@Mae@jeder doesn't work in many major cities (so if you're traveling, you need to have Uber, Grab, Bolt, Lyft, Yango etc on your phone... and none of them will work even slightly outside of major cities.)
And the problem with Uber is that it's a predatory intermediary. From what I've heard, in some major cities taxi associations came up with app not much worse than Uber, bit of course they couldn't compete with Uber burning money on every ride just to offer them cheaper to riders and to push taxi companies out of the market. If things went a different way, these apps could have evolved into a common taxi platform (or several) licensed to local taxi companies in other cities on a subscription basis. But of course this could only work in the absence of predatory exploitative corporation burning VC's billions in order to become a monopoly.
@IngaLovinde@jeder fair enough, I'm just coming off an experience where in a major eu city I wasn't able to get a cab, the shared app for the city is rated 1.9 stars, and I could just... get an uber easily
Taxi@Mae@jeder but comparing a local taxi association with a multi-billion-dollar global corporation which has tons of money to burn on price dumping is unfair. Of course local taxi association is worse, because if it were to become better, corporation would squeeze it out of the market into oblivion or at least into becoming worse. But what if you're not in the city? I've had an experience of being stranded 50km from Bordeaux (turned out there was some kind of event that day so bus route got shortened without an explanation, and bus driver just dropped us of in a middle of small village 10km from our destination and told is it's not his problem what do we do now). Uber is not really interested in serving areas like these. Technically Uber app was saying that there are drivers, that it found a driver, that we'll be picked up in just half an hour... and then it said that no, it's not actually confirmed. Again and again. And since there are no non-corporation apps, the local taxi companies work over the phone, and trying to find local taxi companies in this area and phoning them on Saturday and trying to explain what do I need when I don't speak or really understand French and they don't speak or understand English is an entire experience on its own. So after two hours of unsuccessful attempts to get Uber or a local taxi, in 35⁰ heat with zero shade, we ended up just standing on the roadside with a sheet of paper with "50€ for [destination]" written on it with nail polish (the only wiring implement that we had with us), and eventually thankfully some hippie picked us up. We probably wouldn't have to do this if the world went in the different direction, if there was no Uber.
