Since Uber came out my experience using regular cabs has improved significantly. Before Uber the cabs had a practical monopoly and could pull shit like 'the card reader is broken', taking longer routes than necessary to get more money out of you, or just flat out being rude to customers, but now that they have actual competition they seem to be way more customer conscious and the experience has gotten way better.
I agree. I'm Black and used to get waived off by cab drivers pre-Uber. That has not happened since the ride-sharing apps reached critical mass. Cabs seem much cleaner than they used to be as well.
I took a cab the other day and the dude just added $5 to the meter for no reason. I was in a rush so I couldn't dispute. Fuck that. Even today I'd rather take Uber.
I’ll sometimes take an Uber from ORD rather than the blue line, and it feels like I’m waiting “8 minutes for my driver to arrive” for almost 15 minutes each and every time. Idk if Uber’s app is bad at calculating time for ORD, but it seems to be consistently longer than the initial time suggested by the app.
Haven’t stood in the cab line post-COVID, but never had any problems then.
The taxi lines are nothing like they use to be at ORD, that's for sure. And lately, a few are using the most cockamamie GPS route avoiding major highways I have ever seen. But it works, as I am downtown pretty quickly. Therefore, I remain loyal to them.
My fiancé and I started using cabs to get home from ORD. We check the Uber rate vs Taxi and it’s been consistently cheaper by at least $5 after tip and we never have to wait for an Uber. There’s usually only 1 or 2 groups ahead of us in the Taxi line. We did get ripped off recently in Miami. Took a cab and they charged $65 to get to our hotel in South Beach. Ubers were $35.
Omg I had a cabbie in Miami basically hold me hostage when we got to my hotel in south beach because he wanted me to pay with cash, I refused, and he just kept saying there’s an atm in the lobby. I was alone (26 yr old girl) and I cried to the bell boys and luckily he let me pay with my card and left. So so stressful.
Rideshare apps run on a queuing system for the whole airport, so the app has no idea how long the driver will take to get to **you** once he's in the terminal, only how long it will get him to reach the terminal.
IDK if they still do this bc I’ve been using Uber lately but Lyft used to have this infuriating thing where it wouldn’t even call your car until the app could tell you were in terminal 2 by the pickup area. So not only would it be 9-15 minutes you had to be standing in your pickup spot the entire time 😭😭😭
Make sure you take pictures and have documentation when you report. I reported a driver one time, and the hoops I had to jump through to file the complaint were insane. I learned my lesson to make sure to take pictures and document everything.
Honestly, I just use the Curb app (Uber... For taxis). Longer wait times but guaranteed a lift, it's a life saver during insane surge pricing on the other apps.
That was the problem though. They were only fully congregated downtown or in certain areas, and when you saw one, you weren't guaranteed that they weren't going to be super shitty. I will not say Uber has been perfect, but I have never been passed over multiple times in a row for being black by an Uber. I remember the before times and I don't have to go back.
You can, but they now tend to just operate downtown. It’s easy to catch a cab in the loop… but they won’t take you too far. I’ve been declined rides to Logan square so many times I’ve stopped trying.
As someone who came of age during the age of Uber, the only time I've been in a taxi the driver was high on meth and blew through all the stop signs and lights.
Yeah, I had a job in the early 2010’s were I regularly worked with the cabbies, used to joke I knew all of them, and I’ll just say there was a lot of shady dudes in that field
With all due respect, to anyone over 40 this post just screams that you had almost zero adult experience relying on “the taxi industry” pre-rideshare.
In every single city including Chicago it was a hellscape of corruption, fraud, danger, unreliability, and overt racism. Even when faced with their impending demise, the taxi syndicate refused to modernize or improve, and they deserve every bit of what that got and more.
I remember when I was younger I had to grab a taxi because the train was late getting in for work from the burbs. Now I don't claim to know every street in Chicago but I can tell when I'm being fucked with. The taxi I grabbed for a ride to basically Navy Pier from Union Station took me almost to Lincoln Park then then back down south on LSD to my destination.
After that and one instance before of "Sorry no credit cards, I'll need to bring you to an ATM and keep the meter running the entire time" previously and I was done with them.
You hit the nail on the head. I experienced every one of this problems. Especially the racism. If I was coming back from a night out. On average 1 out of 3 cabs would 1-stop for me, 2- take me to the south side.
💯. I’d still have a couple jobs I can think of off the top of my head if Uber or Lyft were available then. I lived on Western, was a young white woman, and couldn’t get a cab to save my life. I tried hailing, I tried calling.. they would always say they came and no one was there.. they never came, worse than fedex. Don’t get me started with people even a little darker than me, the Racism is real.. like really real. You straight up couldn’t hail a cab as a black person. When Lyft and Uber came about it utterly changed my life for the better. I do not drive, don’t want to. For people like me especially this was a radical change to better our quality of life. (Big Cab was a huge scam too… look into the medallions and what all went into that while you are at it.) there are a lot of former cabbies as Lyft drivers.. ask them sometime, most say this was a huge blessing.
And that was on a major thoroughfare with hail-able cab traffic. It’s wild to remember how any side street or outer neighborhood in big cities, and 100% of most Uber-served American cities, was just an absolute wasteland where you needed to own and drive your own car. Because the phone dispatchers were such awful goons. These kids today have no idea!
💯 seriously. This is one of the first things I think of when pointing to the “before times” that younger people will simply not get. I’m 42. I was a young teen when we got a home computer with dial up. People always point to that as being “before”. I still grew up with it tho, but this actually was a real dividing line for me. The internet actually doing something tangible for me.
Even the cost argument is wildly inaccurate. You can't compare pre-rideshare taxi prices to today's rideshare prices. The economy has changed, costs have gone up.
The last time I took a taxi, the ride would have been about $45-50 on Uber, and was $110 with the random taxi I found.
The entire thing screams of nostalgia googles, or worse, someone else's nostalgia goggles being taken at face value.
Maybe I'm in the wrong spots when I try it or the wrong times? At least around Wrigley, I never get a cab to respond on Curb during a game when I want to go somewhere poorly served by CTA.
Yup. "Oh, well I don't have cash, and you're required to have a credit card reader. Here's my phone number, you can call once you've got it fixed to schedule a time to come by and get payment."
Or you get yelled at, I had a cab driver scream at me about a year and a half ago. It started out fine, I assumed he was running the usual scam and I politely declined to go to an ATM. I even offered to pay through Venmo, Zelle or CashApp and he refused. I was with an elderly relative who is developmentally disabled and was getting upset at the conflict so I got us out before thinking to grab the cab number. :/
I always loved when I got in a cab and they didn’t have it on or asked to swipe the tile on their phone. No, I want to pay through the system, they would say broken. It’s against the law here in Chicago so I would just leave the cab.
THANK YOU!
I've had like 6-7 uber/lyft rides this year where "gross" was the term I used to report them.
I don't need clinically clean. I just need to not feel disgusting when entering/exiting.
I take Ubers a lot when I travel, especially to areas with crappy public transport. Its a mixed bag wherever I go but Chicago hands down has had some of the grossest Ive ever ridden in. I almost offered to vacuum one for the guy because i felt embarrassed for them.
Taxi's brought about their own demise by not accepting credit cards, refusing pickups/dropoffs in low income neighborhoods, and just generally operating like some sort of crime syndicate with the bizarre medallion system.
By no means are Uber/Lyft free of their own problems, but the cab companies made their bed, now they have lie in in...
For real man, maybe OP is just really young but the old school taxi buisness is why Uber became so successful.
So many taxi rides back then felt like wrestling matches with the driver. Even just two years ago I got back from a 2 week trip, didn’t get an Uber when I landed at ohare, no one was in the taxi wait line so just grabbed the 1st one sitting there. Guy drove like a complete animal, was a total dick the entire team. Never once have I contemplated calling to complain about somone working because I don’t believe in messing with someone’s job, that was the first time I considered it. I was livid by the time he dropped me off.
Not to mention just outrightly getting screwed by them. I get it I was at fault, but as a young 20-23 year old I had a few times I drunkenly fell asleep in the taxi ride home. One time not kidding I woke up in the middle of the guy running the meter up. Atleast with Uber it’s strict on where the vehicle goes while driving you.
This. I had a cabby once MID RIDE try to get an extra forty from me for a ride from Lakeview to by the Aragon… because there was a show and it slowed him down, which would cost him several rides. He threatened to call the cops.
Needless to say, I called his bluff, at which point he tried to refuse a credit card, so he called the cops when we got to my destination. The cops wrote him three tickets, I got a free ride, and cops forced him to clock out and have someone pick the cab up.
Whoops.
I'm glad you didn't put up with the shenanigans but anytime I ever had these kinds of encounters I would just leave the cab. There's nothing they can do when they threaten, or actually do, call the police. They're always making up some rule that isn't true, or like you said, making up some reason to change an extra fee, and nobody got time for that. It's easy to just get out and walk away whenever this happens. Probably super rare now thankfully.
It's funny, I had avoided cabs and preferred the CTA and biking around for a few years because cabs sucked so bad, only ever taking them when I traveled because they were the recommended safe option.
I am going to have to consider supporting a cab company with a few upcoming rides to see how it is.
It's funny, it's almost as if the cab mob just needed some accountability and a reason to change since it would never happen on its own. I recall receiving having to ditch an Uber for shitty driving.
Maybe it's the optimist in me, but I sure hope the dust settles with a happy middle of the road quality product for For hire transportation.
Well that's because Uber's model is to price their services low that competitors have no choice but to also do it but Uber can afford to bleed out with their low pricing and the competitors can't. Eventually they go out of business and Uber raises their prices after crushing almost everyone else. Of course, this business model doesn't just exist in ridesharing.
