Cabs and car service existed long before Uber. Bars almost always have a list of car and cab services plus the bartender can call you a cab if you're too drunk to call yourself. Seen it plenty of times.
While true, recent studies show that ride-sharing apps reduced deaths due to intoxicated driving by over 6%, which amounts to hundreds of lives per year.
> I've always avoided Cabs (largely because of lack of trust), while Uber basically fixes cabs' problems for me.
I can say with confidence that I don't trust an Uber driver any more than a car/cab driver. Sure, ive been in sketch cabs and cars with intoxicated drivers or some dick who runs the meter up after you fall asleep - those are rare and I can count them on one hand.
Uber gives you the illusion of being abetter cab service while being markedly worse in some ways. Okay, you voted out a shitty driver with one star - there are a 1000 more waiting to fill that position. I've been in numerous filthy Ubers, drivers who are possibly intoxicated, drivers who got their license in a cereal box, and cars who's mechanical status is questionable (severely worn suspension, squealing brakes, etc.) You vote one out and another scurries in.
Don't get me wrong, I use Uber and Lyft mostly because its tough getting car service as many went out of business. But its no utopia and the safety and quality of the rides is not better in any way.
"Computer-dispatched" taxis would answer those questions when you called for a taxi in the times before Uber. Uber didn't invent those things, it just capitalized on them with better marketing.
I believe taxi in my city still has nothing like that. Or maybe some companies I don't know about? I also get to travel to other cities and researching local taxi companies is not an activity I'm looking forward to.
Some cities never got it or finding it was harder than it should be. Sometimes that was because of incumbent momentum or regulations. Some cities had good "radio-dispatch" laws that made sense at the times they were passed, but those then stymied "computer-dispatch" decades later as those improvements were made available.
There was a brief few years where a couple of big US taxi franchises had "computer-dispatch" labels and you could use that to select between alternatives.
Unfortunately, Uber disrupted the industry in so many wild and interesting ways. The most useful franchise I was aware of with "computer-dispatched" taxis in multiple cities I traveled between apparently broke apart competing with Uber and some of the franchise cities just outsourced the work to Uber or Lyft or other competitor or built entirely new names/brands separate from the old national franchises and figuring out which one is which is so much more challenging than it was for a brief few years in my experiences before Uber started up.
(In the mid-oughts, I used to have a "Yellow Cab" phone number memorized that was the same 7 digit number in multiple cities, you just swapped the local area code you were standing in. That number is basically out of service in one of those cities and goes to very different branded taxi companies in the rest, some of which then just have messages telling you to book them on Uber or Lyft or Some Random App.)
I got stuck once in the middle of the day in a million plus sized US city (not Dallas) where every single cab company I called just flat refused to get me anything within the next hour, and no promises after. Just nothing. No public transport that went where I needed to be, of course. Since I was there for work, I luckily had a phone number of a coworker (whom I never met before) that I had to call and beg to rescue me. Never had such situation once uber/lyft came up.
Cabs and car services were (and still are if we ignore Uber and Lyft) effectively non-existent in many small to medium sized towns. And where they existed, they were exorbitantly priced. Where I lived (while Uber and Lyft were becoming popular) the local taxi service had around a dozen cars for a community of around 250k people. The only other transportation services were catering to the elderly and infirmed and pretty much just drove to hospitals and clinics.
Uber and Lyft introduced an option there (and in many similar towns and cities) that did not, or effectively did not, exist at the time.
There you go. I have been visiting NYC for two decades now and could rely on cabs to a large extent. But haven't seen any reliable cab network like that in other parts of the US (SV, Austin, LA, Seattle, Denver-Boulder, ...).
> ubiquity of everyone having a button on their phone
I mean you just pressed a few more buttons and told the cab company where you were headed and they'd show up in a reasonable 15 min or so. I'm an NYC native and took a lot of cabs and car services - not saying it was perfect - but it wasn't a dystopia. I can only once recall having trouble getting a cab from park slope to ozone park - there were no cars around.
Waiting was simply due to the nature of the cab/car market back then - cabs were radio dispatched and yellow cabs only cared about Manhattan and JFK/LaGuardia leaving us outlier schmucks with a paltry selection of mom and pop car services with few cars.
