There are a few reasons this is hard. 1) I'd imagine there are significant costs to entering a new city. Uber is a two-sided marketplace so in any new city Ube

There are a few reasons this is hard. 1) I'd imagine there are significant costs to entering a new city. Uber is a two-sided marketplace so in any new city Uber needs to invest resources and time into acquiring supply/drivers and to a lesser extent users. Combine this with the operational support to maintain that marketplace and the overhead becomes non-negligible. 2) First mover advantage is a real thing so any ride-sharing network that enters a city with an established player is going to have a harder time acquiring the aforementioned supply/demand. 3) When more than one ride-sharing company is in a city it eventually turns into a subsidy war for demand. From what I have read this is what happened to Uber competing with Didi in China and resulted in massive losses for both companies. TL;DR entering new markets is in fact pretty expensive, and far more so when there is existing competition.