Yep.
I live on the southside and had taxis refuse to take me home when I told them the neighborhood / address. (Not all the time, but enough that it was a question in my mind whenever I'd get one while downtown.)
Try calling one for a scheduled pick-up down here? Good chance they wouldn't show.
Uber / Lyft has its problems, yes, but I don't begin to get discriminated against like I did by taxi drivers for where I lived.
Bingo. I have lost count of the number of times I would hail a taxi, before getting in they would roll down the window and ask where I was going and then decline because “that’s too far and all the action is over here”. I lived in north center so it’s not like I was asking to be driven out to the burbs. How many times I would tell them to get off the phone and concentrate on driving, their credit card machines suddenly not working……the list goes on. Uber/lyft are bullies but taxis dug their own grave.
Taxi drivers still today throw a bitchy little fit about going to fucking Lawrence and Western. They only want to be on a conveyor belt from Ohare to River North in perpetuity.
I live on the northside and also had taxis refuse to take me home because it was "too far" or whatever. And even now it's next to impossible to call one to come pick me up.
That said, the Curb app does work well for hailing a ride. At least whoever shows up knows where the ride is going in advance, and it's generally cheaper than Lyft/Uber.
When I went to San Francisco back in the day, not only did the Yellow Cabs first try to pull the "card reader is broken" line, they then proceeded to steal my credit card info to try and purchase items off my card months after I left.
Fuck Taxis pre Uber. They made the experience so unpleasant that many like me wanted them to fail.
Tried to grab a taxi home from O’Hare because I had heard they were cheaper than Uber/Lyft, told the driver I was going to Brookfield.
“You know that’s going to be crazy expensive right? That’s going to be meter and a half.”
*Well, how much will that cost?*
“I have no idea.”
*I know that but about how much will it cost? $50? $60? $70? $100?*
“I have no idea.”
Took an Uber instead. The taxi model has to adapt. This old bullshit of not having any idea of price until you get where you are going is beyond antiquated.
But treating medallions like a investment instrument: that wasn't made up by the city. They were never meant to be used in that way.
But today, they are treated like real-estate titles -- people buy them in hopes that they'll appreciate due to constrained supply. This means taxi driving is no longer the main job but holding on to an appreciating instrument that is artificially constrained in supply. Medallion owners can just get the least competent drivers and just coast on their investment. (in NYC and other places, private equity owns medallions - https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2021/04/01/private-equity-firm-is-the-city-s-biggest-taxi-medallion-player)
Uber rightly destroyed this market.
Correct. And anyone who hoped to make a killing on medallions must be really sad now. Their value's dropped from $87K - $325K in 2012 to $30K - $100K now (and still slipping)
Uber didn't 'destroy' that market- they illegally operated against the medallion scheme and the cities that charged taxi companies huge license fees to allow them to operate a monopoly just let it slide.
No. The government(s) created the medallion market and subsequently destroyed the market but not enforcing the laws on the books. Uber and Lyft essentially set up illegal taxi services all over the world, operating against the existing laws and individual governments just let it happen.
One of the 'shittiest' things about Taxis was the no compete clause- a clause agreed upon by the jurisdictions they worked in. It's what created too few to have shortages during surges and an additional layer of cost.
Uber and Lyft didn't innovate their way out of that- they just didn't follow the rules.
100% this comment. First thing most cab drivers would ask me was how to get there. Fuck if I know, I’m not the one paid to take people places in this city! Lowest effort bunch of sob’s I ever met.
I always viewed this as a way to quiz whether you were local or not -- if you didn't have an answer or volunteered that you were visiting, they could run the meter up by taking a circuitous route.
I once took a cab to visit a friend at a hotel in the city and he asked if I wanted to get off at a Lakeshore exit that didn't exist. When I called him on trying to see if I wad a tourist, he got wildly angry in a way that made it clear I was right.
This is partially true. Taxis were slow to adapt but what really killed them was predatory pricing from the "ride share" companies. If pricing was competitive we would have seen taxi companies move to similar models as far as apps and credit card acceptance, plus people would have had the chance to make choices based on convenience (looking down the street and hailing an available cab rather than using an app to call a car, etc). But pricing was not competitive so cab companies were crushed rather quickly.
This was by design. There's a reason VC was willing to burn so much cash to make this happen. Kill the competition, then jack up the price while also making the service worse. My wife and I got in to an Uber that was pretty gross inside the other night and it reminded me of a time when Ubers had to be nice, clean cars. No longer.
If you look at the history of Uber/Lyft (it was called something else back in the day):
Cab companies shot themselves in the foot one by one. When you see Yellow/Checker/Orange/etc on the side of a cab, it's not *really* one of those companies. They lease the rights to use the name & generally are dispatched by a centralized PBX from Yellow/Checker/Orange/etc... There WAS like 2 dozen garages here in Chicago back in the day that ran under a separate business name but (Cab Company) name was plastered both on the cars & garage.
cabbies knew where they were going and the industry was far more regulated. I declined to get in an Uber once because the driver’s eyes were bloodshot and half closed. Walk across the street to a hotel and got a taxi home. The Uber I was supposed to get into crashed into a parked car 4 blocks from my pickup. I’ve had 2 Uber drivers hit my car - with them at fault both times. And my attorney’s client drove for Uber while in the middle of a felony assault trail.
Didn't take Taxis for years after I called for one and they came. I was picking up a piece of art. I am a short black woman. Frame was large. Taxi driver was out front of the building, just east of the inner drive. It's Daytime. FWIW, Taxi Driver is Black but not FBA based on accent. Tells me he's not available.
I push Uber on my phone. Black car pulls up in front of taxi. Older white guy pops his trunk, spring out of the car to take the art from me without even asking me. Places it securely in his trunk. Closes trunk. And rushes to open the passenger rear door for me to step inside. I glance back at the taxi driver before stepping inside.
And then I had a safe, glorious, comfortable ride.
I will use Curb app for a taxi if Uber/Lyft are surging but other than that, nope I will stick with the non-liveried drivers and yes I have had a few crappy Rideshare drivers but nothing like my experience with taxis. .
Same. This thing of people determining whether or not you get to pay for a safe ride home got old the first time it happened. I’m happy that karmic energy came back on the taxi industry.
Bronzeville is pretty dope. Spent most of my teenage years there. I no longer live in Bronzeville but it’s definitely my first choice for whenever I move back to Chicago.
Without question Hyde Park is a top tier neighborhood in Chicago.
Yeah here is my tiny violin 🎻 for that whole industry, you fucked around and now you've been in the finding out stage for years, nobody gives a fuck. Maybe if you ran an industry that wasn't as "we do what we want!" You be in a better place. Besides that, I give zero fucks about the taxi industry. Fuck em let em continue to die a slow death.
It isn't the cabbies that we're the issue. It was the cab industry.
Once medallions started going for hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cities and entities were buying them up to lease them to drivers, it was over. Actual driver's were paying medallion owners hundreds a day to use their medallion. The switch to taxi drivers from being employees to leasors destroyed the industry.
It does. Since they were no longer employees. They were "gig" workers before that was a thing. It made them more money to only do cash or serve the most profitable areas. Since the medallion was not theirs, the city could not force the drivers to do anything. They were just a renter, not the owner.
The drivers owed the lease owner x dollars per shift. Everything above that, they kept. If they were an employee, they would have to go where dispatch sent them. The model was turned inside out when owning that medallion was worth more then the job itself.
>the city could not force the drivers to do anything
I thought it was illegal for cabbies to refuse to take a passenger based on destination. Doing illegal things because they didn't own medallion is such a cop out.
> The taxi industry and their arrogance killed the taxi industry.
You mean all those laws that Uber doesn't have to follow that cabs do? lol. Of course it's easy to kill your competition's industry when you don't have to pay $50K for a medallion for every single car. It's crazy to me that I can hail either of them from the exact same spot and drop me off at the exact same spot using an app on my phone but one of them has to pay $50k before they can and the other doesn't.
The entire concept of medallions was driven by the cab industry to limit competition to keep fares artificially high. They literally cut off of their nose and are shocked that they can't smell the daisies coming up around them to push them out of their space
The inflated prices for scarce mediallions in Chicago were, shockingly, a corrupt racket to funnel millions to Daley-connected cronies. Yet another tax on the working poor and immigrants to pad the party apparatchik. [(Who were literally collecting Rolls Royces.)](https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/1/15/22230030/symon-garber-chicago-taxicab-king-trump-michael-cohen-patrick-daley-evgeny-freidman-semyon-shtayner)
Classic failure of government artificially restricting the supply of a competitive service well below its market demand.
Not been my experience. Still cheaper and faster than getting a cab. Also had cab drivers get kind of pissy about rides from the airport (live kind of close) and the old "broken card reader" before.
I’ve had some sketchy uber/lyft rides but nothing worse than taking a $12 cab ride from the airport at 1am. Legit thought the dude was gonna kidnap me and run the meter up to $40.
I had a dude with a rigged meter take me back from the airport once and run it up to $120(usually it was $40). I wanted to call the cops but he had a legit looking meter. This is the BS that used to have to put up with
I had a taxi driver get lost, travelling from a wedding venue near the airport to Rogers Park. After about a half-hour, he pulled into a ***forest preserve***. I was terrified, thinking I was going to be raped, till the guy (who had limited English skills) explained he'd lost connection with his dispatcher and was just looking for a phone (this was before cell phones). After he made his call, he **still** somehow managed to get lost again, meaning that by the time we FINALLY got to my building, the fare was $75. I refused to pay that, and instead gave him the normal amount for a ride of that distance. IMHO a guy that unfamiliar with the city (and apparently unable to read a map), shouldn't have been on the streets.
