Did you hail or call taxis before Uber? The simple ability to see where your car is while en route was game changing. Add to that ratings, embedded payment (“credit card reader broken”) and dynamic pricing and you have a dramatically better experience.
Balance that against the fact that most taxi drivers know the city by heart, including where there is construction, habitual traffic jam, and transit congestion..
I'll take a better drive-to-destination experience over being able to stare at my phone watching a car inch closer to me, or saving a few dollars when I need to get somewhere.
A lot of part-time Uber drivers, especially in big cities, come in from the suburbs to get fares in the city - where they are not familiar with their surroundings - and just blindly follow the directions on their GPS.
In my anecdotal experience over the last 10 years, I've had plenty of experiences with Uber drivers either not knowing the proper way to get somewhere, or naively driving into avoidable traffic jams, or just getting stuck behind a bus or streetcar and not understanding when/how to get past it.
This very rarely happens with taxi drivers - to the point where sometimes they can be a bit scary in traffic, so there is a counterpoint here too.
Interesting angle. My experience (in NYC) has been that while taxis most certainly have better knowledge of the city, Uber is by far more reliable in just getting me there. This is because of the key difference of Uber knowing exactly where I'm going in advance, and relaying turn-by-turn directions to the driver. Most of the time, the taxi driver knows the address or cross streets I'm going to. But when they don't, it's painful. I've never even been asked in a Lyft/Uber, though.
Yeah where I live (Toronto) the turn-by-turn is the problem often. There's no adjustment for traffic or temporary closures, and combined with part-time drivers not knowing what roads should be avoided at certain times of day, and you can end up taking way too long getting somewhere.
In fact I used to see a lot of Uber drivers switch out to Waze for directions once you're in the car, since that was probably better.
What incentives taxi drivers to do an excellent job. There are not ratings for drivers and they can take you on a more expensive route if they sense that you aren’t from that area.
Uber tells drivers the route to take and has access to Waze esque data to help ensure drivers take an optimal route.
Did you hail or call taxis before Uber? The simple ability to see where your car is while en route was game changing. Add to that ratings, embedded payment (“credit card reader broken”) and dynamic pricing and you have a dramatically better experience.