Consumers did not benefit in the long term if Uber nuked their local taxi industry and wrecked the efficiency of their local bus service before suddenly ceasing operations.
In most of North America, the taxi industry is notoriously corrupt and has been that way to protect their medallion systems. While I do feel for some individual cab ower/operators, I don't feel bad for the industry as a whole despite Uber being a horrible company.
Then Uber comes in, knowingly ignores regulations everyone else played by, spews "sharing" nonsense, pricedumps on fares, temporarily attracts drivers and gets many hooked on loans for the recent-year cars Uber demanded, uses money and popularity of pricedumping rates to lobby politicians for official acceptance, then IPOs to keep the scheme going (and so some people can cash out).
People forget that is how Uber got into this business - they started skirting medallions (which was an artificial market in the first place) by telling regulators that these drivers were headed in a particular direction and just picked up a fare.
In Washington DC, there were multiple cases of taxi companies bribing politicians to introduce a medallion system. Even when many of them were caught in stings, they still kept trying (with "good" reason, many of them would become multimillionaires overnight if it passed).
Uber was so successful because we consumers had little choice, though the ride subsidies were definitely helpful.
- Drivers always claimed the credit card reader wasn't working and tried to force payment in cash - the card reader was always just clearly turned off and they would slap it pretending to try to get it to work
- Drivers randomly deciding to charge 1.5x or 2x based on the ride going outside some made-up "zone"
- Drivers all crowding around bars blocking the street and sometimes getting into fistfights over their positioning in front of the bar (this doesn't happen anymore since Uber)
- Most of the cabs had absolutely disgusting interiors
I do agree that Uber's whole pricing competitiveness is a VC-funded greater-fool scheme, but the expectations of service levels in the ride hailing have been greatly improved.
Some older friends mentioned that before Dianne Feinstain was mayor you had unlicensed gypsy cabs that would shuttle random groups for a buck or two each.
I've noticed in particular that prices to Chicago ORD are lower (from the suburbs) and in Miami cabs will actually take credit cards now and show up when you call them.
I'm all for ragging on companies that skirt regulation, but the regulation was 50/50 good for consumers and straight up protectionism for the cabs.
At this point, every major taxi company has a sleek Uber-style call-a-cab app, and most of them work great. Fare prediction has also become common, if not actually a guarantee, and in-app fare payment has mostly killed hearing "the credit card reader is broken" after a ride. (Which was already illegal but omnipresent, so competition solved the problem where regulation failed completely.)
Of course, this wasn't a city with medallions, so Uber couldn't just outcompete taxis by dodging regulation. I'm not sure how NYC et al have changed, since no amount of modernization could fix that problem.
I've mostly seen its effects in big cities (where public transit gets invested in regardless, and lots of people taking buses never moved to more-expensive Ubers), and small cities (where bussing was already atrocious, with no real plans for changing that).
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/innisfil-tran...
Now we have a proven market, more competitive taxi industries, and even some competition. We'll be in much better shape if Uber go away than we were before it.
(I'm an UBER bear and think their shares are comically over-valued. I also think that they're genuinely and sustainably profitable in their core business operation.)