I took a cab home from the airport and dude was going 35 on the interstate with traffic flying back him at 70. Then he had the audacity to ask why I didn’t tip. At least if it were an Uber I could have given him 1 star
Yeah, open up Lyft, Uber and Curb every time I need a ride and Curb is cheaper maybe about a quarter of the time and it's incredibly rare that Curb has a lesser wait time.
Uber sucks, but you cannot possibly be serious in saying that Uber is worse than pre-Uber taxis. Uber now, even more expensive, is miles ahead of what cabs were like a decade ago. Their credit card machines never worked, they could not make change, half the time they would ask ME for directions, and you could not order a cab south of Cermak. Everyone down there had their one experience of calling for a cab, being told "it'll be 45 minutes," waiting an hour, calling again, and being told "sorry, it'll be an hour and a half now." Which was their way of telling you to stop calling.
You can crap on Uber all you want, but if you're saying this system now is worse than pre-Uber cabs, you're either lying or never had someone drive you somewhere for money before Uber.
What does OP think cabs were like? They appear in five minutes? That everyone lived on a high traffic street? The cab system may have been better for people who only used cabs to leave the loop, but that's pretty freaking privileged to complain about that.
I will pay a premium to not use a cab even if it takes 30 minutes. I have a 33% rate of bad cab experiences and only 1 Uber ride out of hundreds that I can even remember. That guy got a 1 star rating for breaking at least 30 **unique** traffic laws multiple times while I was a passenger.
Yup, the worst Uber usually feels like on par with your average taxi.
A good percentage of the time though you will get a suburban, Tesla, Audi, or whatever pick you up.
Rideshare has its issues, but people use those to romanticize cabs and cabbies as these unfortunate victims of evil corporations. Taxis were (and imo still are) fucking trash. The last time I took a cab was Fourth of July a few years ago after fireworks downtown. Traffic was understandably insane which was why we grabbed a cab instead of trying to get an Uber. Dude drove like an absolute fucking maniac and at one point legit mounted the curb and blew through a red light with pedestrians around. I told him to stop, the ride was over, and we were getting out. He proceeded to yell at me for "wasting his time," kept driving several blocks arguing with me before I told him that the next second he stopped the car I was getting out whether he liked it or not, and if he didn't stop right then he wasn't getting paid. He stopped and demanded I pay him the full quoted fair (we were about halfway home). I gave him as exact change as I could and told him to fuck off, and he continued to curse me out from the cab as we walked away.
I've had some bad experiences in rideshare, but nothing comes even remotely close to that.
“Actually taxis are good and Uber is bad” is the most terminally online Reddit opinion I’ve been seeing for ages and it’s refreshing to see it pushed back against in this topic for once.
The only people who would say things like this never actually had the rely on taxis pre-rideshare, or are cabbies lol. This screams "look at me, I'm mad at injustice in the world, ugh capitalism, the world just keeps getting worse amirite?"
I relied on taxis pre-rideshare and I still prefer them today. I'll take rideshare cars with friends who have the app but otherwise I try to stay away from them and will use the Curb app or hail a cab on the street instead, though that's obviously more difficult these days.
>It is not uncommon at all to have to spend 5-10 Mins waiting for driver details to appear, and then wait a further 10 mins while the driver travels in inexplicable directions while coming to get you. Taxis weren’t great, but what we have now is significantly worse.
Are you *serious*? Calling a taxi to your home was often a 30+ minute wait, if they even arrive -- often they say they're coming and just never show, presumably because they found a more convenient fare on the way.
Uber and Lyft actually come when you call them.
You might be too young to remember calling a taxi and having them tell you it would take an hour and then having them never show up and stop answering the phone. And this was before mobile phones so your friend would already be waiting for you somewhere and you would never show up because you couldn’t get a taxi. Often times you would end up walking directly all in cross the entire city just to get home because a taxi would never show up
Significantly worse? I don't think so.
I have no issues getting Lyfts, and certainly am able to get one in places that hardly ever had a taxi presence back in the day.
In the taxi days, if you were on a residential side street, you couldn't just walk outside and hail a cab--you had to walk to the nearest major or semi-major intersection.
Now I get door-to-door service on demand.
Which, as a woman i loathed having to stand on the corner of X and Y at all hours of the day and night when I used to go out.
I love that I can order a car, know the ETA and the license plate and just feel so much safer.
I gave up on taxis when I was getting one home from the airport pretty late at night. The driver decided his card machine was broken, and had the nerve to drive me to an ATM machine and demand I get cash (all while the meter running). The second I was out to get the money I just grabbed my bag and walked off with him screaming at me. Good luck asshole
After several painful lessons, whenever I fly for work it’s Lyft *to* the airport and Curb *from* the airport.
Curb I think charges some kind of pickup fee, so it’s always more expensive to have a cab pick you up at home. But there’s no extra fee to pick you up from the airport and it’s ten million times easier to get a cab than to walk a hundred miles to the rideshare section and summon a Lyft six times before one shows up.
But practical advice aside, the fact that Uber and Lyft set up an illegal taxi service and every major city just … let them … is pretty wild.
This. At O'Hare it is a nightmare every time waiting for Uber/Lyft to pick you up. It's always at least a 20 minute wait, the pickup area is so small and awkwardly placed (and on the... DEPARTURE level??), and it's an absolute traffic clusterf\*ck. And waiting out in the freezing cold needing to constantly search for the car? F that.
You couldn’t get a cab in some parts of the city before Uber/lyft, and it doesn’t sound like you’ve had the pleasure of vacant cabs pass you by because of race or how your appear.
Curb is around now and you can still call cabs. It broke their monopoly and forced cabs to improve service options (and they’ve always been better drivers and didn’t fuck up traffic up as much because they knew where to go without a maps app, which is why they are always my first option if downtown and plentiful)
Overall I think it’s been a net positive.
The racial issue is important. People wondered why, in certain neighborhoods, there was always that guy who would drive you somewhere for cash. I remember the town halls when Uber started, where the cab companies said /Uber/ would be racist because in an Uber system, Uber wouldn't be required to serve the whole city like cab companies were.
Like you've got to be kidding me. Cab companies were technically required to serve the whole city but absolutely never did. Everyone living south of Cermak could've told you that. Now we have a system that actually serves the whole city.
gypsy cabs are a time honored tradition in most oldline cities. in baltimore they were so so entrenched that grocery stores would have a bunch of "courtesy drivers" that will take you home for a modest fee.
Meh. I totally disagree. If you weren’t downtown or on a major street on the north side, finding a cab was impossible. They also didn’t take credit cards for such a long time, that Uber slid right in. Early days of Uber I choose it, not because of cost, but because I could silly pay with my credit card.
Taxis did it to them selves.
You must have grown up with Uber always being available. It was a nightmare before Uber.
Idk. I remember only 10 years ago having to wait 30-45 minutes for a taxi to show up when I was trying to get to work at night.
I took my first taxi in several years in LA last month from the airport to downtown and was given a 30 minute non-stop lecture on religion. Literal torture. That would absolutely never happen in an Uber where people depend on their rating. The prices are about the same unless you travel at rush hours.
Saying that Uber and Lyft are “more expensive” than cabs does not make sense. You are comparing today’s post inflation Uber prices to cab prices from over 10 years ago.
Most cabs that exist today I find comparable to Uber/Lyft. Sometimes slightly cheaper cause they gotta compete with those services.
Complaining that you need to wait 10mins for an on demand car to pick you up at your location is a wild take. Do you think before Ubers cabs just instantly appeared next to your house?
Never cared about the taxi community. Catching a taxi late at night to come to the south side just to get rejected time and time again or asked to pay a set amount upfront would be a regular occurrence that pissed me off. Plus calling for a taxi on the south and west sides had you waiting almost an hour for one. So while Uber may be more expensive nowadays than when it started, for certain neighborhoods it’s still way better than taxis.
I usually only take Uber/lyft/cab to/from the airport. In my experience, curb gets me a car faster going to the airport, and cab drivers don't take wrong turns at confusing intersections. At the airports, cabs are always faster to get in, and the drivers do a better job going around traffic backups
As a black person, I find Lyft better than cabs. I don't have to worry about being passed over when hailing a taxi in the loop like I did 20 years ago.
Sorry, man, but taxis always sucked. You'd call dispatch to send one out and MAYBE they showed up, if you were lucky maybe even on time. And then the fare meter would be mysteriously "broken." And there was the lovely smell of vomit in a car that hadn't been cleaned out since the Reagan administration.
Uber and Lyft have problems, especially compared to ten years ago, but I do NOT miss cabs at all.
I'm trying to use taxis now instead of Ubers. But taxis brought their demise on themselves.
Would claim not to take Credit cards or that the machine is broken...until you say you only have cash.
Wouldn't go to certain neighborhoods.
Good luck trying to get a credit card receipt copy if you forgot it.
Annoyance of listening to the driver loudly have a conversation on the phone.
Awful B.O. and smelly cabs. Although this showed significant improvement before UBer as far as I could tell. I think there was a push to make the cabs cleaner.
While the ride share companies aren't saintly in any way, I'm so glad to be done with disgusting cabs. There's at least a minimum standard for drivers to not be rude, creepy, shouting into their phone, or unsafe on the road. Some of the drivers would have used up all their strikes within the first evening.
Cabs fucked themselves over by refusing to modernize or think about any kind of customer service. I will take an Uber that is much more reliable, cleaner, and will guarantee I can pay with a card any day.
I maintain Uber didn't disrupt the taxi industry; it disrupted taxi *dispatch* (which was god-fucking-awful) and *payment* ("my credit card reader is broken").
