[Barrin92]

>Uber and Lyft do a whole lot more than what you described on the scale of millions of concurrent users in dozens of countries.

which is my point. There's no use in engineering and coordinating something that organises itself. The utility of a centrally managed service needs to be balanced against the resources it costs to run the operation.

Taxis actually don't spent as much time sitting around as you think, traffic organises quite spontaneously, drivers know where to wait and downtime is usually quite low. Which is why it is so difficult for Uber to make a profit, the efficiency gains compared to the engineering effort that goes into them are miniscule, which is the disease of all centrally managed systems. The Soviet planning buro managed millions of factories which sounds impressive, it doesn't mean that they were any good at it.

If Uber would realise such huge efficiency gains in organising rides the result would either be higher wages than taxi companies or lower prices, which would make them instantly profitable, no billions of subsidies required.