[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.