Not that it disproves your point, but Edinburgh taxi service has always been in a league of its own. I have seldom seen one take more than 2 minutes to arrive,

Not that it disproves your point, but Edinburgh taxi service has always been in a league of its own. I have seldom seen one take more than 2 minutes to arrive, even in the days when you had to gasp telephone. I think there's some clever organization on the backend. Whatever makes Uber work, the whole regulatory-end-run driver-exploitation angle is not essential to it.