> My prediction is that in the cities, things mostly won’t change. In rural or suburban areas, cost and wait times will explode, if service is offered at all.
This, in a nutshell, is exactly the problem.
Uber and Lyft make almost all their money in areas where there is already a useful, functioning cab system.
Had Uber and Lyft positioned themselves as serving San Diego, Sacramento, Bakersfield, etc. people would have been falling all over themselves to defend them.
Instead, they focused on San Francisco and Los Angeles and "disrupted" the cab system which was already functioning because that's where all the profit was and they wanted "Unicorn scale".
Well, okay, you reap what you sow.
> Drivers don’t have good statistics on where to wait.
That's totally false. Drivers absolutely know. My street has a lot of brewpubs that close at 10:00PM on weekdays, and the Uber/Lyft drivers flood the area and cruise just ahead of that.
It's actually incredibly annoying if you live in the area because it creates a huge traffic spike on a relatively small road that is also a cycling route at a time that people are going home.