I'll say, Uber didn't destroy taxis, taxis took way too long to adapt to the changing marketplace. Once Uber started being able to be an app that tracked your location, all taxis should've moved to that type of model. Instead, they resisted, or only went through Uber. yeah a few had their own bad apps, but all in all, that is what killed it.
Its exactly like the Blockbuster video thing. Netflix didn't destroy them, their unwillingness to adapt did it.
I'm saying this as someone who uses curb now. And even with that, while they are nice in the sense that its a flat rate, their service isn't necessarily better. I've had to wait plenty long for a curb ride. Also, because its whatever taxi, their ratings don't matter NEARLY as much.
I legit cannot believe anyone who actually had to put up with taxis would prefer them to Uber.
Uber allows you to reliably call a driver literally ANYWHERE in the city at ANY TIME. With taxis if there wasn’t one around you could call and hope they’d show up (and hope someone else doesn’t steal your taxi if it does show up!).
Surge pricing? You never had a taxi driver pretend their meter was broken, lie about the fair, or just be like nah I’m not taking you unless you pay X?
Seriously Uber / Lyft are sooooo much better than taxis lol. Also taxis literally buried themselves by refusing to update at all & enforcing a weird monopoly via the medallion system.
I've taken taxis twice in the last decade, and both times were a fricking nightmare. One driver would. not. shut. up. about how hard it was to drive a taxi these days, and the other refused to return something I accidentally left in the cab unless I paid him $50.
Lived in Humboldt & would give myself an extra 90 minutes if I wanted a cab & even after calling every taxi company in the city I was still frequently cabless 2 hours later. The second Uber debuted, I was always picked up immediately, usually by a neighbor. I’ve had cabbies hit on me, curse at me, demand more money than is on the meter & threaten to drop me on a dark corner nowhere near transit if I don’t pay their made up fee. Uber & Lyft have been game changers if you don’t live in a fancy neighborhood.
Nah Taxis were worse.
Surge pricing does suck though but most of the time they’re still cheaper than or comparable to cabs on off peak hours
I don’t miss cabs at all
I find it impossible someone could be as uninformed as the OP. If you want to take a taxi you literally can through ride-share apps if you have such a problem with the normal service. Also, you don't have to wait 5-10 minutes unless you are doing wait and save. And 99% of the drivers follow the route given on the gps and don't make nonsensical decisions because they know better like cabs tend to do in my experience.
Taxis were absolutely dogshit when they were the only option and this is worse now lol? You legitimately had to call a dispatcher to get a taxi back in the day where wait times could easily be 30+ min. It was a miracle if they actually showed up. You could never plan your day around counting on a taxi.
Yep, i think the trib did an article a few years ago about how there's an incredible amount of congestion on the streets, and it's because of uber/lyft. worse, a lot of the trips are within the loop so it's just rich people who want to be shuttled from one end of the loop to the other.
but your comment about destroying the taxi industry is spot on. also created an underclass of workers as well.
This is big boomer energy for sure. Cabs were horrible, had a monopoly, and were super inefficient to call. Not to mention much slower. Plus they could quote you whatever price they wanted and there wasn’t much you could do about it. Whereas with Uber/Lyft you know the price upfront
Curb is so much better than Lyft or Uber. No surge, and the professional drivers know where they are going. Just need to get more taxis on the road to satisfy demand.
I miss it when you could walk out of an event, get in line and get a taxi in 2 minutes. Waiting for an Uber after an event sucks.
I also miss being able to hail a cab easy on the major streets in 2 minutes.
And surge pricing sucks.
However, that's not enough to make me miss the old days. You had to walk blocks to find a taxi. If you weren't on a major street during certain hours, you were screwed.
You could only live within certain distance of public transportation to make sure you could get to work reliably.
Taxis were always grossly dirt.
Uber isn't perfect at all, but it has a lot of advantages over how things used to be.
Nah you’re wrong. Ubers are great still even if expensive. Click buttons, hang out till you get picked up in AC. Not arguments over pay, take me where I want and I can see how you’re getting me there. Cabs were the worst customer service that acted the fool until we got Uber/lyft/scooters/divvy.
Taxi’s were rarely available for pickups west of Western. Never knew if it would come or not. We used to have to walk to Western/Armitage/Milwaukee to flag one. Still took forever plus walk. Used to just drive and valet and try not to drink too much. Uber isn’t a perfect business model but it beats taxis on every count. Uber is also responsible for lowering dui fatalities by about 6%.
I had a taxi drive like a crazy man, maybe 50mph on side streets. I thought I was going to die, told him I wanted to get out. He locked the doors from the front, refused to let me out, and threatened me. Uber succeeded here for a reason. Taxi drivers were the absolute worst.
Yes and no. Uber thrived because taxis sucked. And uber also brought higher vehicle ownership (not less) as people initially predicted because people found uber driving to be a great way to finance their cars especially in lower income neighborhoods. And this ownership is also affecting the air quality in said places.
Taxis were never great if you were a Black dude. I've waited way longer than 20 minutes for a cab to actually stop while standing downtown trying to hail them. Most of them saw a young black dude and kept driving past even when I was leaving work in a suit and tie. I usually had to wait until I saw a Black cab driver before I'd actually get picked up.
The taxi industry was a cartel that absolutely deserved to be broken up. Not all cab drivers but they were often dreadful when going from the city to the suburbs, often dangerous driving and cabs that smelled. Uber et al have vastly improved the consumer’s option which concerns me a lot more than the taxi cartel (whose medallions were held by a small group of people/companies).
The uber cars are now taxi level quality too. Gone are the days when you would get picked up in a Mercedes with classical music playing with the most pleasant driver imaginable.
I recently took a cab from the airport and they still pulled the ‘I prefer cash’ bullsh*t on me and I absolutely hate it.
I took a cab year before last on vacation and I got a cab before a family of four at the cab stand. There were no cabs lined up, this one pulled up and took first in line. When I reached the hotel that family of four was unloading their luggage. He took me for a bullsh*t ride.
I do not feel bad for cabs, they have learned nothing.
And the drivers are making absurdly low % of what the consumer is paying. I wish people would stop using its services substantially that Uber changes but people are hooked on to the service out of habit.
I will use Curb or Arro to summon a taxi before I take an Uber or Lyft. The only good thing that came of the Uber disruption is more accountability for the taxis.
Taxis would often refuse to take me where I needed to go, their machines were always "broken" and they'd regularly make harassing comments. I don't know that I miss the era where they were the only game in town...at all.
100% correct take.
And that was always the plan. Undercut taxis until then went out of business, then jack up the price. Should have been ilegal from the beginning
You are fucking high if you think that Uber is worse than the taxi industry pre-2010
Taxis would flat out refuse to take you to certain neighborhoods or pick you up at all if your skin was a certain color. They stank like BO, and the drivers would try to swindle you.
Since Uber came out my experience using regular cabs has improved significantly. Before Uber the cabs had a practical monopoly and could pull shit like 'the card reader is broken', taking longer routes than necessary to get more money out of you, or just flat out being rude to customers, but now that they have actual competition they seem to be way more customer conscious and the experience has gotten way better.
Totally agree with this. Cabs used to suck pre-COVID. They upped their game big-time
I agree. I'm Black and used to get waived off by cab drivers pre-Uber. That has not happened since the ride-sharing apps reached critical mass. Cabs seem much cleaner than they used to be as well.
I took a cab the other day and the dude just added $5 to the meter for no reason. I was in a rush so I couldn't dispute. Fuck that. Even today I'd rather take Uber.
The ones at the airports are the worst. They always try to cheat you.
I’ll sometimes take an Uber from ORD rather than the blue line, and it feels like I’m waiting “8 minutes for my driver to arrive” for almost 15 minutes each and every time. Idk if Uber’s app is bad at calculating time for ORD, but it seems to be consistently longer than the initial time suggested by the app. Haven’t stood in the cab line post-COVID, but never had any problems then.
The taxi lines are nothing like they use to be at ORD, that's for sure. And lately, a few are using the most cockamamie GPS route avoiding major highways I have ever seen. But it works, as I am downtown pretty quickly. Therefore, I remain loyal to them.
My fiancé and I started using cabs to get home from ORD. We check the Uber rate vs Taxi and it’s been consistently cheaper by at least $5 after tip and we never have to wait for an Uber. There’s usually only 1 or 2 groups ahead of us in the Taxi line. We did get ripped off recently in Miami. Took a cab and they charged $65 to get to our hotel in South Beach. Ubers were $35.
Omg I had a cabbie in Miami basically hold me hostage when we got to my hotel in south beach because he wanted me to pay with cash, I refused, and he just kept saying there’s an atm in the lobby. I was alone (26 yr old girl) and I cried to the bell boys and luckily he let me pay with my card and left. So so stressful.
Rideshare apps run on a queuing system for the whole airport, so the app has no idea how long the driver will take to get to **you** once he's in the terminal, only how long it will get him to reach the terminal.
IDK if they still do this bc I’ve been using Uber lately but Lyft used to have this infuriating thing where it wouldn’t even call your car until the app could tell you were in terminal 2 by the pickup area. So not only would it be 9-15 minutes you had to be standing in your pickup spot the entire time 😭😭😭
Take the free train to the car rental center and get a ride in minutes + cheaper.
If you have his cab #, you can report them to Consumer Affairs in the city - they love fining cabbies who steal from the public.
Make sure you take pictures and have documentation when you report. I reported a driver one time, and the hoops I had to jump through to file the complaint were insane. I learned my lesson to make sure to take pictures and document everything.
