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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

In the US, I don’t think I’ve ridden in a small, local cab company whose cars didn’t smell like cigarettes and was barely legal to drive, and often had drivers trying to scam you. It was always nice expensive black car service, or shitty local taxi company, which was a super last resort.

The transparency and accountability that Uber brought has been preferred by everyone I know, and people are voting with their dollars.

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It might be due to the fact that in most parts of Europe there's a cheap and good public transport available, so cabs must compete with it too. In USA, there's not much to choose from, so cabs have local monopolies, hence higher price and lower quality service.

Canada is in the same position. Cab drivers regularly take longer routes than necessary to drive up the meter and often pretend their card machines aren't working to force cash payment.

most taxi services in Europe are quite bad and hugely overpriced due to artificial monopoly, to the point that I try to stay away from the countries without Uber

From your description and my personal experience, only London falls under this category. What other cities do you have in mind?

In my opinion as a local, Lisbon is pretty bad. Scamming and rude drivers, unreliable when requested by phone, forget about paying by card (now some have apps, but that's a post-Uber development), plus the organization leadership is very corrupt (getting around licensing limits by putting them under their families names, outright snatching licenses from members when they ask for help renewing them, leaving small towns without cars by using the licenses to drive in big cities, etc).

Before Uber, I already avoided taxis as much as I could, only taking a couple per year.

Athens, Greece is one obvious example; also Brussels. And Amsterdam. And a lot more. And I _love_ Vienna.

I've never had that experience with local cabs. Now what?

Game theory makes it clear why anonymous cabs paid in cash will almost always provide worse service than a rating sensitive system.

The notion that people will be kind and nice because of social norms or "plain decency" or something is sentimental hogwash. People behave well when the system rewards them for doing so and penalises them for not.

Most of local cab companies in my city also let you rate a driver now, so it's not a unique selling point of Uber anymore.

When was the last time you rated a local cab? If no one uses the system it might as well not exist.

Last night, actually.

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