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Comment by rimbo789 | Hacker News Reader

Uber was a massive mistake on every level.

This is what is so frustrating about this whole ai thing is we aren’t learning from the mistakes of even the very recent past

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What's frustrating is that at the end of an event like a concert, everyone goes outside to catch an Uber/Lyft, but we then have to match driver to passenger, instead of having a line of waiting cars, each group just gets in the next available vehicle, shows the driver a QR code, instead of the mess we currently have. Why can't we do that? Taxi regulatory capture.

Uber is a vast improvement over the previous taxi oligopolies.

I miss being able to reliably hail a taxi A LOT. Uber may be an improvement in smaller towns where cabs didn’t exist, but in bigger cities it is mostly a downgrade. Rather than walking to the curb and immediately getting a car, I’ve got to dick around with my phone and wait for a car to come to me.

Living on the south side of Chicago, it was almost impossible to hail a cab, and often times if you called for one it just wouldn’t show up. Or I’d try to hail one downtown, and be refused once I told them my destination. I’ve not had that problem once with Uber, good fucking riddance to taxis.

Uber has been great, I can get around to almost anywhere with a click of a button and have food delivered from a variety of local restaurants at any time of day.

I'm not sure why you think it was a massive mistake? The taxi industry was awful and unsafe, food delivery for many local places was either not available or poorly implemented.

Also many whole food chains didn't have proper delivery for groceries.

Taxis were terrible and I celebrate their destruction at the hands of the rideshare companies. Even now it’s still cheaper than a cab was (though those early days of VC cheap rides were great).

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