This, and worse.

Using a taxi cab in Berkeley before Lyft was a worse nightmare. It's a long story, but Berkeley has a "medallion" system ( because, um, they were afraid of a crush of taxis? ), and one business bought them all, but then went over the limit of something like 3 employees and thus would have to pay benefits. Since they were cheap, they didn't want to pay benefits ( sound familiar? ), and created lots of small sham "taxi companies". Each had a different phone number and dispatch, with the same poor cars and drivers, and the numbers were always busy. The only way to get a taxi was to get somehow to the taxi rank at Berkeley Bart, anything else, forget it. Forget living 5 miles from the train up in the hills or needing a ride to the airport, you simply couldn't do it.

San Francisco was about as bad. Locals realized ( eventually ) that the only way to get a taxi was to head to one of the major hotels and present yourself as a guest to the doorman. If you didn't live within walking distance of a downtown hotel, you weren't ever going to get a taxi. Dispatchers ( there were only two real companies, Veterans and Luxor ) would simply refuse to service non-business addresses, and if you asked a bar or restaurant to call on behalf, they would simply reject outright half the time.

When I read that people were "made uncomfortable by a comment", I agree the system could and should be better, but what happened in the bay area is we moved from an entirely non-functional system where taxi rides simply can't be had, to a system with some problems but people can get rides. The story above about getting rides and the complaints about being dropped off on the wrong side, um, yeah.

I would say about 10% of the rides I take by Lyft are less than optimal. I wish the app allowed me to select preferences: fast driving over chit-chat, don't bother with my luggage I got it, drop me off somewhere close instead of being precise, because we all have different opinions.

I've had my fair share of bad rides, one where a guy was nodding off and I thought we were going to die, a couple where the "meter" was turned on early or off late. The most recent ride I took wasn't great, the guy kept calling me and his location didn't budge for 5 minutes --- I don't answer anymore, they're trying to figure out where you're going and if they don't like it they cancel the ride. That particular guy picked me up from the wrong bay at the airport ("oh, my app didn't show me", yeah right ) as well, but drove me home quickly and correctly otherwise.

I had this same discussion with a driver in Munich last week, and I argued there are places where the old taxi system works great, and those places aren't at risk for replacement. Germany is one of them, and there's no point in using Lyft there. Japan is another. Some of london is fine, the rest, you have to know the minicab number to call. I was in a London cab a few days ago, it was great --- and they're electric! Manhattan isn't bad, but you get some crazy apples.

You could invent a better system. It's pretty easy. The primary customer issue is hailing and tracking. If you built a hailing and tracking app, and the municipal law simply says "anyone offering rides can do it how they want, but they must ALSO offer rides through the municipal app" with a well defined REST API, and created a bidding-like system to allow prices to fluctuate, _and_ gave the municipality the ability to operate that app instead of a contractor agreement where a for-profit company owns the monopoly part of the transit infrastructure.... that works.

Unfortunately, that would require someone to build such an app and offer it to municipalities without the 1000x investor payoff that is required by investors. And it would require a municipality to operate a 7/24 web service, or contract it out, which we haven't seen municipalities be able to do.