Uber is broken in my city now. They don't pay very well, so there aren't many drivers. The drivers that are around will accept a ride, then fuck around for a w

Uber is broken in my city now. They don't pay very well, so there aren't many drivers. The drivers that are around will accept a ride, then fuck around for a while, driving further away, doing whatever (no, there are no scheduled drop-offs, they deliberately waste time). Then you cancel, then when you try to re-book to get a different driver ... oh look, surge pricing, it's an extra $20 for that journey now. This is the point at which I pull out the (crappy) app for the local taxi service, that uber nearly drove out of business, who now offer a more reliable and usually cheaper ride. In fact increasingly I don't look at the uber app first any more. It was never a good idea to allow a VC funded loss-maker to compete in pretty much every market worldwide, using this subsidy to undercut the local firms while somehow dreaming of extracting 20% on every ride. It was always going to have to raise prices to succeed, and the only way it was going to be able to do that was by using its stacks of cash to run at a loss for long enough to destroy the competition completely. I'm just glad it failed to finish the job.