[joelrunyon]

It's also nice that they can't charge "surge" pricing on cabs, so if they're doing a 2x or 4x you can call a taxi through it for a normal-ish fare. That said, the cab option always seems to be very sparsely populated whenever there's an ongoing pricing "surge".

I haven't seen taxis done on uber anywhere other than Chicago though.

[chc]

Well, surge pricing indicates increased demand and is a way to compensate on the market level. So the cars that don't have surge pricing will logically be hard to get then.