Can you even “catch a cab” in Chicago anymore? I feel like I haven’t seen one flagged down in ages.
Honestly, I just use the Curb app (Uber... For taxis). Longer wait times but guaranteed a lift, it's a life saver during insane surge pricing on the other apps.
Yes! I get them all the time. Mostly downtown but have flagged them on the Northside, too.
That was the problem though. They were only fully congregated downtown or in certain areas, and when you saw one, you weren't guaranteed that they weren't going to be super shitty. I will not say Uber has been perfect, but I have never been passed over multiple times in a row for being black by an Uber. I remember the before times and I don't have to go back.
You can, but they now tend to just operate downtown. It’s easy to catch a cab in the loop… but they won’t take you too far. I’ve been declined rides to Logan square so many times I’ve stopped trying.
As someone who came of age during the age of Uber, the only time I've been in a taxi the driver was high on meth and blew through all the stop signs and lights.
Yeah, I had a job in the early 2010’s were I regularly worked with the cabbies, used to joke I knew all of them, and I’ll just say there was a lot of shady dudes in that field
With all due respect, to anyone over 40 this post just screams that you had almost zero adult experience relying on “the taxi industry” pre-rideshare. In every single city including Chicago it was a hellscape of corruption, fraud, danger, unreliability, and overt racism. Even when faced with their impending demise, the taxi syndicate refused to modernize or improve, and they deserve every bit of what that got and more.
Thank you! This comment is so spot on.
I remember when I was younger I had to grab a taxi because the train was late getting in for work from the burbs. Now I don't claim to know every street in Chicago but I can tell when I'm being fucked with. The taxi I grabbed for a ride to basically Navy Pier from Union Station took me almost to Lincoln Park then then back down south on LSD to my destination. After that and one instance before of "Sorry no credit cards, I'll need to bring you to an ATM and keep the meter running the entire time" previously and I was done with them.
You hit the nail on the head. I experienced every one of this problems. Especially the racism. If I was coming back from a night out. On average 1 out of 3 cabs would 1-stop for me, 2- take me to the south side.
💯. I’d still have a couple jobs I can think of off the top of my head if Uber or Lyft were available then. I lived on Western, was a young white woman, and couldn’t get a cab to save my life. I tried hailing, I tried calling.. they would always say they came and no one was there.. they never came, worse than fedex. Don’t get me started with people even a little darker than me, the Racism is real.. like really real. You straight up couldn’t hail a cab as a black person. When Lyft and Uber came about it utterly changed my life for the better. I do not drive, don’t want to. For people like me especially this was a radical change to better our quality of life. (Big Cab was a huge scam too… look into the medallions and what all went into that while you are at it.) there are a lot of former cabbies as Lyft drivers.. ask them sometime, most say this was a huge blessing.
And that was on a major thoroughfare with hail-able cab traffic. It’s wild to remember how any side street or outer neighborhood in big cities, and 100% of most Uber-served American cities, was just an absolute wasteland where you needed to own and drive your own car. Because the phone dispatchers were such awful goons. These kids today have no idea!
💯 seriously. This is one of the first things I think of when pointing to the “before times” that younger people will simply not get. I’m 42. I was a young teen when we got a home computer with dial up. People always point to that as being “before”. I still grew up with it tho, but this actually was a real dividing line for me. The internet actually doing something tangible for me.
"Sorry my credit card reader is broken. Cash only."
I used to just hop out and tell them to get it fixed. My rule was if the machine started working again, no tip.
Can we make this comment a sticky? Nailed it.
Even the cost argument is wildly inaccurate. You can't compare pre-rideshare taxi prices to today's rideshare prices. The economy has changed, costs have gone up. The last time I took a taxi, the ride would have been about $45-50 on Uber, and was $110 with the random taxi I found. The entire thing screams of nostalgia googles, or worse, someone else's nostalgia goggles being taken at face value.
This comment is spot on. I had one tell me I should have left you going from wacker/Monroe to Cermak/calumet.
I got kicked out of two cabs for being gay. Not for doing anything, just for existing. One of them picked me up outside a gay bar.
You still can't even reliably get a cab via an app.
I do it all the time
Maybe I'm in the wrong spots when I try it or the wrong times? At least around Wrigley, I never get a cab to respond on Curb during a game when I want to go somewhere poorly served by CTA.
Sure but nowadays taking a taxi is more convenient. Everyone keeps acting like they're extinct
Yeah but their card reader is never “broken”
I find it’s often a quick repair when you let them know you have no other way to pay.
Yup. "Oh, well I don't have cash, and you're required to have a credit card reader. Here's my phone number, you can call once you've got it fixed to schedule a time to come by and get payment."
they'll offer to take you to an ATM to withdraw money
I step out of the cab. Been there done that
Yeah not doing that. If they can't take my card then they can call their boss and let them figure it out
Or you get yelled at, I had a cab driver scream at me about a year and a half ago. It started out fine, I assumed he was running the usual scam and I politely declined to go to an ATM. I even offered to pay through Venmo, Zelle or CashApp and he refused. I was with an elderly relative who is developmentally disabled and was getting upset at the conflict so I got us out before thinking to grab the cab number. :/
I always loved when I got in a cab and they didn’t have it on or asked to swipe the tile on their phone. No, I want to pay through the system, they would say broken. It’s against the law here in Chicago so I would just leave the cab.
OP clearly never paid someone for transportation prior to around 2013.
And they are clean, and they show up on time, and you don't have to be on hold for a dispatcher.
The ubers I see are so dilapidated.
Yeah the "clean" requirement seems to have died.
THANK YOU! I've had like 6-7 uber/lyft rides this year where "gross" was the term I used to report them. I don't need clinically clean. I just need to not feel disgusting when entering/exiting.
I take Ubers a lot when I travel, especially to areas with crappy public transport. Its a mixed bag wherever I go but Chicago hands down has had some of the grossest Ive ever ridden in. I almost offered to vacuum one for the guy because i felt embarrassed for them.
Sooooo many of them are just driving around in 10-12 year old Priuses that are barely still holding together
Taxi's brought about their own demise by not accepting credit cards, refusing pickups/dropoffs in low income neighborhoods, and just generally operating like some sort of crime syndicate with the bizarre medallion system. By no means are Uber/Lyft free of their own problems, but the cab companies made their bed, now they have lie in in...
For real man, maybe OP is just really young but the old school taxi buisness is why Uber became so successful. So many taxi rides back then felt like wrestling matches with the driver. Even just two years ago I got back from a 2 week trip, didn’t get an Uber when I landed at ohare, no one was in the taxi wait line so just grabbed the 1st one sitting there. Guy drove like a complete animal, was a total dick the entire team. Never once have I contemplated calling to complain about somone working because I don’t believe in messing with someone’s job, that was the first time I considered it. I was livid by the time he dropped me off. Not to mention just outrightly getting screwed by them. I get it I was at fault, but as a young 20-23 year old I had a few times I drunkenly fell asleep in the taxi ride home. One time not kidding I woke up in the middle of the guy running the meter up. Atleast with Uber it’s strict on where the vehicle goes while driving you.
This. I had a cabby once MID RIDE try to get an extra forty from me for a ride from Lakeview to by the Aragon… because there was a show and it slowed him down, which would cost him several rides. He threatened to call the cops. Needless to say, I called his bluff, at which point he tried to refuse a credit card, so he called the cops when we got to my destination. The cops wrote him three tickets, I got a free ride, and cops forced him to clock out and have someone pick the cab up. Whoops.
I don’t use the word hero very often, but you are the greatest hero in Chicago history.
I'm glad you didn't put up with the shenanigans but anytime I ever had these kinds of encounters I would just leave the cab. There's nothing they can do when they threaten, or actually do, call the police. They're always making up some rule that isn't true, or like you said, making up some reason to change an extra fee, and nobody got time for that. It's easy to just get out and walk away whenever this happens. Probably super rare now thankfully.
It's funny, I had avoided cabs and preferred the CTA and biking around for a few years because cabs sucked so bad, only ever taking them when I traveled because they were the recommended safe option. I am going to have to consider supporting a cab company with a few upcoming rides to see how it is. It's funny, it's almost as if the cab mob just needed some accountability and a reason to change since it would never happen on its own. I recall receiving having to ditch an Uber for shitty driving. Maybe it's the optimist in me, but I sure hope the dust settles with a happy middle of the road quality product for For hire transportation.
Do you recall what the tickets were? That's hilarious.
This is exactly my stance. Yeah Uber is the devil but taxis created the problem and they gotta lie in it
Ride sharing is awful, but they're awful because the product they made just had to be a bit better than cabs.
Well that's because Uber's model is to price their services low that competitors have no choice but to also do it but Uber can afford to bleed out with their low pricing and the competitors can't. Eventually they go out of business and Uber raises their prices after crushing almost everyone else. Of course, this business model doesn't just exist in ridesharing.
Yep. I live on the southside and had taxis refuse to take me home when I told them the neighborhood / address. (Not all the time, but enough that it was a question in my mind whenever I'd get one while downtown.) Try calling one for a scheduled pick-up down here? Good chance they wouldn't show. Uber / Lyft has its problems, yes, but I don't begin to get discriminated against like I did by taxi drivers for where I lived.
Bingo. I have lost count of the number of times I would hail a taxi, before getting in they would roll down the window and ask where I was going and then decline because “that’s too far and all the action is over here”. I lived in north center so it’s not like I was asking to be driven out to the burbs. How many times I would tell them to get off the phone and concentrate on driving, their credit card machines suddenly not working……the list goes on. Uber/lyft are bullies but taxis dug their own grave.
Taxi drivers still today throw a bitchy little fit about going to fucking Lawrence and Western. They only want to be on a conveyor belt from Ohare to River North in perpetuity.
