[_benedict]

It depends on the city and the route you're taking. If there are dedicated bus lanes, or other dedicated forms of transport (trains, metros), taking an uber can be slower than taking transport.

Certainly in London, unless you're taking a route that cuts across the city in one of the outer districts, during quiet times of day, these services are rarely materially faster than public transport. If the traffic info is inaccurate you can end up in a journey that's many times slower, without expecting it.

It's still great as an option; it expands the utility of taxis tremendously, since previously the arrival latency was unknown and potentially quite high. With a mature marketplace, the QoS for taxis as a whole goes up tremendously.

But really it's a simple competition with the QoS of the local public transport, and in my experience (in the UK) the Uber QoS is somewhat correlated with the QoS of the local public transport, so it is rarely (if ever) objectively better. It just offers different characteristics that are sometimes worth the cost.