Two Executives to Leave Uber, Adding to Departures(nytimes.com) |
Two Executives to Leave Uber, Adding to Departures(nytimes.com) |
If the waymo lawsuit essentially forces Uber to start its self driving program back from scratch then the path to self-driving viability has essentially been scrapped. To me, this is a better explanation of the recent spat of high-level exits from the company.
I'm not totally discounting the PR issues as a partial cause of the exits. As a c-level employee, you (more than most hires) have to answer for rotten company culture. I also, however, think both issue (lawsuit and PR issues) make it untenable for the current batch of executives to stay on.
Maybe in the US. But Uber is everywhere. Given their penchant for "bending" the law, I wouldn't be surprised if they start deploying driverless cars in places with more lax regulation, which will 1) help their bottom line, 2) give them more training data, and 3) prove it works to make regulatory issues easier in the US.
That's of course if they can keep their tech, which seems less likely given the waymo suit.
Honestly even that seems way overly optimistic in my opinion, if we're talking about R&D + regulatory acceptance & general adoption.
I haven't seen them in the news at all in the last year or so.
> By contrast, in the hundred years since the first motorized taxi, there has been no evidence of significant scale economies in the urban car service industry. That explains why successful operators never expanded to other cities and why there was no natural tendency towards concentration in individual markets. Drivers, vehicles and fuel account for 85% of urban car service costs. None of these costs decline significantly as companies grow. As the P&L data above demonstrates, Uber has not discovered a magical new way to drive down unit costs.
Uber's long-game, and the reason they've been funded so handsomely, is the autonomous taxi plan.
Its a pity that taxi companies were so slow to adapt to Uber by providing convenient ways to summon and pay for a cab. All that people really want is to get from point A to point B without a hassle.
They employ more than 2000 Engineers, many of them in the Bay Area. Those cost easily more than any manager in a Taxi corporation..
Without self-driving cars, that strategy isn't sustainable, and so eventually Uber will find itself unable to maintain its advantage over Lyft.
Hey - brb!
The work Uber needs to do to onboard a driver in Alberta, Canada is completely different from Ontario, Canada (e.g. drivers needing a commercial class 4 vs consumer class 5 license).
As a result, they are facing unique regulations that is making it difficult to automate the work that is being done in each local market.
Your assessment of "replaces a whole layer of management and overhead" isn't entirely true as far as I know. If anything, they have more overhead.
1. Levandowski was critical to the development of the Lidar technology he allegedly stole
2. Google has never before enforced IP theft by former employees, and makes it clear to engineers that it doesn't do that. This is the first time.
3. Levandowski was selling technology he developed at Google to other companies, while working at Google, and Google looked the other way.
Waymo obviously has good reasons to be pissed off, but they've already set a precedent of permissiveness towards Levandowski's antics, which are not news to people familiar with the matter. All these years Goolge has been going around with a 'kick me' sign taped to it's back, and big surprise, Levandowski kicked them. They've already let him get away with this kind of shit.
I can't actually speak to the 14,000 documents he allegedly downloaded, so it's possible there's a silver bullet hidden in there somewhere. We'll see what sort of defense Uber trots out likely sometime over the next few weeks.
Also Google did their own internal investigation which led to them strongly believing that the theft of important tech and secrets happened.
> The company decided to perform a forensic investigation of Levandowski’s former company computer after a Waymo employee was inadvertently copied on an email from a lidar supplier with the subject line “Otto Files.” The email was being sent to a list of people that Waymo believes were working with Uber. Attached to the email were drawings of Otto’s lidar circuit board.[0]
Seems pretty straight forward
[0]: http://www.recode.net/2017/2/23/14717432/waymo-otto-uber-ant...
Doesn't matter. It is Google's prerogative whether to go after people who steal their IP. Just because they have not done so in the past does not weaken their case. In fact, it strengthens it, because now they can make the argument that the reason they made an exception in Levandowski's case is because of the humongous potential impact of the technology that was stolen.
IP is not like a trademark where if you don't enforce it you lose it.