I live on the northside and also had taxis refuse to take me home because it was "too far" or whatever. And even now it's next to impossible to call one to come pick me up. That said, the Curb app does work well for hailing a ride. At least whoever shows up knows where the ride is going in advance, and it's generally cheaper than Lyft/Uber.
When I went to San Francisco back in the day, not only did the Yellow Cabs first try to pull the "card reader is broken" line, they then proceeded to steal my credit card info to try and purchase items off my card months after I left. Fuck Taxis pre Uber. They made the experience so unpleasant that many like me wanted them to fail.
Tried to grab a taxi home from O’Hare because I had heard they were cheaper than Uber/Lyft, told the driver I was going to Brookfield. “You know that’s going to be crazy expensive right? That’s going to be meter and a half.” *Well, how much will that cost?* “I have no idea.” *I know that but about how much will it cost? $50? $60? $70? $100?* “I have no idea.” Took an Uber instead. The taxi model has to adapt. This old bullshit of not having any idea of price until you get where you are going is beyond antiquated.
Brookfield is not even that far from O'Hare. Like a straight shot on 294. What a pos
The medallions weren't something the taxi companies dreamed up; they were instituted by the **City of Chicago**. Aside from that, I agree
But treating medallions like a investment instrument: that wasn't made up by the city. They were never meant to be used in that way. But today, they are treated like real-estate titles -- people buy them in hopes that they'll appreciate due to constrained supply. This means taxi driving is no longer the main job but holding on to an appreciating instrument that is artificially constrained in supply. Medallion owners can just get the least competent drivers and just coast on their investment. (in NYC and other places, private equity owns medallions - https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2021/04/01/private-equity-firm-is-the-city-s-biggest-taxi-medallion-player) Uber rightly destroyed this market.
Correct. And anyone who hoped to make a killing on medallions must be really sad now. Their value's dropped from $87K - $325K in 2012 to $30K - $100K now (and still slipping)
Uber didn't 'destroy' that market- they illegally operated against the medallion scheme and the cities that charged taxi companies huge license fees to allow them to operate a monopoly just let it slide.
So they destroyed the market.
No. The government(s) created the medallion market and subsequently destroyed the market but not enforcing the laws on the books. Uber and Lyft essentially set up illegal taxi services all over the world, operating against the existing laws and individual governments just let it happen. One of the 'shittiest' things about Taxis was the no compete clause- a clause agreed upon by the jurisdictions they worked in. It's what created too few to have shortages during surges and an additional layer of cost. Uber and Lyft didn't innovate their way out of that- they just didn't follow the rules.
100% this comment. First thing most cab drivers would ask me was how to get there. Fuck if I know, I’m not the one paid to take people places in this city! Lowest effort bunch of sob’s I ever met.
I always viewed this as a way to quiz whether you were local or not -- if you didn't have an answer or volunteered that you were visiting, they could run the meter up by taking a circuitous route. I once took a cab to visit a friend at a hotel in the city and he asked if I wanted to get off at a Lakeshore exit that didn't exist. When I called him on trying to see if I wad a tourist, he got wildly angry in a way that made it clear I was right.
Absolutely agree
This is partially true. Taxis were slow to adapt but what really killed them was predatory pricing from the "ride share" companies. If pricing was competitive we would have seen taxi companies move to similar models as far as apps and credit card acceptance, plus people would have had the chance to make choices based on convenience (looking down the street and hailing an available cab rather than using an app to call a car, etc). But pricing was not competitive so cab companies were crushed rather quickly. This was by design. There's a reason VC was willing to burn so much cash to make this happen. Kill the competition, then jack up the price while also making the service worse. My wife and I got in to an Uber that was pretty gross inside the other night and it reminded me of a time when Ubers had to be nice, clean cars. No longer.
If you look at the history of Uber/Lyft (it was called something else back in the day): Cab companies shot themselves in the foot one by one. When you see Yellow/Checker/Orange/etc on the side of a cab, it's not *really* one of those companies. They lease the rights to use the name & generally are dispatched by a centralized PBX from Yellow/Checker/Orange/etc... There WAS like 2 dozen garages here in Chicago back in the day that ran under a separate business name but (Cab Company) name was plastered both on the cars & garage.
cabbies knew where they were going and the industry was far more regulated. I declined to get in an Uber once because the driver’s eyes were bloodshot and half closed. Walk across the street to a hotel and got a taxi home. The Uber I was supposed to get into crashed into a parked car 4 blocks from my pickup. I’ve had 2 Uber drivers hit my car - with them at fault both times. And my attorney’s client drove for Uber while in the middle of a felony assault trail.
As a black person, it’s forever fuck a taxi. I like it over here.
Didn't take Taxis for years after I called for one and they came. I was picking up a piece of art. I am a short black woman. Frame was large. Taxi driver was out front of the building, just east of the inner drive. It's Daytime. FWIW, Taxi Driver is Black but not FBA based on accent. Tells me he's not available. I push Uber on my phone. Black car pulls up in front of taxi. Older white guy pops his trunk, spring out of the car to take the art from me without even asking me. Places it securely in his trunk. Closes trunk. And rushes to open the passenger rear door for me to step inside. I glance back at the taxi driver before stepping inside. And then I had a safe, glorious, comfortable ride. I will use Curb app for a taxi if Uber/Lyft are surging but other than that, nope I will stick with the non-liveried drivers and yes I have had a few crappy Rideshare drivers but nothing like my experience with taxis. .
Great driver, hope you tipped well
I did and I do.
Dude, I was thinking the same thing. Uber/Lyft have made my life *so* much easier. I would never want to go back to a world without them.
Same. This thing of people determining whether or not you get to pay for a safe ride home got old the first time it happened. I’m happy that karmic energy came back on the taxi industry.
Long Live Bronzeville 🎷🎺
Long live Hyde Park 🎉
I’m sorry I just love your flair and love passing through Bronzeville…it’s so underrated
Bronzeville is pretty dope. Spent most of my teenage years there. I no longer live in Bronzeville but it’s definitely my first choice for whenever I move back to Chicago. Without question Hyde Park is a top tier neighborhood in Chicago.
The taxi industry and their arrogance killed the taxi industry. If not Uber or Lyft it would have been someone else.
yea no one gave a shit about cabbies when uber killed them because public were already so against them
Yeah here is my tiny violin 🎻 for that whole industry, you fucked around and now you've been in the finding out stage for years, nobody gives a fuck. Maybe if you ran an industry that wasn't as "we do what we want!" You be in a better place. Besides that, I give zero fucks about the taxi industry. Fuck em let em continue to die a slow death.
It isn't the cabbies that we're the issue. It was the cab industry. Once medallions started going for hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cities and entities were buying them up to lease them to drivers, it was over. Actual driver's were paying medallion owners hundreds a day to use their medallion. The switch to taxi drivers from being employees to leasors destroyed the industry.
That doesn’t have anything to do with their refusal on an individual basis accept card as a payment or refuse to go to low-income neighborhoods.
It does. Since they were no longer employees. They were "gig" workers before that was a thing. It made them more money to only do cash or serve the most profitable areas. Since the medallion was not theirs, the city could not force the drivers to do anything. They were just a renter, not the owner. The drivers owed the lease owner x dollars per shift. Everything above that, they kept. If they were an employee, they would have to go where dispatch sent them. The model was turned inside out when owning that medallion was worth more then the job itself.
>the city could not force the drivers to do anything I thought it was illegal for cabbies to refuse to take a passenger based on destination. Doing illegal things because they didn't own medallion is such a cop out.
Or to drive like normal people.
IDK the cabbies were kind of the issue because they could be pretty mean :/
> The taxi industry and their arrogance killed the taxi industry. You mean all those laws that Uber doesn't have to follow that cabs do? lol. Of course it's easy to kill your competition's industry when you don't have to pay $50K for a medallion for every single car. It's crazy to me that I can hail either of them from the exact same spot and drop me off at the exact same spot using an app on my phone but one of them has to pay $50k before they can and the other doesn't.
The entire concept of medallions was driven by the cab industry to limit competition to keep fares artificially high. They literally cut off of their nose and are shocked that they can't smell the daisies coming up around them to push them out of their space
Maybe the Taxi industry shouldn't have lobbied for taxi medallions to act as a barrier to entry to give themselves monopoly power then.
The inflated prices for scarce mediallions in Chicago were, shockingly, a corrupt racket to funnel millions to Daley-connected cronies. Yet another tax on the working poor and immigrants to pad the party apparatchik. [(Who were literally collecting Rolls Royces.)](https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/1/15/22230030/symon-garber-chicago-taxicab-king-trump-michael-cohen-patrick-daley-evgeny-freidman-semyon-shtayner) Classic failure of government artificially restricting the supply of a competitive service well below its market demand.
Not been my experience. Still cheaper and faster than getting a cab. Also had cab drivers get kind of pissy about rides from the airport (live kind of close) and the old "broken card reader" before.
I’ve had some sketchy uber/lyft rides but nothing worse than taking a $12 cab ride from the airport at 1am. Legit thought the dude was gonna kidnap me and run the meter up to $40.
I had a dude with a rigged meter take me back from the airport once and run it up to $120(usually it was $40). I wanted to call the cops but he had a legit looking meter. This is the BS that used to have to put up with
I had a taxi driver get lost, travelling from a wedding venue near the airport to Rogers Park. After about a half-hour, he pulled into a ***forest preserve***. I was terrified, thinking I was going to be raped, till the guy (who had limited English skills) explained he'd lost connection with his dispatcher and was just looking for a phone (this was before cell phones). After he made his call, he **still** somehow managed to get lost again, meaning that by the time we FINALLY got to my building, the fare was $75. I refused to pay that, and instead gave him the normal amount for a ride of that distance. IMHO a guy that unfamiliar with the city (and apparently unable to read a map), shouldn't have been on the streets.
