boroughs of NYC, or Manhattan above ~125th St.

edit: which is exactly why the city rolled out the green cab system, which has inverted limitations on where they can accept street hails

[pbarnes_1]

I found that using Blacklane in that case was cheaper and more predictable than Uber.

[robryan]

Same with Hong Kong, Uber have started up there but I think they will struggle.

[morgante]

That's not my experience in Singapore. The one time I was there I had to wait 15 minutes to get a taxi and then had to argue with them to get them to take me where I wanted.

In contrast, Uber took less time and required no negotiation.

[thaumasiotes]

Taxis are abundant and cheap in Shanghai... unless it's raining (very common). Then they won't pick you up at all. They're still driving around, but you can't actually get one.

[rahimnathwani]

It also depends on where you are and the time of day. Even without rain it's not always easy to hail a taxi in Shanghai.

[rando18423]

Yes actually? "Hail a cab."

[pigeons]

> People have dreamt about on-demand car hailing for a long time

Taxis.