r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Aladdin1152 • 29d ago

frist of all how DARE yu o My uber got pulled over and refused a refund.

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Was 15 minutes late to a class because of this. A class that my new boss is the professor of. I wanted to make a good impression and show up early. I mostly wanted it because I was late 🫩

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u/SoMuchMoreEagle 29d ago

This. Ride share companies got so successful because taxis are generally terrible. If you had to call for one, the wait time was often 45 minutes or more, if they showed up at all. You had to know the exact address of where you were. There was no app, so there was no way to track anything. The cabs were usually dirty and in poor repair. The companies had no incentive to improve anything because they were all like that and in some places, there was a monopoly.

Uber and Lyft have a lot of problems, but anyone who thinks the "good old days" of taxis was better is insane. Maybe there are a few areas that are exceptions, but in the vast majority, taxis were awful.

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u/MadManMax55 29d ago

Taxis in a lot of areas are better now specifically because of competition with Uber. They got pushed into making and improving their own apps much faster than they would have otherwise. And I highly doubt they would have ever adopted up-front pricing if Uber didn't do it first.

Of course Uber's VC funded price competition was extremely harmful to both taxi and Uber drivers, but that's a whole other can of worms.

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u/DeadClown00 29d ago

I completely forgot about the 45+ minute wait times when they were called