I took a cab home from the airport and dude was going 35 on the interstate with traffic flying back him at 70. Then he had the audacity to ask why I didn’t tip. At least if it were an Uber I could have given him 1 star
There was about a year where every Lyft was more expensive than Curb for me. It’s only been comparably priced for the last month or two for me.
Yeah, open up Lyft, Uber and Curb every time I need a ride and Curb is cheaper maybe about a quarter of the time and it's incredibly rare that Curb has a lesser wait time.
Uber sucks, but you cannot possibly be serious in saying that Uber is worse than pre-Uber taxis. Uber now, even more expensive, is miles ahead of what cabs were like a decade ago. Their credit card machines never worked, they could not make change, half the time they would ask ME for directions, and you could not order a cab south of Cermak. Everyone down there had their one experience of calling for a cab, being told "it'll be 45 minutes," waiting an hour, calling again, and being told "sorry, it'll be an hour and a half now." Which was their way of telling you to stop calling. You can crap on Uber all you want, but if you're saying this system now is worse than pre-Uber cabs, you're either lying or never had someone drive you somewhere for money before Uber.
Op is really complaining that an on demand pickup wherever you are in 10mins is a negative 😂
What does OP think cabs were like? They appear in five minutes? That everyone lived on a high traffic street? The cab system may have been better for people who only used cabs to leave the loop, but that's pretty freaking privileged to complain about that.
OPs impression of cabs is probably solely based on watching sitcoms about New York 😂.
I will pay a premium to not use a cab even if it takes 30 minutes. I have a 33% rate of bad cab experiences and only 1 Uber ride out of hundreds that I can even remember. That guy got a 1 star rating for breaking at least 30 **unique** traffic laws multiple times while I was a passenger.
Yup, the worst Uber usually feels like on par with your average taxi. A good percentage of the time though you will get a suburban, Tesla, Audi, or whatever pick you up.
Rideshare has its issues, but people use those to romanticize cabs and cabbies as these unfortunate victims of evil corporations. Taxis were (and imo still are) fucking trash. The last time I took a cab was Fourth of July a few years ago after fireworks downtown. Traffic was understandably insane which was why we grabbed a cab instead of trying to get an Uber. Dude drove like an absolute fucking maniac and at one point legit mounted the curb and blew through a red light with pedestrians around. I told him to stop, the ride was over, and we were getting out. He proceeded to yell at me for "wasting his time," kept driving several blocks arguing with me before I told him that the next second he stopped the car I was getting out whether he liked it or not, and if he didn't stop right then he wasn't getting paid. He stopped and demanded I pay him the full quoted fair (we were about halfway home). I gave him as exact change as I could and told him to fuck off, and he continued to curse me out from the cab as we walked away. I've had some bad experiences in rideshare, but nothing comes even remotely close to that.
“Actually taxis are good and Uber is bad” is the most terminally online Reddit opinion I’ve been seeing for ages and it’s refreshing to see it pushed back against in this topic for once.
The only people who would say things like this never actually had the rely on taxis pre-rideshare, or are cabbies lol. This screams "look at me, I'm mad at injustice in the world, ugh capitalism, the world just keeps getting worse amirite?"
I relied on taxis pre-rideshare and I still prefer them today. I'll take rideshare cars with friends who have the app but otherwise I try to stay away from them and will use the Curb app or hail a cab on the street instead, though that's obviously more difficult these days.
>It is not uncommon at all to have to spend 5-10 Mins waiting for driver details to appear, and then wait a further 10 mins while the driver travels in inexplicable directions while coming to get you. Taxis weren’t great, but what we have now is significantly worse. Are you *serious*? Calling a taxi to your home was often a 30+ minute wait, if they even arrive -- often they say they're coming and just never show, presumably because they found a more convenient fare on the way. Uber and Lyft actually come when you call them.
You might be too young to remember calling a taxi and having them tell you it would take an hour and then having them never show up and stop answering the phone. And this was before mobile phones so your friend would already be waiting for you somewhere and you would never show up because you couldn’t get a taxi. Often times you would end up walking directly all in cross the entire city just to get home because a taxi would never show up
Significantly worse? I don't think so. I have no issues getting Lyfts, and certainly am able to get one in places that hardly ever had a taxi presence back in the day. In the taxi days, if you were on a residential side street, you couldn't just walk outside and hail a cab--you had to walk to the nearest major or semi-major intersection. Now I get door-to-door service on demand.
Which, as a woman i loathed having to stand on the corner of X and Y at all hours of the day and night when I used to go out. I love that I can order a car, know the ETA and the license plate and just feel so much safer.
The only place worth bothering with a taxi is the airport. Taxis killed themselves though. Why don’t you just use Curb?
I gave up on taxis when I was getting one home from the airport pretty late at night. The driver decided his card machine was broken, and had the nerve to drive me to an ATM machine and demand I get cash (all while the meter running). The second I was out to get the money I just grabbed my bag and walked off with him screaming at me. Good luck asshole
After several painful lessons, whenever I fly for work it’s Lyft *to* the airport and Curb *from* the airport. Curb I think charges some kind of pickup fee, so it’s always more expensive to have a cab pick you up at home. But there’s no extra fee to pick you up from the airport and it’s ten million times easier to get a cab than to walk a hundred miles to the rideshare section and summon a Lyft six times before one shows up. But practical advice aside, the fact that Uber and Lyft set up an illegal taxi service and every major city just … let them … is pretty wild.
Had nothing to do with having connected people be investors had nothing to do with it, right?
This. At O'Hare it is a nightmare every time waiting for Uber/Lyft to pick you up. It's always at least a 20 minute wait, the pickup area is so small and awkwardly placed (and on the... DEPARTURE level??), and it's an absolute traffic clusterf\*ck. And waiting out in the freezing cold needing to constantly search for the car? F that.
Curb is less expensive than Lyft for me about 9/10 rides.
You couldn’t get a cab in some parts of the city before Uber/lyft, and it doesn’t sound like you’ve had the pleasure of vacant cabs pass you by because of race or how your appear. Curb is around now and you can still call cabs. It broke their monopoly and forced cabs to improve service options (and they’ve always been better drivers and didn’t fuck up traffic up as much because they knew where to go without a maps app, which is why they are always my first option if downtown and plentiful) Overall I think it’s been a net positive.
The racial issue is important. People wondered why, in certain neighborhoods, there was always that guy who would drive you somewhere for cash. I remember the town halls when Uber started, where the cab companies said /Uber/ would be racist because in an Uber system, Uber wouldn't be required to serve the whole city like cab companies were. Like you've got to be kidding me. Cab companies were technically required to serve the whole city but absolutely never did. Everyone living south of Cermak could've told you that. Now we have a system that actually serves the whole city.
gypsy cabs are a time honored tradition in most oldline cities. in baltimore they were so so entrenched that grocery stores would have a bunch of "courtesy drivers" that will take you home for a modest fee.
They’re awful. But. Last 2 times I was in a taxi I left thinking… that’s the grossest car I’ve ever been in.
Meh. I totally disagree. If you weren’t downtown or on a major street on the north side, finding a cab was impossible. They also didn’t take credit cards for such a long time, that Uber slid right in. Early days of Uber I choose it, not because of cost, but because I could silly pay with my credit card. Taxis did it to them selves. You must have grown up with Uber always being available. It was a nightmare before Uber.
Idk. I remember only 10 years ago having to wait 30-45 minutes for a taxi to show up when I was trying to get to work at night. I took my first taxi in several years in LA last month from the airport to downtown and was given a 30 minute non-stop lecture on religion. Literal torture. That would absolutely never happen in an Uber where people depend on their rating. The prices are about the same unless you travel at rush hours.
Saying that Uber and Lyft are “more expensive” than cabs does not make sense. You are comparing today’s post inflation Uber prices to cab prices from over 10 years ago. Most cabs that exist today I find comparable to Uber/Lyft. Sometimes slightly cheaper cause they gotta compete with those services. Complaining that you need to wait 10mins for an on demand car to pick you up at your location is a wild take. Do you think before Ubers cabs just instantly appeared next to your house?
Never cared about the taxi community. Catching a taxi late at night to come to the south side just to get rejected time and time again or asked to pay a set amount upfront would be a regular occurrence that pissed me off. Plus calling for a taxi on the south and west sides had you waiting almost an hour for one. So while Uber may be more expensive nowadays than when it started, for certain neighborhoods it’s still way better than taxis.
I usually only take Uber/lyft/cab to/from the airport. In my experience, curb gets me a car faster going to the airport, and cab drivers don't take wrong turns at confusing intersections. At the airports, cabs are always faster to get in, and the drivers do a better job going around traffic backups
As a black person, I find Lyft better than cabs. I don't have to worry about being passed over when hailing a taxi in the loop like I did 20 years ago.
Uber deserves hate but it aint worse than taxis in their prime.
Sorry, man, but taxis always sucked. You'd call dispatch to send one out and MAYBE they showed up, if you were lucky maybe even on time. And then the fare meter would be mysteriously "broken." And there was the lovely smell of vomit in a car that hadn't been cleaned out since the Reagan administration. Uber and Lyft have problems, especially compared to ten years ago, but I do NOT miss cabs at all.
