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One thing I will say in their favor is that it if someone dives in I'm sure they will find it was a massive economic boom for late night entertainment venues, e
by jedberg 4y ago
One thing I will say in their favor is that it if someone dives in I'm sure they will find it was a massive economic boom for late night entertainment venues, especially in Los Angeles and other car dependent cities.
When I was younger, going out in LA was a huge pain. You had to figure out who would be the DD, how you would carpool, how you'd get all the cars home in the morning, where you'd park them overnight while you were sleeping off the hangover, etc.
Now you just call an Uber/Lyft, everyone can have a drink, and you can all sleep in your own beds that night (or someone else's, whatever floats your boat).
- ugjka 4y agoNo Taxis in L.A?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y agoI heard of taxis, not sure I saw one anywhere other than the airport.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mk_stjames 4y agoYou could never get a taxi from a warehouse in LA to the south bay cities at 6AM before uber. You'd get laughed at. You pretty much had to have a place to crash or you're out $100 and you were waiting a while for the cab.
- kristjansson 4y agoNone competitive with Uber/Lyft. Too much sprawl to for hailing to be viable, so pre-Uber one would have had to call to request a cab, wait as indeterminate amount of time, risk a no show, all without feedback.
- kortilla 4y agolol, taxis in the US outside of NYC and maybe the core downtown of a few other cities were a joke. You’d call in to get a cab and they would say someone “should be there in 20-40 mins”. Then there was a 70% of them showing up if it wasn’t around bar closing time and maybe 25% if it was. If you wanted to plan a night out you needed a car service if you wanted reliability and that cost a fortune. That doesn’t even begin to scratch at the “my credit card reader is broken” and “should I take route X, it’s faster” scams nearly every cabbie would pull on you.
- spaceywilly 4y agoHere is an article from 2014 that discusses this trend: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/fashion/how-uber-is-changing-night-life-in-los-angeles.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/fashion/how-uber-is-chang... One thing I didn’t see mentioned, why didn’t people just take a cab before Uber? Was it just too inconvenient?
- wskinner 4y agoInconvenient, unreliable, expensive.
- burnished 4y agoI can’t speak for LA, but taking a cab in other cities sucks and sucked. Dispatch was rude and inaccurate and you had to actively watch and assess the meter if you didn’t want to get scammed in the cab itself. Also if the driver didn’t want to go the direction you were headed you were SOL. This can still happen with ride shares of course, but it happens when you are trying to find a ride instead of when the ride arrives.
- jedberg 4y ago> why didn’t people just take a cab before Uber This is addressed in sibling comments, but basically it was impossible to get one, especially late at night, and if you did, it would cost a fortune.
- ProAm 4y agoThis is becoming the case with Lyft and Uber now.
- mrDmrTmrJ 4y agoYes. Getting a cab into the city/nightlife is difficult but possible. But if you don't know when or where you're going home from. B/c you want to hang out with your friends and moving around, then coordinating a cab ride home was near impossible. Only exception was NYC where the density of cabs in nightlife locations kinda/sorta-of solved this.
- 4y ago