| HN Mirror

Some cities never got it or finding it was harder than it should be. Sometimes that was because of incumbent momentum or regulations. Some cities had good "radio-dispatch" laws that made sense at the times they were passed, but those then stymied "computer-dispatch" decades later as those improvements were made available.

There was a brief few years where a couple of big US taxi franchises had "computer-dispatch" labels and you could use that to select between alternatives.

Unfortunately, Uber disrupted the industry in so many wild and interesting ways. The most useful franchise I was aware of with "computer-dispatched" taxis in multiple cities I traveled between apparently broke apart competing with Uber and some of the franchise cities just outsourced the work to Uber or Lyft or other competitor or built entirely new names/brands separate from the old national franchises and figuring out which one is which is so much more challenging than it was for a brief few years in my experiences before Uber started up.

(In the mid-oughts, I used to have a "Yellow Cab" phone number memorized that was the same 7 digit number in multiple cities, you just swapped the local area code you were standing in. That number is basically out of service in one of those cities and goes to very different branded taxi companies in the rest, some of which then just have messages telling you to book them on Uber or Lyft or Some Random App.)