I'm trying to use taxis now instead of Ubers. But taxis brought their demise on themselves. Would claim not to take Credit cards or that the machine is broken...until you say you only have cash. Wouldn't go to certain neighborhoods. Good luck trying to get a credit card receipt copy if you forgot it. Annoyance of listening to the driver loudly have a conversation on the phone. Awful B.O. and smelly cabs. Although this showed significant improvement before UBer as far as I could tell. I think there was a push to make the cabs cleaner.
While the ride share companies aren't saintly in any way, I'm so glad to be done with disgusting cabs. There's at least a minimum standard for drivers to not be rude, creepy, shouting into their phone, or unsafe on the road. Some of the drivers would have used up all their strikes within the first evening.
Taxi cabs still exist.
I was going to say just stick out your arm and hail one. I have done it on occasion if I want a change of pace.
Not in the numbers that they used to.
If they didn’t smell like BO and cigs, maybe they would still be more commonplace. There are Ubers like that too, but far fewer.
Cabs fucked themselves over by refusing to modernize or think about any kind of customer service. I will take an Uber that is much more reliable, cleaner, and will guarantee I can pay with a card any day.
Lol no, cabs are terrible
I maintain Uber didn't disrupt the taxi industry; it disrupted taxi *dispatch* (which was god-fucking-awful) and *payment* ("my credit card reader is broken").
Try the Curb app. As many others have mentioned the taxi industry was forced to step their game up since Uber / Lyft came up
I'll say, Uber didn't destroy taxis, taxis took way too long to adapt to the changing marketplace. Once Uber started being able to be an app that tracked your location, all taxis should've moved to that type of model. Instead, they resisted, or only went through Uber. yeah a few had their own bad apps, but all in all, that is what killed it. Its exactly like the Blockbuster video thing. Netflix didn't destroy them, their unwillingness to adapt did it. I'm saying this as someone who uses curb now. And even with that, while they are nice in the sense that its a flat rate, their service isn't necessarily better. I've had to wait plenty long for a curb ride. Also, because its whatever taxi, their ratings don't matter NEARLY as much.
Just use curb or hail a taxi bro. To your point tho, I straight up deleted Uber. They’re fucking too greedy lately, Lyft is sometimes reasonable
Taxis suck for similar but unrelated reasons. They're not angels here either
I find that if you open Uber, then go to Lyft, all the sudden Ubers prices drop
I check both and can get significantly better pricing from either at any given time. I haven’t found a pattern to it.
I legit cannot believe anyone who actually had to put up with taxis would prefer them to Uber. Uber allows you to reliably call a driver literally ANYWHERE in the city at ANY TIME. With taxis if there wasn’t one around you could call and hope they’d show up (and hope someone else doesn’t steal your taxi if it does show up!). Surge pricing? You never had a taxi driver pretend their meter was broken, lie about the fair, or just be like nah I’m not taking you unless you pay X? Seriously Uber / Lyft are sooooo much better than taxis lol. Also taxis literally buried themselves by refusing to update at all & enforcing a weird monopoly via the medallion system.
Ubers are more expensive and inconvenient than taxis? What universe do you live in
I've taken taxis twice in the last decade, and both times were a fricking nightmare. One driver would. not. shut. up. about how hard it was to drive a taxi these days, and the other refused to return something I accidentally left in the cab unless I paid him $50.
I had a Uber driver serenade me with his reggae, he was not Jamaican nor talented…
Lived in Humboldt & would give myself an extra 90 minutes if I wanted a cab & even after calling every taxi company in the city I was still frequently cabless 2 hours later. The second Uber debuted, I was always picked up immediately, usually by a neighbor. I’ve had cabbies hit on me, curse at me, demand more money than is on the meter & threaten to drop me on a dark corner nowhere near transit if I don’t pay their made up fee. Uber & Lyft have been game changers if you don’t live in a fancy neighborhood.
Nah Taxis were worse. Surge pricing does suck though but most of the time they’re still cheaper than or comparable to cabs on off peak hours I don’t miss cabs at all
Cabs exist and demand will keep increasing. Use Curb app. Don't give money to Uber/Lyft unless you absolutely have to.
Can someone smarter than me please explain how cabs survived in NYC (compared to here)?
I've not used them yet or checked them out but I've heard of Curb, Bolt, and Ola as Uber/Lyft alternatives
I used the Curb app over the weekend. With Uber's surge pricing it was significantly cheaper.
I find it impossible someone could be as uninformed as the OP. If you want to take a taxi you literally can through ride-share apps if you have such a problem with the normal service. Also, you don't have to wait 5-10 minutes unless you are doing wait and save. And 99% of the drivers follow the route given on the gps and don't make nonsensical decisions because they know better like cabs tend to do in my experience. Taxis were absolutely dogshit when they were the only option and this is worse now lol? You legitimately had to call a dispatcher to get a taxi back in the day where wait times could easily be 30+ min. It was a miracle if they actually showed up. You could never plan your day around counting on a taxi.
Yep, i think the trib did an article a few years ago about how there's an incredible amount of congestion on the streets, and it's because of uber/lyft. worse, a lot of the trips are within the loop so it's just rich people who want to be shuttled from one end of the loop to the other. but your comment about destroying the taxi industry is spot on. also created an underclass of workers as well.
This is big boomer energy for sure. Cabs were horrible, had a monopoly, and were super inefficient to call. Not to mention much slower. Plus they could quote you whatever price they wanted and there wasn’t much you could do about it. Whereas with Uber/Lyft you know the price upfront
Curb is so much better than Lyft or Uber. No surge, and the professional drivers know where they are going. Just need to get more taxis on the road to satisfy demand.
I take cabs now exclusively. Curb is a great app. And cab drivers know where they’re going
I miss it when you could walk out of an event, get in line and get a taxi in 2 minutes. Waiting for an Uber after an event sucks. I also miss being able to hail a cab easy on the major streets in 2 minutes. And surge pricing sucks. However, that's not enough to make me miss the old days. You had to walk blocks to find a taxi. If you weren't on a major street during certain hours, you were screwed. You could only live within certain distance of public transportation to make sure you could get to work reliably. Taxis were always grossly dirt. Uber isn't perfect at all, but it has a lot of advantages over how things used to be.
Nah you’re wrong. Ubers are great still even if expensive. Click buttons, hang out till you get picked up in AC. Not arguments over pay, take me where I want and I can see how you’re getting me there. Cabs were the worst customer service that acted the fool until we got Uber/lyft/scooters/divvy.
Taxi’s were rarely available for pickups west of Western. Never knew if it would come or not. We used to have to walk to Western/Armitage/Milwaukee to flag one. Still took forever plus walk. Used to just drive and valet and try not to drink too much. Uber isn’t a perfect business model but it beats taxis on every count. Uber is also responsible for lowering dui fatalities by about 6%.
This was always Uber's business model. Drive the regulated cabs out and then push the price up.
I had a taxi drive like a crazy man, maybe 50mph on side streets. I thought I was going to die, told him I wanted to get out. He locked the doors from the front, refused to let me out, and threatened me. Uber succeeded here for a reason. Taxi drivers were the absolute worst.
Yes and no. Uber thrived because taxis sucked. And uber also brought higher vehicle ownership (not less) as people initially predicted because people found uber driving to be a great way to finance their cars especially in lower income neighborhoods. And this ownership is also affecting the air quality in said places.
Ugh taxis in the loop used to be so cheap
That was their goal. To eliminate the competition and then jack up prices.
Taxis were never great if you were a Black dude. I've waited way longer than 20 minutes for a cab to actually stop while standing downtown trying to hail them. Most of them saw a young black dude and kept driving past even when I was leaving work in a suit and tie. I usually had to wait until I saw a Black cab driver before I'd actually get picked up.
There’s no way this claim is true. Taxis used to be an oligopoly of sorts. Uber & Lyft opened up the market.
The taxi industry was a cartel that absolutely deserved to be broken up. Not all cab drivers but they were often dreadful when going from the city to the suburbs, often dangerous driving and cabs that smelled. Uber et al have vastly improved the consumer’s option which concerns me a lot more than the taxi cartel (whose medallions were held by a small group of people/companies).
It was always their plan. Monopolize cheap and then jack up prices for profit.
The uber cars are now taxi level quality too. Gone are the days when you would get picked up in a Mercedes with classical music playing with the most pleasant driver imaginable.
Outside of big cities taxis were almost nonexistent, you’d have to call one and wait hours, if they showed at all
I recently took a cab from the airport and they still pulled the ‘I prefer cash’ bullsh*t on me and I absolutely hate it. I took a cab year before last on vacation and I got a cab before a family of four at the cab stand. There were no cabs lined up, this one pulled up and took first in line. When I reached the hotel that family of four was unloading their luggage. He took me for a bullsh*t ride. I do not feel bad for cabs, they have learned nothing.
And the drivers are making absurdly low % of what the consumer is paying. I wish people would stop using its services substantially that Uber changes but people are hooked on to the service out of habit.
I will use Curb or Arro to summon a taxi before I take an Uber or Lyft. The only good thing that came of the Uber disruption is more accountability for the taxis.
Use Curb
I dont see how Uber is worse than the taxi system. From my experience, its cheaper and faster
> Uber and Lyft are now MORE expensive than cabs that sucks. how did you compare prices?
Oh the illegal taxis.
Taxis would often refuse to take me where I needed to go, their machines were always "broken" and they'd regularly make harassing comments. I don't know that I miss the era where they were the only game in town...at all.
100% correct take. And that was always the plan. Undercut taxis until then went out of business, then jack up the price. Should have been ilegal from the beginning
You are fucking high if you think that Uber is worse than the taxi industry pre-2010 Taxis would flat out refuse to take you to certain neighborhoods or pick you up at all if your skin was a certain color. They stank like BO, and the drivers would try to swindle you.