[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.

[p4wnc6]

It's almost like there should be websites that give reviews and ratings for local businesses and services.

[jpatokal]

As it happens, the first hit for that search is Yelp. Do you find this helpful?

https://www.yelp.com.au/search?cflt=taxis&find_loc=Mountain+...

[p4wnc6]

Yes? The second entry clearly looks like a highly-rated general taxi service with a phone number. I might skip the top entry since it could be more related to airport rides.

I don't see what you're getting at. This looks like exactly what I'd use to quickly find a cab company and their contact info.

[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!"

[p4wnc6]

I live in a rural area of northern Indiana that is about 1 hour outside of a medium-sized city (around 250,000). I don't own a car. I rely on rides from family, and unusual combinations of taxis and buses when in town.

I've experienced none of the problems you describe, and I've used taxis in small (less than 30,000 people), medium (100,000 - 300,000 people) and large (Boston (where I lived for a long time), Chicago (nearest large city to me now), New York (visited friends there many times), Austin (work travel), Paris (worked there in 2010), and various other places I traveled) cities and towns.

If you call with a bit of advanced notice, it's rarely an issue. If you call at the last minute, of course there's a problem. But the exact same problems happen with Uber/Lyft.

[stormbrew]

Well, no. Apparently if you call with a bit of advance notice it's rarely an issue.

If I do it, who the hell knows. I've called the night before and still waited almost an hour for a taxi beyond when it was supposed to come. The difference between taxi and uber/lyft variance is night and day, in my experience.

Your experience seems to be exceptional to me.

[p4wnc6]

Meanwhile, your experience seems exceptional to me.

[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.

[p4wnc6]

I have also used taxis in many countries. They arrive mostly on time, and when they are not on time, the variability is not significantly different than the variability also experienced with Uber/Lyft.

[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.