As you seem to have acknowledge, it is untrue that the more people using a taxi service, the longer you have to wait for a cab for obvious reasons - namely cab

As you seem to have acknowledge, it is untrue that the more people using a taxi service, the longer you have to wait for a cab for obvious reasons - namely cab rides end. Imagine in a city there is a cab service which services about 1 million people at a time. And there is a service which services about 100 people at a time. How likely is it that a cab is going to be concluding a ride near to your pick up point with both services? Which is more likely to have an idle cab near you? How long would you expect to have to wait for each service? Autonomous taxis also completely revolutionize the possibilities for scale. Cars mostly only deteriorate when in active use. Massively oversupply will likely be a thing in some areas opening up possibilities like your sports event thing. People aren't going to be going to the streets to try to find a ride. There will be hundreds outside the stadium - and the cool thing is anybody using the monopolized company should be able to hop into any cab and it'll auto sync to their destination and they'll be off, rapidly replaced by another cab from the monopolist ensuring 0 wait for other users. And then we get into cost, something you continue to inexplicably ignore. Right now there is no room for economy of scale to affect the price of taxis. I'm not going to repeat myself as I've gone into this above. Suffice to say, the biggest player is going to be the cheapest and by a wide margin. So your dozen taxis are going to be less reliable, more expensive, likely less well maintained, require people to install yet another app, and also face a trust issue. Self driving technology will likely be closed source and proprietary for some time. So on top of all of the above issues you'll require users jump into an unknown car, from an unknown brand, using who knows what software and security standards. And this isn't getting into the tertiary developments of self driving vehicles. We'll likely see the introduction of services (that hopefully can be disabled) that tie in the taxi to commercial agreements from the monopolist. For instance, you're passing by a coffee shop and the car offers to order a coffee for you for 50% off. You needn't pay anything (all charged through the monopolist's finance infrastructure) and a server will bring it out for you. Wait time - approximately 30 seconds. I'd assume things like that can be disabled, but on the other hand they'll be kind of nice when you're in the mood - you could also perhaps simply ask the car if there are any deals nearby on [---]. Ultimately self driving taxis will be a paradigm shift. Comparing them to current taxis (or even ride sharing services) will likely be as quaint a notion as considering there was a time when we classified automobiles as "horseless carriages."