If they allowed other ride-share/delivery services to integrate seamlessly into the Uber app/driver onboarding process, they don't need to build self-driving vehicles. They just level up from a driver dispatch service to a general dispatch service.
It'd be pretty tough for any one car manufacturer to go their own on a ride-sharing/delivery platform as long as Uber does everything they can to keep competition on both their inputs and outputs thriving.
It doesn't need to be legal everywhere, it just needs to become legal in a way that scales with your ability to deploy the tech.
Uber is a large company with hundreds of "execs" at this level.
If we assume there are 100 "senior execs", even with a healthy 5-year retention, we'd expect 20 execs to leave every year. Sure, we'd expect churn to ramp over time, but 1 senior exec leaving every month would not be out of the ordinary.
I guess it's not really surprising that some people (and therefore reporters) want to believe this story. Uber is the villain and the villain must die. But, it doesn't make it true.
So while Google/Waymo probably have a case, it's not black and white. A lot of techniques developed over years of research was probably stolen from Google, but the truth is Google does not have a monopoly on using LIDAR sensors to train self-driving cars.
True. But they do have a LIDAR that's an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition -- which makes LIDAR practical as a use-phase sensor (not just a training sensor), as well as a patent on "zoomable" LIDAR with Levandowski listed as one of the inventors.
The only other thing I could think of is that the board is complicit in something worse than what's been exposed, and is afraid Kalanick will blow things up if they move on him.
EDIT: BBC is now reporting that two separate internal sources at Uber say Kalanick will step down when a new COO is in place.
For each person telling him to resign, there are hundreds stroking his ego and encouraging him to carry on.
If he wants to be the king of an ash pile, so be it. But it's not gonna be an ash pile worth $60B.
However, shortly after this story was published, another source, who also did not want to be named, said there was "zero chance" of Mr Kalanick stepping down when the new COO is announced.
Every senior person leaving Uber now has to manage their image as they leave. And every journalist is digging to see if there is any dirt.
Sure, you'd expect to see this churn ramp and plateau over time, but something like 10 "senior execs" leaving every year doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary.
I think it's important to note that stories like this will be reported whether or not it's based in truth because it's what certain people want to believe.
let's set that aside for a moment, because you're saying this is completely normal for a large company. but to me this seems like a pretty abnormal event worth reporting. we're talking about a pretty large number of senior executives leaving within a very small timeframe. this seems to be why it's making the tech news sites, since it's not just the normal churn of employees leaving.
> Mr. McClendon is departing amicably from Uber and will be an adviser to the company. ... His exit has been in the works for some time
Includes a list of other recent Uber departures.
Permanently deleted, without regret.
Not saying it is the case, but owing up to one's mistakes is the least one can do
For non-German speakers, its a pun on the German name of the the movie Downfall (Untergang), infamous for it's Hitler in the bunker clip.
Interesting side-node about 'infamous'. Just because a movie depicts a terrible event or subject (Hitler in this case), it doesn't mean the move itself is 'infamous'. The movie (i.e. the artists) didn't do a terrible deed (e.g. completely misrepresent Hitler as innocent), so in this case the movie is simply "famous for it's Hitler in the bunker clip".
1. Recruiting drivers and passengers
2. Legal issues
3. Marketing and branding
4. Support
In this particular example, remember that Charles Ponzi's books were totally fake; outright fraud. That does not characterize other phenomena such as other things like speculative bubbles or simple investment gambles that don't pay off. In contrast the Bernie Madoff scam is a recent example of an actual Ponzi scheme.
Which, it's been reported, is widely used among Uber employees: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/25/ubersecret/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-16/fury-road...
I thought the Bloomberg article was pretty favourable towards Uber and Levandowski too, especially some of their reporting on the lawsuit without context:
> Levandowski defended Uber’s lidar technology as “clean”—that is, not the product of stolen design documents—and told the company’s engineers that he’d downloaded the files to work from home.
The major cache of documents that he downloaded were from an SVN system that he apparently had never connected to before (based on search logs). After he downloaded them and copied them onto the memory card, he wiped the laptop.
