[alkonaut]

Just to straighten out the terminology: Let's say "Taxi" (at least for the context of this discussion) is a car that takes someone somewhere the passenger decides, for money.

It doesn't matter whether you hail it on the street or book it elsewhere. Taxi is a paid car. By that definition in NYC all black cars, yellow cabs, Ubers etc are Taxis.

That weird US regional laws have made a whole family of terms for this simple service just makes this discussion muddy (as you might have noticed).

What this news article is about and what is already obvious is that Uber is Taxi because they take people places for money.