To me the biggest "innovation" of Uber is how they were able to strong-arm municipalities into allowing regular people to use their cars effectively as taxis wi

To me the biggest "innovation" of Uber is how they were able to strong-arm municipalities into allowing regular people to use their cars effectively as taxis without having to deal with any special regulation or taxes. Whether this is good or bad is up for debate. The other aspect -- being able to hail a car from an app and know (within reasonable bounds) how much the ride will cost in advance -- is not much of an innovation technically, but considering that the cab companies could have something similar and failed to do so, the innovation is showing that the logistics of it can work