> A handful of Google employees soon followed him to the new company.
They fail to mention that those Google employees followed him out the door with confidential docs.
In my opinion, the Bloomberg piece is trying to blunt the revelation [1] that Levandowski was consulting/meeting with Uber just weeks after leaving Google and forming Otto by comparing it with his earlier behaviour at Google. They do a good job of that, but didn't ask the hard questions of why he would consult for a direct competitor, especially when he had his own startup where he had the freedom to do whatever he wants.
[1]: http://www.recode.net/2017/3/14/14923056/uber-google-waymo-s...
What would it be worth in $ at this point? Does Uber have deep pockets for _that_ much money at this point?
At least, the kind of crank call where they'd need to send a cab.
Either way, please lock your devices.
This thread is chock full of wishful thinking, but the fact of the matter is the vast majority of Uber's users just want to get somewhere and don't care how the company is being run.
Still, only on when app is on would be the best choice.
Maybe those clips are really offensive to some people, in which case they would be infamous to the offended.
1) Economies of scale. Airbnb has management and overhead but it's spread across thousands of cities. Cab co.s need a full structure for each city in which they operate. 2) Automation. Many of the manual jobs in local cab companies like dispatch and scheduling are automated. You don't call a human when you need a ride, you push a button on an app. So that's also less overhead.
They are also very clever in how they treat their drivers, so labor cost is also low, and of course there is no maintenance on cars (drivers change their own oil, buy their own tires, etc).
So I believe Uber could probably make money just by replacing cabs, but like others have said, they have to compete with other VC money receiving ventures that are wiling to burn money to come out on top.
For now, we the customers are benefiting greatly from the situation.
Unlike Amazon, Uber faces massive variable costs in driver recruitment/onboarding, legal regulations and local advertising.
Seriously. The rules needed to onboard a driver in Alberta, Canada are completely different from New South Wales, Australia. You can't automate driver recruitment/onboarding in either of these cities because these markets have passed actual legal regulations to allow ridesharing that require unique, but idfferent things (e.g. like market-specific commercial drivers licenses, background checks... or filling out registration forms made by the jurisdiction).
As I see it, Uber employs drivers, whereas AirBnB facilitates BnB owners.
I don't believe this is true in all markets. IIRC the heavy subsidizing behavior causing severe losses is in new markets like China.
From your source:
> Net revenue—the amount of money Uber generates after it pays its drivers—was $1.7 billion in the third quarter,
That's what it takes to be a real business. If you are a grocery store that buys bread for $1 and sells it for $2, you potentially have a real business even if you only move 20K loaves a month and need 30K to cover all expenses.
People keep on alleging that Uber is somehow buying bread for $1 and selling it for less than $1. There was stupidness like this in the first dot-com bubble. You aren't a business if you are doing this.
This distinction really matters. Since Uber is making money on each ride, there is a real business here.
MOST companies fail. 75% of venture backed companies fail quickly. Only about 50% of all businesses are capable of lasting 5 years, and only about 35% are able to last 10 years.
We have all seen companies that were offering products you wanted, but that closed for one reason or another, and it is not in every case that you can attribute it to bad management.
But this is still attributable to "bad management". Good management would not even try to sell a low-volume product where they cannot price it high enough to make up for the limited demand and volume, and would instead come up with a better business plan in the first place.
If someone steps on the back of your shoes, is reacting the same way as if they had stolen them not counterproductive?
I assume they want to do more than let the product stagnate, not to mention the resources they are putting into driverless vehicles.
Also:
1. Software is all about automation and increasing efficiency!
2. Let's hire thousands of programmers!!1!12!
Empire building much?
They won't be able to retain talent when the talent will figure out they can't get the stock that was wrongly promised.
There was a palpable shift from "prioritise growth above all else" to "let's think about about unit economics".
We are fine if we can't raise more, so I am not panicked... just concerned.
"Yeah, computers don't do that yet. Don't worry, you just wait for awhile, and eventually they do. That's how technology works."
I saw red.
