I briefly drove airport shuttles and we'd sometimes rescue people who had been screwed over by taxi dispatchers. I don't think drivers faced any consequences for never showing up at all.

I personally don't blame the drivers, most of the time.

My impression is that taxi companies, wanting to be profitable, keep the largest number of drivers on call that can be maximally utilized -- not the smallest number needed to guarantee a certain SLO. So when you call dispatch and they tell you "30 minutes", that's a bald faced lie. It's not that the taxi driver got lost or stopped for a coffee break on the route, it's that they did not have any taxi drivers available for the next 80 minutes, and knew it.

The drivers don't get punished because they did nothing wrong; there may have never been a driver assigned to go pick you up.

It's like when you go to the grocery and there is one checkout open and ten people in line; it's not that the cashier is slow, it's that it is more profitable to make you wait than to have two cashiers sitting idle after you leave.

...and I guess Uber's main innovation there was, make the drivers independent contractors, so you don't have to pay them for the time they're idle. :\

And (perhaps more importantly) actually give the end user a reasonable estimation of what's going on and how long it'll take for the driver to reach you.

Perhaps even more significant is that Uber gave you the price of the trip in advance. With regular taxis you had to guess, and if you weren't familiar with area, you best guess might well be just "expensive". And then you had to worry about being ripped off.

Uber gave everyone access to information about the cost of taxis - and generally people found it wasn't as expensive as they'd thought.

And, you know, they always say their credit card reader isn't working, nor their fare meter.