I know exactly who will repeat it, seriously, deadpan as if Q.E.D. shown, if I just encourage them a little...
There is is something about that which smacks of borrowing the internet for a day, for a show and tell....
As a product, ride sharing is not quite a commodity, but it's not far off either. As a consumer, I care more about what the product does (a better taxi service) and how much it costs than exactly what company is providing it. Absent artificial constraints (e.g. taxi licenses) it's never going to be a high margin business.
So yes, they could hunker down and "exist", but that doesn't seem like a viable strategy to the get the kind of projected growth their current valuation depends on.
It's hard to see what inherent long-term advantages they have. Their core business is already a commodity. Even if they somehow get usable driverless tech better/faster/cheaper than anyone else, at some point that will become a commodity too. When that happens, there won't be much left on which to compete beyond price.
Don't doubt for a second that there is a ton of engineering that went on in Uber's app that allows it to handle scale. For example, I was in Austin a few weeks ago and used RideAustin. Same experience as Uber. Then I read on the news that the weekend of SXSW, the entire app was basically crushed from the volume of ride requests and couldn't service anybody.
And besides, who wouldn't use Uber if it cost the same amount as a taxi? For me, the advantages of Uber has always been the quality of service. The drivers are nicer, the cars or cleaner, the drivers don't demand tips nor insist at the last minute that their credit card machine doesn't work at the last minute.
And most importantly of all, I would argue that Uber's inherent long-term advantage is their brand. Anywhere in the world that has Uber, I get the same service. I can go to Honolulu and Uber works the same. I just open the app, punch my destination in, look for my driver and go. Same if I was in Mexico City. Same if I was in Delhi.
However, the same is not true for taxis. In certain places (notably South East Asia as a tourist), you agree on a certain fixed fare before getting into the taxi. In the United States they expect tipping, whereas other countries may not. They might insist their credit card machines aren't working in Toronto. There's no accountability of the driver, no GPS trip details in the app...the list goes on.
I think that kind of brand and user experience is highly valuable.
In my experience that's not true at all. In NYC it has to be a qualified black car driver. In LA it can be anyone.
There already is an app for this, with over a billion existing users: Google Maps.
If you search for directions in London, there's a "ride hire" tab next to public transport. It gives you price estimates for Uber, London official taxis, and Hailo - all booked with a button from Google Maps, never having to open the Uber/Taxi/Hailo app.
There's an awful lot of other people's money in Uber. There's an Ayn Rand joke here, but I'll skip it.
But they're spending money like crazy because they still feel like it's getting them "upwind" in ways that will be lasting. New markets, and market dominance in existing markets.
If they scaled back their immense outflows, and used profitable markets to subsidize less profitable ones, I'd bet they could be profitable.
It's just a social network, whose premium users get to sponsor surprise meet-ups between its other users.
If it walks like a duck...
A taxi service can pick you up from the side of the road when you hold up your hand and whistle.
A car-for-hire service is where you call a company and ask for them to give you a ride from place A to place B.
It should be obvious from those two sentences why taxis are more regulated.
Now, with increasing technology (primarily universal smartphones), the need for taxis cruising the streets at random looking for hails has dwindled significantly. This still doesn't mean car-for-hire services are taxi companies.
It might be how you understand "taxi" but that's not relevant, any more than if a robotic factory was doing work with a lot fewer people and a critic can't understand why minimum wage laws don't apply to the assembly machines. In his mind "factory" is something that uses labor to produce goods so there must be some scam going on. But he just doesn't understand.
I think someone should pause to note that, if true, this is one of the dumbest long term business strategies in the history of high finance.
This idea, apparently, is a bet on a technology that not only doesn't exist, but is extremely highly regulated, that the company has literally no demonstrated core competencies in, hasn't been even successfully prototyped, that represents the hardest most complex use case of the technology, and is obviously years away at best, but yet it justifies a policy of losing billions of dollars in the present just to get market share when the costs of switching brands are literally so non-existant that a typical customer often does it several times in a single evening out.
Maybe it's my old age and having lived through the first dotcom crash, but it seems to me that even when you feel like the only person who sees that the underlying business logic is nonsensical magical thinking, it's still quite possible you're correct.
The leaked data from Naked Capitalism is really the only data outsiders have at their disposal: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver... The use of EBITAR (vs EBITDA) makes it difficult to draw real conclusions, though the fact that they use EBITAR at all is suggestive on its own.
So, for that reason alone, I think firms are willing to bet a sliver of their portfolio. If I was a family office I certainly would do so.
Sure the more cars you have the better the service can be, but it's trivially easy for a competitor to come along at any time and attack your most profitable market segment in a given city, and trivially easy for any customer to switch as easily as clicking on a different app and glancing at the estimated time and price. That's going to be true forever, this isn't a market that will ever have a defensible monopoly position.
Investing some amount to hedge in self-driving cars could conceivably be defensible, but looking at what's going on it feels like that's more of an rationalization for their present behavior.
They've been lighting money on fire subsidizing rides for a few years, and have hunted around for a plausible excuse. One is the "pool" functions, as that has a slightly more plausible network effect story, and the other is self-driving cars.
Both appear to be post-hoc rationalizations designed to provide some plausible story for why they need to borrow another couple billion dollars.
You speak of the first dot-com crash, but there was a lot of stupidness back then. One of my favorites is furniture.com http://www.ecommerce-digest.com/early-dot-com-failure-case-s...
Research into "autonomous driving" began 1987 with the Prometheus programme consortium, then came C2C and C2X.
We have "autonomous driving" the day an automotive CEO is happily blindfolded on the back seat, alone, chauffeured a random journey through Seoul on a morning commute in monsoon season or a scooter-mania evening on Friday in Milan.
I see the "Uber is a bet on self-driving cars" coming up in every discussion about their business plan. But even if that's true, why is there an assumption that Uber would have a monopoly on self-driving cars?
Google, every car manufacturer, and a whole series of startups and universities are working on self-driving technology. If for example Google perfects it first, they will sell licenses to car manufacturers, who in turn will sell cars to Uber, Lyft, and every taxi company in every city of the world. Even if Uber develops the technology first and keeps it to themselves - then others cannot be too far behind, the potential payoff is just too great.
In the end the situation is just the same as now.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/16/uber-recode-leaked-autonom...
Whether you have to pay someone.
And those updates have to percolate through federal, state, county, and city level regulations. Making it an inherently slow process.
Dataset availability is really really poor today. We can move with great confidence on known conditions, but so many edge cases remain to be solved.
The ultimate goal of self-driving car is to be driverless. But, if you want to produce a car without driver seat & steering wheel, then yes, from that perspective, driverseat-less car is different from self-driving car.
Otherwise, same.
But, I don't think this is parallel to butt-dialing Uber.
Maybe if you had $6 hanging out of your back pocket, they flew out, someone picked them up, and when confronted said that they didn't do it.
Now, I don't know why uber didn't offer him the benefit of the doubt, but they were well within their rights not to refund. They did nothing unethical.
In your opinion, is work not worth doing if those mammoth companies are pursuing it?
Also, you say it is a risky endeavor. Would you argue that the driverless vehicle is not an inevitability? I would certainly argue that betting on Uber to come out on top is risky, but that doesn't mean there isn't money to be made.
Depends on what it is, and what kind of resources you have. In this case, you're talking about a massively difficult task (between the technical and regulatory aspects and the safety-critical nature), and at least two mammoth (i.e. well-funded internally) companies are already working on it. What exactly is a company with zero expertise in the field (a mobile app? Please), with absolute reliance on VC funding, likely to bring to the table? A lot of risk, that's what.
Yes, I think driverless vehicles are probably an inevitability, but I wouldn't look to Uber to come out on top here, any more than I expect Tinder to come out on top in asteroid mining.
Uber isn't even profitable with their core business of being a not-quite-taxi company. They quite obviously don't have the money to build their own self-driving cars, too.
The Uber app is still best-in-class, and all my friends now say "Get an uber" instead of "Get a cab" because the UX is so much smoother.
Generally it's extremely difficult to dislodge an incumbent from a market slot. Newcomers can only compete on price, UX, and brand recognition. Ideally all three need to be significantly better than the incumbent to have a hope of taking over. Without all three the best a newcomer can hope for is a small slice of the pie.
So market share definitely has value in the abstract. Unfortunately in Uber's case it has negative economic value because of the costs/subsidies.
Then again I suppose it's possible Uber has always been a cunning plot to take VC money and spend it on subsidised transport. If so, it's definitely been a success - for now, at least.
The infrastructure costs of deploying a fleet of cars to compete with Uber if they gain market share will be massive, all but assuring they will hold a monopoly position for years unless a decentralized competitor could actually become reliable quickly (I doubt it).
Why?
Are drivers who make $10-15 an hour so ludicrously expensive that saving that money fundamentally changes the business?
Are the carrying costs and maintenance costs and depreciation costs of self-driving cars likely to be lower or higher than the cost of a 2017 Toyota Camry? How about the regulatory and insurance costs?
Is there likely to be some magic secret that allows one company to dominate self-driving cars, or will it resemble the historical markets for transportation devices, whereby there are dozens of companies who make different offerings of similar technology, and a network of component suppliers and hardware and software companies that contribute?
I guess it captures a unique place in our imaginations, but this topic has an unusually severe infestation of magical thinking for some reason.
I actually agree with you that this is not a given, but it wasn't clear from my phrasing. I should have started my comment with "Even assuming you will print money with a self-driving fleet, etc".
That said, whoever deploys a self-driving fleet first should enjoy a significant cost advantage against human-driven taxis, at least for the initial period before competitors finalize their own transition. Insurance costs should get lower if SD cars prove to be safer (if not, they wouldn't pass regulation), and taxi customers are very price sensitive, so the $10-15 per hour cost advantage will certainly matter. Taxi drivers hate the price competition from upstarts already. If anybody figures out how to make those prices economical, they win, at least until the market commoditizes itself at a lower price level.
Since drivers can't work 24 hours per day, you are paying depreciation on ~three 2017 Toyota Camry's, not one.
With a car-for-hire service, I can investigate the car service ahead of time. I can get an exact rate quote and say "yes" or "no." I can decide whether or not they are worth my trust, and if I don't like them I can hang up, open the Yellow Pages, and shop around to find another one/
The fact that you think "press a button on my phone" is just the same as "put my hand in the air" is the same misunderstanding as the guy who can't understand why the robots aren't paid minimum wage. "Could my mental model of what's going on be incorrect? Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."
Try this: taxi companies and car-for-hire services have been regulated differently for 100 years. Were they wrong to have been regulated differently all along?
The "get into a car with a total stranger with whom I have no commercial relationship" market is vanishing along with its regulations. There is no law of nature or regulation that says we need to find a new industry to be regulated the same way.
With Uber, I now know the rate. All the other points apply to both equally. And with metered taxis, I also know a rough rate.
> With a car-for-hire service, I can investigate the car service ahead of time.
Am I under an incorrect assumption that there are multiple taxi companies in most cities that are licensed to operate? How is this different than calling a dispatcher at a specific company (which afaik does not suddenly make the car that picks me up a car for hire).
> Taxi companies and car-for-hire services have been regulated differently for 100 years. Were they wrong to have been regulated differently all along?
Taxi companies (traditional) and car for hire (Uber) haven't looked this similar over the past hundred years, as everyone wasn't carrying a cellular and GPS equipped supercomputer around in their pocket.
> The "get into a car with a total stranger with whom I have no commercial relationship" market is vanishing along with its regulations.
That sounds a lot like Uber too.
And this is why the regulations exist as far as I can tell: (1) safety, (2) awarding monopolies to prevent a race to the bottom that impacts (1), and (3) preventing your driver from using their position of power to charge you an unexpected / unreasonable rate.
I'd also note that I haven't said anything about whether I think taxis or Uber should be regulated. I've just asked how they're different as each exists today.
Nothing you've said so far makes me feel they are.
Sweden's largest taxi company currently operates in 50+ cities in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. So "never" is probably the wrong word.
If there's one positive thing about Uber, it's that they brought an end to this medallion monopoly.
But that is a quirk of the current American taxi system, not something inherent to the industry.
UberPool is one pointed example of scale economics working. Another would be Uber's brand encouraging more riders and the ability to scale into smaller markets that taxis normally couldn't service.
Well, they do, indirectly, in that that is part of the money the driver is paid. Yes, one way they've improved the numbers is squeezing their drivers more, but they can't do that forever. They're already encountering a lot of pushback.
I question the claim that Uber is serving a bunch of small markets that traditional livery services do not. Do you have an example?
Go on.
Have you ever picked a taxi in Nordic countries?
Those guys already had Uber like apps and all possible ways of paying for a ride, before Uber was a thing.
Any time I've had to use an uber clone apps (from a traditional taxi service, not lyft) they haven't instilled a lot of confidence in me to how reliable they are.
This was the most amazing thing about Uber, to me. I live in Boston and used to take cabs all the time pre-Uber (still take the occasional cab from the airport). Cab drivers are rude, frequently claim the credit card machine is down (despite violating city laws saying they're literally not allowed to drive with a broken CC reader), take the long way / detours to run up the meter, air conditioning or heating might be broken, the cars are dirty, no real recourse for bad service. Even if they have a GPS, drivers refuse to "waste time" by typing in your destination address and require turn-by-turn directions. I'd call a cab and it was hit or miss whether they'd show up or not. I even had a cab driver threaten to call the police when I didn't have cash after he tried to claim that Boston was "cash only" on Saturday nights -- and he was driving me to my HOME in the South End, so it should have been pretty clear I wasn't a tourist unfamiliar with local laws.
Even with the most well-designed and reliable app in the world, cab companies can't compete with Uber -- it's the service and consistency that really made it take off.
IMHO it was a small price to pay for deleting my Uber account.
1) Dial a 10 digit number
2) Someone says "Hello, XYZ car service"
3) You say "I need a car at the corner of Sample street and 123rd road"
4) They say "5 minutes" and hang up
It takes the same or less time as using an app like Uber with fewer things that can go wrong.
One Saturday night we wanted to go out to a place 10 minutes away. We called a taxi cab around 7:30/8:00. We were told that it would be between 2.5 and 3 hours for a cab, if one came. We were considered "out of the way" when we were a 10 minute ride from downtown/the main bar area in the city. Forget about getting a cab back from those bars. We used jitney cabs all the time to get home. Yellow cabs wouldn't bother or were too infrequent.
There used to be a similar/related practice called "slugging" as well, it seems to have faded as Uber rose up.
With the Curb app, your request goes out to multiple cab companies and you usually get a cab that is very close.
Almost every regular/licensed taxi I take here, the driver has Uber/Lyft/99Taxi app running simultaneously so they can reach more clients. In that case, it's the same quality of service as before (which is just fine where I live, so Uber/Lyft aren't disrupting anything here).
Uber and related apps are a bit overrated in terms of their "innovation."
You see, Uber-like "radio dispatch" services have existed in the NYC area for decades, but they used regular phone voice calls, not apps, which was slightly less convenient, I guess, but barely. It was not really qualitatively different IMHO (you waited about the same amount of time, and have about the same amount of certainty about the fare and whether they'll show up.). In fact, it could arguably be easier, as you didn't have to sign up for an account, download an app, set up payment method ahead of time, you just dialed a phone number
The only real innovation ridesharing apps have brought IMHO, are carpooling options like UberPOOL, Via, etc. This was not as practical to do before apps that could automate the dispatching and matching involved
Important to keep in mind that that is not only a lot of cars for SF, but also that they aren't just driving a bit and parking. They're driving and driving (and driving and driving), when they're not blocking traffic picking up or dropping off.
In urban areas there are good reasons for restrictions on numbers.
However, a simple toll would be fairer, as it would treat all cars equally, regardless of whether they are or are not taxis